Undisziplinierte Bücher

This book addresses the conditions that allow military image practices to emerge and function. By looking at five historical case studies, it examines a broad spectrum of Western war technologies, although it focuses on the context of colonial claims to power and military images: from the generation of obedience in the early modern period to the beginnings of aviation and the drone wars of the twenty-first century.

When Alice steps through the mirror in Lewis Caroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she removes herself from the centre of vision and perspective, restoring the autonomy of everything else that lies "beyond" the mirror. Similarly, the philosopher who wishes to engage with the contemporary medial system must pass through the screen, recognising the autonomy of the non-human components of the system, but also understanding the human role within the system itself.

Perched between philosophy and otherdisciplines such as psychology, sociology, neuroscience, computer science, electronics, cultural studies, French médiologie, German Medienarchäologie, and first-order cybernetics, this book challenges our contemporary screen experience and provides the reader with new tools with which to understand it, as well as novel insights into the role of philosophy in the digital condition. Its aim, ultimately, is to lay the foundations of a general theory of being and culture by examining them through their technological manifestations.

In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Asia, as a "central field of world experience" (Osterhammel), is arousing a different kind of interest than it did during the epoch of imperial Orientalism. The emerging global avant-gardes are developing a way of approaching Asia’s vast cultural resources that is changing both the framework and imagination of the arts – and guiding the transition from a homogenous to a plural modernity.

This comparatist study is the first to address failure, a historically recent figure of thought. By looking at selected literary works and scholarly discourses, it examines the origins and implications of the genuinely modern concept of the non-functioning subject, which began taking shape around 1850. It investigates texts by authors like Gustave Flaubert, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud.

SOS signals, knocks, flares, or messages in a bottle: when people find themselves in distress, they must use all possible means to draw attention to themselves. They have to send distress signals in order to stay alive. This book examines numerous catastrophes to show why people in emergencies are existentially dependent on media and means of communication.

As one component of ongoing research into the persistence of similarity in aesthetic modernism, this study sketches the historical and conceptual dimensions of similarity as an aesthetic and epistemological paradigm and looks at the similarity concepts of Breton, Ernst, Magrittes, and Caillois to examine how surrealism’s transversal agenda released similarity from rational, representational, and identitarian criteria.

The research agency Forensic Architecture investigates war crimes and ecological as well as political crises and brings them into the exhibition as well as the courtroom with its "Investigative Aesthetics" (MACBA 2017). Following the figure of "Law on Trial" Lisa Stuckey examines why aesthetic and poetic forensic procedures, of all things, are entrusted with a radical questioning of social justice.

Interest in the voice grew in the late eighteenth century. It was above all its appearance at the peripheries and outside of human articulation and perception that came into view. Physiology, linguistic anthropology, media technology, and literature examined the vocal expressions of animals in an intense process of exchange. This study traces the historic prerequisites for and cultural interferences of bioacoustics avant la lettre.

The cultural history of German migration society is still unwritten, even though, since the 1960s, numerous interactions and aesthetic negotiations have taken place in literature, film, and in societal debates and theories that have driven the transformation of the political system. This volume opens up an unexpected perspective on informal relations and potentials that have so far received little attention.

Contrary to the usual avant-garde narratives, which primarily revolve around dynamic processes, this volume explores the static side of modernism. Piet Mondrian, Oskar Schlemmer and Gottfried Benn are presented as "aesthetic staticians" who, like engineers, are in search of balance. Their works paradigmatically demonstrate that there is far more to the concept of statics than just mathematical formulae and technoid forms.
In addition to these three avant-gardists, numerous other artists and writers also have their say. In this way, a dazzling cultural and theoretical-historical panorama unfolds.
On the one hand, "static modernism" deals with the history and aesthetics of iron architecture, which are closely interwoven with mechanical statics, and on the other, it offers space for the search for harmony, tranquillity, universality and monumentality. The desire to create something static and therefore equilibristic is only at first glance something that is unpopular in an age of pure dynamism. On the contrary, it is clear that statics permeates and characterises classical modernism.

During the political upheaval of 1968, a frequent topic of conversation was how economics rules desire and how desire drives capitalism. This study investigates the relationship between desire and economics based on paradigmatic positions in the history of philosophy. It also suggests ways to update the claims of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for late-stage capitalism.

Trash: It sits in the street and in yellow bins, carefully sorted or carelessly discarded, omnipresent yet invisible. This study investigates the cultural politics of waste, including day-to-day life of the garbage can, the phenomenon of hoarding, and present-day trash separation. Modern trash is not only the basis of justifications of inequality. Garbage also reveals the limits of domination of the one over the other.

Since the 17^th century, palate and taste have been key “technology of the self” used by the new global metropolitan bourgeoisie. The practice of taste, including its communication and staging in a manner divorced from political, economic and bodily needs, holds out the promise of a free and egalitarian society. This history of “mature” taste characterizes a transformation in the realms of orality and appetite.