Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

enough discrepancies between the old paradigm and the
new have accrued, a restructuring of knowledge will necessarily
ensue — a kind of revolutionary cycle. Thomas Kuhn
demonstrated this process effectively when outlining the
shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican celestial model.
“Suddenly there is an intellectual breakthrough and afterwards,
the universe is different.” ↘ 5
Taken outside of this specific context, the epistemic break
evokes totalities; it suggests that the state of the world does
correspond to our current imaginative construct. A totalising
system in this sense is one in which its constituent aspects
garner their meaning purely in relation to one another.
Revolution is then the schismatic supersession of one totalising
system by another — only an equally grandiose narrative
can possibly have the cerebral gravitas to replace its
predecessor. Discussing this revolution paradigm, anthropologist
David Graeber writes that:
“… the political dream becomes to somehow take control of
the process; to get to the point where we can cause a rupture
of this sort, a momentous breakthrough that will not just
happen but result directly from some kind of collective will.
The revolution, properly speaking.
If so it’s not surprising that the moment radical
thinkers felt they had to give up this dream, their first reaction
was to redouble their efforts to identify revolutions
happening anyway, to the point where in the eyes of someone
like Paul Virilio, rupture is our permanent state of being,
or for someone like Jean Baudrillard, the world now changes
completely every couple [of] years, whenever he gets a
new idea.” ↘ 6
However, conceptual models are just that – intellectual tools.
They do not mirror reality, which is far more disorderly.
There is no clear delineation between one epoch and another
in which, for example, post-modernism emerges from the
ashes of its prefixless precursor. Indeed, the use of the post
prefix brings with it several difficulties, not least of which
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Diskurs