sleepless nights


stirring around , words that come and attack  from all sides, the future, the past, the present

getting up

no sleep, old age, will I soon be sitting and wait for the great sleep to come ?

putting  words in the google machine:

“Words beyond Grammar” Boris Groys
Human life can be described as a prolonged dialogue with the world. Man interrogates the world and is interrogated by the world.

This is what came up in the net when I put in the words that circled in my head in the attempts to find sleep. Is this a miracle ? Is it always just asking questions and the right answer for your situation will come up ?
“The dialogue with the world is regulated by the questions we ask and the answers we may find….
If we believe that the world was created by God, we ask questions and wait for answers that are different from those that we ask if we believe the world is an uncreated “emprical reality”……Today we practice our dialogue with the world primarily via the internet. If we want to ask the world questions, we act as internet users. And if we want to answer the question the world asks us, we act as content providers.”
Boris Groys

The essay is essentially about Google and the its rules of dialogue with the world.

Google as the first philosophical machine.

“Google dissolves all discourses by turning them into the word clouds that function as collections of words beyond grammar. ……As a philosophical machine, google is based on a belief in extragrammatical freedom and the equality of all words and their right to migrate freely in any possible direction.”

As Groys points out this development has aready been predicted by the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his text of 1912 on the “destruction of syntax” and he proposed already an early version of word clouds in “Parole in Libertà”

So what is Google in our dialogue with the world? Is this dialogue anymore thinkable without Google?

“The subject of a Google search becomes a struggle for truth, that is on the one hand metaphysical and on the other hand political and technological. It is metaphysical because it is a struggle not for a particular “worldly” truth or to put it in other words – for a particular context. Rather, it is a struggle for access to the truth as such – understood as the sum total of all materially existing contexts. It is the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information- the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space.”
Boris Groys

This text which is again part of the Dokumenta 13 documents is available at Hatje Cantz Verlag and can be bought and downloaded for really little money.

Born in 1947 in East Berlin, Boris Groys is currently Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design. He has authored multiple books, including Art Power (2008) and Going Public (2010), and curated various exhibitions, such as Medium Religion at ZKM, Karlsruhe (with P. Weibel) (2008–09) and the Russian Pavillion at the Biennale di Venezia (2011).






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