Boris Groys: Google: Words Beyond Grammar (2011)

In times when the exchange with the world largely takes place on the Internet, the search engine Google primarily regulates the parameters and formats of this conversation. For the philosopher and media theoretician Boris Groys, Google thus takes on the traditional role of philosophy and religion. Philosophical precursors for the dissolution of different kinds of discourses, the emancipation of words from grammar and accordingly their equalizing, as Google produces it, span from Plato to Saussure’s structuralism to Derrida’s deconstruction. Another analogy is the twentieth-century avant-garde’s production of word clouds that are freed from their context, in particular the Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s. As a result of the radical freeing of words, Groys names “the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information—the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space.”

Publisher Hatje Cantz, December 2011
Series: dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken No. 046
English/German edition
ISBN 3775728953, 9783775728959
36 pages

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PDF (English only, 17 pages, updated on 2012-11-7)