Scaling Problems III: Culture and Technics

Saturday, 22 September 2018, 1 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery

Workshop with
Andrew Fisher

Experiences, processes and techniques of scale, scaling and scalability have become ever more obvious in, and determining of everyday life. Expectations of proportionality and experiences of the disproportionate, the globalized politics of orientation and disorientation and the impact of techno-scientific form upon individual life, have all come to foreground different but interlinked questions of scale. Scaling Problems is a series of workshops that sets out to develop concepts with which to analyse experiences, discourses, forms and possibilities of scale, scaling and scalability as they intertwine with one another to shape the present.

The third workshop in this series will centre on a close reading of ‘Culture & Technics’ by Gilbert Simondon. This will consider how Simondon’s celebrated conception of technics is articulated in critical contrast to culture through a problematic of scale, thus providing a basis upon which to think critically about contemporary meanings of scale, processes of scaling and forms of scalability.

The workshop will take place in English. The event is free, but since places are limited, registration will be required. To register, please send an email to a.t.fisher@gold.ac.uk.

Readings, both available online, are:

Gilbert Simondon: ‘Culture & Technics’, Radical Philosophy, no. 189, Jan/Feb 2015, pp. 17-23.

Andrea Bardin & Giovanni Menegalle, ‘Introduction to Simondon’, Radical Philosophy, no. 189, Jan/Feb 2015, pp. 15-16.

Andrew Fisher is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and founding editor of the journal Philosophy of Photography. He is currently pursuing a research project “The Image of Thought” at the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin. His recent research and publications have focused on issues of scale in contemporary photography, political life and philosophy from a heterodox phenomenological standpoint.