E259-04 - Forschungsbereich Architekturtheorie und Technikphilosophie
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Date (published):
14-Jan-2023
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Event name:
Dividing 2023
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Event date:
14-Jan-2023
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Event place:
Basel, Switzerland
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Keywords:
Methods; Arts; Research; Canon; Pythagorean Comma
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Abstract:
Before the institutional division of the arts into polytechnical arts and so-called fine arts, the liberal arts tradition used to be considered as a "canon of disciplines" and was used as mathematical organon of human knowledge. As such it was operating upon the so-called Pythagorean Comma, a physical residue of sound that cannot be rationalised – but that can also not be placed, somehow, in opposition to rationality. My talk explores this legacy with respect to today's question of method in the arts, as a particular manner of working with partitionings as proportionings in an architectonic, intersectional and situational way of "figuring out" ideas.
Dividing captures a generous contradiction: it is as much about dividing things up, as it is about joining together. Dividing assumes radical irreducibility of different cosmologies and a reemergence of a critique that challenges both the dialectical negation and the persistence of affirmation in contemporary posthumanism. To divide is to perform a quantitative operation by which we achieve an equal distribution. It is the mathematical operation of articulating a ratio: it requires inclusion of rational numbers to compute quantities. Concurrently, division is about unity - government or corporate activity organized in a functional unit, or a territorial section. By taking part in something somebodies are united.
Dividing is relevant to the much-discussed refusal of 'hyper-separations', taking the issue with Kant's idealism and Cartesian dualism but also contemporary gender, computational and other binarisms and divides (Kirby, 2017; Braidotti, 2011; van der Tuin, 2015; Plumwood, 2004). As such, ‘dividing’ lends itself to challenging where precisely we place the limit of a category or how to divide animals from plants, mushrooms from bacteria (Timofeeva, 2018; Wolfe, 2003), parasite from host (Serres, 1982; Smith, 2020), humans from non-humans (Braidotti, 2013; Hayles, 1999; Wolfe, 2009). This sensibility towards the difficulty and importance of carefully articulating difference is of highest importance for engaging with computational techniques and digital technologies, as techniques for symbolizing difference. Dividing is at root of extractive economy, as critics of capitalism often remind. Alienation from living-space entanglements, turns life into resource for investment (Tsing, 2015). To address ‘dividing’ as a spectral term is to foreground the uncertainties and undecidabilities in processing of data, in organizing people, matter and knowledge. This is not meant as a cynical or dismissive approach that suggests nothing can ever be known. The point is to establish a responsible or responsive position towards uncertainty and undecidability.
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Research Areas:
Development and Advancement of the Architectural Arts: 100%
