Table of Contents

Foreword
Chapter one: Introduction
The plan of this book
Chapter two: Quantum literacy
Elementary indecision
Communication versus production: Bearing witness, and literacy
Cultivating indecision: The quantum domain’s domesticity
Ciphers, zeroness, equations: Architectonics of nothing
Chance-bound objects
Taking ignorance into account: Quantifying strangeness
Entropy and negentropy
The price of information as a measure for an object’s strangeness
Quantum literacy: Towards a novel theory of the subject
‘La Langue est une Puissance’
Chapter three: Chronopedia I: Counting time
Meteora: The wisdom of the weather
Code: A rosetta stone, a double staircase
Time modelled as contemporaneity
Counting time: Equinox and solstice
The turning points for modelled beginnings and ends
Of tables and models
Sense means significance and direction
Meteora
A logos genuine to the world – ‘Le Logiciél Intra-Matériel’
Software, hardware
Economy of maxima and minima: An anarchic logos
Chapter four: Chronopedia II: Treasuring time
Homothesis as the locus in quo of the universal’s presence
1st iteration (acquiring a space of possibility)
2nd iteration (learning to speak a language in which no one is native)
3rd iteration (setting the stage for thought to comprehend itself)
4th iteration (intelligence that is immanent and coextensive with the universe)
5th iteration (inventing a scale of reproduction)
6th iteration (the formula, a double-articulating application)
The amorous nature of intellectual conception
1st iteration (marking all that is assumed to be constant with a cipher)
2nd iteration (confluence of multiple geneses)
3rd iteration (the residence of that which is genuinely migrational)
4th iteration (universal genitality)
5th iteration (mathematics is the circuit of cunning reason’s ruses)
6th iteration (the real as a black spectrum)
Chapter five: Banking universality: The magnitudes of ageing
Metaphysics
The quickness of a magnanimous universe
Invariance: Genericness in terms of entropy and negentropy
Genuine and immanent to the all of time: Le ‘logiciel intra-matériel’
White metaphysics: How old does the world think it is?
Freedom
The neutral element: Materialism of identity
(Pan’s) glossematics: The economy that deals with ‘purport’
Quanta of contemporaneity: Heat to incandescence, storage to bank account
Quantum writing: Substitutes step in to address things themselves
Chapter six: The incandescent Paraclete: Tables of plenty
Equatoriality generalized
Coming of age, liking sunset and sunrise
How to combine precision with finesse or: euphoria contained by instruments that behave like cornucopia
The (mathematical) inverse of Pantopia is not a utopia: Law in the panonymy of the whole world
The objective mentality and character of instruments
The vicarious order of knowledge that is authentic to the world
Pan: The excitable subject of universal knowledge
Generational con-sequentiality
Blessed curiosity
Exodic discourse
Chapter seven: Sophistication and anamnesis: Retrograde movement of truth, remembering an abundant past
The currency of knowledge
The price of truth, and the price of information
The convertibility of truth
Classicism: Remembering contemporaneity
Classical analysis, symbolical analysis
Interlude: The Tower of Eiffel, archetypical symbol of existentialism?
Building a cipher
A corpus of intelligent forms
The technical order of an object that is comfortable
How to reason the sum total of all archetypes?
Towards critique with regard to the symbolic alchemy of myth-making
A realist classicism
Familiarizing ourselves as strangers, native to the universe
The domain of the quasi: Instructive analysis, character dispositions
How can reason in general learn from singularities?
Of genealogical and of tabular orders: Eating ‘next to’ (parasite)
Heterogeneous scales, logistical uniformality (forms of operation)
Indexical address: The referential of the centre
Respecting order by challenging it
Cunning ruses: The anarchic architectonic way of paying respect
How to address the third-person singular?
Augmentation, not authorship
Anarchic civility, and the meanings of cultures
Chapter eight Coda: Quantum literacy and architectonic dispositioning
Architecture and philosophy
Chapter zero: Instead of a conclusion: The static tripod
Notes
Bibliography

Promotional Information

The first book in English to consider key elements within the thought of Michel Serres and his philosophies of science, information, and mathematics.

About the Author

Vera Bühlmann is Professor for Architecture Theory and Director of the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at Vienna University of Technology, Austria.

Reviews

What happens when we take mathematics not as the elementary basis upon which science must bloom, but as an ‘architectonics’ that unfolds the world as it informs mass, space and time? With great rigor, in content and style, Bühlmann reads the concepts that Michel Serres produced in his oeuvre through his mathematics and information theory, revealing his highly original, inclusive and affirmative philosophy of the 21st century.
*Rick Dolphijn, Associate Professor of Theories of Arts and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands*

The importance of Serres’ philosophy has mostly gone unrecognized in continental philosophy, even though this philosopher had a critical influence on many of its key figures, such as Deleuze and Foucault. The dearth of informed commentary is now reduced by this scholar whose knowledge of mathematics is able to bridge both the analytical and continental traditions.
*Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of Humanities, Syracuse University, USA*

Mathematic and Information in the Philosophy of Michel Serres acquaints the reader with Serres’ monist manner of addressing the universality and the power of knowledge - that is at once also the anonymous and empty faculty of incandescent, inventive thought. ... The chapters of the book demarcate, problematize and contextualize some of the epistemologically unsettling situations Serres addresses, whilst also examining the particular manner in which he responds to and converses with these situations.
*MathSciNet*