Published in Open Cultural Studies
The article sets out the thesis that the social-ontological account based on the form of life concept can be used to analytically and normatively reflect alternative economies and their attempt to overcome capitalistic structures.2 To develop the thesis, I provide conceptual work on the “economic form of life”, pointing at its plasticity due to the...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
The paper develops a concept of conviviality as a form of friendly togetherness that includes people, technical infrastructures and nature. Therefore, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, different strands of thinking about conviviality (e.g. Ivan Illich), John Dewey’ experimentalism and the political theory and movement of convivialism are firstly ...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical r...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
Published in Open Cultural Studies
In his book Tools for Conviviality (1975), Ivan Illich calls for human self-limitation in technology development. His aim is neither environmental protection nor the prevention of unforeseen side-effects of technology development, but the comprehensibility of technologies’ operating principles for the user. For if the construction or repairing of t...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
Attitudes to digital communication technologies since the 1990s have been characterized by waves of optimism and pessimism, as enthusiasts have highlighted their democratic and liberating potentials, while critics have pointed to the socially, politically and psychologically deleterious consequences of unchecked digital capitalism. This paper seeks...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
Contemporary times have triggered for an interdisciplinary cusp between disciplines that were conventionally read in a hinged academic encore. The Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ near Allahabad city where three holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati converge, is believed to be the holiest riverscape as one drop of amrit (nectar) during ocean churning by...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
In Sisyphus Outdone (2012), Nathanaël’s particular tribute to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the reader faces a challenging hybrid text in which the verbal and visual dimensions intermingle to produce an idiosyncratic type of narrative. Fragmentary, elliptical, a web of quotations, dictums, and meditations on the difficult condition of ...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
This article aims at exploring the subversive nature of two Sinophone Malaysian cultural products, namely “Bie zai tiqi” (2002) a short story by Ho Sok Fong and You Mean the World to Me (2017), a full-length feature film by director Saw Teong Hin. I argue that, despite their differences, both fictional products use powerful metafictional and metana...
Published in Open Cultural Studies
According to the philosopher Fabián Ludueña, before biopolitics, Rome and Greece put in motion the zoopolitics of an Anthropotechnical machine. The practice of expositio is the foundational zoopolitical human gesture. It consisted of leaving new-born children exposed at street markets to be sold as slaves, or in nature, left to survive (or die). Th...
