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Humanities

Nothing is at home
Nothing is at home

Phenomena in Exile

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins. And, what is worse, they say, these are ruins of its own making. But it bears noting that debris has proved to be a productive site. For finding things. Marcel Duchamp’s work, for example, can make an appearance as a phenomenology. And phenomenology itself, for another example, can dispel its origin, the transcendental subject – Kant’s old doublet. What this adds up to is a...
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  • art
  • art theory
  • aesthetics
  • Modernism
  • phenomenology
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

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

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From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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

 

Topics
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • autobiography
    • Theory of fiction
    • memory
    • fiction
    • autofiction
  • Choreographing multitudes

    Choreographing multitudes

    • social movements
    • swarm model
    • crowd psychology
    • social networks
    • crowd
    • protest movements
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

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

    minima oeconomica

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

    • economics
    • economization
    • financial crisis
    • financial markets
    • discourse history
    • economy
Current Texts
Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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  • realism
  • transhumanism
  • art theory
  • artistic practice
  • re-enactment
  • postmodernism

 

A praxeological history of the credit card
A praxeological history of the credit card

Sebastian Gießmann

Towards a Media History of the Credit Card

In every good American tale of entrepreneurship there is at least one hero, and an initial magical scene of invention has to be told. So it does not come as a surprise that the story of Diners Card as a New York neighborhood technology has been told as an anecdote ever since the 1950s. By now, we know that Frank MacNamara did not conceive of the idea while lacking the cash (or the wallet) to pay for his business dinner...
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  • history of media
  • actor-network-theory
  • money
  • ethnomethodoloy
  • credit
Current Texts
Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

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  • feminism
  • body
  • gaze
  • subjectification
  • art history
  • painting
  • gender