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:...

Etrange (غریب) در زبان فرانسوی از ریشه لاتین extraneus به معنای «خارجی» در برابر داخلی intraneus است. آنچه از خانه نیست unheimlich (امر غریب) از heim (خانه) نیست از منزل نیست در طرف دیگر دروازه fores است foreigner (خارجی)، خارج از ضرب و زیادی است odd (زاید) ناهنجار نامعمول نادر کمیاب تکی است seltsam (عجیب) عجیب و غریب besherat رشید ظریف پراوهام خمیده‌‌ verschroben (بد خو) خمیده شگفت‌ آور خارق‌ العاده حیرت‌ انگیز

غنای زبان امری غریب است در کلماتی که به نحوی حولِ مفهومِ غریبِ خارجی ausländer شکل گرفته اند خارج از کشور «هم‌‌ کشور ما» همانگونه  که پیش‌ تر در فرانسه می‌ گفتیم «این کشور من است» برای اشاره به کسی از روستای من محله‌ ی من استان من ولایت من

• Alain Badiou
• theatre studies
• anarchy
• theatre / drama
• contemporary art
• ceremony

If we remember, lastly, Aristotle’s dictum, that “violent taking away of anything is called privation,” which in fact opens into the discussion of the workings of the alpha-privative, we can summarize the semantic scope of what “potentiality” contains in a preliminary way:

It refers to something numerically related to itself – i.e., not to a movement, and is as such not strictly of the order of “realization.” Rather it points, in modern language, to a self-relating. Yet, this is neither substance nor subject, but rather a kind of “in-between” (thus, maybe, a ghostly apparition of both, substance and subject.)

It refers to something best captured with a noun or adjective of the alpha-privative, heuristically understood analogously to the qualitative predicate of Kant’s infinite judgment. I add “heuristically” because, of course, in Kant, these are pure forms of thought (i.e. a priori and not concerned with the labor of getting between privation and negation...

• ethics
• potentiality
• politics
• emancipation / liberation
• justice

Facebook’s Open Graph protocol is the basis of a conglomerate in which the technical functionalities of addressing and distribution go hand in hand with categorization, staging, and user activity. A fundamental aspect to all of this is the fact that Open Graph can only be thought about in terms of crowds. An effective circulation of content requires an exceedingly large number of users; the semantic definition of content depends on the large-scale mobilization of website operators; and at the social level, the formation of “subsets” requires users to interact with online elements and with one another on a large scale. Open Graph produces a level of mediation between these crowds. It integrates organization and communication in such a way that crowds are rearranged; in the same way, it simultaneously organizes the classification of users in terms of content and thus gains, through the staging of its interfaces as well, its...

• Big Data
• crowd psychology
• Facebook
• algorithms
• mathematics

The title of this text poses what at first appears to be an irritating, if not completely insane question, that I myself couldn’t have imagined posing a year ago. For one thing, it’s because one of the important terms in this question was totally unknown to me, and for another, I probably would have affirmed it outright had I known what this word meant.

The question is: Is Marxism a correlationism? The rhetoric of this formulation – “is x-ism a y-ism” – borrows from the title of a famous essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946). In those days it was also a matter of setting a new philosophical fashion in relation to a major cornerstone of orientation – to humanism. Today the question appears to be reversed: Is Marxism – which is now the cornerstone, the old orientation – a correlationism? The correlationism isn’t the new fashion, but...

• anthropology
• materiality
• thing/thingness
• material aesthetics
• materialist turn