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Humanities

The biggest bite out of the fruit of Knowledge
The biggest bite out of the fruit of Knowledge

Claus Pias (ed.)

Cybernetics

Although aspects of cybernetics can be traced back to various points in history, the proceedings of the so-called Macy Conferences, which have been edited for this volume, represent its modern foundational document. Held between 1946 and 1948 under the cumbersome title “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems,” the papers delivered at these conferences were soon thereafter, at least as of 1949, referred to as contributions to cybernetics. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (which was...
  • computer science
  • media theory
  • epistemology
  • historic documents
  • computational sciences
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
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • chromatics / colour science
    • semiotics and semiology
    • color
    • image and imagery
    • monochrome
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • fiction
    • Theory of fiction
    • memory
    • autofiction
    • autobiography
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • potentiality
    • poetics
    • astonishment
    • literary studies
    • epistemology
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • history of knowledge
    • idleness
    • poetology of knowledge
    • experiment
  • THINK ART? THINK ART!
Current Texts

Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

It was Gilles Deleuze who in various contexts underlined that what we most lacked was “belief in the world.” The odd remark appears, for example, in a conversation in 1990 with the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri about revolutionary emergence and the political force of minorities. In this dialogue Negri examines his interlocutor’s thought in the light of the “problem of the political,” which connects the various stages of the philosopher’s intellectual biography. Deleuze’s remark here is the reprise of a motif that would be familiar to readers of his second book on cinema, which appeared in 1985, in which Deleuze contends that the “power of modern cinema” is based on its ability to “give us back” our lost “belief in the world.”

At the end of the conversation Negri asks his dialogue partner about the possibility of present-day processes of subjectivization. After initially emphasizing the “rebellious spontaneity” of such processes, Deleuze...

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Current Texts

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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  • anthropology
  • money
  • ethnology
  • economization

 

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti
Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...

The Cube and the Face

The Cube, as we can see, isn’t one. It is an ­irregular polyhedron which catalogues describe as having twelve sides — that nice figure, twelve, a destinal figure if ever there was one, which willfully evokes Mallarmé’s throw of the dice, at the very moment that the clock strikes twelve at midnight, in the dark house of Igitur. One can imagine that Giacometti wanted to give a unique volume to the twelve facets — six and six — of two cubes added together: a unique architecture...
  • abstract art
  • art history
  • art theory
  • Alberto Giacometti
  • face
Current Texts
Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

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