Suchergebnisse

Erich Hörl's Sacred Channels is an original take on the history of communication theory and the cultural imaginary of communication understood through the notions of the sacred and the primitive. Hörl offers insight into the shared ground of anthropology and media theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and presents an archeology of the philosophy of technology that underpins contemporary culture. This singular and unique project focuses on the ethnological disciplines and their phantasmatic imaginations of a prealphabetical realm of the sacred and the primitive but reads them in the context of media cultural questions as epistemic unconscious and as projections of the emerging postalphabetical condition. Drawing inspiration from work by the likes of Friedrich Kittler, Hörl's understanding of cybernetics in the post-World War II interdisciplinary field informs a rich analysis that is of interest to media scholars and to anyone seeking to understand the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the humanities in the age of technical media

Im Durchbruch zu einer neuen historischen Semantik der Ökologie, den der vorliegende Text attestiert, stellt sich die Genese der technoökologischen Sinnkultur als die große begriffs- und theoriepolitische Herausforderung unserer Gegenwart dar. Dabei zeugen die Verallgemeinerung des Ökologiebegriffs und die Ökologisierung des Denkens, die darin sichtbar werden, von einer durchaus ambivalenten Bewegung. Sie sind Ausdruck eines kontrollgeschichtlichen Ereignisses, nämlich der Durchsetzung des neuen Vereinnahmungsapparates der Environmentalität, der sich auf den Medientechniken der dritten Kybernetik errichtet und dabei den Prozess der Kybernetisierung aller Existenzweisen auf seinen vorläufigen Höhepunkt führt. Zugleich markieren sie Kernmomente eines neuen, radikal relational verfassten Sinns, um dessen ontologische und epistemologische Konzeptualisierung wir heute ringen. ; The genesis of the techno-ecological culture of sense is the great challenge of conceptual and theoretical politics in a present marked, this essay shows, by the breakthrough of a new historical semantics of ecology. The generalization of the concept of ecology and the ecologization of thinking, however, are far from unambiguous. These movements are expressions of an event in the history of control, namely the implementation of a new apparatus of capture—environmentality—that sprang up from the media technologies of third cybernetics and constitutes a preliminary apex in the cyberneticization of all modes of existence. At the same time, they characterize the core moment of a new and radically relational sense whose ontology and epistemology are at the center of contemporary efforts of conceptualisation.

The paper presents Jean-Luc Nancy's outline of a history of sense and especially his thinking of exteriorization as an expression and working-through of the technological condition which characterizes the cybernetic culture of machines and objects. Furthermore, the paper suggests to ground the enthusiasm for the open and external (which is dominant in philosophical politics since 1950 and culminates in Nancy's work) in the supplementary, prothetic and transcategorical logic of the technical world.

"Ecology has become one of the most urgent and lively fields in both the humanities and sciences. In a dramatic widening of scope beyond its original concern with the coexistence of living organisms within a natural environment, it is now recognized that there are ecologies of mind, information, sensation, perception, power, participation, media, behavior, belonging, values, the social, the political ... a thousand ecologies. This proliferation is not simply a metaphorical extension of the figurative potential of natural ecology: rather, it reflects the thoroughgoing imbrication of natural and technological elements in the constitution of the contemporary environments we inhabit, the rise of a cybernetic natural state, with its corresponding mode of power. Hence this ecology of ecologies initiates and demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also constitute an ecological transformation of thought itself is required. In this ambitious and radical new volume of writings, some of the most exciting contemporary thinkers in the field take on the task of revealing and theorizing the extent of the ecologization of existence as the effect of our contemporary sociotechnological condition: together, they bring out the complexity and urgency of the challenge of ecological thought--one we cannot avoid if we want to ask and indeed have a chance of affecting what forms of life, agency, modes of existence, human or otherwise, will participate--and how--in this planet's future."--Bloomsbury Publishing

Das Gespräch arbeitet den spezifische Ort und Einsatz der zeitgenössischen medienästhetischen Frage heraus, skizziert die Geschichtlichkeit ihres Erscheinens und fokussiert die begriffs- und theoriepolitischen Strategien, die für ihre genauere Konturierung notwendig sind. Medienästhetik wird dabei als zentraler Schauplatz des zeitgenössischen Kybernetisierungsprozesses freigelegt, ist sie doch im Innersten mit den neuen Bedingungen des Denkens, der Subjektivität und der Politik verknüpft, die dieser Prozess ins Werk setzt. Die medienästhetische Frage exponiert so gesehen Schlüsselprobleme der kybernetischen Medienkultur überhaupt. Luciana Parisi problematisiert zunächst die Implikationen der immer noch vorherrschenden repräsentationalistischen, ausdrucksorientierten, expressiven Medienästhetik, hinter der ein heute überholter Begriff von Medien als Artikulations- und Äußerungsmaschinen steht. Kybernetisierte Medien haben hingegen längst, so Parisi, die etablierten Medienfunktionen überschritten, sie sind als «Kloner des Realen» zu verstehen, als «immanente Erfasser von Daten», ja schließlich als «Erfassungsmaschinen des Unartikulierbaren und Unrepräsentierbaren». Stattdessen wird von ihr nach einer intensiven, nicht-repräsentativen Ästhetik des Codes gefragt, die sich auf der Höhe der medialen Situation und der entsprechenden Machtform befindet und deren Kernoperationen entziffern kann. Am Ende wird insbesondere die Bedeutung von algorithmischen Experimenten, wie sie in der digitalen Architektur stattfinden, für eine grundsätzliche Reevaluierung von Medienästhetik herausgestellt, eine Reevaluierung, der im Augenblick des Eintritts in die neue digitale Matrix, in der wir leben, eine, ja vermutlich sogar die kritische Funktion zukommt. ; The interview brings out the specific place and application of the contemporary media-aesthetic question, sketches the historicity of its emergence, and brings into focus the conceptual-political strategies that are needed for its accurate outlining. In the course of this discussion, media aesthetics are exposed as the central arena of the contemporary process of cybernetization, yet linked at heart to the new conditions of thought, subjectivity and politics which this process sets in operation. The media-aesthetic question exposes key problems of cybernetic media culture in general. Luciana Parisi first problematizes the implications of the still prevalent representationalist, expressive media aesthetics, behind the now outdated conception of media as articulation-machines and expression-machines. Cybernetized media have however long since exceeded the established media-functions, so Parisi suggests, and are to be understood as »cloners of the real«, as »immanent prehensors of data«, even, finally, as »prehensive machines of the un-articulable and un-representable«. Accordingly, she calls for an intensive, non-representative aesthetics of code, which is located on the level of the medial and technological situation and its corresponding forms of power, and whose core operations it enables to decipher. Ultimately algorithmic experiments, as they occur in digital architecture, are shown to be the basis for a fundamental re-evaluation of media aesthetics as such – a re-evaluation which, at the moment we are currently experiencing of entry into the new digital matrix, plays a, probably the critical function.

Résumé Notre rapport aux technologies médiatiques ne nous met pas tant en présence de nouveaux objets que de nouveaux environnements. C'est donc à partir d'une écologie générale qu'il nous faut tenter de comprendre les médias, nouveaux et anciens. Les réflexions de Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, mais aussi l'agentivité environnementale de Mark Hansen ou la « struction » de Jean-Luc Nancy sont convoqués ici comme autant de pistes fécondes en direction d'une techno-écologie du sens.

This contribution outlines several modes of becoming-environmental that characterize the development thanks to which environmentality [Umweltlichkeit] has become our condition today: the becoming-environmental of media, of power, of subjectivity, of world, of capital and of thinking. The process of cybernetization initiated around 1900—and the process of computerization since 1950 in particular—culminating in the becoming-environmental of computation, is to be understood as a time of environmentalization, that forces us into the new power/knowledge complex of Environmentality [Environmentalität] and that obliges us, as a line of flight, to rethink environmentality as such beyond its restricted actual forms. Accordingly, the key challenge for a general ecology of media and technology is to advance the critique of Environmentalization by developing an analysis of its restricted forms, first of all of the environmentalitarian Capital-Form, and to break through toward a speculative thinking of the environment and a new environmental image of thought.