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

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

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:...

When Graham’s American Document premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York City on October 9, 1938 it engendered a sense of community between the general public and the dance world, and within the dance world itself, where such community had not previously existed. Lincoln Kirstein, despite previous aesthetic gripes, extolled “the quality of Graham’s idiosyncratic gesture formulating just what she meant to say.” Kirstein implied that in American Document Graham avoided the traps of national folklore into which so many choreographic productions of this period had fallen, including Kirstein’s own projects. The left-wing press, for its part, set aside its persistent political misgivings about Graham’s oeuvre: New Masses – the most prominent left-wing cultural publication of the thirties – sponsored the New York premiere. While I do not have the space here to analyze the Libretto and the piece in detail the original version was critical of injustices in American history. Its...

• myth
• 1930s
• body
• photography
• Anti-fascism

If sensory perception of the world takes place prior to all consciousness, one might ask, finally, what this “prior to consciousness” means – is it an unconscious or rather a non-conscious? Who is dancing when dancers dance? Who is moving when bodies process stimuli? For Freud, the notion of the drive was a transitional concept bridging the divide between the somatic and the mental. I think that today, for various reasons, it is possible to replace the notion of the drive with that of affect to obtain a similarly transitional concept. But as I explain in my theory of the affective dispositif, this concept is one that no longer follows the movement of desire (for the Other) but which, with a focus on movement, interval, and plasticity, leads to surprising parallels (synchronizations) between the socio-political and the somatic. In this context, the “not-yet-movement” of affect often mentioned here can be understood...

• epistemology
• media theory
• affects
• body
• gender