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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
and technological debates around the world questioned the ideas and the practices of anthropocentrism. Philosophical circles criti- cized the worldview and the respective conception of the post-en- lightenment human trying to reveal its impact on our social, emo- tional, and political life 20 They questioned the operational value of ‘progress’ as a concept that underlined the thinking and practicing of Modernity. They expressed concern about the impact of the exclu- sion of subjectivity from contemplation. Philosophy also questioned the construction of a worldview founded upon binary oppositions and polarities which biased human contemplation, language, habits, and understandings by imposing fragmented views and supposedly clear-cut distinctions which obscured the real and essential connec- tions and affects between parts, particles, living substances, and ma- terialities, through which an interconnected world could exist. Terms like assemblage, emergence, difference, agency, affect, immanence, sympathy, ecology, symbiosis to state some of them progressively immigrated to many other subject areas and spheres of contempla- tion, associating them through new ecologies, connections, and con- tinuities.
At the same time, epistemology acknowledged the weaknesses of the key premises of the sciences of anthropocentrism and the effec- tive repercussions that its fragmented knowledge had on the appre- ciation of the world. Supported by the philosophical debate, episte- mology attempted to clarify the reasons for what was then called ‘the war of sciences’ 21 , to reconsider the utility of what was up to that point considered to be useless, or at least secondary and to acknowl- edge the value of new terms able to open new perspectives to our appreciations of the world. How ‘to arrange’ and ‘to mix’ constituted different ways of appreciating the materiality of the world and the important information was gaining in the different constellations of human knowledge connecting them all across, while replacing the notion of the system as an inherent notion in modernity’s objectivity.
In the scientific realm, the de-codification of the DNA did not only put information on the pedestal of life but also provided a valid model for understanding life as entirely dependent upon its environ- ments, material, or organic, which are vital parts of its development and existence. At the same time, cybernetics and information theo- ries claimed that the most basic level of this universe is composed of units that have a simple on-off function. Each unit has properties that are defined by the interactions it has with its environment(s), part of which are its adjacent units. The understanding of this in- terdependence assisted in appreciating the human impact on the environment and, more specifically, on climate, totally neglected in modernity. The catastrophic effects of our recent times not only are far from the promises of prosperity that modernity’s progress would
20. Cf. for example, Braidotti (2013), Delanda (1997, 2016).
21. Cf. Stengers(1997).
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki