Aggression in the Lifeworld

Alex Karp wrote a hundred and twenty-seven pages, in German, on how a speech can bind a crowd by giving it someone to blame. Then he built the software that states use to decide who is inside and who is out, and never once put the two things in the same sentence.

A course on the thought of Alex Karp.

Philosophy · Technology

What you will learn

  • State what the dissertation is about and which single case it rests on.
  • Describe what happened in the Paulskirche in October 1998.
  • Correct the Habermas legend and say what the real supervision arrangement changes.
  • State the four claims Karp makes about how jargon works on an audience.
  • Explain why refuting such a speech does not weaken it.
  • Identify the rhetorical moves in the speech without being told where they are.
  • State what Bubis objected to, in his words rather than a paraphrase.
  • State what Brede concluded about the speech and how she got there.

Course outline

  1. The Man and the Speech — A man whose software helps states decide who to look at wrote a hundred and twenty-seven pages, in German, on how a speech turns a room against somebody. He has since said two opposite things about…
  2. Jargon — The mechanism, in the dissertation's own terms. A form of words can unburden an audience — but only at somebody's expense, and it keeps working even after you have shown that it is false.
  3. The Speech — Eleventh of October 1998, the Paulskirche. Read what Walser actually said, and watch the four moves from the last module operate in real time on a room containing the president of Germany.
  4. The Verdict He Withheld — Two readers, the same speech, the same method, at the same time. One of them said what it added up to. The other, using her apparatus on her subject, stopped one sentence short.
  5. The Machine That Fixes Identity — What Palantir actually sells, and the guardrails Karp insisted on — which were real, were his own idea, and cost the company money. Then the limit that no guardrail reaches.
  6. The In-Group Has a Name — Run module three's four moves over the company's own language and record. The vocabulary is not a relic — he was still using it in 2016, about somebody else.
  7. The Reversal — Twenty-three years after the dissertation, the same speech, in a book written for everyone. The mechanism is described exactly as before. Only the verdict has changed.

Built from

This course was built from 8 books.

  • Alexander C. Karp, Aggression in der Lebenswelt (Inauguraldissertation, Frankfurt, 2002)
  • Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic
  • Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley
  • Thomas A. Kovach & Martin Walser, The Burden of the Past
  • Frank Schirrmacher (Hrsg.), Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte: Eine Dokumentation
  • Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
  • Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature
  • Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other

Part of the Simposeum course library.