The paradoxical economy of crisis: ‘Crisis of experience’ and the ana-economy of Else

This paper proposes a critique of the paradigm of representation drawing on Walter Benjamin’s work on technology and on Tomas Kuhn’s discussion of ‘scientific revolutions’, in order to analyse how moments of change reveal a ‘crisis’ where the shortcoming of such paradigm in engaging with the world become evident. This interdisciplinary approach merges questions from aesthetic and epistemological enquiries through the notion of emergence and feedback loop elaborated by complexity theory, proposing that the possibility of ‘making sense’, or establishing an economy, rests on a generative logic rather than the representation of an a priori meaning, and requires a reversal of temporality.