User:Cristinac/unrulyobject

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Hito Steyerl


  • But what, then, is the state of missing itself? Does it take place inside Schrödinger’s box, so to speak? Is it being both dead and alive? How can we understand its conflicting desires: to want and to dread the truth at the same time? The urge to both move on and keep hope alive? Perhaps the state of missing speaks of a paradoxical superposition that cannot be understood with the conceptual tools of Euclidian physics, human biology, or Aristotelian logic. Perhaps it reaches out to an impossible coexistence of life and death. Both are materially interlaced in limbo—as long as no observer opens the “box” of indeterminacy. Which is, in many cases, a grave.


  • Additionally, the twentieth century also perfected observation as a method of killing. Measurement and identification became tools of murder. Phrenology. Statistics. Medical experimentation. Economies of death. In his lectures about biopolitics, Michel Foucault described the stochastic calculus that determined life or death.9 Counting and observing were radicalized to make sure that anything that entered the box died when the box was reopened.




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