SPEAKER:
Maxime Le CalvéABSTRACT
The Latin root of the word contingency is con-tingere (together-touching): It refers to the mutual touch of people and things with their surroundings, and to the mutual dependencies of events in the seamless tissue of life. Cutting is often perceived as a destructive and extractive action, a violent separating operation within this material or conceptual tissue. Dichotomies in particular are conceptual cuts that allow for the classification of things into sharp categories, »carving nature at its joints«, as Plato wrote. However, as Karen Barad has shown, in science and elsewhere, such discriminative and disruptive operations are actually always »cutting together apart«. Based on fieldwork material from ongoing research at »Matters of Activity«, I will challenge in this paper the modernist idea of the cut, especially the breach introduced between the cutter and the thing being cut. I will argue that cutting, as observed in neurosurgery, virtual paleontology and macromolecular physics, can be considered a respons-able stretching of the senses toward materials and things. Blending the elements of modeling, simulation, training and invention, these practices are daily challenging our own bodily entanglement with multifarious contingencies.