DOCSLIB.ORG

ON HYPERSTTION in THEORY Armen Avanessian

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
ON HYPERSTTION in THEORY Armen Avanessian REINVENTING HORIZONS nize the imbalanced nature of their relationship, so grows their ACCELERATING ACADEMIA: demand for equality and their technical capacity to be in charge of their destiny. This realization opens up a space for intervening ON HYPERSTTION in history and for creating new horizons of possibility.22 IN THEORY Armen Avanessian Recall that hype is the ratio of expected earnings to earnings (EE/E), whereas the above impressions are based on the ratio of capitalization to earnings (K/E). The latter number refects both hype and the discount rate (K/E = H/r), so un- less we know what capitalists expect, we remain unable to say anything specifc about hype. But we can speculate[…] —Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan1 The new realist and materialist philosophy and the new po- litical theory which it explicitly inspired, assert that reality can be known and that change is possible. Rather than spell out here what this entails in the various currents of thought that range from New Materialism via Speculative Realism to 22. A diferent version of this essay was originally presented as part of Ashkal Alwan’s Home 1. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder, Works 7, a Forum on Cultural Practices in Beirut on November 18, 2015. (Milton Park: Routledge, 2009), 190. 76 77 REINVENTING HORIZONS AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA Accelerationism, I would like to look at the discursive framework logical. This common folkloristic mystifcation of the past is best and background information that have led to their engagement countered with an accelerationist perspective on the origins of with the scientifc and (fnancial-) economic phenomena that the modern research university. Only in this way can we develop characterize the early twenty-frst century. Yet these phenomena an alternative scenario which we need, in my view, to focus and are largely ignored in the everyday academic life of the human- conceptualize the considerable defcits of the way the human- ities, marked for decades now by a conservative philologism and ities produce theory today – a preliminary but necessary step in a politically motivated, yet nonetheless vague and inert theoret- bringing about actual change. ical relativism – the legacy of ’68. In its various guises – “ma- How, then, do we think (of the academic present) diferently? terialistic turn,” “speculative turn” – the abandonment of the The starting point would have to be the Humboldt nostalgia, dogmata into which poststructuralism and critical theory have rampant not only in Germany, with its wistful phantasm of an petrifed has made an undeniable impact. Suddenly, there are amalgamation of two contradictory claims: to advance research alternatives to the stubborn technological and scientifc analpha- and to promote teaching, a synthesis alleged to have succeeded betism of the humanities, alternatives that recuse the dominant so much better in the past. This combination, the story goes, cultural pessimism. The astonishing ignorance, enmity even, of makes the free development of academics’ individual talents and the ofcial academic apparatus notwithstanding, these new real- creativity possible in the frst place and thereby guarantees origi- isms and materialisms have refocused public attention on philo- nality and quality in research, theory production, and knowledge sophical theorizing outside the academic bubble. transmission. This high-fown scenario of a gradual decline of The discursive-political framework is linked to the political/ Humboldtian ideals, said to be caused primarily by the processes economic and intellectual crisis of the university. To understand of economization which, after all, do not spare the university, is this crisis, we must frst resolve an apparent paradox concern- misleading in more than one way. First of all, it is doubtful, from ing the self-conception of most humanities scholars. Both the an accelerationist perspective, whether such a utopian outside academic feld of the humanities and the function of scholars of capitalist conditions is even possible. When we look, frst, at in it are often misunderstood. There is, frst of all, the critical the origins of the modern research university in Prussia prior self-conception of the protagonists. They see themselves threat- to 1800 and, second, at the reactions of contemporary univer- ened by an increasing economization. What is at stake, in their sities after 1800, the situation looks very diferent from what it view, is nothing less than the construction of a bulwark against is said to be in the ever-popular humanist tale. The judgments capitalism (today, capitalism of the neoliberal variety). A more of the professoriate back then – be it at the Sorbonne, at the careful historical archaeology of the contemporary university, English colleges, or among the Vienna Jesuits – bear a striking however, reveals this view to be quite illusory, not to say ideo- resemblance with the laments about the state of afairs we hear 78 79 REINVENTING HORIZONS AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA today. What Humboldt’s contemporaries merely had an inkling from which “artists in life” are to emerge.4 Aesthetics becomes of has today emerged as the (long repressed) historical truth a philosophical discipline at a time when a new “aesthetic re- of the modern research university: an economic orientation is gime” (Jacques Rancière) produces, as its correlate, an aesthet- inscribed in its very purpose, which is to provide education as ic subjectivity.5 Without being able to elaborate it here, it may professional training. And this shift produces, not as a side ef- thus be necessary to take an even broader approach in deriving fect but as its intended governmental goal, a new type of aca- from the critique artiste the new spirit of capitalism and its “cre- demic and, in my view, aesthetic subjectivity. The switch from ativity dispositif,” the “‘aesthetic capitalism’ of today” (Andreas an oral disputatio (which served to demonstrate mastery of the Reckwitz),6 than Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have done established canon of knowledge) to a written dissertatio (which fo- in their trailblazing study.7 Even before the Romantic bohème, cuses on innovative research) is one example. Another is the bu- the matrix of today’s neoliberalism began to take shape in the reaucratization of the universities. Often presented as the result universities, which are responsible for a general aestheticization of an increasing capitalization of the institution, it too has an of discourse. Autonomy, fexibility, creativity, and all the other antecedent history in Prussian politics and policing – be critical! is ingredients of innovative research were frst conceived and em- an imperative proclaimed beyond just Königsberg.2 As historian ployed in precisely those laboratories of the humanities that to- William Clark pointedly remarks: “The researcher as modern day, wilfully ignoring their genesis, act the part of distinguished hero of knowledge, the civil servant as work of art was a work pockets of resistance. of German irony.”3 Given such misunderstandings, it comes as no surprise that Among the philosophers, including Hegel and Schleier- the critique that has been practiced with such devotion in facul- macher, who were working on this fundamental and, to this day, ties of humanities for more than two hundred years now often internationally reverberating reorientation of the university, it is probably Fichte, who in coining the term Wissenschaftskünst- ler, or academic-artist, has best characterized this new type of 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Deduzierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden höheren subjectivity. The Romantic-idealist university, for him, was to Lehranstalt, die in gehöriger Verbindung mit einer Akademie der Wissenschaften stehe be “a school of the art of the scientifc employment of reason” (1807),” in Idee und Wirklichkeit einer Universität: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Wil- and of “the practical employment of the art of science in life,” helms-Universität zu Berlin, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960), 34. 5. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 2. See Armen Avanessian, Überschrift: Ethik des Wissens und Poetik der Existenz (Berlin: Merve, 6. Andreas Reckwitz, Die Erfndung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (Ber- 2015), 24-46. An English translation is forthcoming from Sternberg Press. lin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 11. 3. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: Univer- 7. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (Lon- sity of Chicago Press, 2006), 211. don: Verso, 2005). 80 81 REINVENTING HORIZONS AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA takes the form of “transcendental miserabilism.”8 The main dif- From an accelerationist point of view, solving societal prob- ference between the various forms of critique – be it immanent, lems requires contextualizing local problems (e.g. working con- external, implicit, explicit, be it called critique or criticality – and ditions in the university) within the global. The crisis of the uni- the speculative and accelerationist approaches already men- versity within globalized capitalism, which is also an intellectual tioned lies in the latter’s emphatic insistence on the potential of crisis, is usefully defned by a formula articulated by economic the future: they attempt a recursive
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris
    China Media Research, 13(4), 2017 http://www.chinamediaresearch.net The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris Janell Watson Virginia Tech, USA Abstract: Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres challenge the binary logic of Western philosophy very differently, Derrida through a philosophy of discourse, Serres through a philosophy of things. Serres has begun to draw more international readers thanks to a recent shift in critical emphasis from words to things. The difference between deconstruction’s word-orientated acosmism and the newer versions of thing-oriented cosmism can be fruitfully explored by comparing Derrida to Serres on the basis of their readings of Plato’s cosmogony, focused on the figure of chora in Timaeus. [Janell Watson. The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris. China Media Research 2017; 13(4): 28-37]. 4 Keywords: Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Peter Eisenman, Plato, chora Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres share the critical concern about human-nonhuman relations ambition of overcoming the dualist, binary logic of non- manifests itself in ecocriticism, new materialism, contradiction which, they complain, has dominated animal studies, posthumanism, anthropocene studies, Western philosophy since Plato. However, they object-oriented continental philosophy, the challenge non-contradiction very differently, Derrida architecture of the fold, actor-network theory, and the through a philosophy of discourse, Serres through a concept of vibrant matter. Once again, matter matters. philosophy of things. These two thinkers, both born in As Serres puts it in his recently translated Geometry, 1930, overlapped at the École normale supérieure in the cosmos has returned as “philosophy’s paradigm, Paris, and thus come from the same intellectual time and its real model,” as in the time of the ancients, but with place.
    [Show full text]
  • Fall 2013 UG Course Descriptions.Docx
    UNDERGRADUATE SPRING 2019 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS PHI 100 (B, HUM) Concepts of the Person, Main Focus An historical introduction to philosophy through readings and discussions on topics such as human identity, human understanding, and human values. PHI 100.01 MWF 12:00-12:53 A. Bernstein In this class, we will ask the question, “What does it mean to be a person?” We will explore the question by making our way through challenging and fascinating texts, whether they are classically considered “philosophy” or not. The question of personhood is always broadly philosophical, but we will investigate whether that which is institutionally called “philosophy” is up to the task of answering the question. We will explore these things through the lenses of media, technology, culture, psychology, literature, and more. Through these interventions, we will try to get a handle on to what extent the concept of personal identity is even still sustainable in our postmodern, “post-truth” society. This class interrogates concepts of the person. PHI 100.02 MWF 10:00-10:53 J. Sares What is Thinking?: The Human Between Animal and Machine The course examines what it means to be a human being in terms of the capacity for conceptual thought and subjectivity. In part one, we will compare the human being to nonhuman animals, questioning whether there is a continuity or radical break between human and nature. Topics in this section may include: Aristotle’s definition of the human being as a ‘rational animal,’ Descartes’ substance dualism, Hobbes’ materialism, the philosophies of nature of Schelling and Hegel, and psychoanalytic accounts of the human being.
    [Show full text]
  • Attached: the Object and the Collective
    Bernhard Siegert Attached: The Object and the Collective 1 Cultural Techniques in 1983, 2000, 2020 As one of the reports written in the course of Friedrich Kittler’s Habilitation pro- cedure attests, in 1983 in the context of the humanities, the term “cultural tech- niques” carried the stigma of being unscientific. Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985, translated as Discourse Networks 1800/1900) was regarded as belonging to a type of book that might be labeled “kulturtechnisch,” which included other works such as Hans-Dieter Bahr’s Über den Umgang mit Maschinen (1983, “On interacting with machines”), Jean Baudrillard’s L’Échange symbolique et la mort (1976, Symbolic Exchange and Death), Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981, History and Obstinacy), Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (1983, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century), or Jacques Derrida’s La carte postale (1980, The Post Card). What these books have in common (if nothing else) is that they appear to suspend “the proven foundations of scientific knowl- edge.”1 Kittler himself had made use of the term “cultural techniques” at the end of the summer of 1983 in the preface he was pressured to write (which was later suppressed) for Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. “Even écriture, which has in the meantime become a hermeneutic slogan, does not use the term ‘cultural tech- niques’ to mean cultural techniques.”2 Describing reading and writing as cultural techniques meant,
    [Show full text]
  • Demonstration and Interpretation
    Serres, M. Demonstration and Interpretation pp. 77-123 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. Transl. by Roxanne Lapidus, (1996) Conversations on science, culture, and time Univ. of Michigan Press Staff and students of University of Warwick are reminded that copyright subsists in this extract and the work from which it was taken. This Digital Copy has been made under the terms of a CLA licence which allows you to: • access and download a copy; • print out a copy; Please note that this material is for use ONLY by students registered on the course of study as stated in the section below. All other staff and students are only entitled to browse the material and should not download and/or print out a copy. This Digital Copy and any digital or printed copy supplied to or made by you under the terms of this Licence are for use in connection with this Course of Study. You may retain such copies after the end of the course, but strictly for your own personal use. All copies (including electronic copies) shall include this Copyright Notice and shall be destroyed and/or deleted if and when required by University of Warwick. Except as provided for by copyright law, no further copying, storage or distribution (including by e-mail) is permitted without the consent of the copyright holder. The author (which term includes artists and other visual creators) has moral rights in the work and neither staff nor students may cause, or permit, the distortion, mutilation or other modification of the work, or any other derogatory treatment of it, which would be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author.
    [Show full text]
  • Thinking With, Through and for Nature – Michel Serres, Branches (2020). London: Bloomsbury
    Johnson, P. (2020). Thinking With, Through and For Nature – Michel Serres, Branches (2020). London: Bloomsbury. Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, 1(1): 15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.34 REVIEW Thinking With, Through and For Nature – Michel Serres, Branches (2020). London: Bloomsbury Peter Johnson Branches is Michel Serres’ latest book to be translated into English. The title is a pertinent description of his overall philosophical thought and practice which spread in multiple directions, working from different but overlapping stems, involving the human, the inhuman and the nonhuman. Serres became a bestselling author in France but has been largely neglected in Anglophone scholarship. Branches is a good a place as any to start to navigate and provide a glimpse of his lucidly inclusive and complex thought. Keywords: Michel Serres; ecology; climate crisis; Anthropocene; trandisciplinarity Michel Serres is an uncomfortable philosopher with Serres’ stochastic practice likewise strays, meanders, an uncomfortable philosophy. Although he wrote over opens, sets adrift, matching how things of the world, living sixty transdisciplinary books from the 1960s to the year and inert, move, divert, flourish and deteriorate. He finds of his death in 2019, many of which concern political evidence for this in the ancient philosophy of Lucretius ecology and the Anthropocene from a decentred human which he audaciously claims anticipates, or in fact is perspective, he has been largely ignored in Anglophone isomorphic with, advanced sciences such as chaos theory, scholarship. Why has he been neglected? His thought is an idea explicitly acknowledged by Prigogine and Stengers utterly impossible to pigeon-hole; he mixes styles, points in their ground-breaking Order out of Chaos (2018).
    [Show full text]
  • Occult Communications: on Article 1 Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology
    communication +1 Volume 4 Issue 1 Occult Communications: On Article 1 Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology September 2015 Occult Communications: On Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Leuphana University of Lüneburg, [email protected] Abstract Viewed from the perspective of the occult, formerly straight and narrow conduits of reason may even begin to resemble irregular relays composed of irregular twists and turns. This essay offers a brief overview of key literature on spiritualism and the occult, some larger reflections on the place of the occult within studies of science and communications, and brief summaries of the essays contained in this volume. Keywords media history, cultural theory, spiritualism, occultism, magic, cultural history This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Geoghegan / Occult Communications In 1864, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot advanced a communicative account of spiritualism. Speaking to auditors of his medical lectures at l’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, he recounted the case of an outbreak of spiritisme at a military penitentiary in Brittany.1 According to Charcot, the officers’ wives at the penitentiary convened séances—at the time a fashionable diversion in Paris salons—to pass the idle hours away in the remote military installation, which in turn instigated maddened possessions in the daughter and two sons of one officer. Charcot diagnosed dreary settings, congenital nervousness, social isolation, and a lack of parental supervision as features that contributed to the children’s susceptibility to outside influence. In addition, the family’s belief in the marvelous and its immoderate consumption of ghost stories had amplified the suggestive powers of the séance.2 Under these inauspicious circumstances a trickle of superstitious inputs transformed into a torrent of hysteria.
    [Show full text]
  • Beauvoir's Reading of Biology in the Second
    Beauvoir’s Reading of Biology in The Second Sex David M. Peña-Guzmán Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XXIV, No 2 (2016) 259-285. Vol XXIV, No 2 (2016) ISSN 1936-6280 (print) ISSN 2155-1162 (online) DOI 10.5195/jffp.2016.726 www.jffp.org This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. This journal is operated by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française Vol XXIV, No 2 (2016) | www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2016.726 Beauvoir’s Reading of Biology in The Second Sex David M. Peña-Guzmán Johns Hopkins University The Scientific Face of Beauvoir Without a doubt, the single most powerful (and illustrious) element of Simone de Beauvoir’s magnum opus, The Second Sex (1949), is her radical declaration that biological processes do not make a “woman.” Social relations do. Perhaps more so than any other claim found in any her works, this claim helped Beauvoir bulldoze over the mythos of gender essentialism that has saturated Western philosophy since the days of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Indeed, according to some, this claim turned The Second Sex into the “feminist bible” of the twentieth century. Of course, various other thinkers—living both before and after Beauvoir—have made comparable claims about the relationship between biology and gender, usually from the standpoint of value theory.
    [Show full text]
  • Michel Serres with Bruno Latour the Natural Contract by Michel Serres Genesis by Michel Serres
    -~-~·-l; '1 1 ~­ -)' ~CJU~ l"· J' ÛlF .t Studies in Literature and Science published in association with the Society for Literature and Science Editorial Board Chair: N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles JamesJ. Bono, State University ofNew York at Buffalo Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study Evelyn Fox Keller, University of California, Berkeley Bruno Latour, Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Mines, Paris StephenJ. Weininger, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Tides in the series Transgressive Readings: The Texts ofFranz Kafka and Max Planck by Valerie D. Greenberg A Bkssed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos by AlexanderJ. Argyros OfTwo Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics by MichaeIJoyce The Artijicial Paradise: Science Fiction and American ReaUty by Sharona Ben-Tov Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time by Michel Serres with Bruno Latour The Natural Contract by Michel Serres Genesis by Michel Serres i 1 h MICHEL SERRES with BRUNO LATOUR Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time 1 1 il Translated by Roxanne Lapidus 1 i AnnArbor 'l'HE l1NIvERSITY OF MICHIGAN PREss English translation copyright © by me University ofMichigan 1995 Originally published in French as Eclaircissements © by Editions François Bourin 1990 AlI rights reserved Published in the United States ofAmerica by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica e Printed on acid~free paper 1998 1997 1996 1995 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalogue recwd fw this book is availoble }Tom the British Library. Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Serres, Michel. [Eclaircissements. English] Conversations on science, culture, and time / Michel Serres with Bruno Latour; translated by Roxanne Lapidus.
    [Show full text]
  • Abstrakty 11
    Abstracts Łukasz Andrzejewski On the Political View The essay is an attempt to present thoughts of the 70-year-old French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The centre of Andrzejewski's attention is a set of ideas about relations between art and politics. Giving one a tour of this theme, he examines and explains the most important elements of Rancière's political discourse. Initially the author describes time and space – terms that constitute a theoretical framework both Kantian critical philosophy and Rancière's politics of aesthetics. Later the writer articulates and analyses a key term of Rancière's apparatus - the distribution of the sensible – and places it in the context of its ontology. Andrzejewski clarifies the idea by giving an example of two basic figures in Rancière's theory: the workers (demiurgos) and the citizens (polites). Furthermore, the author referrs and comments Rancière's thoughts of relations between politics and aesthetic, politics and art and also politics and public space. In conclusion Andrzejewski emphasises very compound character of described ideas as well as the practical dimention of Rancière's distribution of the sensible theory. To provide evidence for his opinion and illustrate it the author analyses simultaneously a film 33 sceny z życia by Małgorzata Szumowska and political situation in Greece at the beginning of 2010. Bartłomiej Błesznowski Towards Potentiality. Truth as a Political Category in Foucault and Deleuze Thought The subject matter of this article deals with redefinition of the truth in philosophical and political project by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The truth witch is understood by Nietzsche is hereby expressed as a result of the struggle of powers whose confrontation constitutes western metaphysics.
    [Show full text]
  • Losing Touch: Rethinking Contingency As Common Tangency in Continental Thought
    Losing Touch: Rethinking Contingency as Common Tangency in Continental Thought Liane Francesca Carlson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Liane Francesca Carlson All rights reserved ABSTRACT Losing Touch: Rethinking Contingency as Common Tangency in Continental Thought Liane F. Carlson This dissertation grows out of the collapse of traditional Christian justifications for evil in the wake of Enlightenment critiques of religion and the atrocities of the twentieth century. Skeptical of teleological narratives that sought to domesticate suffering as part of a necessary plan - whether God’s plan, or some more secularized ideal of progress - a generation of Critical Theorists adopted the concept of contingency as their central tool for political critique. Defined as the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary, contingency serves for most contemporary thinkers to remind us that even seemingly natural categories, such as sex, race, and religion could have been otherwise. Yet in using contingency to make sweeping statements about the nature of history, scholars often overlook how contingency is understood on the ground by those who feel their bodies and identities abruptly made unstable. This project seeks to reground contingency in the specificity of human experience by returning to a neglected Christian tradition that understood contingency as a state of finitude, defined in contrast to the necessary, impassive God. For such thinkers, contingency was experienced most acutely in the sense of touch as it renders the body vulnerable to the external world and the passions as they ambush the soul.
    [Show full text]
  • Michel Serres and the Emergence of Social Order
    Social Chaosmos: Michel Serres and the emergence of social order Kelvin Clayton A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Staffordshire University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2011 Contents Table of contents ii Abstract iv 1 General introduction 1 1.1 Micro / macro problem: theory 1 1.2 Micro / macro problem: praxis 7 1.3 General approach to the problem 13 2 Literature review 17 2.1 Philosophy 17 2.2 Social Theory 20 2.3 Complexity Science 24 3 Methodology and Michel Serres 27 3.0 Introduction: the methodology of Michel Serres 27 3.1 Serres: key ideas 32 3.2 Serres: comparative methodology 35 3.3 Serres: complexity science 43 3.4 Serres: thinking the multiple 56 3.5 Serres: empiricism 61 3.6 Conclusion: the methodology of this thesis 65 4 Existing approaches to social multiplicities 68 4.0 Introduction 68 4.1 Badiou: the void and multiplicities 69 4.2 Deleuze and Guattari: the arborescent and the rhizomic 82 4.3 DeLanda: nested sets 93 4.4 Conclusion 106 5 Non-units of social organisation 108 5.0 Introduction 108 5.1 Foucault: power relations 108 ii 5.2 Tarde: beliefs, desires and memes 122 5.3 Foucault: statements and expectations 134 5.4 Conclusion 146 6 Social (self) organisation 148 6.0 Introduction 148 6.1 Repetition and difference 148 6.2 Imitation and auto-catalytic sets 161 6.3 Codifications: norms and laws 174 6.4 Conclusion 184 7 Conclusion and implications 186 Notes 196 Appendix 201 References and Bibliography 213 iii Abstract This thesis presents a social ontology.
    [Show full text]
  • HERMES Literature, Science, Philosophy
    HERMES Literature, Science, Philosophy HERMES LITERA TURE, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY by MICHEL SERRES Edited by Josue V. Harari & David F. Bell THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS , BALTIMORE & LONDON This book has been brought to publication with the generous as­ sistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Copyright © 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Permissions are listed on page 157, which constitutes a continuation of the co pyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Serres, Michel. Hermes: literature, science, philosophy. Includes index. Contents: The apparition of Hermes, Don Juan­ Knowledge in the classical age-Michelet, the soup -Language and space, from Oedipus to Zola-[etc.] 1. Harari, Josue V. II. Bell, David F. III. Title. PQ2679.E679A2 1981 844' .914 81-47601 ISBN 0-8018-2454-0 AACR2 ..... .......... Contents Editors' Note VIl INTRODUCTION: Journala plusieurs voies by Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell lX I. LITERATURE & SCIENCE 1. The Apparition of Hermes: Dam Juan 3 2. Knowledge in the Classical Age: La Fontaine and Descartes 15 3. Michelet: The Soup 29 4. Language and Space: From Oedipus to Zola 39 5. Turner Translates Carnot 54 II. PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE 6. Platonic Dialogue 65 7. The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics 71 8. Mathematics and Philosophy: What Thales Saw. 84 9. Lucretius: Science and Religion 98 10. The Origin of Geometry 125 POSTFACE: Dynamics from Leibniz to Lucretius by lIya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers 135 Name Index 159 Subject Index 163 v ....
    [Show full text]