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Questioning the United Fruit Company archive
 Questioning the United Fruit Company archive

Liliana Gómez

Archive Matter

The United Fruit Company archive is the point of departure for this book’s reflections about the constructions but also the contested meanings of photography and thus about how the camera both depicts and configures the Caribbean as a laboratory of the modern. As archives emerge, they are resurgent, may change over the course of time, mold space anew, or revise history. By their nature archives are Pandora’s box, the outcome of opening them necessarily unknown, bringing the possibility of detournements....
  • Caribbean
  • cultural studies
  • archive
  • photography
  • capitalism
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

    • economy
    • financial markets
    • economics
    • financial crisis
    • economization
    • discourse history
  • Choreographing multitudes

    Choreographing multitudes

    • crowd psychology
    • swarm model
    • crowd
    • social movements
    • protest movements
    • social networks
  • THINK ART? THINK ART!
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • image and imagery
    • semiotics and semiology
    • monochrome
    • color
    • chromatics / colour science
Current Texts

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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  • contemporary art
  • aesthetics
  • critical theory
  • political aesthetics
  • morals

 

A dialogue that doesn’t cover up its traces
A dialogue that doesn’t cover up its traces

David Graeber

Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

There’s endless literature on the mob or “the madness of crowds”, and most people do assume that any kind of crowd is necessarily going to be, collectively, stupider than any one of the individuals that make it up. That’s why most people accept the legitimacy of authoritarian leadership. If this were really true, it stands to reason that if you took even any one random person out of the crowd and made that person dictator, the crowd would make better...
  • anarchism
  • community
  • anarchy
  • resistance
  • political theory
Current Texts

Jean-Luc Nancy

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 πόσες λέξεις εκφράσεις τρόπους διαφορετικούς έχουμε για να μιλήσουμε για τον παράξενο ξένο τον ausländer τον έξω από τη χώρα και όχι «pays avec nous» όπως λέγαμε κάποτε στη Γαλλία «c’est un pays à moi» για να πούμε κάποιος από το χωριό μου τη γειτονιά μου την περιοχή μου την πατρίδα μου

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