The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference by Müller-Sievers Helmut

Author:Müller-Sievers, Helmut [Müller-Sievers, Helmut]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2015-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

A Doctrine of Transmissions: On the Classification of Machines Around 1800

I

After the age of natural history and before our epoch of thermodynamic and evolutionary sciences, the great debates in Europe over questions of classifications placed two types of objects into a reciprocal relation: life-forms and artworks. In a chiastic process, attributes long attached to one type break loose and pass over to the other: artworks become organic, natural objects become beautiful and significant . This complex transition from natural history’s stable binary classifications to the temporalized and complementary systems of Naturphilosophie – a transition reflected in the shift from rule-guided poetics to an aesthetics of production –has been thoroughly examined for both sides of the equation.348 Kant’s Third Critique, which left a blank page between the analysis of aesthetic and teleological judgment, is, at least for the German-speaking world, the axis on which this process turns.

What is expelled from accounts of this process are “figures of the third,”349 whose contours are designed on the empty page between aesthetics and teleology and who truly and irrevocably pull down the walls between life and art around 1800: machines. They force the art of nature and the nature of art into a new relationship and, even more fundamentally, alter the nature of work and of the work; they are the first “art-works” to be understood as such. In the middle of the eighteenth century, their classification first follows standards derived from Linnaean natural history; then, engineering attempts to affiliate itself with morphology’s functional tables, only to end in a theory of mechanical epigenesis that excludes machines from the spheres of life-forms and of artworks alike. The “Question Concerning Technology” begins with this exclusion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.