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The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization
The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...

Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. These terms appear crucial for any description of our contemporary situation, whether in economics, media studies, or contemporary art. This book asks whether the preponderance of talk of flow, liquidity, and circulation is an expression of the cultural logic of today’s environmental capitalism.
  • art
  • capitalism
  • cultural critic
  • digital culture
  • digital media
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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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From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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

 

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Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

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

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  • ethnology
  • money
  • anthropology
  • economization

 

Political Reflections on Choreography, Dance and Protest

Political Reflections on Choreography, Dance and Protest


Oliver Marchart

Dancing Politics

The human body is the most important medium through which a public space is curved out of the social. Of course, this does not always have to occur in form of a militarized collective marching in-sync through the streets. Very often it is precisely the vulnerability of bodies which is used as a ­performative medium of protest (up to the extreme point where people decide to publicly set themselves on fire). Taking this word of caution into account, we may...
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  • Jean-Luc Nancy
  • acting
  • activism
  • Hannah Arendt
  • Occupy Wall Street
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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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  • identity
  • gender
  • performativity
  • migration
  • queer theory
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Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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