Bühlmann, V. (2022, June 22). Digital Dignity - On Computational Amphoras and the Public Nature of Knowledge [Conference Presentation]. Michel Serres and the Social, Cambridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the).
E259-04 - Forschungsbereich Architekturtheorie und Technikphilosophie
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Date (published):
22-Jun-2022
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Event name:
Michel Serres and the Social
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Event date:
21-Jun-2022 - 22-Jun-2022
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Event place:
Cambridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)
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Keywords:
Michel Serres, the Social, Dignity, Humanism, Cosmos, Architectonics, Quantum Optics, Caustics, Scultpure
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Abstract:
A Commentary on Eduardo Viveiros De Castros Perspectivist Cosmology (Social Contract) and Michel Serres evocation of a praxis of "Anthropography and Cosmoliteracy" (Natural Contract)
It is only worth comparing the incommensurable, maintains de Castro and continues: comparing the commensurable is a task for accountants, not anthropologists. My talk finds in this statement the angle with which I want to attend to the question of how the notion of "contract" operates in general, when we think of it not in economic terms (as the formalization of an accountant's contract) but in political terms. De Castro contrasts anthropology to the accountant, not politics - hence my framing question must be rectified with a slight inclination: Can a contract operate at all in terms that would be political? Would this not inevitably institute a naturalism bound to be incapable of consolidating tracts that were not homogenizing tracts, but rather contracts capable of consolidating a public domain of multiply coded and multiply shared conviviality?
Incommensurability itself is subject to particular constitutions, maintains Michel Serres. He suggests that we think of these constitutions as constitutions that are both engendered through and owed to Law as an institution. The challenge here lies in how to think of law as an "institution" and, on the other hand, as something that were constitutive for human forms of culture and custom – and hence de jure (immanently so) exterior to them. De Castro's framing notions of "controlled equivocations" and "methods of cosmological deixis", as well as what I have called Serres' "praxis of anthropography and cosmoliteracy" work with a philosophical notion of a transcendental that is not subject-centric (Kantian) but object- centric (de Castros) or objective (Serres).
What I hope to accentuate with my commentary is how we can learn about what Elias Zafiris has recently called "Digital Dignity" from both of these proposals. My comments will revolve around a sense of (eco)spherical translation that seeks to understand better how to count-in (take into account) the active transversality and convertibility through which code is at work in how the notion of "contract" – in general – operates.