Creating Concepts
Space and culture, then, is still all about the ‘and’; about the connections between practices of repetition and processes of objectification. What we aim to achieve, in the next 15 years or so, is to become a venue where social sciences can engage empirically with questions of the everyday. The key questions remain the same; they are concerned with presence, presentation, and representation. They are still concerned with the way in which these processes are distinctive social spatializations. Likewise, we are still concerned with the relative durability of significance as it is inscribed in distinctive objects. However, they need to become more precise, more empirical, more specific, -because the smaller is always more complex – and therefore more revealing than the larger. We want to learn in more detail which repetitions have taken place to enable which particular objectifications. How do distinctive imitations ‘make’ space. We want to know more about objects; how they have been constructed; how they have been modified; what work they are called upon to perform; which associations they have enabled; which associations they have disabled.
Association, the ‘and’ is what permeates both space and culture. Perhaps we will be accused on re-inventing a certain formalism or structuralism, a juxta-structuralism to be more precise. Perhaps we will be accused of naïve objectivism or empiricism. Yes, we are interested in juxta-structurings as particular ways of ordering, i.e. in terms of sequences or patterns. True, we are intending to ‘make objects speak’ and we are certainly not going to shy away from the principle that experience grounds all possibilities for thought. Above all, I hope we will be able to embrace a ‘philosophy of having’ rather than a ‘philosophy of being’. That is, what if we start thinking of spaces as ‘having’ specific qualities (objects), which would in turn have to be reversed in the sense that a space ‘is being had or has been had’ because we always have to explain the larger from the smaller.
This Tardean insight, which has been put in practice for the last 30+ years by several actor network theorists, implies a new way of doing social sciences as well as a return to a pre-Kantian metaphysics (one that could be traced back to Epicurus but is perhaps most famously attributed to Baruch Spinoza) as ‘monism’. The key to monism is the non-separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, or more importantly, the abolition of the idea of a splitting of matter between essence and appearance.
Although this may not sound very revolutionary, and it has indeed been repeated quite frequently throughout the last 200 years by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Deleuze, Stengers and Latour, the consequences are still immense. If we no longer think in terms of a separation between the Ideal and the Real, which is thus an acceptance of the univalence of the Virtual, we are liberated from having to work on the basis of deeply problematic assumptions. We can just start ‘in the middle’ which is in the middle of empirical research, because as Whitehead states, only experience can provide philosophical evidence.
So, we are proposing a new beginning for space and culture research; one that more radically embraces the empirical, yet at the same time, does not get bogged down with ‘describing places’. We want encounters with perspectives of virtualities that generate concepts, i.e. the work of philosophy; we want to make objects speak by generating functives and prospects, i.e. the work of science, and we want to develop ways of appreciating by generating percepts and affects, i.e. the work of art. We want to be a journal for empirical philosophy and social science and for that reason we require contributions that have a strong grounding in empirical research. We are not looking for studies that apply concepts, but ones that create concepts.
Percepts: http://armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1345
…. Joost
