This article uses foodscapes as a lens to explore the potential of ecovillages’ food practices towards enhancing sustainable food systems. Ecovillages are collective projects where members attempt to integrate sustainability principles into daily community life. In these communities, food acts, not only as an element of social life, but also as a venue through which to interact with mainstream food systems and society. Yet, how food practices at ecovillages contribute to sustainable food systems remains vague. This article proposes foodscapes, as (...) a lens, for exploring the sustainability potential of place-based food practices in ecovillages, while also directing attention to how these practices intersect with networks at broader social and spatial scales. It asks, how can we better understand and draw from sustainable food practices, when considering these as both, place-based and relational? And what is the potential and the role of ecovillage communities to contribute to broader sustainable food system change? Drawing on ethnographic and food mapping methods, the article explores selected food practices at three ecovillage communities in the United States. Using social practice theory for “zooming in” on place-based practices and “zooming out” to examine relational networks, we investigate how these communities create internally sustainable food systems, while externally bridging themselves with broader urban and rural communities. Through viewing ecovillage food practices as place-based and relational, we develop a broader and spatially-focused understanding of food system sustainability. (shrink)

In a time in which an exuberant, trans-classical, non-trivial machine culture redesigns terminologies, remodels logics, produces new evidence, and reorganizes semantic resources, a new, neocybernetic regime of truth is taking shape. Many of our recent self-descriptions and theory formations are coined by our media-technological condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Niklas Luhmann, especially in his inherent narrative of the history of rationality. This essay attempts to reconstruct Luhmann’s redescription of European rationality, especially the media- and (...) machine-historical conditions that remain apparent in Luhmann’s account. The decisive issue is that Luhmann’s history of rationality reveals the technological unconscious of systems theory and indeed the epochal imaginary it belongs to. With the help of the theories of machines developed by von Foerster, Simondon and Günther, Luhmann’s oeuvre must be read as probably the most striking conceptual edifice to emerge from what could be called the 20th-century’s epochal technological shift of meaning. (shrink)

Résumé Notre rapport aux technologies médiatiques ne nous met pas tant en présence de nouveaux objets que de nouveaux environnements. C’est donc à partir d’une écologie générale qu’il nous faut tenter de comprendre les médias, nouveaux et anciens. Les réflexions de Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, mais aussi l’agentivité environnementale de Mark Hansen ou la « struction » de Jean-Luc Nancy sont convoqués ici comme autant de pistes fécondes en direction d’une techno-écologie du sens.

The paper presents Jean-Luc Nancy's outline of a history of sense and especially his thinking of exteriorization as an expression and working-through of the technological condition which characterizes the cybernetic culture of machines and objects. Furthermore, the paper suggests to ground the enthusiasm for the open and external (which is dominant in philosophical politics since 1950 and culminates in Nancy's work) in the supplementary, prothetic and transcategorical logic of the technical world.

The paper presents Jean-Luc Nancy's outline of a history of sense and especially his thinking of exteriorization as an expression and working-through of the technological condition which characterizes the cybernetic culture of machines and objects. Furthermore, the paper suggests to ground the enthusiasm for the open and external (which is dominant in philosophical politics since 1950 and culminates in Nancy's work) in the supplementary, prothetic and transcategorical logic of the technical world.

There is a relationship between time and technology which has been obvious since the classical philosophies of time. Even telling the time necessitates technologies relating to measuring and counting. Technological developments have changed the temporal state of our reality. Key terms such as deceleration, synchronisation, prevention and de-temporalisation point to relevant problem areas in this respect. This yearbook, whose thematic focus is 2021, endeavours to reveal new technological and philosophical perspectives on the temporal conditions in which we think, communicate, work (...) and live. With contributions by Cornelius Borck, Stefan Böschen, Christopher Coenen, Olivier Del Fabbro, Andreas Folkers, Yvonne Förster, Alexander Friedrich, Steve Fuller, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Thilo Hagendorff, Thomas Hilgers, Dirk Hommrich, Erich Hörl, Sebastian Lederle, Janne Mende, Jürgen Meutgens, Carl Mitcham, Oliver Müller, Alfred Nordmann, Tom Poljanšek, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludger Schwarte, Astrid Schwarz, René von Schomberg, René Umlauf, Sarine Waltenspül, Bastian Weiß, Langdon Winner and Yongmou Liu. (shrink)

In this volume the editors gather diverse perspectives on one agreed-upon condition: that the computational power of today's world has fundamentally transformed all aspects of this very world. This requires the investigation and questioning not only of the possible sites of critique but also of the concept of critique as such. If there used to be a critical subject constituted in the cultural techniques of modernity, and if digitality, as a condition, indicates itself as a product of modernity while at (...) the same time somehow being its very ending, what are the determinable ramifications? Digitality severely alters the critical subject and its spatio-temporal relations, and therefore interferes with its potentiality to be a critical subject. The authors of this volume therefore do not proclaim a crisis of critique, but rather ask how and what critique in the digital might be, to then look at specific settings of critique and critical practices. With contributions by Clemens Apprich, Timon Beyes, Mark Hansen, Erich Hörl, Holger Kuhn, Luciana Parisi, Ying Sze Pek, Claus Pias, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Judith Sieber, Lotte Warnsholdt. (shrink)