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Punk’s raptures are mystical.
Punk’s raptures are mystical.

Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

Philology often seems concerned with tracing origins and identifying true sources as a way of sweeping away the penumbrae of cultural ornamentation and exfoliating the accumulated dead skin of the past that hardens into decadence, at once institutional and intellectual. Its spirit is Lutheran, or Nietzschean, which amounts to the same thing when you think about it a little. So can it be with punk, which is usually reduced to a series of flattened clichés about bondage trousers, dyed hair...
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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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Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • science fiction
  • communication media
  • linguistics
  • utopia
  • semiotics and semiology
  • communication

 

Topics
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

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

    • financial crisis
    • economy
    • financial markets
    • economics
    • economization
    • discourse history
  • The Subject of Capitalism

    The Subject of Capitalism

    • migration
    • capitalism
    • subjectification
    • cognitive capital
Current Texts
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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  • communism
  • motherhood
  • community
  • family
  • critique of neoliberalism
  • social movements
  • birth
Current Texts

Stephen Barber

An immodest proposal

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-­alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions.
Although the Ballard ­estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-­accessible manuscripts collection there.

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Only art has the power of a form. Mathematics is an exercise for monks.
Only art has the power of a form. Mathematics is an exercise for monks.

Alain Badiou

Art and Mathematics

We all know that the relationship between mathematical activity and artistic creation is a very old one. We know that for a start the Pythagoreans tied the science of number not merely to the movements of the stars but to musical modes. We know that Babylonian and Egyptian architecture presupposed elaborate geometrical knowledge, even if the notion of demonstration had still not been won. Further back still, we find formal, or abstract, outlines mixed in with animal representations, in the...
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  • art criticism
  • poetry
  • aesthetics
  • contemporary art
  • art