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“Obsessed with buffering”
“Obsessed with buffering”

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant ­metropolis, a “factory-state” in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on ­elevator-cables: a conurbation ­Pynchon calls the “City of the Future” or “Raketen-Stadt.” The...
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  • literary studies
  • fiction
  • literature
  • conversation
  • Modernism
Current Texts

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
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

    Analysen und Kritik moderner Ökonomie, deren Wissenschaft und Legitmation im Zeitalter der Finanzialisierung

    • economization
    • financial markets
    • financial crisis
    • economics
    • economy
    • discourse history
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • autobiography
    • autofiction
    • Theory of fiction
    • fiction
    • memory
Current Texts
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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  • migration
  • political aesthetics
  • concentration camp
  • National Socialism
  • gift
  • Poland
  • contemporary art
  • ethics
  • propaganda
  • documenta

 

“Every human body is an old civilization”
“Every human body is an old civilization”

Susanne Witzgall

“Every human body is an old civilization”

Susanne Witzgall: One common point in your texts in that both of you describe migration as an incomplete process, as a practice that is not completed with the arrival at the destination, but perhaps even only finds its starting point, its beginning, there. For instance, you Christian Kravagna, have written in your essay that many migrants develop a practice of travelling back and forth, almost like commuting, a process in which there is no definitive home that one can return...
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Current Texts
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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  • critique of neoliberalism
  • community
  • birth
  • communism
  • motherhood
  • social movements
  • family
Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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