User account

Humanities

Hurrah!
Hurrah!

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

A Diary of my Encounters

Evreinov was occupied with the spectacle’s theatrical, dramaturgical side. Due to its immense size, the production was directed collectively: Evreinov was the director-in-chief, followed by Kugel, Petrov, Derzhavin, and myself. I also designed the scenery and the costumes. My stage sets spanned the entire width of Palace Square and reached up to the third floor of the General Staff. They consisted of two huge platforms (a White and a Red one), connected by a steep bridge. There were around 8,000...
ABO
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
Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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

 

Topics
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

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

    • discourse history
    • economics
    • financial markets
    • economization
    • financial crisis
    • economy
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • mirror
    • optical illusion
    • observer
    • gaze
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

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

    Choreographing multitudes

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

Andreas L. Hofbauer

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of sedentary, food-producing communities. It wasn’t sheep, goats, or cattle that were domesticated first; it was the zoon logon echon itself that bowed to the self-created yoke of the cult. Why, we don’t know. Beyond this it’s important that unlike plants only very few species of animal can be domesticated, and that this shouldn’t be confused with taming. Economic significance develops as an epiphenomenon. It transforms from possible human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the distribution of meat in early “Greek” antiquity, then to the obeloi (skewers with varying amounts of meat, as tokens for the priests’ or judges’ portion; even...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • money
  • ethnology
  • economization
  • anthropology

 

How can withdrawal be represented?
How can withdrawal be represented?

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...

On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

How can withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself, or which is being withdrawn—be represented, thus made visible and negotiable? This publication takes this paradox as its starting point, which remains present as a tension throughout. The book aims to draw constellations of different instances of withdrawal, ranging from passivity, failure, and refusal to disappearance and remembrance and to resilience and resistance. Understanding withdrawal as a concept that encompasses both cutting ties and reaffirming relations, the contributions collected here trace the...
  • protest movements
  • contemporary art
  • artistic practice
  • resistance
Current Texts

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become king, CEO, or US president, he doesn’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all. He just states his claim. And so he shimmies from statement to power. And having obtained power, Ubu decerebrates the world, exposing the grounds for groundlessness, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. Ubu is a tautomaniac, that is, he can be explained in his own terms and is thus always in the right (being in the right is all he is). He needs no proof, but on the contrary wants “to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)....

OPEN
ACCESS
DE