Serial Syllabus

An open, online syllabus for a course with no overarching theme or discipline. The course is dedicated to one research question at a time, which will be addressed with one single piece of bite-sized related activity or content to consume per day. Videos, texts, audio recordings, exercises, exhibition visits, &c. will be suggested for each day. The serial format will allow new questions to supercede the old, as the learning trajectory takes on its own momentum.

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Any power, no matter how supreme, totalitarian, ubiquitous, high-tech, democratic, and evasive, at the end has to land on the actual ground of the city and leave traces that are difficult to efface. This is why, unlike the web, the city as the actual space of our primary perception remains a very strategic site of action and counter-action. For any power the city is the most vital place to conquer and, at the same time, it is power’s most vulnerable form. But in order to critically frame the network, we would need to propose a radical reification of it. This would mean its transformation into a finite ‘thing’ among other finite things and not always see the network and its derivatives like something immaterial and invisible, without a form we can trace and change.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, in "Form" a conversation in Uncorporate Identity (262)

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Uncorporate Identity, Metahaven

Metahaven, Uncorporate Identity, Lars Muller Publishers, Baden, Switzerland (2010)

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Market of Knowledge

Graw posits a further division - beyond primary and secondary markets - in art by including what she calls the "market of knowledge". This knowledge market consists of "art institutions, large-scale exhibitions, symposia, magazines, art academies, and publications." (11) Distinct and interrelated, each market has its own "value system, criteria, language games, and set of rules", yet a key polemic in her text is the assertion that "the commerical art market increasingly focuses its attention on the (seemingly) non-commercial activities of the knowledge market." (12) She cites the blurring of the art fair and curated exhibition as an example.

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Whereas after 1945 the art market was associated with Western financial centers such as Paris, New York, and London, such centers have multiplied in the process of globalization. (11)

Yet, Graw agrees with French sociologist Alain Quemin, "who points out tha tin many respects, the notion of a truly global art market is an illusion. Any artist aiming at commercial success in the premium segment is well advised to begin by selling in a city like New York, London, or, more recently, Berlin." (11)

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The meaning ascribed to artworks goes beyond its equivalent in monetary terms, and this is why astronomical amounts can be asked for them at times. (10)

Art dealers make the claim that art is essentially priceless, that its symbolic value is divorced in logic from its market value. This distorts the judgement process, it pushes art into pure speculation underpinned by an ostensible intractability.

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High Price, Isabelle Graw

Graw, Isabelle, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, trans. Nicholas Grindell, Sternberg Press, New York (2009)

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The mobility of troops becomes the surest guarantee of success. A new branch of military science appears: logistics or 'the practical art of moving armies.'

"The development of the road, rail, and telegraphic networks changes the rules of conduct of war and the strategic ways of preparing for it. The mobility of troops becomes the surest guarantee of success. A new branch of military science appears: logistics or 'the practical art of moving armies.'" (198)

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This tower [Patrick Gedde's Outlook Tower] is a symbol. It is the architectural and museographic concretization of a pedagogic project for the social sciences.

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It was through its application to Copernican cosmology that the term 'system' would make its breakthrough at the end of the 17th C, and become common in the philosophical discourse of the 18th C.

(17) Footnote: R. Sasso, "Systeme et discours philosophique," in Recherches sure le XVIIe siecle (Paris: CNRS, 1978)

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First use of "Network" in Science

In 1628, William Harvey discovered a new understanding of blood circulation that overturned the previous understanding which dated back to Claude Galien in the 2nd C A.D. In the mid-17th C, some 40 years later, aided by microscopes - which appeared around 1615 - Marcello Malpighi, performed the first scientific study of an invertibrate, following which he "imported into science the word 'network', which until then had been reserved for lace making. Malpighi's 'network' was at first the 'reticulated matter of the skin,' only observable thanks to the new microoptics." (16)

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In this era, the secular inertia of dogma was challenged and people began to believe in the virtue of movement.

"Francis Bacon (1561-1626), established the principles of a science based on facts. His Novum Organum (1620) is a plea for a theory of scientific progress, and for progress itself through science - a science founded on experiments and observation and capable of inventing the means of 'making us better and more happy' and 'making human life gentler'." In this era, the secular inertia of dogma was challenged and people began to believe in the virtue of movement. The world came to be seen as perfectible." (15-16)

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The translation into mathematics of the movements of a horse will accompany a great change in military strategy: the gradual emergence of the idea of mobility and the mobilization of armies in the field.

Horses were war animals, machines for fighting. The study of their movement underpinned the discovery of the first motor. That is, horses were the first forms of mobility, which manifested first in military combat. (4)

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The advent of communication as a project and a realization of reason descended directly from the ideal of the perfectibility of human societies.

"A first constellation of ideas took shape around the communication routes and the link that united them to the formation of a national space. It's principal home was France in the 17th and 18th centuries, where the transport of people, goods, and messages and the formation of a unified domestic market both faltered on the poor development of canals and roads." (3)

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Scientific Revolution as an introduction of Movement

"In the course of the seventeenth century, intellectual reform placed on the agenda a program for a science both useful and factual, from which emerged the representation of a world in movement and open to change." (3)

That is, the scientific revolution allowed one to think of the world in such later terms as progress, evolution, development: all terms that require the world to move.

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Structure: Four Historical Periods

The book cycles through four historical periods (xv-xvi):

the domestication of flows and of a society in movement: the relationship between 19th century ideas of progress, evolution, development, emancipation and freedom born in conjunction with modern communication

the place of communication in the formation of a universal social bond: communication as an apparatus of global solidarity, rendered in Universal Expositions, and the utopias/dystopias of figures like Saint-Simon

space: geopolitics; the 19th century networks of communication and culture that accompanied the hegemonies of empire - ends with "the genesis of a strategic thinking upset by the new means of mobility" (xv)

history of normalization: from l'homme type and criminal man - man-as-measure - to knowledge about the body and its movements, to the definition of the profile of consumers of cultural productions - the first steps of the "institution of advertising" and the "gradual shift from scattered cultures to a mass culture", an outcome of the "first manifestations of 'statistical reason'", a "history of thought about calculation"

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New York overtakes London

"This book opens with the first strategic formulations about the mastery of movement by Reason and the structuring of a national mercantile space by establishing a system of communication routes. When Fordism launches the practice of market studies - "the segmentation of territory in the United States in order to better communicate with target groups" (xiv) - the "technical management of opinion", "this was precisely the moment when New York took the lead over London, hegemonic since the 1780s, as the center of a new world-economy."

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Mattelart, The Invention of Communication

Mattelart, Armand, The Invention of Communication, trans. Susan Emanuel, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London (1996)