Immanuel Kant treated the success of our epistemological, moral and aesthetics judgements as fait accompli, but at the same time retained the schematism as its mysterious ground. Essential to the architectonic of modern subjectivity, the schematism is the spatial patterning of time by the imagination that ultimately allows us to connect a concept to an intuition. Schemas like number, a dog, or a triangle function like mediators that pre-structure experience and regulate how something appears to us. Yet even though the hierarchy of faculties shifts between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment, these books only present the most rudimentary outline of what renders subjectivity possible. For example, why did Kant not begin from an original synaesthesia, but from a heterogeneity of domains of experience still waiting to be synthesized?
Twentieth century philosophy has generally tried to follow Kant by ‘forgetting’ the schematism, that is, by faithfully describing its cognitive and normative achievements. However, authors such as Heidegger, Adorno, Deleuze, Simondon, and Stiegler have emphasized that subjectivity, even in the modest, anti-metaphysical guise of philosophy, remains ignorant of its own preconditions unless it reckons with what for Kant remains ‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul.’ Posing the question of the schematism once more means asking what is it, beyond what is already intelligible or sensible, that makes us think in the way we do? And also: To what extent does this make our apparently autonomous thought inseparable from a kind of stupefaction, or even enchantment?
The sounding of the soul is not just a cognitive, but in the first place an aesthetic and political problem. Kant’s acknowledgement of depth indicates that the schema-producing activity does not just occur in the head but in objective reality, where we are always already beyond ourselves. This demands a return to the critical question of our modes of (meta)schematization: What are the corporeal, cultural, political, and technical schemas that animate us? How do new media, forms of artificial intelligence, and digital money get a hold on our souls today? And where does the free and wild creation of schemas that could break their spell occur?
Schedule Saturday May 27th Day Programme
13:00 – 14:00h Lecture: Vera Bühlmann Respondent: Robert Gorny
14:30 – 15:00h Film performance: Time Frames (2023) by Ollie Palmer
A performative essay-film about the ways in which time frames our experience, perception, and the bounds of what is, and what isn’t possible. Made using a rules-based constrained creative process, the film ties together three perspectives – that of a fictionalised Italo Calvino, a petulant contemporary artist, and the archetypical joker (as described by Alan Watts), to create a new collage which reflects on our present relationship to time.
15:30 – 17:30h Workshop #2 Com-positions (three 15min talks, interspersed with discussions). Participants: Andrej Radman, Cris Argüelles, Sonia de Jager, Joost De Raeymaecker
Evening Lecture
20:00 – 21:30h Stephen Zepke
Respondent: Florian Cramer
The Schematism of Conceptual Art; from the Analytic Proposition to the Culture Industry
In 1968 Joseph Kosuth, a 23 year old artist in New York, read the second edition of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic published 20 years earlier. While Logical Positivism had rather lost its momentum by the late ‘60s, Kosuth’s paraphrasing of its ideas in relation to art detonated a seismic shift in the cultural landscape, laying out the co-ordinates of Conceptual art. This new art form rojete the dominant aesthetic paradigm of Modernist artistic practices (both that of ‘feeling’ and its styles and materials), along with philosophical metaphysics in general, in favour of art as a mode of conceptual creation in which the artwork’s appearance simply repeated, represented or explained the idea or conceptual process that was its artistic essence. In doing so Conceptual art explored the artistic potentials of Kant’s schematism, the mechanism applying concepts to sensual appearance. As Peter Osborne has convincingly demonstrated, this not only transformed art’s aims and appearance, but its ontology, giving rise to what he calls ‘Postconceptual art’, the philosophical definition of contemporary art.
In opposition to Deleuze’s well-known (and entirely Modernist) proposal, also made in 1968, to combine Kant’s two senses of the aesthetic ‘to the point where the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation’ (Difference and Repetition 68), Conceptual art proposed separating Kant’s two senses of the aesthetic, in order to privilege the schematic application of concepts to determine appearance. The concept or idea is the art work, which employs a variety of schemata to give the concept ‘significance’ or ‘signification’ (the term is Kant’s [CPR, A 146], but it attains special importance for Conceptual art), entirely independent of any aesthetic feeling. While Kosuth favoured the tautological schema of analytic propositions (an approach that was highly influential), others such as Sol Le Witt or Lawrence Weiner explored the technical unity produced by the schemata actualising ideas, which provide an ‘order of the parts that is determined a priori from the principle of the purpose’ (A 833/B 861). This latter style of Conceptual art allowed a slightly looser relation of concept and appearance, which arguably (Osborne disagrees with this) became the dominant schema of postconceptual practices.
This latter style of schematism is perhaps closer to Heidegger’s reading, where it’s origin in the imagination means ‘it would not do to set up an isolated analytic of concepts and then inquire into their employment in a subsequent part’ (Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s CPR 291). Instead, the schematism grounds concepts in the imagination’s transcendental determination of time, making concepts ‘a transcendental product of the pure power of of the imagination’. As a result, the schematism, Heidegger says, is Kant’s ‘self-defence’ against formal logic (ibid. 292). Heidegger’s reading was influential on Deleuze, and his re-conception of the schematism as ‘spatio-temporal dynamisms’ incarnating an idea (ibid. 218), which led to Guattari’s later statement, almost directly opposed to Kosuth’s position with which we started, that Conceptual art presents the most deterritorialised form of sensations.
All these various positions are relevant to the question Conceptual art so urgently raised regarding the proper relations of conceptual and material production within the realm of art. A question we are still grappling with in terms of postconceptual artistic practices. How then, might these versions of the schematism contribute to understanding Conceptual art’s emergence and legacy? And to what extent will its embrace of language and the immanence of its ‘distributed ontology’ (as Osborne calls it) to digital and economic networks integrate it to the type of schematism Adorno and Horkheimer called the ‘culture industry’?
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This event is organised by Erasmus School of Philosophy + Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, TU Vienna + V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media. Find more information on the official page.
