Boris Groys: Google, Words beyond Grammar: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 046

For the philosopher and media theoretician Boris Groys, Google performs the function of philosophy and religion as a ubiquitous means of negotiating the world. Philosophical precursors for Google's dissemination of discourses and the emancipation of words from grammar include Plato, Saussure and Derrida; another analogy is the twentieth-century avant-garde's production of 'word clouds' severed from their context, as found in the Conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s. Groys identifies this tradition as "the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information-the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space."