What’s in a prefix? How to read a prefix as short as ‘re-’? Does ‘re-’ really signify? Can it point into a specific direction? Can it reverse? Can it become the shibboleth of a ‘postcritical’ reboot? At first glance transparent and directional, ‘re-’ complicates the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present, and future, opening onto errant temporalities.
This analysis of ‘socialist bromance’ humour can’t take us far enough to argue that it contributes to the liberalisation of public discourse in China. But we can say that socialist terminology no longer belongs exclusively in its original official field. For what we see here is that the very iteration of ideology imposed by political authorities through language is starting to cause its own demise, bringing inevitable changes to its politically persuasive power.
What Bridle repeatedly warns of in his book is that we don’t know what we don’t know, particularly when it comes to tech. There is an urgent need to develop a more-than-functional or technologically-deterministic knowledge of tech and its systems
The ‘Re-‘ network asks what repetition does. Why do we repeat, revive, re-enact, restage, reframe, remember, represent, and refer – to whom, when, where and why – and why is this a topical question in a digital era?
