After successful completion of the course, students are able to better follow live lectures of contemporary theory discourses, and to express and formulate in short and concise reports their own engagement with the positions.
.
(ONCE) UPON (A) PLENITUDESummoning Commonalities beyond Totality
10-12 December 2020, TU Wien
The comparison between architecture and language is perhaps one of the most recurring clichés of architecture theory. Both language and architecture can in fact be understood as structures resting upon dialectics, as “mediators” of different positions facing off one another. Yet today dialectic entanglements tend to dissociate and tear apart, striving to end their relations for good. Different positions thereby seem to be turning more and more into stark opposition. In such loud escalation of conflictual positions – between man and planet, humanism and materialism, life and technology, culture and nature… . Even science itself seems to be called to take parts, to be therefore one of the many voices screaming against the others. How to find a stability upon such indeterminate, noisy grounds? The Sophistication Conference™ of this year invites to address such topics by looking for how to conceive of measure and moderateness beyond reactionary moralism and conservativeness. Its aim is to rethink the global beyond an immanent agonism of dialectical opposites. (ONCE) UPON(A) PLENITUDE is an invitation to eschew comparative analysis and look at the givenness of terms in the terms of their construction, as a way to make room – to open up a cosmocratic and political space by the means of architectonic articulations – into the loudness of the contemporary.
A Sophistication Conference™ – More info at this link.
Task: Listen to 6 of the full lectures (of your choice, all the moderation clips count as one lecture) carefully. Write short reports for each lecture, recapitulating and critically interrogating the argumentation and theme of the talks.
Students who sign up for this course are to hand in a written report on the different lectures they have heard at the Conference: What is the overall topic of the conference and how do you understand it? Which lectures have you attended and what were they about? What will you remember especially from the conference program?
We expect a report on at least 6 of the full lectures of the conference. Moderation clips are much shorter: if you chose those lectures, chose all. together as equivalents for 1 full lecture.
There will be Sprechstunden on ZOOM to exchange experiences and techniques of how to learn to follow and report on academic lectures.
Final delivery via TUWEL by: 9. Februar 2021
The conference will be in English.
