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Lieber Paul 3 . . . . . . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism . . . . . Elena Vogman . Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture . . . . . Corporate Love . . . . . . . . . . Bang Bang Baroque . . . . . Maël Renouard . Fragmente eines unendlichen Gedächtnisses . . . . . BELISAR by François Gérard . . . . . Drag-nets . . . . . After This Comes That Before That Comes This . . . . . Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was . . . . . I say . . . . . Marcus Quent . Verrinnen der Zeit und Glaube an die Welt . . . . . Stephen Barber . A War of Fragments: World Versus America . . . . . Maël Renouard . Modifications infimes et considérables . . . . . Maël Renouard . The Twilight of Classi­fication? . . . . . Stephen Barber . Krieg aus Fragmenten: World Versus America . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism . . . . . Marcus Quent . Elapsing Time and Belief in the World . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was
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Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

Is it possible to regain a lost belief? Is it possible to do as we will with belief? OPEN
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Dietmar Dath

Do you want to believe in language?

The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. OPEN
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

On Gestational Communism

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

Pregnancy is the weirdest condition

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men ABO DE

I.V. Nuss

The Love in the Convex, in Absolute Roundness and the Sluttification of All Men West of the Bosporus

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

The Pitch

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s... OPEN
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Donatien Grau, James Spooner

Afropunk Philology

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats. OPEN
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Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

DIAPHANES No. 8/9
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 8/9

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Becoming the translator rather than the careless exploiter of nature might be the ad­venture of humankind in the years to come. OPEN
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Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first… ABO DE FR

A. L. Kennedy

What is an Author?

Critique of generic rationality

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as... OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially)... ABO DE

Felix Stalder

Feedback as Authenticity

Practice in collective destruction

We recklessly count on ethics coming from somewhere other than a practice only offered by party politics or activism, from which the majority population excludes itself. The panic invocation of Christian values shows the extent of the dilemma here: please come up with something, anything, that will make people behave... OPEN
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Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

DIAPHANES No. 6/7
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 6/7

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

In his photographs and texts, ­Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as... ABO DE FR

Soham Gupta

Angst

Camouflaged with a visual language

What Reena really wanted to know was why – in a night club, for example – do we chose, always... ABO

Malte Fabian Rauch

Where the Negative Holds Court

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

Based on a brilliant trick

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination... ABO DE

Barbara Basting

Marinetti Detox

He would say “Never work!”

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait... ABO FR

Raphaëlle Milone

Dachy Alive

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

Language can never be private

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed. OPEN
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Johannes Binotto

Shrewing the Tame

350 000 000 photographs onto Facebook everyday

The idea of making the world more open and connected has degenerated to a business concept. OPEN
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Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

What we don’t see

Saturnaaaaalia

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Oratio Soluta

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits—could I simply have gone past the first object at the bottom? Number 1, “Formless Veil, curtain …” Must have been attached to the wall just between the entrance and exitus … “My... OPEN
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Axel Dielmann

The Dressmaker

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

Ξένος extraneus του έξω όχι του μέσα (intraneus) όχι της οικίας unheimlich όχι του heim όχι της εστίας της άλλης πλευράς της πόρτας – fores, foreigner όχι υπερβολικά στον ρυθμό, odd όχι κανονικός όχι συνήθης σπάνιος ιδιάζων seltsam παράξενος besherat γενναίος κομψός απρόβλεπτος στραβός verschroben λοξός αναπάντεχος εξαιρετικός εκπληκτικός   Είναι εκπληκτικό... OPEN
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Jean-Luc Nancy

Zah Zuh

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them. ABO DE FR

Zoran Terzić

Political Transplants

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Xenolinguistics

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not... OPEN
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A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

An immodest proposal

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-­alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions. Although... OPEN
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Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

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,... OPEN
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Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Wolfgang Plöger

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Do you want to believe in language?

Asleep, Patrick sees what he doesn’t believe while he’s awake. The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. But they’re slow shutter pictures of the past.   Five minutes past four, Patrick... OPEN
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Dietmar Dath

Your Sprache Never Was

Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio

I noticed this pattern for fingernail decoration four years ago in the window of a “nail studio” in Salisbury, south-west England. Nail studios had begun to interest me because I supposed them to be something like sociological indicator plants. How dumb or despairing must a women be to want to...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 3

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their... ABO

Stephen Barber

Futurama Nights, October 1978

The limp, voluptuous decadence of the place

I’m not going to talk about my profession here. ABO FR DE

Bruce Bégout

The Man from Venice

“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
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Mário Gomes

The Poetics of Architecture

A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted

I have rarely left the Biennale so dissatisfied and tired as this year. No, it wasn’t the endless kilometers.

Barbara Basting

Dear Paolo Baratta

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

To lay a hand on the shoulder of ­future victims…

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.« OPEN
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Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

Conversation

TWELVE DRUMMERS DRUMMING

1. Ringo Starr 2. Mike D. 3. Roland TR 808 4. Jaki Liebezeit 5. Paul Lovens 6. Anthony Williams 7. Valerie Scroggins 8. David Moss 9. Moe Tucker 10. Dannie Richmond 11. Robert Görl 12. Georgia Hubley

Hanno Leichtmann

LISTMANIA: TWELVE DRUMMERS DRUMMING

A fast trip through the American night

Mike Wilson’s literature is a fast trip through the American night, drawn in melancholy images of great beauty. ABO

Mike Wilson

Rockabilly

Who is the bait? Who is the catch?

Dire works on the bogus regime—not just of art—but endowed with wit, beauty and irresistible fetish character.

Luc Meresma

Natural Enemies

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

 

Future Pluperfect

Luzia Gast, 09.06.2023

Nicht zuletzt die 2016 abgeschlossene Restaurierung hatte die These gestützt, dass es sich bei Hieronymus Boschs venezianischem Triptychon um die...

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma, 26.10.2018

It may be due to the simple design of this dust jacket, which gives no indication of genre, and to...

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen, 10.04.2018

The Nonexistent Giotto
A picture may announce the future not in the sense that it refers to any future events...

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber, 13.12.2017

Although contemporaries attested Romantic ­qualities to François Gérard’s Belisar, it didn’t appeal to the arch-Romantic Delacroix: “The fortune of a...

Other columns
Magazine Special
Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the world.

OPEN
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Magazine Special

Stephen Barber

An immodest proposal

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-­alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience.

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-­alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions.
Although the Ballard ­estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-­accessible manuscripts collection there.

OPEN
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»Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: DELINE THE MARE.


Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA! I will see if I can see.


See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.«


James Joyce

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