CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
This short essay offers thoughts on bell hooks's use of the list form in the phrase 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'. While this list suggests that the social forces it contains work together in one unified direction, we can also look to instances in which they pull in opposing directions. However, the function of the list may not be to faithfully map the complexities of social life, but, rather, in its reduction and simplicity, to enable us to believe that social transformation is possible.
On the list
(2022)
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction - as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction - as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
The chapter explores the dimension of the living present as a form of temporal reduction, looking at its manifestation in literary texts. Bazzoni proposes here a focus on the living present as different from a still, eternal moment, and contrasts the experience of the living present with the reduction at play in trauma. Finally, the author discusses the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of the temporality of the living present as a site of subjectivation, which effects a counter-reduction of normative discourses.
Nothing beyond the name : towards an eclipse of listening in the psychotherapeutic enterprise
(2022)
What are the different kinds of reduction that take place in a psychotherapeutic discipline? This article looks at the agonistic relations between the two types of reduction that fundamentally constitute a psychotherapeutic paradigm: naming and listening. At any given moment in the history of psychological theory, various schools and theories are in contention with each other over an institutional and state legitimation that will only be granted to one or some of them. It is argued that these disciplinary contentions for a dominant status subordinate the names and concepts that populate a particular psychotherapeutic paradigm to a property regime, thereby obscuring or compromising the attention paid to forms of listening that occur on the edge of naming and meaning.
Die telefonische Revolution des Bildes : Effekte einer Kommunikationsobsession des 21. Jahrhunderts
(2010)
Um was für ein Objekt handelt es sich eigentlich beim gegenwärtigen Mobiltelefon? Im Folgenden sollen kurz drei Elemente skizziert werden, die für die historische Entwicklung und das gegenwärtige Design des Mobiltelefons von zentraler Bedeutung sind: Das Mobiltelefon ist (1) ein höchst hybrides Medium, das eine ganze Reihe von Medientechniken verbindet und dabei auch diese eigentümliche Verbindung von Telefon und digitalem Bild herstellt; es ist (2) eine mobile Operationseinheit, die sich von einem physischen oder architektonischen Ort löst und dessen Mobilisierung (3) die Minimierung der Interfaces forciert. All dies erzeugt die neuen Bedingungen für eine Revolution des digitalen Bildes im Zeichen des Telefons.