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.

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Azimuth 9/2017 | The Battlefield of the Anthropocene. Limits, Responsibilities and the Duty of Flight

Edited by Sara Baranzoni – Paolo Vignola
ISBN: 978­88­9359­011­2
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In the year 2000, Paul Crutzen made the explosive proposal that the name Anthropocene be adopted to describe a new geological era whose specific characteristic is the centrality of humankind as a factor in geophysical systems. The term immediately implied a question not just of beginnings but of endings: the advent of something that would also be an encounter with limits, in the first place ecological, but also economic, political, technological and conceptual. Nevertheless, what seems to have no limits, is the life of this very term: it has disseminated and gathered ground well beyond the scientific fields to which it is most immediately relevant. What has been called the Anthropocene and recognized as an event might thus be conceived as a multiplicity of events, a dispersal each moment of which breaks with one or another of the traditional dichotomies and hierarchies of what Heidegger called metaphysics (Nature/Culture, human/non-human, Anthropocentrism, Ethnocentrism). But might it not be seen also as a dehiscence within the very field of theoretical thought itself, and hence as a kind of pure Event, in a Deleuzian sense: as a shock that would be a kind of chronological suspension of the possibility of events? Conscious of the Anthropocenic limits, the duty of flight calls for a decolonization of thought (Viveiros de Castro) from old and new hierarchies, a decolonization based on a general ecology. Such a decolonization would thus need to be involved in the elaboration of another image of thought, aimed towards a new kind of relationship between technology, environment and social ties, so as to make possible the creation of a future in which one can believe.

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