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Humanities

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.
Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

whole blocks of avenues in all directions | The verse snaps tight around the dynamic contrast of geometric uniformity and omni-directional spread, with north-south avenue grids stretched across the crest of human sound. From solid blocks to liquid (“we got a drink”) to gas “(As if the fog lifted”): the metamorphosis of phase-states. But when I read BLOCKS, I hear Lil Wayne: “tha block is hot, tha block is hot… Dodging cops and burning blocks.” And I remember the boys...
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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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Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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

 

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How can withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself, or which is being withdrawn—be represented, thus made visible and negotiable?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
  • resistance
  • artistic practice
  • contemporary art
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Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name must first and foremost struggle against false pretenders, not against those who do not even claim to be pretenders. The efficiency of critique’s propaedeutic character should be sought in this struggle against false pretenders. If one fears that its negativity may entail a dangerous impotence and if for this reason one wishes to supplement it with a justifying and constructive “affirmationism”, mindful of the fact that it was once meant to prepare the outline of a metaphysics purged of precritical dogmatism, then one risks forgetting that critique ceases to hurt and can no longer trigger an impulse the instant that...

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  • aesthetics
  • critical theory
  • political aesthetics
  • morals
  • contemporary art
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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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  • performativity
  • migration
  • queer theory
  • gender
  • identity