Browsing by Subject "Gravity"

In the context of today's global mobility, information, bodies and goods are circulating across the globe, and even further into outer space. However, we face a paradox: the more we move, the more we become sedentary. The modes of transportation that enable our global mobility are working against us, insidiously dwindling our psycho-physical mobility. Globalization is thus not the world becoming bigger (or too big), but the world becoming immobile. Taking the body as the central non-place of political space, Architectures of Aliveness: Building Beyond Gravity interrogates the possibility of inhabiting circulation as a pragmatic form of resistance to the contemporary immobilization of life. In an era in which bodies and goods are ever more constantly in global circulation, architectures of aliveness ask, what would an experience of weightlessness do for us?

Biotechnology serves as the current dominant model for enlivening architecture and the mobility of its inhabitants. Architectures of aliveness invert the inquiry to look instead at outer space's modules of inhabitation. In questioning the possibility of making circulation inhabitable --as opposed to only inhabiting what is stationary--architectures of aliveness problematize architecture as a form of biomedia production in order to examine its capacity to impact psychic and bodily modalities toward an intensification of health. Problematized synchretically within life's mental and physical polarization, health is understood politically as an accretion of our capacity for action instead of essentially as an optimization of the biological body. The inquiry emerges at the intersection of biotechnology, neurosciences, outer space science and technology, and architecture. The analysis oscillates between historical and contemporary case studies toward an articulation that concentrates on contemporary phenomena while maintaining an historical perspective. The methodology combines archival research, interviews, and artistic and literary analysis. The analysis is informed by scientific research. More precisely, the objective is to construct an innovative mode of thinking about the fields of exchangeability between arts and sciences beyond a critique of instrumentality.

The outcomes suggest that architectures of aliveness are architectures that invite modes of inhabitation that deviate from habitualized everyday spatial engagements. It also finds that the feeling of aliveness emerges out of the production of analog or continuous space where the body is in relation with space as opposed to be represented in it. The analysis concludes that the impact of architecture on our sense of wellbeing is conditioned by proprioceptive experiences that are at once between vision and movement and yet at the same time in neither mode, suggesting an aesthetic of inhabitation based on our sense of weightedness and weightlessness.

These outcomes are thus transduced to the field of media studies to enchant biomediatic inquiry. Proposing a renewed definition of biomedia that interprets life as a form of aesthetic relation, architectures of aliveness also formulate a critique of the contemporary imperialism of visualization techniques. Architectures of aliveness conclude by questioning the political implications of its own method to suggest opacity and agonistic spaces as the biomediatic forms of political space.

Given that we cannot perceive space via the senses, how do we arrive at the representation of space in the first place? Why do we tend to attribute certain properties to space – for instance, that it is infinite, empty, continuous, immutable, and so forth? My dissertation, consisting of four chapters, investigates two early modern accounts, which have suffered relative scholarly neglect, despite proposing to answer these time-honored questions: Locke’s account in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Du Châtelet’s account set out in in her Foundations of Physics. While Locke’s views concerning the idea of space prompted animated responses from early modern philosophers, it seems to have fallen into relative neglect in contemporary scholarship. In the first chapter, I engage with Locke’s controversial distinction between simple and complex ideas, as applied to the simple idea of space. In particular, I take up two objections that have been raised against Locke: that Locke’s criterion of simplicity fails (Aaron 1955) and that Locke’s use of ‘idea’ is ambiguous (Woolhouse 1970). I show that appealing to the method of strict interpretation is an effective means to defuse these difficulties, allowing us to appreciate Locke’s views with a greater degree of analytical confidence. The second chapter is devoted to analyzing Du Châtelet’s chapter on space, in order to identify her singular contributions to the absolute-relative debate about space which animated the scientific body at the time. To begin with, I demonstrate that contrary to the received view, Du Châtelet’s account is neither Wolffian nor Leibnizian. Instead of deriving the representation of space from perceptions of spatially related objects, Du Châtelet argues that we obtain this representation by conceiving extension as occupiable by possible coexisting objects. Next, I argue that by means of this proposed account, Du Châtelet not only defends the Leibnizian idea of space as the order of coexisting objects, but further succeeds in explaining why the Newtonian idea of absolute space is so attractive, viz. the idea that space is an independently-existing, empty, infinite, and immutable entity. The third chapter, “A Deeper Investigation of Du Châtelet’s Uses of the Term “External-to””, identifies three distinct uses of the term ‘external-to’ in Du Châtelet, and argues that each of them denotes a relation obtaining among different kinds of relata: simple substances, composite bodies, and objects of imagination. At the outset of the chapter, I challenge a recent interpretation by Jacobs (2019), which construes “external-to” as an ontological relation, pointing out that this interpretation is in tension with (1) Du Châtelet’s division of labor between the faculty of imagination and the faculty of understanding, and (2) her considered view that we cannot perceive simple substances as distinct individuals, owing to the weakness of our sensory organs. This significant chapter lays the groundwork for future research by seeking to distinguish three tiers of created reality in Du Châtelet’s ontology: the elementary (inhabited by simple substances), the phenomenal (by material bodies), and the ideal (by entities such as space and time). The last chapter turns to another issue intimately related to the ontological problem of space in the same period: the problem of gravity. This chapter starts with a response to George E. Smith’s “Newton’s numerator in 1685: A year of gestation”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 68 (2019) 163-177. I offer this response from the perspective of Euler scholarship. First, I challenge Smith’s claim that Euler dismisses gravity’s proportionality to the mass of the attracting body. Rather than rejecting this proportionality from the numerator of Newton’s law of gravity, I will show that Euler is opposed to Newton’s appeals to the third law of motion to derive this term. Second, I provide a reconstruction of Euler’s elastic ether mechanism of gravity, whereby he “recovers” all three proportionalities in Newton’s law of gravity without appealing to the third law, but to the material properties of the ether and contact action (i.e., fluid pressure). Third, I proffer a critical assessment of Euler’s mechanism. My analysis reveals that, while Euler is right to point out the lack of direct evidence for gravity being a force of interaction governed by the third law of motion, his alternative falls far short of its Newtonian rival on grounds of empirical adequacy and fruitfulness for future research.