Bogdan Ghiu

INTERDISCIPLINARY TRANSLATION OR THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE ARCHIPELAGO

The average environment

To think with your hands, bit by bit. Another way of thinking. Another «image of thought» (Deleuze). Tree / Rhizome. Intuitive, artistic, poetic type of modelling, not «scientific», «rational».

NOT a «continental» thinking, dry and continent (containing) + the two types of colonial empires: the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese (only interested by the «target», by the «receiver») vs the English and, today, inchoative (as a great historical overturn and recovery) the Chinese (interested– also – by the «environment» itself, the environment as it is).

NOT dualism: NO me / you, identical / different, the same / another etc. No juxtaposition, like countries on a continent (countries contained by the continent, continents for containing human beings between the limits of the firm land, the certainty under their feet), with nothing between them, only the abstract line of the «border». There are no borders, the border being a territory in itself, the border is the alterity, but a communicating alterity, alterity  environment, not alterity – address. We need to spatialize, to corporalize the borders, as a mean of communicating, negotiating, meeting – translation.

Why the trinity (third, «tertiary», how Peirce would have said) is (just) divine? Introducing the third differentcommunicative, of the average-environment (you must be different in order for you to favour communication, the meeting), which is in between, the terrestrial Holy Spirit.

To think with your hands, bit by bit. Another way of thinking. Another «image of thought» (Deleuze). Tree / Rhizome. Intuitive, artistic, poetic type of modelling, not «scientific», «rational».

The archi(tectures) of the archi(pelago)

Architecture is not a science, it’s not «soft», nor «hard», it’s not «natural», nor «human». But exactly this secondary, concrete, practical character, which comes close to handcrafting and diy – or, more exactly, balancing, «making a bridge» between the engineering pillar and the crafting pillar (acc. the famous dichotomy of Claude Lévi-Strauss from Wild Thinking) –, makes it having a politically strategic role: of a generalizable, transposable, «translatable» paradigm, as a universal metaphor.

Architecture is a metaphor (amongst the most widely spread) especially because it is a meta-metaphor, if you could call it that way, tying the far and the close, defining close through the far, which makes it meta-tie, meta-associate (making them make a society) the poetic (the artistic) with the political-a method which also constitutes a archimeta- metaphor, between the ethical and the pragmatic (it is more pragmatic to behave ethical).

Extra est inter. Effractions, infractions, events, singularities

What is the translation? A different environment, which unites: the different unites.
TRANSLATION DETOUR.

Let us not forget about the deconstruction of the phenomenological naive illusion: we can’t escape entirely, from any discipline and disciplinarity of knowledge towards a given target, but only between disciplines, which actually is the largest space. There is no non- or pre-interpretability, «pure targeting» and virgin, direct «donation», but only inter-disciplinarity.

But – another illusion, another naivety – we cannot pass directly from one discipline to another, disciplines are not attached and separated by double walls, just like countries on a map of lands, like the firm and dry land, elevated, risen from the waters. Between disciplines, there is exactly the world: the alterity environment of the translation. The alterity is translation, traductibility.