Adrian Daub

From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley

What Tech Calls Thinking

Wie eine moralische Panik die Welt erfasst

Cancel Culture Transfer

"The German ballad was an unusual poetic genre: supposedly inspired by a treasure trove of authorless poems that had for centuries circulated among the common people, the ballad attained popularity in the form of deeply ironic poems written by some of Germany's most canonic authors. Supposedly a celebration of the oral culture of the German Volk, the ballad instead circulated through the emerging channels of nineteenth century culture industry: from anthologies and picture books via the exploding market for song settings, from the opera house to the vaudeville stage, the ballad hewed to its medieval pretence while sounding surprisingly modern. This book traces the strange trajectory of this poetic genre from its origins in the late 18th century to its political appropriations in the 20th. Throughout, the ballad and its path across a wide variety of milieus and media told a surprising and contradictory story of the German nation. What The Ballad Knows shows that, even though the ballad arrived in Germany as a literary genre, it very quickly came to make its home in between different genres and even different media - to the point that laypeople were as likely to encounter it in a concert hall, a classroom, an art museum or a choral rehearsal as they were to encounter it in a book. When cultural conservatives in the early 20th century sought to claim the ballad as a straightforward and serious vehicle of German nationalism, they ignored just how complex the ballad's relationship to the nation had been, and what complexities within nationalism the form had managed to highlight through the decades"--

The Ballad Genre, Memory Culture, and German Nationalism

What the Ballad Knows

Discusses the Idealist and Romantic poets and philosophers in Germany in the early 19th century, who thought about marriage differently from their Enlightenment predecessors.

The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism

Uncivil Unions

In the course of the nineteenth century, four-hand piano playing emerged across Europe as a popular pastime of the well-heeled classes and of those looking to join them. Nary a canonic work of classical music that was not set for piano duo, nary a house that could afford not to invest in them. Duets echoed from the student bedsit to Buckingham Palace, resounded in schools and in hundreds of thousands of bourgeois parlors. Like no other musical phenomenon, it could cross national, social, and economic boundaries, bringing together poor students with the daughters of the bourgeoisie, crowned heads with penniless virtuosi, and the nineteenth century often regarded it with extreme suspicion for that very reason. Four-hand piano playing was often understood as a socially acceptable way of flirting, a flurry of hands that made touching, often of men and women, not just acceptable but necessary. But it also became something far more serious than that, a central institution of the home, mediating between inside and outside, family and society, labor and leisure, nature and nurture. And writers, composers, musicians, philosophers, journalists, pamphleteers and painters took note: in the art, literature, and philosophy of the age, four-hand playing emerged as a common motif, something that allowed them to interrogate the very nature of the self, the family, the community and the state. In the four hands rushing up and down the same keyboard the nineteenth century espied, or thought to espy, an astonishing array of things. Four-Handed Monsters tells not only the story of that practice, but also the story of the astonishing array of things the nineteenth century read into it.

Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture

Four-Handed Monsters

Charles Kronengold

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964. In The James Bond Songs authors Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold use the genre to trace not only a changing cultural landscape, but also evolving conceptions of what a pop song is. They argue that the story of the Bond song is the story of the pop song more generally, and perhaps even the story of its end. Each chapter discusses a particular segment of the Bond canon and contextualizes it in its era's music and culture. But the book also asks how Bond and his music reflected and influenced our feelings about such topics as masculinity, race, money, and aging. Through these individual pieces the book presents the Bond song as the perfect anthem of late capitalism. The Bond songs want to talk about the fulfillment that comes from fast cars, shaken Martinis and mindless sex, but their unstable speakers, subjects, and addressees actually undercut the logic of the lifestyle James Bond is sworn to defend. The book is an invitation to think critically about pop music, about genre, and about the political aspects of popular culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

The James Bond Songs

Elisabeth Krimmer

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on Goethe and visual culture.

Goethe Yearbook 23

Emma Acker

Sue Canterbury

Lauren Palmor

A fresh look at a bold and dynamic 20th-century American art style Characterized by highly structured, geometric compositions with smooth surfaces, linear qualities, and lucid forms, Precisionism fully emerged after World War I and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. This insightful publication, featuring more than 100 masterworks by artists such as Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Demuth, sheds new light on the Precisionist aesthetic and the intellectual concerns, excitement, tensions, and ambivalences about industrialization that helped develop this important strand of early American modernism. Essays explore the origins of the style--which reconciled realism with abstraction and adapted European art movements like Purism, Cubism, and Futurism to American subject matter--as well as its relationship to photography, and the ways in which it reflected the economic and social changes brought about by industrialization and technology in the post-World War I world. In addition to making a meaningful contribution to the resurging interest in Modernism and its revisionist narratives, this book offers copious connections between the past and our present day, poised on the verge of a fourth industrial revolution.

Precisionism and American Art

The Cult of the Machine

“What a strange invention marriage is!” wrote Kierkegaard. “Is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?” Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany’s most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely metaphysical justification of marriage. Through close readings of philosophers like Fichte and Schlegel, and novelists like Sophie Mereau and Jean Paul, Daub charts the development of this new concept of marriage with an insightful blend of philosophy, cultural studies, and theory. The author delves deeply into the lives and work of the romantic and idealist poets and thinkers whose beliefs about marriage continue to shape ideas about gender, marriage, and sex to the present day.

Four-hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-century Culture

Four-handed Monsters

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on acoustics around 1800.

Goethe Yearbook 25

Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.

Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner

Tristan's Shadow

Associate Professor of German Studies Adrian Daub

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on environmentalism.

Goethe Yearbook 22

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and his age, featuring in this volume a special section on the poetics of space in the Goethezeit.

Goethe Yearbook 24

Von Uber-Flexibilität über Selfies bis zum für immer veränderten Liebesmarkt des Online-Datings: Den Boom ständig neuer Technologien könnte nicht einmal ein neues Erdbeben stoppen, glauben viele Bewohner von Silicon Valley. Als einer von ihnen stürzt sich der langjährige Kalifornier Adrian Daub auf Start-Up-Großraumbüros, Nerd-Kuppelshows und die verbindende Funktion des „Dick Pics“ – stets wissbegierig und ohne jeden Kulturpessimismus. Ein Essay, sprühend vor Beobachtungen und Theorien für jene High-Tech-Welt, in der wir längst alle leben.

Innenansichten aus dem Silicon Valley

Pop Up Nation

You know the name. You know the number. And, strangely enough, you recognize the songs: "Live and Let Die," "Skyfall," "Nobody Does It Better" and of course "Goldfinger." For more than fifty years, the producers of the James Bond movies have felt the need to open their films with chintzy songs featuring puzzling lyrics about diamonds and guns. And for more than fifty years we've listened to, bought, and sung along with these songs. The Bond-songs make pop critics and pop historians of all of us - there is a canon of them, and whenever a new one hits the airwaves we compare it to that canon. This book is about the canon, but it's as much about the kind of audience that canon has turned us into. The Bond-songs are far more about us the consumers than they are about 007: they talk to us about what pop music has to do with work, they try to tell us what's great (and maybe not so great) about capitalism, they speak about aging and becoming obsolete. Following their trail of bizarre lyrics and retro instrumental gestures we trace a secret history of pop and of our changing ways of listening to pop over the last half century.

Adrian Daub

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