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V. Bühlmann:
"Abstraction and Generosity";
Talk: SOPHISTICATION: Rhetorical, Geometrical And Computational »Articulation«. Conference, TU Wien (invited); 2017-12-07 - 2017-12-09.

For apprehending a simple line for what it is, the Art Historian Wilhelm Worringer writes in Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung) from 1906, "I have to expand my inner vision till it embraces the whole line; I have inwardly to delimit what I have thus apprehended and extract it, as an entity, from its surroundings." Worringer foregrounded thereby a particular kind of psycho-motoric activity, which he called "apperceptive action", as a means for attending to the socio-political role of art in relation to an individual subject ́s aesthetical sense and cultural technical "progress". This paper will discuss Worringer ́s proposal beyond the strictly disciplinary scope of Art History, and extend its concerns to the societal role of "Intellectuality" at large. It proposes to consider Worringer ́s psycho-motoric activity in relation to the economy of an active life.

With Abstraction and Generosity, this paper proposes a generalised concept-couple that is to relate the concerns raised by Worringer one hundred years ago to our own situation, with regard to what it means to date an object: Inevitably, Datafication too involves an "apperceptive activ- ity." But, this paper asks, Where to locate, and how to identify the "subjectivity" to which this psycho-motoric activity is to be attributed? Key points of reference will involve also John Stuart Mill ́s theory of "naming" in his A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1836), Dante Alighieri ́s Convivio (in German: Das Gastmahl, 1306), Rem Koolhaas ́s Generic City (1995).

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_264984.pdf