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Critique of generic rationality
Critique of generic rationality

Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

The generic means that symbolic algorithms don’t remake themselves as feedback—as in a “living narrative” or in second-order cybernetics—but that they repeat themselves without needing to keep up with the excessive forms of late-capitalist production, from which they derive. Capitalism generically overproduces idiosyncrasies, with no concern for the circumstances of their reproduction. Capitalism, according to Eva Illouz, doesn’t know how to reproduce producers. It doesn’t create relationships, but relationship crises that inhibit the general flow of capital. Yet at the...
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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
  • THINK ART? THINK ART!
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • fiction
    • Theory of fiction
    • memory
    • autobiography
    • autofiction
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

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

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • chromatics / colour science
    • semiotics and semiology
    • image and imagery
    • monochrome
    • color
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)....

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Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

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  • migration
  • gender
  • queer theory
  • performativity
  • identity

 

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
  • cosmopolitics
  • art theory
  • politics
  • globalization
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...

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Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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