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From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

Xenolinguistics

If ever humans should face creatures from outer space, they would ­surely have to find a way of dealing with the aliens and—supposing they would have such a thing: with their languages. The branch of linguistics dedicated to the study of such languages from outer space is commonly referred to as xenolinguistics. For the time being, xenolinguistics is an essentially speculative and certainly radical exercise of conceiving the diverse. We have asked a series of specialists from different fields that...
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  • science fiction
  • linguistics
  • communication media
  • semiotics and semiology
  • communication
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

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

    minima oeconomica

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

    • financial markets
    • economy
    • financial crisis
    • discourse history
    • economization
    • economics
Current Texts
Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

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  • Africa
  • ceremony
  • colonialism
  • body
  • feminism
  • spiritism
  • ritual
  • performance

 

Photographs tend to suggest infinity
Photographs tend to suggest infinity

Siegfried Kracauer

The Photographic Approach (1951)

The photographic approach – that is, the effort to utilize the inherent abilities of the camera – is responsible for the particular nature of photographs. In the days of Zola and the Impressionists, the properties of photographs were commonly held to be the hallmarks of art in general; but no sooner did painting and literature break away from realism than these properties assumed an exclusive character. Since they depend upon techniques peculiar to the medium, they have remained stable throughout its evolution....
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  • photography
  • History of photography
  • film
  • media theory
  • Siegfried Kracauer