Current Issue

The current logic of a result-driven culture and its neoliberal focus on free market mechanisms support a flat worldview that continuously demands transparency and visibility. Thus it produces a horizontalist world that—with its twitter-democracy and the ubiquitous blogosphere—brings a “net culture” into being that leaves no room for rest, concentration, contemplation, creation and experiment.

In such a worldview, knowledge is instrumentalized and consequently produces patterns of thought homogenized through a disciplining dispositive that uses neoliberal concepts such as expert-knowledge, stakeholders, and knowledge transfer as its formatting requirements. The planet that emerges is shaped by globalized—cognitive—capitalism where verticalist perspectives such as reflexivity, imagination, and historic profundity are reduced as much as possible to horizontalist frameworks, thus leaving them very little room.

In its interaction with human existence, art, like philosophy, is virtually the ontological purveyor of verticality. It is therefore up to art to critically map and investigate the current rather narrowed and overstrung situation, and to demand renewed attention for different forms of reflection that search for a more subtle balance. With this goal in mind, MaHKUscript’s 2019 issue "Whatever Speculation" will focus on a key-concept in the history of—artistic—thinking, i.e. speculation.

Nowadays speculation has been devalued to a one-dimensional economic meaning. It seems that speculative thought about future forms of knowledge and solutions to problems surrounding existence and social viability has made way for an almost self-evident resignation to the present moment and status quo—leaving a blurred view of complex issues that characterize the here and now. For that reason it is extremely urgent to reconsider different and alternative connotations of speculation and to bring them up to date.

For this fourth issue of MaHKUscript, the keynote author is Marina Vishmidt.