Intersections. At the Technophysics of Space

Azimuth 10/2017 | Intersections. At the Technophysics of Space

Edited by Georgios Tsagdis – Susanna Lindberg
ISBN: 9788893591102
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Intersections: At the Technophysics of Space is devoted to an engagement with the ways in which space can be thematised anew in the face of its historical consignation as a stable, foundational category. 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—space from antiquity to modernity has been thought, interpreted or produced as a constant; its various transformations reinstating its immutability. 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 for the most part attached to a general theory of space. This generality and quasi-universality blinds thought to the singularity, locality, provisionality and mutability of contemporary technological spaces. The present collection of essays revisits this genealogy, in order to draw on and recast its moments; in order to think the nature of space and accordingly the space of nature, in its (in-)distinction from technologically produced spaces. Questions on the function and implications of new political, urban, ecological, aesthetic and other spaces are opened through a rigorous theoretical examination of a series of foundational articulations of space, as the latter withdraws in the hands of technology, leaving a spectre in its place.