The paper focuses on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude. If presented there arguments (based on concepts of arche-fossil and ancestrality, contingency, factiality and unreason) are valid and refute the fundamental thesis of correlationism – impossibility to access the reality outside correlation between thinking and being – then we should be able to exceed it form the scientific ground it was formulated upon and to apply it to theory of culture. The paper considers that possibility and follows the consequences of such broadening. What is culture in speculative realism’s ontological paradigm? How to grasp cultural reality that is no longer a correlate of human subjectivity? Culture, its processes, objects, networks would not be human any more, ontologically. Rather, one might say, it emerged that culture is non-human. However, these questions and indications have now existed for long time in philosophy of culture, theory of culture, anthropology, cybernetics, media studies, ecology and many other disciplines. Issue that arises in regard of prior is the problem of theory of culture within speculative materialist perspective. If one acknowledges the arche-fossil argument, one cannot continue to approach culture in structuralist or phenomenological current. Meillassoux claims that mathematical ideation describes the objective structure of reality as it is in-itself. If mathematisation is the condition for theory, how can we theorise culture? The aim of the paper is to problematise the concept of culture and theory of culture in perspective of Meillassoux’s speculation.
 

In The Interior of Things: The Origami of Being Bryant develops a critique of object-oriented philosophy and its thesis that objects are withdrawn from one another or never touch. Arguing that such a position is ultimately incoherent, Bryant instead proposes an ontology of folds and folding in which the minimal unit of existence is conceived as the fold between thing and field such that things interiorize the field out of which they emerge. In this way Bryant is able to account for relationality among beings while also maintaining their irreducible singularity resulting from the unique way in which things pleat their world. What emerges is a profoundly ecological conception of existence in which beings are perpetually pleating their world.
 

The Object and the Code: Analyzing Video Games through Software Studies and Speculative Realism

The article deals with the analysis of the ludic and mechanical aspects of the video games using Levi Bryant’s notion of onticology. It expands the Bryant’s idea that the being is composed entirely of machines or processes, and treats a video game as a collective of objects that communicate with each other through various codes. The main focus of this approach is to analyze the instances in which the said objects present a certain type of self-alienation, independency and agency that allow for a continuous reconfiguration of the states in which a video game object can be found. The various scripts and their role in altering the communication patterns within the game mechanics are investigated in the context of bots, regarded as both automatic prothesis of the human agents and autonomous interpreters of the games’ implicit rules. Cases of speedruns, glitches and particular uses of the basic C++ language syntax are also considered as the examples of events in which the hidden properties of the objects form a collective process of a video game. On such grounds, this paper discusses the possible removal of distinct ontological domains of subject and object in the context of object-oriented philosophy, taking into account the fluid hierarchy of beings and their mutual inaccessibility.
 

Kaja Silverman and her concept of a subject

The author explores main subject of Kaja Silverman’s diverse ouvre. The theoretician combines linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, philosophy, art history and film studies to focus on a concept of a subject, with special interest for a feminine subject. Silverman promotes a concept, that signification cannot be in any way separated from a subject and cultural system, which generates it.
 

Desire for Utopia in the Best of All  Possible  Worlds.  Dilemma  Ideas in Stanislaw  Lem’s Solaris toward film adaptations directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh.

The problem of the history of ideas (unrestricted progress) in the Solaris written by Stanislaw Lem and in most known film adaptations directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002). Utopia as a camouflage of dystopia. Imperfection of human nature and metaphysical optimism. Utopian thinking in trans- and post-humanism. Possibility (?) of total communication (Lem’s novel) and the image of impenetrable mystery (Tarkovsky’s movie). Inevitability of defeat (Lem) and the image of salvation (Soderbergh).
 

Szkic poświęcony jest antologii Electronic Literature Collection 3, opracowanej przez Stephanie Boluk, Leonardo Floresa, Jacoba Garbego, Anastasii Salter i wydanej przez Electronic Literature Organization w 2016 roku. Celem artykuły jest omówienie kolekcji w kontekście historii literatury elektronicznej i rozważań dotyczących obecności jej trzeciej fali. Pierwsza część szkicu poświęcona jest przybliżeniu historii literatury elektronicznej i wykazaniu podstawowych różnic między między poszczególnymi jej fazami. W drugiej części tekstu następuje omówienie antologii przy jednoczesnym udowodnieniu, że posiada ona cechy wyróżniające trzecią generację literatury elektronicznej. ELC3 charakateryzuje zatem zwrot w stronę globalizacji, rekonstrukcji literatury elektronicznej, znaczenia produkcji oraz rozwoju nowych platform medialnych. Celem szkicu jest wykazanie, że trzecia fala literatury elektronicznej kładzie nacisk na produkcję, mechanizm i operacyjność dzieła (Marino, Montfort, Wardrip-Fruin, Kirschenbaum), co widoczne jest w rozwoju prac generatywnych dominujących w ELC3

Karolina Charewicz-Jakubowska „Nimfa Post/Post Moderna. Działanie obrazów”, Narodowe Centrum Kultury, Warszawa 2016, s. 316.