Commentary The manhunt doctrine Grégoire chamayou George W. Bush had warned us early on: the United States has launched itself into a new kind of war, a ‘war that requires us to be on an international manhunt’. [1] It would be wrong to believe that Barack Obama’s ‘justice has been done’, echoing Bush nearly ten […]

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 […]

Media, as considered by media philosophy, are not what you expect them to be. In the first place, they have almost nothing to do with information, or transmission, or communication, or storage. They do not as such produce sense or distribute meanings. If they do so, it is as a side effect or a secondary […]

When I read the expression ‘The map is not the territory’ for the first time, it occurred to me that it contained the quintessence of Anglo-American philosophy of common sense. The defiant insistence on a logic of representation, a common-sense belief in the evidence of an objective ‘reality’ that is prior to all mental representations […]

In my view, the question raised by this short and sharp Dossier concerns the relationship of the ‘regime’ of German media philosophy to the contemporary philosophy involved in its major operation: the de-definition of media. This is shown, immediately, by the very un/common notion used by Professors Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert: not ‘Philosophy of […]

Robinson in Ruins New materialism and the archaeological imagination Paul dave Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keil er’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson. [1] The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson […]

Universities Devolving public universities Lessons from America Christopher newfield It is easy enough to be fatalistic about the current funding situation in higher education. US public universities have locked themselves into a model that has led to the slashing of public funding off and on for thirty years and that has been forcing public universities […]

Euphemism, the university and disobedience Alexander garcía düttmann Euphemism is the linguistic condition of contemporary society and spreads through the university as much as through any other institution. But what, exactly, is a euphemism? After having turned his attention to the different meanings of the Greek word from which ‘euphemism’ is derived, and having considered […]

Reviews Well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out…Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300 pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 26202 650 5. One of the more interesting recent Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, is a musical set in 1950s’ Moscow. The historical Stilyagi were the Soviet […]

Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 26202 650 5. Owen Hatherley One of the more interesting recent Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, is a musical set in 1950s’ Moscow. The historical Stilyagi were the Soviet Union’s beatniks, enthusiasts for modern jazz and […]