Introduction

Multistable figures offer an intriguing model for arbitrating conflicting positions. Moving back and forth between the different aspects under which something can be seen, one recognizes that mutually contradictory descriptions can be equally valid and that disputes over the correct account can be resolved without dissolving differences or establishing a higher synthesis. Yet, the experience of a gestalt switch also offers a model for radical conversions and revolutions – that is, for irreversible leaps to incommensurable alternatives foiling ideals of rational choice while providing the possibility and necessity of decision. Accentuating the temporal dimensions of multistable figures, this multidisciplinary volume illuminates the critical potentials and limits of multistability as a complex figure of thought

Preface

Tension/Spannung explores the critical potential of tension by bringing together contributions from several academic and artistic fields, including history of science, philosophy, literature and media studies, political and social theory, visual and performing arts. Both individually and in their combination, they produce a rapprochement and confrontation between different meanings and models of tension that unsettle the apparent self-evidence that any particular model has when considered in an isolated context

‘La vera Diversità’:Multistability, Circularity, and Abjection in Pasolini’s Pilade

Before completing his uncharacteristically hopeful filmic vision of an African Oresteia, Pier Paolo Pasolini invented a theatrical continuation of Aeschylus’s trilogy. Pilade (1966/70) imagines what happens after Orestes, having being absolved by the Aeropagos in Athens, goes back to Argos. With its clear allusions to political developments in the last century – fascism, the Resistance, and Communist revolutions – the play reads as a mythical allegory for the situation of engaged intellectuals in the twentieth century

Oscillations and Incommensurable Decisions:On the Multistable Use of Multistable Figures

The children’s book Duck! Rabbit! dramatizes the lesson that just because one is right, others don’t have to be wrong. An endless dispute is quickly settled once the quarrellers experience an aspect change or gestalt switch and thereby realize that the same picture can be seen in different ways. This simple scenario offers an intriguing model for arbitrating between conflicting positions by going back and forth between different aspects and thereby realizing that conflicting accounts can be equally valid

Tension In/Between Aesthetics, Politics, and Physics

The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality

Active Passivity?:Spinoza in Pasolini’s Porcile

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (Pigsty) was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1969 and was harshly criticized for its scandalous and desecrating character. It is indeed a provocative and bleak film, which offers a scathing political critique of ongoing fascism but without seeming to allow for any space for intervention or change. With Porcile, Pasolini continues to distance himself from Marxist engagement and revolutionary politics, and while he characterizes its politics in terms of an ‘apocalyptic anarchy’ that can only be approached with distance and humour, our suggestion is that Porcile proposes abandoning (political) activity and hope for a better future as a paradoxical form of both radical political critique and joy

The Case for Reduction

Critical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. This volume suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction, their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts?Introduction | CHRISTOPH F. E. HOLZHEY and JAKOB SCHILLINGER | 1–12The Case and the Signifier: Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man | IRACEMA DULLEY | 13–37Haptic Reductions: A Sceptic’s Guide for Responding to the Touch of Crisis | RACHEL AUMILLER | 39–61Disalienation and Structuralism: Fanon with Lévi-Strauss | CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERLIN | 61–89Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital | ÖZGÜN EYLÜL İŞCEN | 91–115Lines that Reduce: Biography, Palms, Borders | SAM DOLBEAR | 117–33Post-anti-identitarianism: The Forms of Contemporary Gender and Sexuality | BEN NICHOLS | 135–53Nothing Beyond the Name: Towards an Eclipse of Listening in the Psychotherapeutic Enterprise | SARATH JAKKA | 155–73Reduction in Computer Music: Bodies, Temporalities, and Generative Computation | FEDERICA BUONGIORNO | 175–90Reduction in Time: Kinaesthetic and Traumatic Experiences of the Present in Literary Texts | ALBERICA BAZZONI | 191–212Seeking Home: Vignettes of Homes and Homing | AMINA ELHALAWANI | 213–26Law Is Other Wor(l)ds | XENIA CHIARAMONTE | 227–50EXCURSUSOn the List | SAM DOLBEAR, BEN NICHOLS, and CLAUDIA PEPPEL | 253–61White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy | BEN NICHOLS | 263–65Proust List Impulse | SAM DOLBEAR | 267–70A List of Fears: Eva Kot’átková’s Asylum | CLAUDIA PEPPEL | 271–76How to Bake X Cake: Notes on the Recipe | IRACEMA DULLEY | 277–79Walking Away, Walking in Circles, Writing Lists | RACHEL AUMILLER | 281–83The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25

Introduction

Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, ‘Introduction’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 1-12 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_01