This article explores one aspect of digital politics, the politics of videos and more specifically of DAESH recruitment videos. It proposes a practice theoretical approach to the politics of DAESH recruitment videos focused on the re-production of regimes of (in)visibility. The article develops an argument demonstrating specifically how digital and commercial logics characterize the aesthetic, circulatory, and infrastructuring practices re-producing the regime of (in)visibility. It shows that digital/commercial logics are at the heart of the combinatorial marketing of multiple, contradictory images (...) of the DAESH polity in the videos; that they are core to the participatory, entrepreneurial, individualized and affective processes of contagion determining whom the videos reach and involve; and that they shape the sorting, linking, flagging and censoring of the videos that define their accessibility on the internet. The theoretical and political cost of overlooking these digital and commercial characteristics of DAESH visibility practices are high. It perpetuates misconceptions of how the videos work and what their politics are and it reinforces the digital Orientalism/occidentalism in which these misconceptions are anchored. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures to effectively organize increasingly (...) ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. (shrink)

The article investigates the mathematical and philosophical backdrop of the digital ocean as contemporary model, moving from the digitalized ocean of Georg Cantor’s set theory to that of Alan Turing’s computation theory. It examines in Cantor what is arguably the most rigorous historical attempt to think the structural essence of the continuum, in order to clarify what disappears from the computational paradigm once Turing begins to advocate for the structural irrelevance of this ancient ground.

This paper addresses the exclusion of physical and technical media from questions of ontology. It is argued, first, that from Aristotle onwards ontology has dealt with the matter and form of things rather than the relations between things in time and space. Second, it is argued that because the Greeks did not distinguish between speech elements and alphabetic letters there has been a tendency for philosophy to neglect writing as its own technical medium. This paper traces these tendencies through a (...) range of philosophical sources: from Aquinas and Descartes to Fichte and Hegel. It is argued, by way of response, that it is only with Heidegger that a philosophical consciousness for technical media first arose, and that today the connections of mathematics and media, and of media and ontology are to be formulated in more precise terms. (shrink)

This article argues that the abundance of Greek figures and scenarios in Kittler’s recent work points to a shift in his oeuvre, which, however, does not represent a radical break with his ‘hardware studies’. At the turn of the 21st century, Kittler champions an emphatic notion of culture as a necessary supplement to science and technology. This conceptual marriage mediates grand historical narratives of cultural identity. Specifically, Kittler’s texts provide us with narratives of Greek origin which serve to re-capture collective (...) identities in the age of globalization. On the explicit level, this identity is predominantly European, but the search has national components as well. With his turn to culture, the organizing trope of 19th-century German nationalism, Kittler has also embraced the legacy of German philhellenism, which articulated national identities through the theme of ‘elective affinity’. Kittler’s Greece occupies the very structural place it had in 19th-century German philhellenism: It stands in for both the foundation of European civilization and its virtual better self, a realm of sensual culture untainted by modern capitalism and Empire. Most of the figures inhabiting this realm are familiar from 19th-century discourse as well, but these discursive loops are fueled by contemporary feedback. Kittler’s Greek narratives have developed out of postwar academic discourses and connect to other post-unification Greek fantasies. (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza críticamente la propuesta de Kittler de renovar las ciencias sociales y humanas mediante una reflexión orientada hacia los medios de comunicación. Para ello, se sitúa tal propuesta en el debate, impulsado por el giro medial en Filosofía de los Medios, acerca de la pertinencia (o no) del enfoque trascendentalista sobre los medios. En un primer momento, se presenta en términos generales el planteo kittleriano en cuanto enfoque trascendentalista. En un segundo momento, se reconstruye y analiza la (...) estrategia kittleriana consistente en eliminar la noción de sentido para concentrarse, en cambio, en la noción de información. (shrink)