Reinhold Martin: Ideal-Material: Aesthetics, Technics, and Dialectics

Invitation pdf

Abstract

Balanced at the limits of historical materialism, this talk proposes an inexhaustible dialectic of ideal and material processes in place of a metaphysics of the material base, whether of technology or of labor. An aesthetics that regards the artwork as a medium of thought rather than of experience or of ideological expression provides a resource for the study of technical media, including architecture, within this ideal-material dialectic. To preview the implications, the talk will outline an approach to technology as symbolic form that returns to the neo-Kantian philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and moves from there through twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics toward a contemporary politics of technological meaning. This is dialectics all the way down: an incessant encounter between a world of ideas and a world of material production, both of which remain vividly real.

Respondent: Jana Ndiaye Beránková, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences

The ArchConcepts project (Reg. No. CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0008600) is co-financed by the European Union under the Jan Amos Komenský Operational Programme