- Germany
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Originally published in German in 2004, Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Erich Hörl’s unorthodox genealogy of thinking about thinking, is now available to readers in English. Beginning with epistemological crises... more
Originally published in German in 2004, Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Erich Hörl’s unorthodox genealogy of thinking about thinking, is now available to readers in English. Beginning with epistemological crises induced by the sciences in the nineteenth century and ending with the convergence of cybernetics and structural anthropology in the middle of the twentieth, Sacred Channels recounts the slow triumph of symbolic logic over intuition and representation in the human and physical sciences. In the process, Hörl braids together the formalisation of mathematics, the emergence of electromagnetic field theory, anthropological obsessions with ‘primitive’ thought and the coming of information theory, offering space for reflection on how intellectual paradigms mutate and exceed the bounds their authors ascribe to them. And rather than point to the limitations of digital logic for capturing the flux of life and experience – as is common in the contemporary humanit...
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe
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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... more
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.
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The cybernetization process which emerged in the middle of the 20 th Century and the digital evolution of information and communication technologies in the beginning of the 21 st Century are today resulting in a growing technicization and... more
The cybernetization process which emerged in the middle of the 20 th Century and the digital evolution of information and communication technologies in the beginning of the 21 st Century are today resulting in a growing technicization and reticulation of social and cognitive human environments and to their invasion by media technologies at all scales (“smart” and real-time evolving algorithmic environments, analysis of micro-sensitive data, colonization of daily life by “social networks”). Thus revealing the primary technical condition of human beings, this cybernetic becoming of contemporary environments imply to ask anew the ecological question and to rethink the Humanities, in the context of digital capitalism and hyper-industrial society.
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Research Interests: Simulation and De Gruyter
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At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the factory replaces the theater. The regime of production follows the order of representation. The epochal prioritization of the production process that shaped the... more
At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the factory replaces the theater. The regime of production follows the order of representation. The epochal prioritization of the production process that shaped the industrial modes of existence, as well as the related understanding of being and system of experiences, increasingly yields forces that can no longer be bound representationally—that are located at the limit of the unrepresentable, the inconceivable, or the uncontrollable. Michel Foucault has pointed out that “violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our [...] thought”.4 It is in any case the introduction of production into representation that forces thinking throughout the entire nineteenth century to comprehensive new descriptions to match the heavy industry. But this shift also took place for precise med...
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Scred Chnnels 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... more
Scred Chnnels 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 histori...
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ly envisaged by a spectator who only sees what goes into the workshop and what leaves it again without understanding the process as such. It is essentially an operation that is ordered by someone free and carried out by slaves.... The... more
ly envisaged by a spectator who only sees what goes into the workshop and what leaves it again without understanding the process as such. It is essentially an operation that is ordered by someone free and carried out by slaves.... The active character of form and the passive character of matter correspond to the transmission conditions of the order, which presupposes a social hierarchy.... The difference between form and matter, between soul and body, reflects a city that structure, involves the embedding of these actors in the digital, informationand CPU-intensive environment of new media and in automatic environmental technologies, which collectively represent the new dispositif of transformatory technologies. This ultimately transgresses the basic categorial dispositions and forms of intuition that have been controlled by the meaning-giving and meaning-carrying intentional subject, which was formerly the central actor and key protagonist of the sense culture, and it replaces this...
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Notre rapport aux technologies mediatiques ne nous met pas tant en presence de nouveaux objets que de nouveaux environnements. C’est donc a partir d’une ecologie generale qu’il nous faut tenter de comprendre les medias, nouveaux et... more
Notre rapport aux technologies mediatiques ne nous met pas tant en presence de nouveaux objets que de nouveaux environnements. C’est donc a partir d’une ecologie generale qu’il nous faut tenter de comprendre les medias, nouveaux et anciens. Les reflexions de Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, mais aussi l’agentivite environnementale de Mark Hansen ou la « struction » de Jean-Luc Nancy sont convoques ici comme autant de pistes fecondes en direction d’une techno-ecologie du sens.
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In a time in which an exuberant, trans-classical, non-trivial machine culture redesigns terminologies, remodels logics, produces new evidence, and reorganizes semantic resources, a new, neocybernetic regime of truth is taking shape. Many... more
In a time in which an exuberant, trans-classical, non-trivial machine culture redesigns terminologies, remodels logics, produces new evidence, and reorganizes semantic resources, a new, neocybernetic regime of truth is taking shape. Many of our recent self-descriptions and theory formations are coined by our media-technological condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Niklas Luhmann, especially in his inherent narrative of the history of rationality. This essay attempts to reconstruct Luhmann’s redescription of European rationality, especially the media- and machine-historical conditions that remain apparent in Luhmann’s account. The decisive issue is that Luhmann’s history of rationality reveals the technological unconscious of systems theory and indeed the epochal imaginary it belongs to. With the help of the theories of machines developed by von Foerster, Simondon and Günther, Luhmann’s oeuvre must be read as probably the most striking conceptual edifice to em...
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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... more
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 an...
This article has been published in: Mathias Denecke, Anne Ganzert, Isabelle Otto, Robert Stock (eds.), ReClaiming Participation, Bielefeld 2016: Transcript, pp. 93-121
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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... more
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 thin...
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The idea of sustainability is intrinsically normative. Thus, understanding the role of normativity in sustainability discourses is crucial for further developing sustainability science. In this article, we analyze three important... more
The idea of sustainability is intrinsically normative. Thus, understanding the role of normativity in sustainability discourses is crucial for further developing sustainability science. In this article, we analyze three important documents that aim to advance sustainability and explore how they organize norms in relation to sustainability. The three documents are: the Pope's Encyclical , the and the . We show that understanding the role of different types of norms in the three documents can help understand normative features of both scientific and non-scientific sustainability discourses. We present the diverse system of norms in a model that interrelates three different levels: macro, meso, and micro. Our model highlights how several processes affect the normative orientation of nations and societies at the meso-level in different ways. For instance, individual ethical norms at the micro-level, such as personal responsibility, may help decelerate unsustainable consumerism at th...