Seminar series on CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL THEORY
Theme five: Signs & numbers; culture & nature
(first session September 8, 2009)
Organised by: Dr. Rick Dolphijn (Media and Culture Studies), Dr. Iris van der Tuin (Gender Studies)
“Signs & numbers; culture & nature” deals with the ways in which the new materialism engages itself with mathematics, models, numbers, always in their entanglement with the human sciences, culture, signs. This theme will make clear the importance of science in new materialist theory. Yet it is not by taking the sciences as exemplary for good academic research that the humanities are critiqued. On the contrary, it is in re-reading the sciences and the humanities as they write a similar morphogenesis that builds up new materialist thinking. Neglected by the philosophy of science, this theme unveils a history of thought that is affirmative of both the sciences and the humanities, and shows their entanglement throughout the history of Western thinking.
Location: Muntstraat 2a room 0.02, Utrecht
Time: Tuesdays 13:15 - 14:45 (you can bring your lunch)
1. Sept 8
Badiou, Alain (2007) ‘The Category of Model and the Historical Time of Mathematical Production’ in The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics. Trans. Zachary Luke Fraser. Melbourne: Re.press, pp. 48-55.
2. Sept 15
Whitehead, Alfred North (2007) ‘Nature and Thought’ in The Concept of
Nature: the Tarner Lectures, delivered in Trinity College, November 1919. Bibliobazaar, pp.1-25.
3. Sept 22
Kirby, Vicki (2003) ‘Enumerating Language: ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in Configurations: Journal of Literature, Science and Technology 11(3), pp. 417-39.
4. Sept 29
DeLanda, Manuel (2002) ‘The Mathematics of the Virtual’ in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. New York: Continuum, pp. 9-45.
5. Oct 6
Mullarkey, John (2006) ‘Thinking in Diagrams’ in Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. London and New York: Continuum, pp. 157-86.
6. Oct 13
Spinoza, Benedictus de (2000) ‘Ethics II Prop. 13 and following’ (Spinoza’s “small physics”) in Ethics. 1677. Trans. G.H.R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 124-30.
7. Oct 20
Rajchman, John (1998) ‘Other Geometries’ in Constructions. Cambridge and
London: MIT Press, pp. 91-108.
8. Oct 27
Barad, Karen (2007) ‘Quantum Entanglements: Experimental Metaphysics and the Nature of Nature’ in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 247-352.
9. Nov 3
Bergson, Henri (1998) ‘On the Meaning of Life - The Order of Nature and the Form of Intelligence’ in Creative Evolution. 1907. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, pp. 186-271.
10. Nov 10
Reiser + Umemoto (2006) ‘Matter’ (with lemma’s: Intensive and Extensive;
Geometry and Matter; Folly of the Mean; Classical Body/Impersonal Individuation; Material Organizations; Matter/Force Relationships; From a Static to an Oscillatory Model (and Back Again); Operating in a State of Poise; Poise in an Allied Discipline; Refrain; Exchange among Systems; Intensive and Extensive II; Machinic Phylum; the Diagram; Diagram Deployment; Fineness and the Macroscale; Fineness in Allied Fields; Interdisciplinary Exchange; New Possibilities for Spatial Structures; Matter and Content; Essentialized Systems vs. System with Singularities; Exact/Anexact-yet-Rigorous; Material Computation; Systems Becoming other Systems; Post-Fordist Implementations) in Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 71-161