Take a square. Its side and its diagonal share no common measure: no unit, however small, fits whole into both. The Greeks called this alogos: irrational, without ratio, without speech. They were said to have drowned the man who revealed it.
That diagonal cuts forward.
In philosophy, as the persistent failure of logos to close around its object, the unsayable that every system of reason leaves at its edge.
In Beckett, as the voice of The Unnamable (1953), going on where it cannot go on: “I, say I. Unbelieving.”
In finance, as the contemporary irrational: exuberance, debt, derivatives, magnitudes that no longer measure any thing. The diagonal we still cannot square.
And in sound, finally, as a method. Not to explain the unnameable but to bring it into the body, the street, the register of intuition. What cannot be calculated can still be heard.
Outcome of the joint seminar Instrumentalities for Acoustic Ecologies & Radio Topologies (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Akustische Ökologien und Sound Studies + Experimentelles Radio).
11.06.2026, 15:00–17:00
Atelier Café, M18, Geschwister-Scholl-Straße, Weimar
