10,811 research outputs found
Indeterminacy and Architectural History: Deterritorializing Cosimo Fanzago
This article is a critique of architectural historyâs tendency to overdetermine in thinking about practice and theory in general, and in thinking the relationship between architecture and spirituality in post-Tridentine ecclesiastical architecture in particular. It first demonstrates what is meant both by over-determination and resistance to interdisciplinarity within mainstream architectural history before critically exploring in relation to this how post-Tridentine architecture and spiritual life or religious devotion might be thought together, the sorts of relationships between the two that may be thought to take place, and asks where this relationship might be located. Suggesting that it might be profitable to follow Deleuzeâs philosophy of the Baroque in refusing the tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (in his case the book, in ours, architecture) and a field of subjectivity (the author, the architect), and rather to adopt like him, the notion of rhizome â without beginning or end, always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo, indeterminate. The article seeks to consider Baroque architecture as rhizomatic construction, rather than the usual (and unhelpful) preoccupations with it as dichotomous, expressive, or âpropagandisticâ
Phenomenology and difference: the body, architecture and race
The aim of the thesis is to consider the position of phenomenology in contemporary thought in order to argue that only on its terms can a political ontology of difference be thought. To inaugurate this project I being by questioning Heidegger's relation to phenomenology. I take issue with the way that Heidegger privileges time over space in "Being and Time". In this way, the task of the thesis is clarified as the need to elaborate a spatio-temporal phenomenology. After re-situating Heidegger's failure in this respect within a Kantian background, I suggest that the phenomenological grounding of difference must work through the body. I contend that the body is the ontological site of both the subject and the object. I use Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty to explore the ramifications of this thesis. I suggest first of all that architecture should be grounded ontologically in the body, and as such avoids being a 'master discourse'. Secondly, by theorising the body and world as reciprocally transformative, my reading of Merleau-Ponty emphasises the ways in which his thinking opens up a phenomenology of embodied difference.
It is on the basis of these themes that I develop this thinking in the direction of race, exploring the dialectics of visibility and invisibility in the work of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. I argue that embodied difference attests to variations in the agent's freedom to act in the world. If freedom is understood through Merleau-Ponty as being the embodied ground of historicity, we must ask after unfreedom. I suggest that the "flesh" ontology of a pre-thetic community should be rethought as a regulative ideal, the ideal of a justice that can never be given. In this light, phenomenology becomes as much as poetics. Beyond being though of as conservative, phenomenology henceforth unleashes the possibility of thinking a transformative embodied agency
Imagining Modernity: Kant's Wager on Possibility
In the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edition), Kant claims that a transcendental cognition is a one âthat is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as is this ought to be possible a priori (a priori möglich sein soll)â. In this paper, I argue that Kant scholarship should take into account the specific signification of the term âsollenâ, which might require us to reconsider the usual distinction between the system of freedom and the system of nature. Following a Fichtean perspective, I will try to show that, even if âsollenâ in this context does not refer to a duty in the strict sense, it does refer to the demand that transcendental philosophy itself be possible. I will argue that this demand is contingent at its very origin and, accordingly, expresses a particular kind of âfreedomâ. On this basis I will consider the tribunal of reason enacted in the Critique of Pure Reason as a tribunal that emerges from a free decision, in which the transcendental philosopher imagines its own possibility. Because it is a âfreeâ and âcontingentâ tribunal, it cannot exceed the status of a problematic philosophical strategy
Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding
In âPsychopower and Ordinary Madnessâ my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stieglerâs recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stieglerâs work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanismâor, more specifically, nonhumanismâto problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Baillyâs conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandomâs conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestaniâs deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)
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On standards and values: Between finite actuality and infinite possibility
This article explores the relation between subjects and standards in a way that is informed by a process orientation to theoretical psychology. Standards are presented as objectifications of values designed to generalize and stabilize experiences of value. Standards are nevertheless prone to becoming âparodicâ in the sense that they can become obstacles to the actualization of the values they were designed to incarnate. Furthermore, much critical social science has mishandled the nature of standards by insisting that values are nothing but local and specific constructions in the mundane world of human activity. To rectify this problem, this article reactivates a sense of the difference between the idea of a finite world of activity and a world of value which points beyond and exceeds passing circumstance. Resources for the reactivation of this differenceâ which is core to a processual grasp of self, memory, and valueâare found in the thinking of A. N. Whitehead, Max Weber, Marcel Proust, and Soren Kierkegaard
âWhile the imagination strains / after deerâ: William Carlos Williamsâs Interrogations of the American Transcendental Imagination and the Proto-Suburban Scene
Oftentimes the American suburbs are considered through the lens of architecture, economics, fiction, and visual media. And, typically, the conversation centers on their cultural zenith in the 1950s. One literary form is neglected in this conversation: poetry. This omission is peculiar, as a fascination with the vastness of the continentâs landscapeâand its significanceâpervades the history of the American verse. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apparently endless expanses of space and rejuvenative qualities of the American landscape provide the poetâs ideal inspiration, and Walt Whitman, in perhaps the most important collection of poetry of the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass, is very much concerned with rendering the American experience through the landscape. As America approached modernity, suburbanization subsumed the American Romantic attitude toward the landscape and the evacuated rural spaces outside of urban cores to produce a new space for the bourgeois upper class. This relocation of the emergent bourgeois upper class to the outskirts of the city created a new hybridized space for Modernist poets to consider. William Carlos Williamsâs poetry stands out from that of his Modernist counterparts in that it is able to identify and dismantle the illusion of proto-suburban spaces. That is to say, Williams notices that both the American proto-suburbs and the pastoral ideal rely upon ignoring the material reality of the rural and suburban poor. Through an analysis of Williamsâs poetry, the history of the pastoral form, the history of the American suburbs, and contemporary literary criticism, this essay will consider how Williams responded to the subsumption of the American countryside
The art of conversation: design cybernetics and its ethics
Purpose
This paper discusses ethical principles that are implicit in second-order cybernetics, with the aim of arriving at a better understanding of how second-order cybernetics frames living in a world with others. It further investigates implications for second-order cybernetics approaches to architectural design, i.e. the activity of designing frameworks for living.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper investigates the terminology in the second-order cybernetics literature with specific attention to terms that suggest that there are ethical principles at work. It further relates second-order cybernetics to selected notions in phenomenology, pragmatism and transcendental idealism. The comparison allows for conclusions about the specificity of a second-order inquiry. In line with the thematic focus of this journal issue on the framing of shared worlds, the paper further elaborates on questions relating to the activity of designing âworldsâ in which people live with others.
Findings
The paper highlights that a radical openness toward the future and toward the agency of others is inscribed in the conception of second-order cybernetics. It creates a frame of reference for conceiving social systems of all kinds, including environments that are designed to be inhabited.
Originality/value
The paper identifies an aesthetics grounded in the process of living-with-others as an ethical principle implicit in second-order cybernetics thought. It is an aesthetics that is radically open for the agency of others. Linking aesthetics and ethics, the paperâs contributions will be of specific value for practitioners and theoreticians of design. Considering second-order cybernetics as a practice generally dealing with designing, it also contributes to the wider second-order cybernetics discourse
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