ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Posts tagged “philosophy

material concepts

Posted on November 13, 2011

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, Bauhaus Building Block Set, circa 1923 Every art is material—and can be only material. The possibility of using concepts, projects, ideas and political messages in art was opened by the philosophers of the “linguistic turn” precisely because they asserted the material character of thinking itself. Thinking was understood by these philosophers as the operation and manipulation of language. And language was understood by them as thoroughly material—a combination of sounds and visual signs. Now the real, epoch-making achievement of conceptual art becomes clear: it demonstrated the equivalence, or at least a parallelism, between language and image, between the order of words and the order of things, the grammar of language and the grammar of visual space. –Boris Groys, “Introduction–Global Conceptualism Revisited,” e-flux journal…

new problems

Posted on June 1, 2011

There is a first, false idea that needs to be set aside, which is that the philosopher can speak about everything. This idea is exemplified by the TV philosopher: he talks about society’s problems, the problems of the present, and so on. Why is this idea false? Because the philosopher constructs his own problems, he is an inventor of problems, which is to say he is not someone who can be asked on television, night after night, what he thinks about what’s going on. A genuine philosopher is someone who decides on his own account what the important problems are, someone who proposes new problems for everyone. Philosophy is first and foremost this: the invention of new problems. –Alain Badiou. 2009. in conversation with…

  

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