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Critique of generic rationality
Critique of generic rationality

Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

The generic means that symbolic algorithms don’t remake themselves as feedback—as in a “living narrative” or in second-order cybernetics—but that they repeat themselves without needing to keep up with the excessive forms of late-capitalist production, from which they derive. Capitalism generically overproduces idiosyncrasies, with no concern for the circumstances of their reproduction. Capitalism, according to Eva Illouz, doesn’t know how to reproduce producers. It doesn’t create relationships, but relationship crises that inhibit the general flow of capital. Yet at the...
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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
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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

 

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Current Texts
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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  • migration
  • political aesthetics
  • concentration camp
  • National Socialism
  • gift
  • Poland
  • ethics
  • propaganda
  • documenta
  • contemporary art

 

The Architecture of Disaster
The Architecture of Disaster

Ines Weizman, Eyal Weizman

Before & After

History is increasingly presented as a series of catastrophes. The most common mode of this presentation is the before-and-after image—a juxtaposition of two photographs of the same place, at different times, before and after an event has taken its toll. Buildings seen intact in a “before” photograph have been destroyed in the one “after.” Neighborhoods bustling with activity in one image are in ruins or under a layer of foulwater in the next. Deforestations, contaminations, melting icebergs and drying rivers...
  • forensic science
  • war
  • History of photography
  • photography
  • photographic images