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The chapter engages the nature-culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human's fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which 'weathering' can involve subject-object relations, objectless subject-predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.
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.
Preface
(2020)
The intensifying ecological devastation of the planet is being registered across scientific disciplines and activist, artistic, or more broadly cultural endeavours in ways that rethink the temporal dimensions of a catastrophe that can no longer be considered 'looming'. In many political contexts - trying to get scientists heard, mobilizing state power and international agreements to curb the extractivist rapaciousness of global capitalism - it might still seem essential to create a sense of urgency, of a rapidly closing interval, last chance, now or never. Yet taking stock not only of the planetary sum totals of global climate change but its present local manifestations, the devastations of neocolonial extractivism, the irreversible extinctions of countless species, destruction of ecotopes on land and in the sea, has produced a growing awareness that in many crucial senses, it is 'too late' - that the time can no longer be given as 'five minutes to midnight' but has moved a lot closer to the dead of night, whether this is being regarded primarily as a question of the cumulative loss of biodiversity as part of what is now known as the 'sixth mass extinction' or as the approach of several 'tipping points' of global climate change, such as the current ice sheet disintegrations in the polar regions, the greenhouse gas release triggered by the loss of permafrost, and irreversible desertifications. The complexion of ecology, over these last years, has turned from juicy green to dark and brittle. The most decisive recent interventions, while acknowledging the overwhelming pessimist thrust of ecological thought, have tried to use a more complex, more differentiated account of the temporality of environmental ruination in order to reflect on the diminished possibilities for life in these ruins while avoiding familiar registers both of science fiction dystopias and self-healing planets.
Preface
(2019)
What's in a prefix? How to read a prefix as short as 're-'? Does 're-' really signify? Can it point into a specific direction? Can it reverse? Can it become the shibboleth of a 'postcritical' reboot? At first glance transparent and directional, 're-' complicates the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present, and future, opening onto errant temporalities.
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.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey beschäftigt sich in seinem Aufsatz "Kippbilder des Vitalen" mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen und Leben bei Canguilhem und Haraway. Im Begriff des Kippbildes stellt er Canguilhems Beschreibung des Lebens als einer "dialektischen Essenz" den Vorschlag gegenüber, das diskursiv konstituierte Leben als etwas zu denken, das ohne Vermittlung zwischen verschiedenen Aspekten oszilliert und seine Einheit allein im Phänomen oder im Namen Leben findet.
Introduction
(2014)
The experience of multistable figures or so-called Kippbilder - the sudden and repeated 'kippen' of perception as the same object is seen under different aspects - is fascinating in its own right. However, what animated the year-long discussion leading to this volume was a critical exploration of the proposition that such figures may offer a helpful model for thinking through the intercultural and interdisciplinary effort of productively negotiating between conflicting positions.
Wie wird das Leben zum Objekt des Wissens? Und wie gestaltet sich das Verhältnis von Leben, Wissenschaft und Technik? Donna J. Haraway und Georges Canguilhem verstehen diese Fragen als politische Fragen und Epistemologie als eine politische Praxis. Die besondere Aktualität von Canguilhems Denken leitet sich aus der von ihm gestellten Frage her, wie sich eine Geschichte der Rationalität des Wissens vom Leben schreiben lässt. Haraway bezieht sich nicht explizit auf Canguilhem, schließt jedoch an die von ihm gestellte Frage an.
Die Möglichkeit einer 'Aktiven Passivität' und der Entwicklung einer queeren Kunst des Scheiterns mit Spinoza lotet Christoph F. E. Holzhey in seinem Aufsatz "Paradoxe Lust zwischen Teleologie und Mechanik" entlang der Diskussion systemtheoretischer Probleme weiter aus, die Spinozas "Ethik" mit ihrer Verschränkung von Epistemologie, Ontologie und Ethik aufwirft. Ausgehend von dem bekannten Satz Spinozas, nach dem bisher noch niemand bestimmt habe, was ein Körper vermöge, fragt Holzhey ob dieser Satz, der den Körpern und der Materie eine eigene Aktivität zuschreibe, tatsächlich, wie es in vielen aktuellen Positionen der New Materialismen unterstellt wird, mit einer Überwindung der Newtonschen Physik und deren Mechanik verbunden sei. Seine zentrale Frage zielt auf die neovitalistischen Tendenzen in den aktuellen Auslegungen des Conatusprinzips. Werden, so fragt Holzhey, hier nicht genau jene Probleme behandelt, welche die Thermodynamik und statistische Mechanik am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts aufwarfen? Statt jedoch zu fragen, wie aus Trägheit Fortschritt wird, untersucht er, wie Fortschritt durch Trägheit denkbar ist. Dazu fokussiert Holzhey die Verbindung von Ethik und Affektlehre und legt das Conatusprinzip konsequent als Trägheitsprinzip aus. Vor diesem Hintergrund zeigt er nicht nur, wie nah sich Spinozas Unterscheidung von Freude und Trauer an Freuds Lust und Unlust bewegt, sondern auch, dass sich die Hierarchisierung der Freude nicht halten lässt, sondern die Affekte allein als paradoxe Lust ihre antiteleologische und antinormative Wirkung entfalten.
Wholes are said to be more than the sum of their parts. This 'more' contains both a promise and a threat. When different elements - which might be individuals, cultures, disciplines, or methods - form a whole, they not only join forces but also generate a surplus from which the parts can benefit. Being part of a whole is a way to acquire meaning and to extend beyond one's limited existence; and having a part in the whole is to have an enlarged agency. But wholes are also more powerful than the sum of their parts. Wholes constitute their parts: they determine what is a part and what is apart, what can become a part, and which parts have no part. Even if parts therefore may not be said to pre-exist a whole, there may still be something in them that exceeds being a part - if only the possibility of being part of a different whole.