'Boris Groys' tag archive

of wasted labour’, then Capital switches tack. This time the labour is minimal for maximal result. The techno-utopian conceit – and here comes the Whitmanic dimension again – seems to be to democratize The Arcades. It’s the notion that anyone can do this stuff; all you need is a computer, a city and some time. […]

Reviews Culture and adminBéatrice Hibou, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale, La Découverte, Paris, 2012. 223 pp., €17.00 pb., 978 2 70717 439 0. ^ Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, Zone Books, New York, 2012. 182 pp., £19.95 hb., 978 1 93540 826 0. The ascendancy of neoliberalism […]

After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013. In a darkened room stand seven podiums, like black treadmills at a standstill. Each faces a digitized photo­graph projected onto a bare wall. The […]

Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Answering the question: What is to be done? (education) David cunningham The question ʻWhat is to be done?ʼ, Adorno remarked, frequently ʻsabotages the logical progress of knowledge that alone allows for changeʼ . However, despite being always-already-inscribed within the imperatives of instrumental rationality, it is, he acknowledged, nonetheless ʻunavoidableʼ. [1] This is especially so for […]

Reviews Bluffer’s guideTimothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. 360 pp., £19.00 hb., 0 231 13730 3. Itʼs the evening of 8 August 1974, and Iʼm watching Richard Nixon resign from the US presidency with the lack of grace that distinguished his entire political […]