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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

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Prof. Dr. Christian Kassung

 

Curriculum

Christian Kassung has been Professor of »Cultural Techniques and History of Knowledge« at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2006. After reading German Studies and Physics in Aachen and Cologne, he completed his Doctorate 1999 in German Literature at the Universität zu Köln with a dissertation on Robert Musil's »›Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften‹ in the discourse of modern physics«. In 2007, his professorial dissertation was on the pendulum and its meaning for the history of knowledge. From 2018 to 2023, he headed the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences as Dean. Furthermore, he is a member of the »Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques« (HZG) and the »Center for the Science of Materials in Berlin« (CSMB). He is Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«. During the summer semester of 2023, he will be Senior Fellow at the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies »Imaginaria of Force« at Universität Hamburg.

The professorship »Cultural Techniques and History of Knowledge« combines the study of cultural techniques as an implicit knowledge that connects practices and things with the question of the historical, material and medial conditions of knowledge. The research profile is thus not only strictly interdisciplinary, but also focuses on the boundary zones where new knowledge emerges, disorders are negotiated, hegemonic claims are championed and translations are made. The main areas of work are the history of knowledge and culture in physics, the cultural techniques of industrialisation and the history and practice of technical media.

Publications (selection)

  • Christian Kassung: »Virtual Head and Analogue Simulation: John Smeaton, 1759«. May 2021. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4742656.
  • Christian Kassung: »Gleich(zeitig)e Bilder. Über Anfänge und Störungen der Bildübertragung/Similar (and Simultaneous) Images. On the Inceptions and Interruptions of Image Transmission«. In: Send Me an Image. From Postcard to Social Media. Hrsg. von Kathrin Schönegg Felix Hoffmann. Berlin: Steidl, April 2021, pp. 51–63.
  • Alwin J. Cubasch, Vanessa Engelmann und Christian Kassung: »Theorie des Filterns. Zur Programmatik eines Experimentalsystems«. April 2021. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4731045.
  • Christian Kassung: Fleisch. Die Geschichte einer Industrialisierung. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning, 2020.
  • Christian Kassung: »Die Flügel der Concorde. Analogsimulation als Sichtbarmachung von Störung«. In: Visuelle Zeitgestaltung. Hrsg. von Claudia Blümle, Claudia Mareis und Christof Windgätter. Bd. 15. Bildwelten des Wissens. Berlin und Boston: Walter de Gruyter, Dez. 2019, pp. 33–44.

Research project: Looking into the Vortex

The term vortex refers to the funnel-shaped suction of a liquid or gas. As a concept, however, it swirls the levels of image, metaphor and concept in a similarly dynamic way as the phenomenon itself. Though chaotic, this movement of the vortex is characterized by two fundamental directions: rotation in the plane and gravity perpendicular to it. At the same time, the vortex resists fixation; it has no defined inside and outside. The rotating outside reaches potentially infinitely far. The rotating inside points to another world, it breaks the dimension, points to the real.

The cultural scope of the vortex concept is immense. Herman Melville, for example, makes Ishmael's journey begin on land but end in the vortex. Whereas Ishmael escapes the vortex, we as spectators are drawn all the deeper into the inescapable stream of consciousness of Scottie Ferguson, whom Alfred Hitchcock has chasing after his wife believed to be dead. Michel Serres sees the beginning of modern thermodynamics in Lucretius, whereas Descartes uses vortices to explain gravity - in contradiction to Newtonian physics. And while William Turner lets himself be tied to a mast in the strongest of swells so he can paint a »Snow Storm«, in 1939 Tullio Crali paints a »Nose Dive on the City« to illustrate the idea of vorticism.

Given this background, the project asks about the specific experience of reality that becomes manifest in the view into the vortex. Does the simultaneity of complex hydrodynamics and modern subject experience refer to a crisis-like doubling of reality for which the vortex stands as an image and metaphor?

Research results: Looking into the Vortex

In the vortex, imagery, knowledge, and cultural transmission intermingle in a similarly dynamic and diverse way as in the phenomenon that it is itself. This finding of a massive discursive density is inevitably followed by the question of its justification. The project starts from the thesis of an epistemic simultaneity of complex hydrodynamics and threatened subject around 1900. Accordingly, »Looking into the Vortex« correlates with a specific experience of reality, which can be described with Luhmann as a crisis-like doubling of reality.

Accordingly, the discursive attractiveness of the vortex points to the possibilities of a culturally productive self-assurance that the modern subject finds or explores along the epistemic intersection of determinism and aleatory. Thus, the »revolution of matter« (Serres [1994] 2010, 92) that has been taking place since the mid-19th century also shapes the vortex. With Poncelet (1822), the vortex becomes a group of forms, and it is necessary to relate the moments of stability and instability of this group to the history of knowledge. With thermodynamics, statistics (Boltzmann constant k) first enters physics as a tool, and with quantum mechanics (Planck’s quantum of action h) it becomes fundamental. Thus, against this background of the history of science, it is not only a matter of »currents and rays« in the Asendorfian sense (cf. Asendorf 1989), but of the principal collapse of the notion of an ultimate matter: liquid and solid are per se indistinguishable. In this respect, the vortex is always already a figure of the liquid and solid. It explodes immersion and unfolds in it a media reflection that leads to transgressive gestures of text, image, film, and so on. The vortex is always at the same time an objective as well as subjective phenomenon, as becomes clear, for example, in Hitchcock’s »Vertigo«.

However, apart from all aspects of chaos that characterize the movement of the vortex, the two fundamental directions of a potentially infinite rotation and a linear movement perpendicular to it, which is accompanied by a dimensional break, can be distinguished. This correlates with a self-reflexive dilation of time at the discontinuous transition into another dimension (discontinuity) and a permanent movement (continuity), which inevitably raises the question of its own past and future.

Bibliography

  • Asendorf, Christoph. 1989. Ströme und Strahlen. Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie um 1900. Vol. 18. Werkbund-Archiv. Gießen: Anabas-Verlag.
  • Serres, Michel. (1994) 2010. Über Malerei. Vermeer – La Tour – Turner. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts.