In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one remaining hope is to cultivate nimbleness. Nimbleness is an embodied aesthetic sensitivity to the material presence. Cultivating nimbleness is a particular style of cultivation; it is to willfully gather together one’s self in the wake of a formative force far richer than the derivative web of living power relationships of human embeddness within a horizon of social, economical, political and historical subjectivating power relations; which (...) are chronicled and labeled by Michel Foucault as the normalizing practices of biopower. In other words to have freedom, one must start by rejecting the categories and labels normally internalized in order to relearn to learn from the material presence. Such a style of cultivation is a means of resisting normalizing power relations which co-opt cultivating practices to engross their own dominance which has had the by-product of an impotence to negate the gross material injustices present. This normalizing style of cultivation is a prevalent, corrupted, semblance which denies the importance of beauty for that of efficiency, rejects non-human purposiveness, and limits its measure of ethics to short term economical pragmatism. The thesis acknowledges that something is awry with the world and that giving care to beauty might help. The aim is to examine the event of Beauty as depicted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant and to apply this characterization to elective architectural spaces such that it may motivate individuals to cultivate their own nimbleness in relation to a formative force of nature. However given the revealed need for sensitivity to the particular material presence, the thesis can not be a rule book or catalog for beautiful design. Rather it is a rehabilitation for architects who are already heterospatially curious, with the desired outcome of architects cultivating their own nimbleness to reflectively judge as a ground up, multi-node, rhizomatic means of resistance to normalizing power practices as manifest in bad architecture. (shrink)

The ambiguous material identity of nanotechnology is a minor mystery of the history of contemporary science. This paper argues that nanotechnology functioned primarily in discourses of social, not physical or biological science, the problematic knowledge at stake concerning the economic value of state-supported basic science. The politics of taxonomy in the United States Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the 1990s reveals how scientists invoked the term as one of several competing and equally valid candidates for reframing (...) materials sciences in ways believed consonant with the political tenor of the time. The resulting loss of conceptual clarity in the sociology of science traces ultimately to the struggle to bridge the disjunction between the promissory economy of federal basic science and the industrial economy, manifested in attempts to reconcile the precepts of linearity and interdisciplinarity in changing socio-economic conditions over a half century. (shrink)

Max Scheler's Reformation of Philosophy of Religion The following contribution aims to show the relevance of Max Scheler's reflections on the relation of Christianity and modernity for the present situation. It interprets Scheler's philosophy of religion in terms of a principle of reformation that can be implicitly found in Scheler's critical assessment of the historical impact of Lutheran Protestantism. Scheler's principle of reformation provides four criteria: autonomy of the religious sphere, dialectics of life and spirit, community beyond religious denominations, and (...) metaphysical determination of the divine. On that basis, we will see that Scheler's "catholic” phenomenology of religion from 1921 only partly meets his own criteria, whereas his "post-catholic” metaphysics of panentheism, developed after 1922, is more suitable to meet these criteria. Two factors are crucial: First, the divine is characterized by a fundamental metaphysical tension between spirit and vital impulsion, which leads to transferring the responsibility of balancing this tension to the history of mankind. Second, the community that corresponds to this metaphysical conception is not delimited by religious denomination but is integrated by solidarity among all human and living beings instead. (shrink)