After successful completion of the course, students are able to better contextualize their ongoing PHD research in the larger context of the discipline Architecture Theory, and with respect to contemporary discourses and developments especially in history, philosophy, arts and technics.
“... we must enrich our models of thinking which are, generally speaking, lamentably poor.”
"Fortunately, Leibniz's system is made in such a way - if we are careful - that, in a single movement, it constantly builds itself and speaks of itself, it forms itself and describes its formation, that it intertwines chiasmically, if we may use this word, its semantics and its syntax."
(Michel Serres, p. 285-6)
In the academic year 23/24, the PHD colloquium "Architectural Theory and Philosophy of Technology" will focus on a single book:
Michel Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques: Étoiles, schémas, points (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968) .
At the heart of our interest in this text is an understanding of architectonics that is primarily informed by "mathematical thinking" rather than "history" or "historiography" - an "architectonics" in the tradition of the liberal arts canon, and in close dialogue with the quantum paradigm in contemporary physics, electronics, sustainability and cyclical processes (Meteora), as well as information technology: Serres' book shows how models of thought through mathematical modelling need not become language-poor and alienated from an artistically inspiring, realistic relation to the world, but can become rich, generous, circumspect, and inspiring. Mathematical thinking is a wellspring for artistic research - it bridges for example music with mechanics, optics with imagination, communication with poetics, logics with coding, geometry with calculus, algebra, engineering and - above all - subtlety with technics-literacy.
One of the challenges posed by this text is how to dispel and re-address a broad misunderstanding that has in unfortunate manners shaped modernist discourses especially perhaps in art and architecture in particular: Mathematical modelling does not offer us an ethically neutral (and hence "innocent") position, it does not release us from historical situatedness of our endeavors, and yet it embodies a "universality" and a "timelessness" - as participatory and shareable, yet profoundly "impersonal" "bodies of thinking"; friendly imaginaries and ideas about the "agency" of such "bodies of thinking" are perhaps more urgently needed today than ever before: latently, the topics of artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language models, etc. will accompany us as subtext as we work our ways through the text.
This book is Michel Serres' early doctoral thesis from the 1960s, not yet translated into another language, and it carries the entire "scope" of his life's work like no other of his many books. The course will take place in "tandem" and complementary with our strategic project to translate this text into English, and to publish it in the applied virtuality book series at Birkhäuser. Hence, we will train our understanding of the text discursively, as well as through and in translation work.
Reading of texts and group discussions.
The weekly meetings entail:
- readings of approx. 30 pages
The seminar is conducted as a joint course with PHD candidates from ETH Zurich. It can be joined either actively (with the rewards of 3 ECTS) or passively (as a listener, without credit points).
Core reading:
Michel Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques: Étoiles, schémas, points (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).
Complementary reading:
TBD, a.o.
Vera Bühlmann, Mathematics and Information in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Bloomsbury Academic, London 2020).
