Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome

Description

Fiction writer, internationally known filmmaker, critical theorist, Alexander Kluge is perhaps postwar Germany’s most prolific and diverse intellectual. With this translation of Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, a novella first published in German in 1973, one of Kluge’s most important literary works becomes available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Written in a quasi-documentary style, this fascinating hybrid work combines science fiction with modernist forms of montage and reportage to describe a future in which Earth has been almost totally destroyed following the catastrophic Black War. The planet’s remaining inhabitants have been driven underground or into space where the struggle to establish a new society rages on. Whether describing the scene in China where the devastated landscape is reconstructed according to old paintings, or in the galactic realm of the Starway where giant, turf-battling, corporate colonizing forces exploit the universe’s resources, Kluge tells his tale by inventing various forms of “evidence” that satirize the discourses of administrative bureaucracy, the law, military security, and the media. He gives us some of his most bizarre and hilarious characters in this peculiar world in which the remains of the past are mixed with the most advanced elements of the future. The cast includes highly specialized women workers who have adapted to the massive gravitational field of their heavy-metal planets, a commander with lethal foot-fungus, and ex-Nazi space pioneers who, in their lonely exile from the conflagrations on earth, spend their time carving enormous facsimiles of operatic sheet music in the forests of uninhabited planets. With parody, and humor, Kluge shows how the survivors of Armageddon attempt to learn the art of civilization, and, despite the disaster they have suffered, how they set out to reproduce at new sites a caricature of a classic and fascistic feudal capitalism. klugedvd-001 klugedvd-002 klugedvd-003 klugedvd-004 klugedvd-005 klugedvd-006 klugedvd-007 klugedvd-008 klugedvd-009 klugedvd-010 klugedvd-011 klugedvd-012 klugedvd-013 klugedvd-014 klugedvd-015 klugedvd-016 klugedvd-017 klugedvd-018 klugedvd-019 klugedvd-020 klugedvd-021 klugedvd-022 klugedvd-023 klugedvd-024 klugedvd-025 klugedvd-026 klugedvd-027 klugedvd-028 klugedvd-029 klugedvd-030 klugedvd-031 klugedvd-032 klugedvd-033 klugedvd-034 klugedvd-035 klugedvd-036 klugedvd-037 klugedvd-038 klugedvd-039 klugedvd-040 klugedvd-041 klugedvd-042 klugedvd-043 klugedvd-044 klugedvd-045 klugedvd-046 klugedvd-047 klugedvd-048 klugedvd-049 klugedvd-050 klugedvd-051 klugedvd-052 klugedvd-053 klugedvd-054 klugedvd-055 klugedvd-056 klugedvd-057 klugedvd-058 klugedvd-059 klugedvd-060 klugedvd-061 klugedvd-062 klugedvd-063 klugedvd-064 klugedvd-065