Critical discourse has little patience with reduction. One of the most devastating charges levelled against theories, analyses, and descriptions is that of being reductive. Conceptual frameworks are dismissed for being impoverished, ontologies rejected for being too poor, descriptions for being too sparse or flat. And conversely, to call something ‘irreducible’ seems to confer an immediate and indisputable dignity to it. Yet the history of knowledge and in particular the history of science cannot be told without acknowledging the importance of reductionist paradigms, from Stoic physics or mechanistic materialism to cybernetics and structuralism. Any attempt to reject these paradigms has to contend with their ambiguous effects, such as their ability to generate radical innovations even when they are ultimately considered to have failed. Reductionisms indeed make the theoretical landscape more complex even as they seek to account for more with less and to achieve deeper understanding through unified theories.
What lies at the root of such different attitudes towards ‘reduction’ and what can be made of their tensions? A polar opposition of reductionist and anti-reductionist positions is often aligned with the alleged split of the ‘two cultures’ — the natural sciences and the humanities, with the social sciences somewhere in between and internally split. Yet, ‘reduction’ itself has always had at least two distinct meanings: following the Latinate root ‘re-ducere’, it means bringing something back to something else, whereas in the more common, vernacular sense it means a decrease in quantity. The latter furthermore has the almost irresistible connotation of devaluation.1 To what extent do anti-reduction reflexes rely on the conflation of these different meanings, and to what extent can re-duction help establish relations between terms and dissolve boundaries between fields without implying a hierarchy in quantity, scale, or value? How might reduction, in its contraction of multiple dimensions and its extension across virtually all fields of inquiry, generate unexpected or errant resonances, interferences, and entanglements without losing its sense of direction, orientation, and analytical purchase?
The significance of reduction is perhaps most evident in relation to complexity. Quite plausibly, nothing could be described, understood, or done without reducing complexity. While this insight deflates accusations of reductiveness and establishes a common ground across all fields, it also shifts attention to the ways in which reductions are performed: Reduction can be done sparingly — taking complexity as a limited resource to be saved and economized — or liberally, treating complexity as a bounded, even conserved quantity that can be differently distributed. In the latter case, the relevant question is not how much one reduces, but which complexities one seeks to enhance at the price of which reductions, or which focus one sets and narrows in order to allow for greater complexity within it. While a trade-off between reduced complexity in some respects and increased complexity in others suggests a zero-sum game of reduction and complexity — or a competition over finite attention — reduction can also be reconciled with a logic of growth. For instance, division of labour increases overall production by reducing the individual’s work to a limited range of often very mechanical activities. But it can also promise the emergence of new and greater complexities for everyone involved. Such is the premise of intersectional, trans- or multidisciplinary endeavours that combine different knowledge systems, each defined by its specific epistemic reduction, with the expectation that complexities not merely add up but multiply.
Yet the belief in unlimited growth, fuelled in the second half of the twentieth century by a new, post-Newtonian science of complexity, emergence, and self-organization, may well be the product of a selective perception: the constructive interferences that are welcomed get balanced by destructive ones, and periods of catastrophic collapse are an integral part of self-organizing systems maximizing complexity.2 In a different register, lateral to visions of accumulated reductions and emergent complexities, there remains in all fields of inquiry the guiding ideal — epistemological as much as aesthetic — of being clear and distinct, even simple. The sciences may be more deliberately reductive in their theorizing and experimenting, but attempting to grasp the core of a phenomenon, issue, or question by stripping away all that is incidental and distracting also characterizes writing and modelling practices within the humanities, the arts, and design. No doubt resonances exist with ideas of efficiency and parsimony, even ascesis or austerity, yet techniques of concentration and condensation, intensification and subtraction also exceed economic considerations and constitute arts of knowing and forms of life.
The ancient technologies of the self, whose practitioners sought to rid themselves of the devastating effects of the passions, were compared by Plotinus to sculpture, regarded at the time as the paradigmatic art of reduction: while a painter proceeded through addition, a sculptor was thought to free an image from a block of marble through subtraction alone.3 Pierre Hadot has argued that Western philosophy was initially a ‘spiritual exercise’ aimed at transforming the self and its vision of the world. On his account, Western philosophy was ‘emptied of its spiritual exercises’ under the influence of medieval scholasticism, which had philosophy’s role ‘reduced to the rank of a “handmaid of theology”’; it ‘was henceforth to furnish theology with conceptual — and hence purely theoretical — material’. At the same time, practices of the self were ‘relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics’.4 Medieval female mystics, in particular, intensified such practices and retained a strong bodily dimension in ways that would resonate through the centuries — from Catherine of Siena to Simone Weil — but techniques of the self are also present in René Descartes’s Meditations and in Edmund Husserl’s ‘eidetic’ and ‘transcendental reductions’. And reductive paradigms have periodically revitalized the arts, from neo-classicism to modernist design, from abstraction to diverse minimalisms or self-imposed arbitrary restrictions and aleatoric principles.
The present volume is the first publication to come out of the core project ‘Reduction’ that the ICI Berlin launched in autumn 2020. Defined along the lines just sketched, the aim was to explore the critical potentials of notions and practices of reduction within and across different fields and approaches — from the sciences, technology, and the arts, to feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches — and to inquire, in particular, into the ways different economies of reduction travel and the possibilities of escaping the seemingly unquestionable premium placed on production.
Formulated at the end of the ‘ERRANS, environ/s’ project, which culminated in the volume Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure,5 the project’s inquiry was meant to resonate also with demands for reduction that acquired unprecedented public visibility in the context of climate change, partially due to movements such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion.6 By the time the project started, COVID-19 led to other, unexpected resonances. The collective project began shortly before the second partial shutdown in autumn 2020 and was accompanied by repeated experiences of reduction in several domains: little mobility, few possibilities of exchange (cultural, economic, or otherwise), and limited social contacts — both quantitatively and qualitatively, as those that did occur were for the most part reduced to the two-dimensional screen. Yet such reductions by no means implied a uniformity or greater simplicity of experience, which was instead often characterized by new difficulties, complexities, temporalities, and intensities.
In weekly meetings over a period of almost two years, the contributors to this volume thus discussed reduction not only as a concept and method but also in its experiential dimensions. They inquired into possibilities of understanding and experiencing reduction as generative as well as diminishing. Phenomenological reduction was soon evoked as a model joining method with experience and the generative with the limiting aspects of reduction. Insofar as it can be understood as a method of bracketing preconceptions and judgments about reality and causality, time and space, physical and social determination, phenomenological reduction promises a fuller experience of the present in its duration, a richer description of this experience, and a better account of how it is embodied and arises in perception through memory and expectation.
While some contributions explicitly engage with phenomenology, the multidisciplinary group moved on to considering reduction as a practice in a more general sense and inquired into the possibility of distinguishing different styles, genres, or aesthetics of reduction. Minimalist and abstract art here provided a case with which to reflect on the possibilities and risks of thinking reduction as expansion. Subtracting specificities opens (re)presentations up to the general and even universal, but it also risks perpetuating the privilege of unmarked subjects at the expense of gendered, sexualized, and racialized others. While especially mid-twentieth century artistic movements can and have been problematized along these lines,7 important developments in Black and queer abstraction suggest that it may be time to revisit the well-rehearsed critiques of abstraction as a claim to universality and explore its potentials.8
Considering diverse genres of reduction — among them the vignette, the list, and the dictionary, which all figure in this volume — the group was ultimately most attracted to that of ‘the case’. It first discussed the case in the context of law and psychoanalysis, to which discussions ended up returning as much as to phenomenology and to questions of style, genre, and aesthetics. But a ‘thinking in cases’ — which John Forrester proposed as a ‘style of reasoning’ alongside others, such as ‘postulation and deduction’, ‘experimental exploration’, or ‘hypothetical construction of models by analogy’9 — also seemed to characterize well the subsequent trajectory of the conversations, from reduction as metaphor and event to reduction as experience structured, and possibility curtailed, by habitus and class, sexuality and racialization, colonization and migration, technology and capital, etc.
The case is indeed a paradigmatic form of reduction, one that ties together two opposite poles: an incommensurable singularity that cannot be reduced further and a general theory or structure to which it could be reduced. The case is of particular interest when it mediates between the two and brackets both, reducing the complexity of empirical reality in view of more general schemata or rules that allow for comparison with similar cases, but at same time remaining in excess of, and irreducible to, the general it nonetheless conjures up, affirms, or even founds.
As a form, the case thus emblematically articulates the tension between singularity and generalization that the contributions to this volume explore in different ways and with different emphases, often associating singularity with experience and generalization with structure, concept, or category. Some contributions push the logic of the case to its limit and are perhaps better understood as presenting no longer cases of something more general, but rather pure cases — i.e. the contingent facticity of what is the case — that seek to resist subsumption and instead enter constellations with other singular cases.
The volume’s title should be read in this light. Of course, at first glance it probably reads rather as ‘making the case for reduction’, that is, as polemically arguing for reduction and defending it as one might in a court case. Such a provocative resonance is not entirely unintended, but it should be clear that there is no single such case: there are many meanings and forms of reduction and, for each of them, one could no doubt make many different cases. Nor should the title be understood as a snappy shorthand for ‘Cases for Reduction’, as if each contribution was arguing one such case. In this volume, the case for reduction serves rather as a heuristic device: To push back against — or at least temporarily suspend — anti-reductionist reflexes is to allow critical attention to dwell on different notions and practices of reduction and also to explore their generative potentials.
As the cover design is meant to evoke, the case is also to be heard as a ‘box’ or ‘receptacle, designed to contain an item or items for safe keeping, transportation, or display’.10 Instead of shunning reduction as such, that is, in general, the case showcases it to explore its potentials and dangers. It particularizes reductions so as to inquire about their ethics and politics: Which reductions are to be avoided and which are to be endorsed? Can the benefits of reductions be transported and can the violences of reductions be contained? The case — now again in the sense of a form evoking the thorny practice of negotiating singularity and generality, bottom-up and top-down determination, and ultimately also agency and justice — may be more essential than ever to identify not only the ‘reductions to be avoided’, but also those to be fostered.11
The volume opens with an analysis of how the case study as method proposes generalizations based on singularity and how it may mediate between the individual and the social. Focusing on Sigmund Freud’s Rat Man case, Iracema Dulley explores the chain of signification that emerges in Freud’s articulation of the rat-related signifiers through which his patient’s neurosis is expressed. She shows that the general claim this case makes is one that asserts the singularity of each particular case, namely that any individual neurosis finds its expression in a unique chain of signifiers. Dulley’s reflection is furthermore guided by a concern to question the divide between the individual and the social by showing how signifiers are one of the ways in which the symbolic inscribes itself onto the subject.
A similar intertwinement of the individual and the social, in this case effected by an oscillation between different reductions, is at work in Rachel Aumiller’s contribution. ‘Haptic Reductions’ puts forth a feminist ethic grounded in phenomenological scepticism. Identifying two contrasting methodological reductions utilized in philosophical scepticism — ‘withdrawal/doubt’ and ‘immersion/attention’ — it explores how reduction relates to experiences of personal and global uncertainty during a pandemic. Reduction, Aumiller argues, involves the entire embodied being, challenging how one is fundamentally in touch with the world.
The case study’s inherent tension between general and particular and the technique of bracketing either pole open up the field that this volume measures out in different ways. In Aumiller and Dulley, the social, symbolic, and abstract appear relatively fixed and inaccessible to transformation by the subject, who instead moves laterally within, seeking to override fixations or dogmatisms through therapeutic or bodily techniques. Other contributions focus rather on how the general enacts reduction and how it may be historicized and possibly transformed.
Christopher Chamberlin’s chapter does so by identifying how structural anthropology, long maligned for its conceptual reductions and politics, has exerted a hidden influence on Frantz Fanon’s theory of the ‘sociogenesis’ of mental illness. His text outlines how Fanon’s belief in the therapeutic capacity of ‘socialization’ critically absorbs Claude Lévi-Strauss’s examination of the link between ‘madness’ and the symbolic structure of society. These innovations, Chamberlin argues, pushed Fanon to institute ‘semi-hospitalization’ as a radically dialectical method of treatment in his final role as a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Day Centre in Tunis. Functioning as a heterotopia, the Fanonian hospital partially brackets the colonized world to allow for the patients’ disalienation, but it also creates the space for them to act politically back onto the social field.
In ‘Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism’, Özgün Eylül İşcen historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within the cybernetic undercurrent of today’s smartness mandate. Her text revisits Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping as a model for grasping the structures and processes of computational capital along with their inherent frictions. It highlights that cognitive mapping poses the aesthetic problem of mediation between different fields and scales — such as the global and local, or the social and psychic — and explores this issue in the work of Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri. Mobilizing the concept of allegory, İşcen engages with the fundamental paradox, also addressed by Chamberlin, that identifying, mapping, or otherwise representing structures or systems in order to counter their reductive effect is itself a form of reduction.
The ambivalence of mapping is also central in Sam Dolbear’s ‘Lines that Reduce’. The text moves from biography to a diagram of ‘primal acquaintances’ drawn by Walter Benjamin, which it transposes to other linear or lineal forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, an astral chart, and the lines of a palm. Dolbear highlights the entangled constellations and rich lives these reductions can evoke and contrasts them to the reductive use of fingerprints performed by border guards. Moving from case to case, the essay suggests that the singularity of individual lives may be redeemed not by an evasion of reduction but by juxtaposing different kinds of temporal, historical, epistemic, and aesthetic reductions in a non-hierarchical, open-ended list.
While these contributions, which unveil the analytical potential of reduction, tend to emphasize the — often violent — losses it imparts on lived experience, Ben Nichols’s ‘Post-Anti-Identitarianism’ focuses on its enabling and generative dimension. Nichols, too, engages with open-ended lists. While feminist, queer, and trans studies are all influenced significantly by anti-identitarian thought, contemporary gender and sexual identities only seem to be proliferating: nonbinary, graysexual, demigender, and more. Nichols’s contribution focuses on a series of reference guides that schematize this recent expansion, often miming reductive formats, such as the dictionary or the A–Z list. These texts and the questions they raise, Nichols argues, help to rethink the place of ‘identity’ across gender and sexuality studies.
If Nichols’s text could be said to bracket the totality of ‘identitarian thinking’ in order to focus on specific cases and concrete functions, such a bracketing of the general is the explicit method of other contributions. The point here is not just epistemological — to bring into focus experiential particularities that would otherwise be elided through subsumption under the general — but also performative, linked to the claim that such bracketing or suspension might counteract the reductive effects of generalization. In ‘Reduction in Time’ Alberica Bazzoni explores the experience of what she terms ‘the living present’ as a form of temporal reduction that brackets past and future, but is also different from a still, eternal moment. Examining its articulations in literary texts, Bazzoni contrasts the living present with the temporal reduction at work in trauma. Her contribution identifies the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of the living present as a site of subjectivation, as a form of reduction that counters the reduction effected by normative discourses.
A similar bracketing involving temporal experience allows Federica Buongiorno to reconceptualize agency as well as the role that the relation between human bodies and technology plays in constituting reality during an age of pervasive computing. The decreasing role played by embodiment is a problem in computer music in particular, since the latter relies heavily on different layers of (digital) technology and mediation in both its production and its performance. In her contribution, Buongiorno argues that such a mediation should not be conceived of as an obstacle but rather as a constitutive element of a permanent, complex negotiation between the artist, the machinery, and the audience. Focusing on the artist Caterina Barbieri, she outlines the aim of shaping a musical temporality that could resist the synchronizations of collective entrainment by mainstream music.
Sarath Jakka’s ‘Nothing Beyond the Name’ directly juxtaposes the reduction performed by generalization with the reduction performed by bracketing generalization. The text considers the agonistic relation between a listening to patients and a diagnostic naming to be constitutive for various psychotherapeutic paradigms. Yet, as different schools compete and struggle for institutional legitimacy, Jakka argues, they all tend to subordinate the names and concepts they use to a property regime, thereby obscuring or compromising forms of listening that occur on the threshold of naming and meaning.
Yet other contributions take an operational, processual view of the general, conceiving it not as a fixed structure but as constantly actualized and reconstituted through techniques in the widest sense. Noting that the notion of home does not just point to a location but also involves a complex process of ‘homing’, Amina ElHalawani insists that it can only be studied by conjuring it through individual cases. ElHalawani’s text thus engages in a close reading of key moments in the film Salt of this Sea by Annemarie Jacir and the collection of essays The Idea of Home by John Hughes. These ‘vignettes of homes and homing’ allow her to identify what constitutes or recreates home for displaced individuals.
Drawing on the thought of legal historian Yan Thomas, Xenia Chiaramonte’s contribution examines law as a casuistic practice, focusing on the interplay between cases and legal institutions. The art of law, she argues, is characterized by the reduction of the ‘things’ of the social world through the construction of categories, and by the use of these same categories to conduct legal operations. Based on the observation that the quintessential legal performance is that of instituting, Chiaramonte raises the question of how to exercise a legal imagination for Gaia. Her chapter thus calls for a new way of instituting nature: not as a foundation, as is the case in natural law, but rather as a fiction, following the tradition of Roman law.
Seeking to mediate between the reductive poles of singularity and generalization, the case at once participates in these reductions and exceeds them. It thereby calls for its own proliferation, for a movement from case to case within an open-ended list. The device of the list indeed not only features prominently in several contributions but also sparked additional projects, whose outcomes are included at the end of this volume. The ‘Excursus’ on lists, collected and introduced by Sam Dolbear, Ben Nichols, and Claudia Peppel, and containing contributions by these authors as well as Rachel Aumiller and Iracema Dulley, thus stands as a reminder of the remainder in excess of any reduction.
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