On the central norms and imperatives of Western aesthetics
Lecture by Ruth Sonderegger within the IKA Lecture Series WS 2018/2019 Uselessness: Is this humankind’s most valuable tool? organised and curated by Michelle Howard and Luciano Parodi.
Our use of tools has often been portrayed as the definitive attribute that led to our current position at the top of the animal hierarchy by provoking us to stand upright and walk. As a direct result, our brains developed at an exponential rate, allowing us to express ideas, tell stories and make objects whose uselessness still confounds us today. Uselessness rarely matches our expectations and disappoints a priori, but it can also fascinate and liberate because it contradicts the logic of use equals value. A depository of neglected ideas can also be a treasure trove, an alternative Pandora’s box that can trigger creativity and free the imagination. Since the advent of modernism, we have been preoccupied with usefulness and employability, be it in terms of space, energy, production or, indeed, education. Historians predict that the rise of artificial intelligence will produce a “useless” class that will not only be unemployed, but unemployable. Karl Marx, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written in 1844, said that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. Uselessness is an uncharted phenomenon that may lead us to a better understanding of what our common values are and prepare us for a new future. If our future will be defined by our uselessness, then it is time for this state and our judgements of it to be reappraised. This lecture series brings together people with very differing approaches to uselessness and attempts to shed light on what our new future could hold.
Winter Term 2018/2019
15 October 2018
Ebru Kurbak, Artist, Designer
Lost Skills, Lost Potentials, and Fiberpunk
The biggest threats to the limits of what we can imagine are our assumptions. This lecture explores confronting dominant assumptions about values of skills, knowledge and technology as a critical and artistic strategy.
19 November 2018
Guta Moura Guedes, Curator, Strategic Designer
Useless Design?
Design is the operational tool for the 21st century and from its very beginning exists to serve humankind. Useless design is a paradox, unless the lack of use is non-existant. Some observations from a design curator’s point of view and some notes from a strategic designer perspective.
10 December 2018
Friedemann Schrenk, Palaeoanthropologist
7 Million years of Uselessness in Human Evolution
Major transitions in early human history include upright walking and the earliest material cultures. Triggered by originally useless responses to environmental change, these transitions depict uselessness as the underlying cause for Human biocultural evolution and diversity.
7 January 2019
Owen Hatherley, Author, Journalist
Superfluous Space
This talk will be about the in-between spaces of post-war housing estates, large open green areas which are traditionally treated as 'useless' space with no obvious programmed purpose, and what in those spaces is attractive and valuable precisely because of their lack of clear function.
Summer Term 2019
18 March 2019
Eva Buchinger, Sociologist
Uselessness? From the ‚Unemployed of Marienthal’ to the robotic age
Uselessness is a possible, but not at all necessary consequence of unemployment. This has been taught by the famous Marienthal sociography among others. So maybe the ‘rise of robots’ together with a (possible) jobless future is nothing to worry about?
8 April 2019
Diedrich Diederichsen, Author, Critic
Gebrauchswertromantik und Vernunft ohne Instrumente / A Romanticism of Use-Value and a Non-Instrumental Reason
Was geschieht, wenn man seine Ideale ernst nimmt / What happens when your ideals are taken seriously.
(This Lecture will be in German)
29 April 2019
Kerstin Meyer, Economist, Activist
The Provocation of the Standstill
Tempelhofer Feld, a former airfield in the centre of Berlin, is now an open space for the public to use for leisure. It may neither be sold nor built on nor designed. The story of the political fight over the city’s most valuable asset and how the public assumed its right to legislate standstill.
13 May 2019
Sonia Leimer, Architect, Artist
Dear Werner Herzog
During a trip through Peru last year I read your book Conquest of the useless . Your diary of the time your spent in Peru shooting the film Fitzcarraldo and my personal impressions during my journey through the Andes overlapped.
3 June 2019
Ruth Sonderegger, Philosopher
On the central norms and imperatives of Western aesthetics
My lecture will focus on the emergence of uselessness, purposelessness and disinterestedness as central normative concepts of Western aesthetics; of norms, that is, which came into existence during the 18th century in tandem with capitalism and its emphasis on purpose, use and interest.
