User account

Humanities

Based on a brilliant trick
Based on a brilliant trick

Barbara Basting

Marinetti Detox

I still don’t quite understand why I suddenly became obsessed with Marinetti. What made me track down even the obscurest of his writings? First editions that had ended up in the far corners of libraries, soon to be deposited into some bunker in the mountains. Sour-smelling volumes, from which decades-old, handwritten borrower’s tickets fell. An edition of all Marinetti’s futurist tracts in a series of Italian classics; as well as his diaries, but only those from 1915–21, in an annotated...
ABO DE
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:...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE

 

Topics
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • image and imagery
    • color
    • semiotics and semiology
    • monochrome
    • chromatics / colour science
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • history of knowledge
    • literary studies
    • epistemology
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • poetics
    • potentiality
    • idleness
    • poetology of knowledge
    • astonishment
    • experiment
  • Choreographing multitudes

    Choreographing multitudes

    • social movements
    • social networks
    • crowd psychology
    • protest movements
    • crowd
    • swarm model
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

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

    • financial crisis
    • economy
    • financial markets
    • economization
    • economics
    • discourse history
Current Texts
Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • gender
  • gaze
  • painting
  • feminism
  • subjectification
  • art history
  • body

 

"Curriculum Vitae in Pictures“

Maria Zinfert (ed.)

Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Kracauer. Photographic Archive presents  largely unknown material from the estate of the German-American theorist of film and photography, ­Siegfried Kracauer and his wife and assistant Elisabeth, known as Lili. The single and group portraits, still lifes, street scenes and landscapes collected in this book all come from the estate of Siegfried Kracauer. Published here for the first time, they are an extensive and representative selection from the enlargements, contact sheets and rolls of film originally archived by Lili Kracauer. With...
  • 1950s
  • archive
  • 1930s
  • biography
  • 20th century
Current Texts

Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

It was Gilles Deleuze who in various contexts underlined that what we most lacked was “belief in the world.” The odd remark appears, for example, in a conversation in 1990 with the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri about revolutionary emergence and the political force of minorities. In this dialogue Negri examines his interlocutor’s thought in the light of the “problem of the political,” which connects the various stages of the philosopher’s intellectual biography. Deleuze’s remark here is the reprise of a motif that would be familiar to readers of his second book on cinema, which appeared in 1985, in which Deleuze contends that the “power of modern cinema” is based on its ability to “give us back” our lost “belief in the world.”

At the end of the conversation Negri asks his dialogue partner about the possibility of present-day processes of subjectivization. After initially emphasizing the “rebellious spontaneity” of such processes, Deleuze...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
Current Texts

Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name must first and foremost struggle against false pretenders, not against those who do not even claim to be pretenders. The efficiency of critique’s propaedeutic character should be sought in this struggle against false pretenders. If one fears that its negativity may entail a dangerous impotence and if for this reason one wishes to supplement it with a justifying and constructive “affirmationism”, mindful of the fact that it was once meant to prepare the outline of a metaphysics purged of precritical dogmatism, then one risks forgetting that critique ceases to hurt and can no longer trigger an impulse the instant that...

ABO DE
  • contemporary art
  • political aesthetics
  • critical theory
  • morals
  • aesthetics