force

in ,

Is the concept of force a technico/scientific one or a philosophical, even metaphysical one?

By defining force purely as the product of an acceleration (a purely kinematic magnitude--from Greek kineo, referring to constrained or controlled motion) and a mass (a coefficient to be determined empirically), modern science eliminated both the metaphysical terminology and psychological origins of the concept of force. (E. J. Dijksterhuis) (see machine ) see also qualititative / quantitative .

For classical physics, force is really only explainable in terms of bodies in contact. "Action at a distance", which is also a feature of gravity, seems "occult." Yet from the work of Kepler and Newton, particles had a dual nature: on the one hand, a highly localized object, and on the other an influence extending through the whole of space. But is the concept of force to be associated primarily with Newtonian mechanics -- as opposed to Newton's alchemical writings?

Newton refused to define the nature of his fundamental gravitational force. He emphasized its heuristic importance and the possibililty of mathematizing it. On the other hand, his alchemical speculations downright invited the amplification and translation of his concept of force into the realm of living things. Could magnetism and electricity, he asked, fulfill the same role for living beings that gravitation did for inanimate matter? (see mechanism / vitalism ) Whether as quasi-mechanical attraction of molecules (as suggested by Buffon and Maupertius) or eventually as formative force (as suggested by the epigeneticists) the Newtonian concept of force supplied the debate about generation with a new energy in the eighteenth century.

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fordism

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Ford's factories required a disciplined and deskilled workforce, willing and able to perform repetitive tasks on the assembly line. F. W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management published in 1911 had already described how labor productivity could be radically increased by breaking down each labor process into component motions and organizing them according to rigorous standards of time and motion. 

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form

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Is there an independent problem of form, for which biology must develop its own concepts and methods of thought? The Pre-Darwinian project of rational morphology was to discover the "laws of form," some inherent necessity in the laws which governed morphological process. It sought to construct what was typical in the varieties of form into a system which should not be merely historically determined, but which should be intelligible from a higher and more rational standpoint. (Hans Driesch, 1914, p. 149) 

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Form / Matter

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The Judeao-Christian account of creation is an account of the origin of form, not of matter. "In the beginning..the earth was without form, and void."... The passage deals at length with the origin of order.

 For Aristotle, the generation of each organism was the result of a male formal cause (conveyed by the semen) and a female material cause (the menstrual blood.)(see epigenesis)  cf body / soul.

 The "hylomorphic" model separates a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form.  Gilbert Simondon bases his critique of the hylomorphic model on "the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension." 

 A formalist concept presupposes a contrast between form and matter. Indeed, without this distinction the absolutization of form makes no sense. "When we look upon the work of art, the means and the materials are forgotten and it is satisfying in itself as form." (Gottfried Semper)

 In The Life of Forms in Art, Henri Focillon argues against the antithesis of form and matter. For him, art is bound to matter, and "unless and until it actually exists in matter, form is little better than a vista of the mind, a mere speculation on space that has been reduced to geometrical intelligibility." (p95) According to Focillon, "matter, even in its most minute details, is always structure and activity, that is to say, form." (p.96) and each kind of matter has a certain "formal vocation." But the life which inhabits matter undergoes a metamorphosis as it becomes a substance of art, and technique is a "whole poetry of action" as a means to achieve metamorphoses.

 Konrad Fiedler described the achievement of classical Greek architecture as the complete intellectualization of all the material elements of building. "We can speak of understanding a Greek building from the great period only when we perceive how the force that strives for a pure expression of form has taken command of every part of the building." ("Observations on Architecture, in Empathy, Form, and Space, p. 134) Still, Fiedler is careful to note that "Form has no existence except in material, and the material, to the mind, is not only the means by which form expresses itself but the medium in which form achieves existence."

 For Heinrich Wölfflin, the force of form (Formkraft ), the opposition between the tendency of matter towards formless collapse and the opposing force of will, life, or whatever, sets the entire organic world in motion and is the principle theme of architecture. 

 For Ferdinand de Saussure, "language is a form and not a substance." (Cours, p.169)

 For Deleuze and Guattari, the distinction between matter and form is characteristic of "Royal Science", the science of a society divided into governors and governed. For nomad science the relevant distinction is material-forces rather than matter-form. Materials for nomad science are not homogenous, and form is not fixed. The singularities or haecceities are already like implicit forms that are topological rather than geometrical, and that combine with the processes of deformation: for example the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. "energetic materiality in movement" (see Thousand Plateaus, p 408)

 (see transcendent / immanent) (see also natural form)

 

 

danger

"We moderns can do lot of politicizing merely by the selection of our dangers." “What are Americans afraid of? Nothing much, really, except the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the land they live on, and the energy they use.” (Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture) "My satisfaction was perfect, though my danger was the same; and I was as happy in not knowing my danger, as if I had never really been expos'd to it." (Robinson Crusoe)

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embryo

in , ,

Development is the process that transforms an egg into a growing embryo and eventually into an adult form.

How is this process to be understood? According to Scott Gilbert, the aesthetic of embryology separates it from other areas of biology. It is an aesthetic informed by the ordered, directional change manifest during the life of individual organisms, as they develop from a single, fertilized egg into complex patterns of diifferent, yet interacting cell, tisssues, and organs.

A few questions have dominated the study of embryology:

First of all, how is the extraordinary process of development regulated? How does a single-celled organism turn into a highly differentiated one with millions or even billions of cells? Do Genes control development? see genotype / phenotype

Is the final form of the organism set from the start? Or are there different paths of development available to the embryo? (For a discussion of preformism and epigenesis, see epigenesis}

What is the relation between the sequence of development and the process of evolution? Why do embryos of different species look so similar, and how do they end up so different?

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formless

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formless

This image of two inchoate substances ressembles Plato's accounts of creation in the Timaeus, in which earth and sky are separated by the gap of space, a gap which Eros tries to fill. (see philosophy / chaos ) While these accounts are about the origin of form, the informe is a counter-movement against the authority of form.

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Formalism

in ,

We can perhaps begin by describing formalism as the valorization of the purely aesthetic experience, as aestheticism. The principle work of formalism focuses on the techniques specific to a medium.

Michael Podro describes the critical historians of art as treading a tightrope between a sense of context in art and a sense of autonomy. He describes the concept of art as both inextricable from context and irreducible to it. When the former is elevated at the expense of the latter, art becomes a trace or symptom of context, when the latter is stressed, the position moves more towards formalism. For art, to be autonomous is to have a separate history. (The compromise solution for this tension has been to describe the "semi-autonomy" or "relative autonomy" of art.)

For the Russian formalist critics, such as Viktor Shklovsky, "estrangement" (or "defamiliarization”) was the central vehicle for a modernist aesthetics that sought to define the "literariness of literature". (although Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Cervante's Don Quixote written long before modernism, are often referred to as canonic examples of the technique)In "Art as Technique" (1917), Shklovsky claimed that the purpose of art was to force us to notice. Because of habitualization, "the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously...and art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. ...The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar", to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." (Lemon & Reis, p. 12)

Formalism presents itself as moving beyond representation, and it thus moves out of the communicational social contract constituted in representation.

Russian Formalism was first attacked by Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, in 1923. Trotsky saw Formalism as only concerned with the technical aspects of literature. In the following year, the first Soviet Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, renewed the attack, calling Formalism "decadent" rather than simply "narrow". for Lunacharsky, Formalism encouraged art for art's sake and promoted aesthetic sterility. (see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 103-107)

The debate between the Marxist and Formalist critics continued for the rest of the decade and took a decidedly more frightening turn with the rise of Stalin. One of the more interesting attempts at going beyond both a-social pure Formalism and a-literary sociologism of pure Marxisms was the study originally attributed to P.N. Medvedev, but now thought to be principally written by M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship.

In 1932, Sergei Eisenstein was one of the few active artists still able to defend the idea of form. In "In the Interest of Form", he wrote, echoing what Medvedev/Bahktin saw as "the main claim of European formalism" that "Form is always ideological ."


fractals

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fractals

The classic example used by Benoit Mandelbrot to introduce the fractal geometry of Nature is the question: How long is the coastline of Britain? Imagine measuring the coastline with a meter-long stick. This act of measurement would make an approximation of the coastline consisting of a finite number of meter-long straight lines and would give us one result. If we went back with a 50cm long stick and remeasured, we would get a total more than twice the first. As our unit of measure became smaller, the total length would increase without bounds. Our answer to the question would be that the length is scale dependent and increases without bound as the scalar unit becomes smaller. However, the "roughness" of the coastline seems to remain constant at every scale. Fractals have the same degree of irregularity at all scales of measurement. This roughness can be calculated as the log-log plot between the measured length and the reciprocal of the measuring unit, between "count" and "step" (see fractal dimension)

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frame

in ,

If distinctions are "frames" for observing and describing identities, we will need a theory of frames, including, as Derrida would say, a frame for the theory of frames. In the Parergon quote, Derrida twists the theory of the frame to directly connect its inside and outside. The lack of a theory of the frame is directly connected to the place of lack within the theory. 

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genealogy

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Foucault credits Nietzche with formulating the notion of a history capable of being analyzed and recovered by a process known as genealogy. It provides a "history of the present" -- a history of the events that make possible struggles in the present such as the prisoners' movement, sexual liberation movements, etc. "Genealogy makes no presumptions about the metaphysical origins of things, their final teleology, the continuity or discontinuity of temporally contiguous elements, or the causal, explanatory connections between events." (Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 145)

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genius

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Kant's aesthetic is based on a distinction between reason's requirements for determinate concepts, and the indeterminate, yet universal quality of aesthetic judgement. For Kant, natural beauty is the prime paradigm, because it is not a product guided by concept (a design). Yet when we judge nature aesthetically, we impute the "mere" form of cognisibility to it. In Kant's terminology, the aesthetic judgement of nature requires that we think of nature as "purposive without purpose."

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geometry

geometry

Galileo's aphorism that "the Book of Nature is written in the characters of Geometry" is as old as Plato, as old as Pythagoras, and as old perhaps as the wisdom of the Egyptians.

But is geometry, like the idea of nature as a book, a human invention? Interestingly enough, Euclid's Elements was one of the first books printed. After being lost to the West when the Northern tribes overran the Roman Empire, the original Greek texts were preserved in Byzantium and were translated into Latin during the Renaissance. Not only was Euclid's Elements one of the first published books, but after the bible, it is one of the most often republished.

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Gestalt

The word "Gestalt" is usually translated as form, although it might be better understoond as "organized structure," as opposed to "heap", aggregate, or simple summation (what Max Wertheimer called "and-sums.") 

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globalization

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globalization

What is globalization? On a simple level, Globalization seems to be a a name for the increased interconnectedness of cultures, a world of complex mobilities and interconnections, characterized by cultural flows of capital, people, commodities, images, and ideologies. 

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glocal

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glocal

The word glocal is a fusion of global and local.

Glocalization has provided a way for multinational corporations to distance themselves from Americanization. Savvy multinationals, such as Coca-Cola were able to establish "local relevance" by claiming "We are not a multi-national. We are a multi-local." One of the leaders in "glocal" marketing was said to be McDonald's, which "has adapted itself so successfully to foreign markets that consumers outside the US often believe it is a domestic company."

In a similar way, "Mass-customization" is a production technique that promises to reconfigure the generic and the particular. These examples are seller's strategies to cater to cultural differences and are known as micro-marketing. But these techniques create increasingly differentiated consumers just as much as they respond to existing varietes or heterogeneities.

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hegemony

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In the Gramscian tradition, hegemony is the historical ability of a given class to legitimate its claim to establish political institutions and cultural values able to mobilize the majority of the society, while fulfilling its specific interests as the new dominant class. (Manuel Castells)

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