Bryan Norton

German Romanticism plays a central role in Gilbert Simondon's writings. In Mode of Existence, Simondon draws on Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann to illustrate the tragic consequences of failing to attend to the individuated relationship between landscape and tool. While Novalis is only mentioned in passing, his work presents the most radical form of what might be called Romantic mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis's poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new light on several key aspects of romantic poetry and philosophy.

This essay explores the artist Gregory Chatonsky's development of a new type of image-the extinction image. Emerging as a by-product of new technologies such as deep learning and neural nets, this nonoperative image is typified by a painstaking attempt to come to grips with the current threat of human extinction. It arises as a symptom of numerous crises endemic to the Anthropocene, providing a speculative tool for planetary thinking to develop alternatives in and through what has been called postcinema by scholars such as Steve Shaviro and Shane Denson. For Chatonsky, the Earth itself must now be imagined as a disarticulate user of postcinematic media, producing images that display a stunning indifference to the presence or absence of the human species. Close examination of Chatonsky's work will reveal a radical ecopolitics defined by a concern for what Alexander Galloway has called whatever being. Urging us to think carefully about the planetary emergency presented by climate change and geopolitical unrest, the extinction image serves as a reminder that the future of life on Earth is not a foregone conclusion.

While there is still much work to be done on the relationship between art, technology, and philosophy, Art and Cosmotechnics serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of what, for Hui, seems to matter most: technodiversity. The book provides a fruitful look into the way philosophical investigations of art may benefit from comparative approaches to technology and cultural cosmology. While undeniably dense and challenging, it will reward patient readers with its mapping of a complex history of intellectual and political exchange. While not every node fits harmoniously in the network of links Hui seeks to establish between technology and nature, East and West, Art and Cosmotechnics is nevertheless a bold synthesis, both recursive and organic. It reads a lot, in fact, like cosmotechnics.

The lexeme veloziferisch (velociferian) was first coined by Goethe in an unsent letter from 1825 and entered the public stage four years later with the second edition of the novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants). As a portmanteau, the neologism, which is composed of the Italian velocità and the German luziferisch, combines two central elements of the Goethean imaginary: the accelerated velocity of modern life and the “luciferian” function of negation. Das Veloziferische marks a dangerous speed at which organic growth is outpaced by the rapid acceleration of technological development. At velociferian speeds, the otherwise figurative role of negation in Goethe’s philosophy of nature takes on a disfiguring function, highlighted most clearly by the techno-accelerationist allegory Faust. The invention of this term has prompted recent investigations into the relationship between technological development and social acceleration in modernity. Furthermore, an appreciation of Goethe’s critique of the velociferian enables a fuller understanding of his unique position in relation to broader trends in natural philosophy and the philosophy of biology (Spinoza, Schelling, and Erwin Schrödinger), in addition to the philosophy of technology (Thomas Carlyle and Bruno Latour).

Dieser Artikel setzt sich mit der Beziehung zwischen Ontologie, Kontingenz und Geschlecht in der Frühromantik auseinander und legt den Fokus dabei auf die Figur von Dorothea Schlegel. Obwohl Dorothea Schlegels Werk oft getrennt von den theoretischen Zielen der Frühromantik behandelt wird, argumentiere ich für die Zentralität ihres Romans Florentin im nachkantischen Kontext. Florentin bietet eine wichtige Revision von Friedrich Schlegels Poetik und Metaphysik der Ehe an, sowie der geschlechtsspezifischen Dynamik seiner Idee einer romantischen Symphilosophie. Darüber hinaus lässt sich der Roman als eine Inszenierung grundlegender Aspekte der realistischen Ontologie Markus Gabriels lesen, die angesichts von Beisers Plädoyer
für eine nichtsubjektive Ansicht auf die transzendentalen Ziele der Romantiker für die Romantikforschung in Anspruch genommen werden kann. In Kontrast zu Gabriels Sinnfeldontologie, die Ontologie in letzter Instanz von Geist abhängig macht, insistiert Dorothea Schlegels Florentin allerdings auf die irreduzible Präsenz der Körper und körperlicher Kontingenzen.

In this interview, scholar-curator Bryan Norton discusses new forms of planetary-scale image-making with artist-researcher Asia Bazydrieva (Geocinema) and media theorist Jussi Parikka. While collaborating with Bazdyrieva during the production of Geocinema's 'Making of Earths' , a documentary exploring the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China, Parikka wrote a new book, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (2023). In this study, Parikka suggests that the forms of image-making explored in 'Making of Earths' press against the very borders of the visible, possessing a long history with drastic political and social consequences. Drawing on the history of satellite imagery, drone footage and climate models, both Parikka's and Bazydrieva's work present fecund modes of artistic and scholarly engagement with the contemporary creation and dissemination of what Harun Farocki called 'operational images' in his audiovisual work from the early 2000s. In this conversation, Bazdyrieva, Norton and Parikka discuss the ever increasing ubiquity of these types of images in order to highlight their role in planetary-scale computation systems, the production of scientific knowledge and the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This catalogue essay for a 2018 exhibition at the Ross Gallery in Philadelphia discusses displays of 'natural' design in art and craft objects exhibited at universal exhibitions between 1851 and 1915, in particular amphora vases and ceramics designed by Max Läuger. The essay also discusses ways in which natural forces proved a logistical challenge to the plans of exhibit organisers, such as the flooding of the Schuylkill River before the 1876 fair in Philadelphia.

This new collection of essays on German romanticism takes its cue from the opening page of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant proposes that human experience consists of a surprising assemblage, a Zusammengesetztes, of sense impressions and a priori components of intellectual cognition. This "conceptual monad of 'assembly,'" as Mottram and Clason explain in their well-crafted introduction, "gathers the myriad ways that a concordance between perception and meaning is constructed" for human beings (1). This logic of assembly foreshadows the deployment of Kant's synthetic judgments a priori later on in the first Critique, a process which folds intellectual and sensual modes of cognition together into a single unified operation. This conceptual nexus provides Mottram and Clason with the opportunity for investigating the unique ways meaning-making systems like a poem or a piece of music are conceptualized, created, and even disassembled by romantic writers working in the wake of Kant's project. Tracing the post-Kantian composition and decomposition of meaning by Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and others, Assembly and its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought highlights the centrality of the senses and Kant's investigation of the relationship between aesthetics and knowledge for romantic poetry and scientific experimentation. The emphasis on the role played by sensing, aesthesis, in poetic production could place romanticism front and center for current discussions occurring elsewhere in German Studies and in the humanities at large on the role of the senses and embodiment in knowledge production. This important connection, however, is not touched on directly in the volume. The link remains merely implicit, a lacuna which presents a real missed opportunity for scholars who might be otherwise interested in better

This compact volume aims to take stock of the myriad critical responses elicited in recent years by transformations in computational media and digital capital. Attending to the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence in the construction of digital media environments, these essays collectively highlight the contingency embedded within algorithmic functionality while addressing the oppressive organizational structures and governmental capabilities such operations make available to big data. Containing entries from Mark Hansen, Luciana Parisi, Claus Pius, and others, Critique and the Digital provides an impressive overview of both the theoretical and practical stakes of coming to terms with the digital in its increasingly ubiquitous forms.

Exhibiting a unique combination of historical acumen and theoretical bravado, Sweet Science draws from an array of scholarly and disciplinary traditions including science and literature, gender studies, new materialism, and radical pedagogy in an attempt to shed light on a Lucretius-inspired countertrend to the increasingly sharp disciplinary boundaries that were drawn between art and the sciences over the course of the nineteenth century. Blake joins a chorus of figures including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin in casting "animal formation as a work of acute circumstantial dependence, rather than of autotelic power." Lying hidden in this essay, Goldstein shows, are a number of astounding affinities between De rerum natura's imaginative display of Brownian motion via dancing dust mites and Goethe's own gradual understanding of figuration as central to the project of thinking nature and poetry concomitantly.

When Bernard Stiegler passed away last august, he left behind a wealth of influential writings and experimental praxes. He was the head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation , an institution he founded at the Pompidou Center in 2006, and had previously served as general director of the Institut nationale de l'audiovisuel. His written work spans dozens of volumes and has been translated into a number of languages. In titles such as Technics and Time, Symbolic Misery, and Mécreance et Discrédit , he reminds us time and again to take seriously the role technics and exteriorization play in identity formation on an individual and collective psychic level. It seems the urgency of this project is only just beginning to be appreciated as technology firms and big data continue to infiltrate and reshape the lifeworld at an alarming rate. The political and social imaginary is being rapidly transformed before our eyes, often under the guise of creating what Mark Zuckerberg has innocuously dubbed 'global communities.' The virtual spaces of digital platforms-once deemed capacious enough to house Occupy and the Tea Party, the Arab Spring and Erdogan-have given rise to Trumpism, COVID denial, and a number of other far-right movements. While the exteriorization of the collective and individual psyche through technics can provide points of contact around which emancipatory political and social bodies might emerge, this process has been corrupted by digital capital and the information economy, a situation which Stiegler diagnosed as a "New Conflict of the Faculties." More recently, Stiegler turned his attention to the psycho-social stakes of the cultural politics of 'disruption,' that catchword which, as Adrian Daub recently noted, recalls the sounds and images of emancipatory revolution while providing nothing of the sort. The Anthropocene, Stiegler suggests, has always been just an 'Entropocene,' tending towards chaos and disarray rather than order and social cohesion. What the present requires is the creation of new forms of life that are capable of redistributing energy in unforeseen, negentropic ways. This project seeks contributions probing the theoretical and material stakes of digital capital in light of Stiegler's call for the creation of a new experimental politics of negentropy. We are looking in particular for essays exhibiting how a speculative approach from the theoretical humanities might be used to probe concrete questions concerning exteriorization in all its forms, including AI and machine learning, film, music and sound, the history of cybernetics, literature, platform capitalism, and other new media. Contributions might ask, for example, how the Derridian pharmakon and its employment in Stiegler's work can be used as a means of exploring, even pushing back against, the current cultural politics of 'disruption.' What new visions for the future might be opened up when we further interrogate the politics of digitization? Cryptocurrencies and machine learning software are becoming increasingly reliant on high entropy/low information yield algorithms, which serves to accelerate the conflictual interrelations of the faculties Stiegler diagnoses. How might his framing of the Anthropocene in