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“Obsessed with buffering”
“Obsessed with buffering”

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant ­metropolis, a “factory-state” in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on ­elevator-cables: a conurbation ­Pynchon calls the “City of the Future” or “Raketen-Stadt.” The...
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  • Modernism
  • literary studies
  • conversation
  • literature
  • fiction
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Topics
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • Theory of fiction
    • fiction
    • memory
    • autobiography
    • autofiction
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

    Analysen und Kritik moderner Ökonomie, deren Wissenschaft und Legitmation im Zeitalter der Finanzialisierung

    • financial markets
    • economy
    • financial crisis
    • economics
    • discourse history
    • economization

 

About ‘how we treat the others’
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

Glimpse shows us scenes filmed in various places. How long did you stay at these places? Was it already known that Calais would be cleared when you started the project?   We spent more than one month filming in Berlin, Calais, Grande-Synthe (the suburb of Dunkirk), and Paris. Yes, it was announced that the French administration was going to “clear” the Jungle in Calais. It was also quite obvious that refugees would be removed from the streets of Paris. Such places, like...
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  • contemporary art
  • ethics
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  • concentration camp