Vera Bühlmann: Bodies of Thinking and the Fascist Affect

Vera Bühlmann will be presenting her talk: “Bodies of Thinking and the Fascist Affect” as part of SMR's first Special Program: "Essays on the Architectonic Body."

Abstract for talk:

Over the long-term, there are two main philological lines with respect to what knowledge appears to be "doing": one line emphasises the aspect of "organising a body of facts or teachings", the other – presumably quite a bit older – relates knowledge to the happening or having of "sexual intercourse".

How to relate such intimacy of knowledge with its publicness?

When we take seriously the new-materialist idea of knowledge as being situated and engendered, then we cannot metaphorically think of knowledge in terms of "building", "canon", or in general any kind of "corpus" – dead, silent, determined, serene. Rather, engendered and situated knowledge is active, there is a quickness to it, an interiority and an embodiment. How to address this? We often refer to knowledge now in terms of "networks", "fields" or "discourses", but none of these are very well capable of acknowledging a scale of interiority, an aspect of autonomy, that would pertain (impersonally) to knowledge. What i want to consider here instead is to think of knowledges' quickness in terms of how it actively co-habits with knowledges in impersonal bodies-of-thinking, abstract but at the same time elemental and tempered. Each a public place - a place engendered by and through the active co-habitation of knowledges. Such public places embody (architectonically speaking) an ethos. They are neither fully undetermined (capital, body-without-organs) nor asexual (pure form, powerful-because-individually-impotent, neither fertile nor productive, but prescriptive).

How to think this? Two lines will be guiding my proposals:

In their quest for an ethical role of feminism in a mode-of-thought-to-come that would not unfold in object-centric formalism, nor in a subject-centric logic of the sexed dyad, Luce Irigaray and Catherine Malabou (among others) remember the tradition of thought in terms of place-making and material "elements" (Irigaray's elementary kind of being-in-touch (con-tingency), and Malabou’s plasticity). With respect to such thinking, there is a re-cycling kind of abundance of distinctness and likeness of bodies and their places; nothing, really, is ever at its proper place here.

The second line follows the ambition to make a place where the "fundamental affects" (of which Descartes spoke) and the monist materialism of affect sub ordine geometrico (of which Spinoza spoke) could co-habit together in one and the same body-of-thinking.

Bionote:

Vera Bühlmann is professor for architecture theory at Vienna University of Technology, where she directs the research unit Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP. Together with Ludger Hovestadt and Elias Zafiris, she founded and co-directs the Digital Gnomonics Research Group (between TU Vienna, ETH Zurich, and Athens University). Among her latest publications are her monograph Information and Mathematics in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Bloomsbury 2020), as well as "Entwurf of the Method and Ethics of its Discourse. Notes on Cartesian Rationalism Reconsidered" (in The Digital Continent: Anarchic Civility, Metaphysics of Copiousness, TU Academic Press, 2021 (forthcoming)), Ethics of Coding, A Report on the Algorithmic Condition with Felicity Colman, Iris van der Tuin and Aislinn O'Donnell (EU Horizon2020 Pr. Nr.732407), "Photosynthesis" (in Philosophy Today, 2019 ) and "Atomic Time and Quantum Literacy: Michel Serres' Apologia for Science" (forthcoming in Minnesota Review, 2021).

About the School of Materialist Research:

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is an education and research collective that offers Intensive Study Courses, Seminars, Special Programs, and Research Initiatives that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics. SMR was founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, The Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities Skopje, the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Vienna, and the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven and serves as a global hub for education, research, and experimentation at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, creative fields, and the STEM sciences.