Simondon, Lyotard and the Transdisciplinary Shadow

This paper was delivered at the 'Designing Community' conference at Espace Niemeyer, Paris. Drawing from experiences as an artist involved in a cross-disciplinary project with archaeologists based in Saint-Denis, France (NEARCH – New Scenarios for a Community Based Archaeology), this presentation observes relationship and antagonism between holistic and discrete fields of knowledge, aesthetics, community, communication and noise. This paper proposes questions (generated by consideration of Gilbert Simondon’s proposition of aesthetics as ecumenical thought, Jean Francois Lyotard’s notion of the differend and Michel Serres idea of the parasite): To what extent does the formation of a universal community depend upon successful relations and practices of communication? If founding a community requires an act of exclusion (of noise, dispute, silence or remoteness) in order to successfully exchange messages, can architects of new communities acknowledge and incorporate this act of exclusion? Can the formal character of the exclusion be inverted into a building block for a new community where community might be made from “differences, noise and disorder” and “not in the key of pre-established harmony”? (Michel Serres, The Parasite (2007), Minnesota Press Edition. 13)