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The Case for Reduction
No full textCritical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. This volume suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction, their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts?Introduction | CHRISTOPH F. E. HOLZHEY AND JAKOB SCHILLINGER | 1-12The Case and the Signifier: Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man | IRACEMA DULLEY | 13-37Haptic Reductions: A Sceptic’s Guide for Responding to the Touch of Crisis | RACHEL AUMILLER | 39-61Disalienation and Structuralism: Fanon with Lévi-Strauss | CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERLIN | 61-89Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital | ÖZGÜN EYLÜL İŞCEN | 91-115Lines that Reduce: Biography, Palms, Borders | SAM DOLBEAR | 117-133Post-anti-identitarianism: The Forms of Contemporary Gender and Sexuality | BEN NICHOLS | 135-153Nothing Beyond the Name: Towards an Eclipse of Listening in the Psychotherapeutic Enterprise | SARATH JAKKA | 155-173Reduction in Computer Music: Bodies, Temporalities, and Generative Computation | FEDERICA BUONGIORNO | 175-190Reduction in Time: Kinaesthetic and Traumatic Experiences of the Present in Literary Texts | ALBERICA BAZZONI | 191-212Seeking Home: Vignettes of Homes and Homing | AMINA ELHALAWANI | 213-226Law Is Other Wor(l)ds | XENIA CHIARAMONTE | 227-250EXCURSUSOn the List | SAM DOLBEAR, BEN NICHOLS, AND CLAUDIA PEPPEL | 253-261White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy | BEN NICHOLS | 263-265Proust List Impulse | SAM DOLBEAR | 267-270A List of Fears: Eva Kot’átková’s Asylum | CLAUDIA PEPPEL | 271-276How to Bake X Cake: Notes on the Recipe | IRACEMA DULLEY | 277-279Walking Away, Walking in Circles, Writing Lists | RACHEL AUMILLER | 281-283ReferencesNotes on the ContributorsInde
Counter-Futuring
No full textSince the 2008–09 global financial crisis, the neoliberal ethos has come forth via the technocratic premises of finding market-led and technology-enabled solutions to the ever-growing economic and ecological crises occurring at a planetary scale. The growth of automated and predictive technologies has reorganized the realms of finance, security, environment, energy, urban planning, as well as the global supply chain. The spectacles of what Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan call the ‘smartness mandate’ (2017) prescribe profit-driven imaginaries of risk and hope for the future to absorb the recurring crises of capitalist modernity. In contrast, Counter-Futuring invests in forms and networks of praxis that invert the contemporary enframing of technological systems and their underlying colonial, racial, and patriarchal regimes of space, time, and visuality. Counter-Futuring aims at demystifying and contesting the material conditions of hegemonic forms and narratives of futurity integral to the extractive mechanisms and imperial violence of capitalist operations. It reconfigures the aesthetic and political potentials of a given technology by shifting the registers of the archive, information, and futurity. Counter-Futuring attends to the ongoing decolonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer, and migrant struggles taking place within and beyond socio-technical interventions while highlighting the verb form in the present tense of futuring. This one-day symposium will gather artists and scholars whose works generate critical yet creative responses to the imperial aspirations of computational capital as manifested within and beyond Western settings. Indeed, Counter-Futuring is part of a larger project Counter-N, which is a web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection curated by Shintaro Miyazaki and Özgün Eylül İşcen, and is supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.The title is inspired by Jussi Parikka, who in his contribution to the collection coined the term mainly in reference to Kodwo Eshun’s writings on Afrofuturism. Ultimately, this symposium seeks to initiate a series of conversations to collectively reclaim the acts, techniques, and infrastructures of speculating and commoning otherwise. The event will take place in a hybrid format, some speakers will participate virtually
On the List
Get PDFThis essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction — as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction — as a form of condensation to the most salient data
Let’s Talk about Vaccination
No full textThe appropriation by anti-vaxxers of pro-choice rhetoric and its transformation into claims about ‘bodily violence’ (‘My body, my choice’) heralded a shift in the debates about COVID-19 and vaccination. Central to this is the link between choice and risk. The talk will examine the history of such concepts in times of plague and the role that ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ plays in these debates and their precursors. The lecture will compare these debates about care and cure (or at least prevention) with the late 20th-century debates about vaccination, HPV, and risk. Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor emeritus of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over one hundred books. His ‘I Know Who Caused COVID-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia (with Zhou Xun) appeared in 2021 and his most recent edited volume is The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (with Youn Kim) published in 2019. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published in 1982 (reprinted: 1996 and 2014) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his monograph of 1986, which is still in print. He has held positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, The United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, China, and New Zealand
Flatness. Aesthetics and Epistemology
Get PDFIt is generally assumed that a reference to surfaces marks a reduction and hence a loss for our thinking. But what would it mean to consider the opposite? What if cultural techniques of ‘flattening’ afford a potential without which scientific and artistic inquiry, architectural and technological practices, but also bureaucratic administrations would hardly be possible? Indeed, what cave painting and tattooing share with writing, diagrams, maps, formulas, computer screens, and smartphones is the productive use of illustrated and inscribed surfaces. What is the secret of this success? And what are the changes we are witnessing with the digitalization of artificial flatness? Sybille Krämer was a professor of philosophy at Free University Berlin; since her retirement she has been a guest professor at the Institute of Cultures and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM) at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She served as member of the German ‘Scientific Council’ (2000–06), the European Research Council (2007–14) as well as of the German Research Foundation (2009–15), and was a Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Institute for Advanced Study (2005–08). In 2016, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Linköping University, Sweden. Her research areas include mathematics and philosophy of the seventeenth century; social epistemology; philosophy of language and writing; performative studies, media and cultural techniques; digitality and history of computation; testimony and witnessing. Her publications in English include: Media, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy (2015); Thinking with Diagrams: The Semiotic Basis of Human Cognition (2016), co-edited with Ch. Ljungberg; and Testimony/Bearing Witness: Epistemology, Ethics, History, Culture (2017), co-edited with Sigrid Weigel
