http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/15/postmodernism-cutting-edge-to-museum?CMP=twt_iph/postmodernism-from-the-cutting-edge-to-the-museum-art-and-design-the-guardian Postmodernism: Was this pre-digital phenomenon killed off by the Internet? http://t.co/KLWldzzq #x #exhibition #culture #digital ]]> Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:03:29 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/15/postmodernism-cutting-edge-to-museum?CMP=twt_iph/postmodernism-from-the-cutting-edge-to-the-museum-art-and-design-the-guardian http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:08:16 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called… ]]> Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:48:43 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia11/parrhesia11_ranciere.pdf I will present some remarks here on the use of the notion of medium in art theory and the light cast on this notion by the case of photography. The notion of medium is in fact much more complex than it appears at first. Theorizations of medium as the crucial element of artistic modernity bring two apparently opposite senses of the word into play. First, we understand the word ‘medium’ as ‘that which holds between’: between an idea and its realization, between a thing and its reproduction. The medium thus appears as an intermediary, as the means to an end or the agent of an… ]]> Sat, 12 Mar 2011 02:55:38 -0700 http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia11/parrhesia11_ranciere.pdf http://chronicle.com/article/What-if-They-Had-a-Science-War/125828 In November the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, of which I am a member, met for one and a half days. In preparation for the meeting, we were expected to read a 250-page briefing book. About three pages of that 250-page book were taken up by what the meeting will now be remembered for: a revision of the association's statement on its long-range planning. We did not know it, but those three pages were to set off a short "science war" within anthropology. Now that tempers have died down, we can ask what the controversy shows about the… ]]> Tue, 18 Jan 2011 04:18:26 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/What-if-They-Had-a-Science-War/125828 http://e-flux.com/journal/view/175 by Svetlana Boym

Critic and writer Viktor Shklovsky proposes the figure of the knight’s move in chess that follows “the tortured road of the brave,” preferring it to the master-slave dialectics of “dutiful pawns and kings.” Oblique, diagonal, and zigzag moves reveal the play of human freedom vis-à-vis political teleologies and ideologies that follow suprahuman laws of the invisible hand of the market or of the march of progress.

The twentieth century began with futuristic utopias and dreams of unending development and ended with nostalgia and quests for restoration. The twenty-first century cannot seek… ]]> Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:49:00 -0700 http://e-flux.com/journal/view/175 http://www.curatormagazine.com/sorinahiggins/what-is-posthumanism/ Perhaps you have had a nightmare in which you fell through the bottom of your known universe into a vortex of mutated children, talking animals, mental illness, freakish art, and clamoring gibberish. There, you were subjected to the gaze of creatures of indeterminate nature and questionable intelligence. Your position as the subject of your own dream was called into question while voices outside your sight commented upon your tenuous identity. When you woke, you were relieved to find that it was only a dream-version of the book you were reading when you fell asleep. Maybe that book was Alice in… ]]> Mon, 13 Sep 2010 03:19:00 -0700 http://www.curatormagazine.com/sorinahiggins/what-is-posthumanism/ http://www.svetlanaboym.com/manifesto.htm “It's not my fault. Communication error has occurred,” my computer pleads with me in a voice of lady Victoria. First it excuses itself, then urges me to pay attention, to check my connections, to follow the instructions carefully. I don't. I pull the paper out of the printer prematurely, shattering the image, leaving its out takes, stripes of transience, inkblots and traces of my hands on the professional glossy surface. Once the disoriented computer spat out a warning across the image “Do Not Copy,” an involuntary water mark that emerged from the depth of its disturbed memory. The communication error… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:22:00 -0700 http://www.svetlanaboym.com/manifesto.htm http://museumviews.com/?I6aLwGm8 It seems to me part of the problem is that the term "postmodernism" was always so muddy and abstract. To different people, it meant (at least) two different things. First of all, for many, "postmodernism" stood as a certain critical paradigm for art and theory. This is the sense that both Krauss and Foster mean it. Postmodernism embodies the "critique of essentialism," a rejection of totality, liberated irony; it was defined by genre jumping, institutional critique, deconstruction, and so on.

The problem with this "theoretical" definition of postmodernism seems to me to be its lack of historical… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:56:00 -0700 http://museumviews.com/?I6aLwGm8 http://www.thecommonreview.org/feature-articles/gottschalls-problem.html These are fighting words. But can the scientific model really be applied to literature? Some of the scholars I talked to regard science’s push into the humanities as an intrusion, an attempt to explain the magic of human achievement with the most indelicate tools. Gottschall is calling for a science of the humanities—notscience in the humanities (as in Darwinian literary theory), but science of. The distinction is important. To critics, a science of the humanities is simply unfathomable, a contradiction in terms. It weaponizes Darwinian theory, co-opts the most painstaking literary work, and bashes away close reading with a club.… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:21:00 -0700 http://www.thecommonreview.org/feature-articles/gottschalls-problem.html http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-soul-of-the-scientist-of-man ow does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this trend, as other contributors to this symposium have noted, are entwined with those of modernity itself. And while the tale of this turn has been told broadly before — the story of entire disciplines adopting the name, the method, and the underlying assumptions of modern science — little has been said of the change in the educators themselves. It is not just the method of inquiry and the substance of… ]]> Sun, 04 Apr 2010 06:54:00 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-soul-of-the-scientist-of-man http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/04/religion-atheism Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself has lived between the tugs of belief and unbelief, made an eloquent call in the New Yorker last August for "a theologically engaged atheism". Concluding a review of Terry Eagleton's recent attack on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, he imagines something "only a semitone from faith [which] could give a brother's account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative." At the American Academy of Religion meeting… ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:29:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/04/religion-atheism http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=133 Paul Virilio is one of the most significant French cultural theorists writing today.1 Increasingly hailed as the inventor of concepts such as 'dromology' (the 'science' of speed), Virilio is renowned for his declaration that the logic of acceleration lies at the heart of the organization and transformation of the modern world. However, Virilio's thought remains much misunderstood by many postmodern cultural theorists. In this article, and supporting the ground-breaking work of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, I shall evaluate the contribution of Virilio's writings by suggesting that they exist beyond the terms of postmodernism and that they should be conceived of… ]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:34:00 -0700 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=133 http://spacecollective.org/Rourke/4692/Traversing-the-Altermodern-Tate-Britains-4th-Triennial In one of the most uncanny revelations in science fiction, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine awakes from his anthropic slumber: the museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his future. From here the very notion of history, of memorandum, retrospection and the artefact is called into question. The Time Traveller has become lost not in space, but in time, and nothing will ever be straightforward again.

Like the Time Traveller I too am a wanderer of ancient museums in unfathomable lands. From… ]]> Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:58:00 -0700 http://spacecollective.org/Rourke/4692/Traversing-the-Altermodern-Tate-Britains-4th-Triennial