Alexander Kluge: Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (1973–)

“Written in a quasi-documentary style, this fascinating hybrid work combines science fiction with modernist forms of montage and reportage to describe a future in which Earth has been almost totally destroyed following the catastrophic Black War. The planet’s remaining inhabitants have been driven underground or into space where the struggle to establish a new society rages on.

Whether describing the scene in China where the devastated landscape is reconstructed according to old paintings, or in the galactic realm of the Starway where giant, turf-battling, corporate colonizing forces exploit the universe’s resources, Kluge tells his tale by inventing various forms of “evidence” that satirize the discourses of administrative bureaucracy, the law, military security, and the media. He gives us some of his most bizarre and hilarious characters in this peculiar world in which the remains of the past are mixed with the most advanced elements of the future. The cast includes highly specialized women workers who have adapted to the massive gravitational field of their heavy-metal planets, a commander with lethal foot-fungus, and ex-Nazi space pioneers who, in their lonely exile from the conflagrations on earth, spend their time carving enormous facsimiles of operatic sheet music in the forests of uninhabited planets.

With parody, and humor, Kluge shows how the survivors of Armageddon attempt to learn the art of civilization, and, despite the disaster they have suffered, how they set out to reproduce at new sites a caricature of a classic and fascistic feudal capitalism.” (from the back cover)

First published as Lernprozesse mit tödlichem Ausgang, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1973.

Translated, with an Introduction and Afterword by Christopher Pavsek
Publisher Duke University Press, 1996
ISBN 0822317443, 9780822317449
xiv+112 pages
via Charles

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (21 MB, no OCR)
More from Kluge.

Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 11: The Future of the Idea of the Left (2015)

Identities “is a peer reviewed international journal that seeks to serve as a platform for the theoretical production of Southeastern Europe and enable its visibility and an opening for international debate with authors from both the ‘intellectual centers’ and the ‘intellectual margins’ of the world. It is particularly interested in promoting theoretical investigations which see issues of politic, gender and culture as inextricably interrelated.”

With contributions by Jacques Rancière, Katerina Kolozova, Oxana Timofeeva, Craig Gent, Creston Davis, Artan Sadiku, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Tibor Rutar, Zdravko Saveski, and Richard Seymour.

Edited by Katerina Kolozova and Žarko Trajanovski
Publisher Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, 2015
Open Access
ISSN 1857-8616
129 pages

Publisher

PDF

The Birth of Digital Populism: Crowd, Power and Postdemocracy in the 21st Century (2015) [EN, IT]

“The Five Star Movement led by Grillo & Casaleggio had an unexpected success in the Italian general elections of February 2013, deeply disrupting the panorama of Italian politics. This book seeks to explore some of the features characterising the emergence of a new political phenomenon: digital populism. We asked Italian and English thinkers from different political and disciplinary backgrounds to contribute to an analysis of some fundamental points behind the rise of populism and the digital relations between masses, power and democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The book features nine interviews carried out between May 2013 and February 2014 with Luciana Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Godani Paul, Saul Newman, Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson and Alberto Toscano.”

Published in January 2015
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
84 pages

Five Star Movement on Wikipedia
Editors

PDF: English, Italian
Issuu: English, Italian