CALL FOR PAPERS
Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age
Issue X, 2017
Intersections: At the Technophysics of Space
Editors: Georgios Tsagdis (Westminster Law & Theory Lab), Susanna Lindberg (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)
Deadline for proposals (300 words): 15th October, 2016
Intersections: where technology encounters space. Where the technological transformation, organization and manipulation of what appeared to be the incontestable, unalterable terrain of physics – a fundamental element of nature – challenges the pace of thought. Can our discourses keep up with the transformation that they, as logoi, at the intersection with techne, have wrought? What compasses and cartographies, what instruments of navigation and observation, do our new territories, environments, multi-scapes and horizons exact?
Interpreted by Plato as receptacle (chōra), by Aristotle as place (topos), by Descartes as extension, by Leibniz as principle of individuation, by Kant as transcendental condition of apperception-throughout its history from antiquity to modernity, space has been thought as constant or given the theoretical articulations of which would transform only to reinstate it as an immutable foundation. The same logic continues to govern physical theories of general gravitation and general relativity, as well as mathematical theories of topology, which despite breaking with the idea of space as a single universal dimension, remain attached nonetheless to the idea of a general theory of space. The generality of such theoretical approaches makes them blind to the singularity of the artificial spaces created by contemporary technologies, and their universality makes them miss the locality and provisionality of a technologically furnished space.
Accordingly, technology creates and follows a logic that undertakes a reconfiguration, a reconstruction of ‘natural’ space. Technologies of writing and painting (graphein), by enabling a simultaneous co-presence of absent events, didn’t only dissociate presence from lost moments of time, but also presence from distant places. One hardly notes the disappearance of natural space anymore: information technologies have accustomed us to it, but the most diverse technologic forms supplement and intensify the phenomenon. The friendly face on the screen does not appear as the emission of a satellite. The co-presence of ubiquitous re-productions across the globe does not need an original anymore. In retrospect, historical technics appears as an artifice, which could only negate space understood as primordial constancy. It would seem, however, that we have reached a point in which this negation constructs space as absence. In the era of the holo-gram, a total writing of non-presence, place is no more. Technology, which offered space a logic of presence, now structures and striates its function as a manifold order of absence.
Deleuze and Guattari’s territories, Foucault’s heterotopias, Derrida’s spectrality, Baudrillard’s hyperreality, Serres’s networks, Auge’s non-places, Bauman’s liquidity and Latour’s ANT, are some of the diverse loci of reflection, through which contributions might attempt to approach the transformation of:
- SOCIAL SPACE: digital environments, accessible only through technological devices and programs; new and renewed technological modes of encounters, interactions and mediations and the ensuing spaces; the construction of evermore encompassing networks; the proliferation of signifiers as building blocks of social space; (post-)urban habitats and the transformation of the human body; techno-consumerism.
- GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE: digital grids where ‘nature’ no longer provides the ground of orientation, making coordination and postioning possible solely through technology (i.e. GPS); the transformation of landscapes, the oceans and the atmosphere and the onset of the anthropocene as a recasting of space itself; outer space as a vantage point of new inner spaces.
- POLITICAL SPACE: technological walls (e.g. limits in internet) instead of physical frontiers; differential access to technological systems of information, communication, etc and the formation of new geopolitics; the exploitation and monopolization of world-resources and the violent disavowal of world-problems; the spatiality of the technological erosion of sovereignty; the fragmentation of political ideologies, agile political identities and shifting political territories.
- NATURAL SCIENCE: technological modelization instead of empirical research on natural objects; knowledge as flows of accelerated information, as well as its academic and ethico-political implications; the manufacture of life and its spaces; the space of science itself as a technological product.
- ART: the dominance of virtuality and of an highly technological aesthetic experience in non-real spaces; avatar subjects and objects of art; conceptual art and architecture as space-less celebrations of the absent work, in the face of infinite technological possibilities.
Original contributions including but not limited to the aforementioned themes are welcome. Please send your proposals to: georgiotsagdis@outlook.com, susanna.e.lindberg@hotmail.com.
DEADLINE: Proposals (300 words): 15th October, 2016 & Completed Articles: 15th March, 2017.
ESSAY LENGTH: min. 25,000 and max. 34,000 characters.