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Hinweis Internationale Hölderlin Bibliographie: Zu Hölderlin S. 348-396: "Weitere Ausgestaltung des synthetischen Freundschaftsverstehens in der deutschen Frühromantik" (S. 366-384: "Die beständige Erneuerung im liebenden Streit: Freundschaft in Friedrich Hölderlins 'Hyperion'")

Anthropological expeditions seeking out algorithms frequently return empty-handed. They are confronted with the challenge of the object: what to study when studying algorithms? In this article, I draw together a number of literatures to outline one possible answer to the question of how to study algorithms in social science. I argue that what we should study are algorithmic ecologies. I sketch five modalities of algorithmic ecologies and review concomitant literatures: ( a) imaginaries, ( b) infrastructures, ( c) interfaces, ( d) identities, and ( e) investments and interests. The speculative propositions offered here are that algorithms are immanent to ecologies and that they are enacted across all the modalities of algorithmic ecologies.

This article foregrounds comparison as a key practice in science by discussing the case of chronological comparability in paleoclimatology. Based on an ethnographic study of a paleoclimate research project, I illustrate how paleoclimatologists are able to produce comparative data on and images of past climates through the use of 'proxies'. I focus on the calibration of a type of algae as a proxy for climate variables. Such comparability is one illustration of the myriad ways in which relatively standardized forms of comparison underlie conceptions of 'climate change' and of 'climate' itself. The work of comparison discussed here has relevance for a variety of practices of qualification, quantification, monitoring, and evaluation.

Crisis jargon has become endemic in modernity. Whether in radical or in affirmative versions, the idea that 'crisis' offers 'opportunity', in accordance with the meaning of crisis as 'decision', is widespread. This paper questions the relationship between modernity and crisis, first by highlighting the ways in which modernity itself has been cast as 'crisis': first as crisis of tradition, then as crisis of modernity itself. The main part of this paper then consists of a reading of modernity-as-crisis inspired by Walter Benjamin, most notably by his Passagen-Werk. It consists of an attempt to consider 'crisis' as what Benjamin calls a 'wish image', an image that contains hidden utopian ideals. In invoking 'crisis', I argue, a conception of modernity as shock, raised to the level of the collective, becomes apparent. Crisis jargon thereby remains wedded to what Benjamin calls a mythical conception of history. The paper ends with a discussion of the political consequences that follow from this that are grounded in the relation between messianism and profane politics in Benjamin.