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Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?
Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?

Zairong Xiang (ed.)

minor cosmopolitan

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism....
  • art theory
  • art
  • cosmopolitics
  • politics
  • globalization
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
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

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

    minima oeconomica

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

    • economy
    • financial markets
    • economics
    • financial crisis
    • discourse history
    • economization
  • Choreographing multitudes

    Choreographing multitudes

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

 

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti
Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...

The Cube and the Face

The Cube, as we can see, isn’t one. It is an ­irregular polyhedron which catalogues describe as having twelve sides — that nice figure, twelve, a destinal figure if ever there was one, which willfully evokes Mallarmé’s throw of the dice, at the very moment that the clock strikes twelve at midnight, in the dark house of Igitur. One can imagine that Giacometti wanted to give a unique volume to the twelve facets — six and six — of two cubes added together: a unique architecture...
  • Alberto Giacometti
  • art theory
  • abstract art
  • face
  • art history
Current Texts

Sandra Frimmel

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma of the series: a (large) part of the artistically trained viewers see these shorthand works as abstract forms, without understanding the text, and only the few who can read (Russian) shorthand perceive a text, which for them doesn’t necessarily have to be art. I Hate the Avant-Garde was created in 2017, after a sketch made in 1987 in reaction to a changed situation in the reception of nonconformist art. With the beginning of perestroika, unofficial art that had hitherto been excluded from the state-run art scene—that is, from the official infrastructure of museums and exhibition spaces, and from art scholarship...

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  • writing
  • democracy
  • avant-garde