Seminar Title,Seminar Description
The Anarchy of Objects I: Objects and Regimes of Attraction,"Since the revolutionary work of Immanuel Kant, Continental philosophy has been dominated by the idealist or correlationist turn wherein it is argued that mind structures and constitutes reality. In 20th century Continental philosophy, this correlationist turn has been manifested in the thesis that it is language, signs, discourses, or narratives that structure reality. This thesis has also harbored the emancipatory promise of liberating people from oppressive conditions through a critique and deconstruction of various discourses and symbolic systems that structure social relations.

Through the disclosure that forms of subjectivity and identity are not intrinsic properties of persons but are social constructions, these identities and power-relations are revealed to be contingent, and it becomes possible to build new forms of subjectivity, identity, and social relations. Such is the political import of the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and those influenced by Lacan. The emancipatory achievements of the semiotic turn are not to be underestimated nor minimized; however, they have obscured another form of power, non-discursive power, that arises from materiality as such. Power issues not simply from signification and how we signify, but also how the world of objects about us is organized.

Through a reading of Levi Bryant’s Democracy of Objects, this seminar explores both the being of material objects and how they contribute to the organization of social relations through technologies, infrastructure, living beings, and features of geography. Over the course of the Fall seminar, students will be introduced to the ontology of objects, relations between objects, and how they influence the form that societies take. Special emphasis will be placed on interrelation between the agency of signs and the agency of material objects in structuring the social worlds in which we live. In exploring these themes, the seminar hopes to disclose new sites of political struggle as well as new opportunities for political emancipation."
Hyperstition & The New Weird I: Entities and Worlds/Genres and Climates,"The New Weird is a notoriously difficult literary genre to define, as it involves splicing together of fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres - but as Ann and Jeff Vandermeer suggest, The New Weird undermines those genres’ fixed cliches and overtly romanticized world views. Indeed, the genre remains difficult to define further. As Michael Cisco has put it:

“Nothing could be more unenlightening or useless than a New Weird manifesto. What strikes the observer is precisely the spontaneity with which so many different writers, pursuing such obviously disparate literary styles, should vaguely intersect in this way. Instead of a set of general aims, we have a great proliferation of correspondences on a more intimate level, like a sprawling coincidence of idiosyncratic choices.”

This Fall seminar, “Entities and Worlds/Genres and Climates,” sets out less to pin down what the new weird is and more to establish what it does. Following Cisco's lead, the New Weird attempts to demonstrate how types of writing do not depend upon the entities invoked, and that the creation of worlds is not the automatic inhabitation of a genre or its typical style. In essence, The New Weird brings the generation of worlds and the depiction of our world closer together.

Furthermore, this seminar will explore how and why the Weird and the New Weird has influenced the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit (CCRU) notion of hyperstition and the subsequent concept of theory-fiction. Hyperstition, which Nick Land and Sadie Plant defined as ‘making fictional entities real’, has a Lovecraftian provenance which is accelerated by the New Weird’s philosophical and political realisms which still utilize seemingly impossible creatures, dimensions, and technologies. Thus the boundary between speculative philosophy engaging with fictional entities and fiction which engages with speculative philosophy (theory-fiction) further mutates the boundary between genre, world, nonfiction, and fiction."
Abducting the Future: Strategic Thought & the Logic of Military and Political Inquiry,"This Seminar will look at the logic of inquiry in the history of strategic thought, exploring the role of abductive inference and anticipatory practices in key discourses of strategic rationality, with the aim of elucidating their significance for military-political logics of the present. From ancient warfare and Renaissance statecraft to modern strategy and global intelligence, throughout history, a key aim of those engaged in political conflict has been to detect, anticipate and shape future events by inferring possibilities, designing plans, and pursuing actions despite danger, chance, and uncertainty. While in classical strategic thinking, the future was something given by fate or fortune, capable of being shaped only by the most skillful and cunning heroes, in modern strategy, the future has increasingly become something that must be predicted, preempted, and controlled through rational inquiry and systematic action. Today, wars and conflicts are not only fought for the present but play out in a hypothetical future as long-range strategic plans, speculative military theories, or conjectural forecasts of intelligence. Through abductive methodologies, the kairos of advantage is increasingly pushed farther into the future, enabling those with the means to exert violent and intellectual power to dominate not only the present world but also the worlds to come.

However, what are the means of discovering and exploiting future opportunities latent in the present? How are signs of hidden danger or future advantage detected, interpreted, or transformed into the design of actions, artifacts, or assemblages? And if the answer is ‘through the means and methods of inquiry,’ the question remains as to how the logic of inquiry fits into the larger scheme of adversarial rationality, which must account not only for chance and uncertainty but for danger, violence, secrecy, and deception, undermining not only the ideals of science but the normative premises of rationality itself.

Adopting a pragmatist perspective based on the philosophical work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the Seminar approaches historical and contemporary problems of strategic rationality from the point of view of pragmatist epistemology and semiotics. Across these four Sessions, we will use Peircean tools to read both major and minor works from the history of strategic thought, finding new and critical ways to read texts on Ancient Greek and Chinese warfare, Early Modern statecraft, Napoleonic and Industrial Age strategy, and present-day practices of military futurology and global intelligence.

Preliminary Readings include:

Session 1: Peirce, Homer, Sun Tzu.
Session 2: Machiavelli, Hobbes.
Session 3: Clausewitz, Liddell Hart.
Session 4: John Boyd, Doctrinal texts from US Joint Command & Central Intelligence Agency."
Lethe: Impressions of forgetfulness & concealment,"Through the works of Kant, Stiegler, Freud, and Lacan, this Seminar will embark on a philosophical trajectory through four discourses that take forgetting and forgetfulness as a theme in a transcendental context.

Session 1: Philosophical modernity and, in particular, the Enlightenment period can and should be read as, above all, a renewed reflection on the meaning and role of forgetting. While ever since ancient Greece, every possible object of thought could be given a place in the mental spaces of the ars memoria, only forgetting could not. The enlightenment period would go on to elevate forgetting to a faculty (Vermögen) in its own right. This can nowhere be seen better than in the writings of Immanuel Kant, who not only instituted forgetting as a faculty but furthermore elevated forgetting to a condition of possibility for autonomous thought and judgment.

""Only by turning away [Abwendung] from memory, as it still prevailed in the pre-existing doctrinal philosophy, could Kant become the 'great destroyer in the realm of thoughts [der große Zerstörer im Reiche der Gedanken]' (Heine) and the 'all-crushing [alles Zermalmende]' (Mendelssohn)."" (Harald Weinrich)

Session 2: By insisting on its technical and external prostheses, Stiegler opened a way to historicizing memory beyond philosophical anthropology. But mnemotechnics are always also lethotechnics, and vice versa. It is, however, the thought of forgetting in its relation to technics, which Stiegler finds in the figure of Epimetheus, that has, even in the work of philosophy's seminal thinker of forgetting (Heidegger), itself been forgotten. The excavation of the relation between technics and forgetting is the 'Leitmotif' of Stiegler's project.

'Epimetheus is not simply the forgetful one, the figure of essential witlessness that makes up all experience [...]; he is also the one who is forgotten. The forgotten of metaphysics. The forgotten of thought. And the forgotten of forgetting when thought thinks of itself as forgetting. Whenever Prometheus is spoken of, this figure of forgetting is forgotten, which, like the truth of forgetting, always arrives too late: Epimetheus.' (Bernard Stiegler)

Session 3: From the very beginning, Freudian metapsychology denied that memory-impressions fade or wane but, at the same time, defined the psychical apparatus as a tendency towards the inanimate. Yet, after the First World War, the same principle baffled analysis in the opacity of the traumatic neuroses. Freud was forced to posit a new, silent drive, a drive to dissolve bonds, to erase any trace.

""The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof."" (Sigmund Freud)

Session 4: To 'leave' something, let's say, a mark, doesn't always mean making a secure deposit. A trace might be something left behind. To leave is, ambivalently, a figure of memory in its positivity and of forgetting in its destitution, like Eros, the child of Poros and Penia. For Lacan, to complete analysis means to be forgotten by the Other and still desire because the Other, the place of language, is not a subject. Joyce's letter and litter, and Thomas's sicut palea ('manure,' he said, of his own tractates), echo what he had already admired in Sade's will and testament.

""The grave, once covered, is to be sown with acorns, so that, subsequently – its lot adorned once more, the thicket dense as before – the traces of my tomb will disappear below the surface of the earth, just as I flatter myself that my memory will fade, erased from the minds [esprits] of humans."" (Marquis de Sade's last will, signed at Charenton-Saint-Maurice on January 30, 1806)."
The Well-worn Knot: How Gilles Châtelet thinks about the Formal,"The philosopher Gilles Châtelet is an unfairly unknown thinker and activist. A contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Châtelet synthesized extensive research in physics, philosophy, politics, and economics in order to develop a philosophy emphasizing formalization as something emerging from the natural while at the same time extending the wild creativity of mind found in the tail end of French Rationalism. In a similar fashion Châtelet extracted a theory of the formal from German Romanticism and Idealism (especially Schelling) by emphasizing an epistemic movement from intuition, to the gesture, to the diagram, and finally to the sign. Following the romantic tradition, Châtelet saw the actions of thought as processes of nature reflected back to itself in this broad understanding of the formal where the diagram is the capture of the gesture before it is frozen in a letter or number. This Seminar will introduce Châtelet’s work with a particular emphasis on the gesture, the diagram and how they bring him close to, but keeps him apart from, the works and thoughts of Deleuze, Cavailles, and Merleau-Ponty.

Session 1-The Last Romantic.
Preface and Introduction to Figuring Space

Session 2-The Philosopher of Science: Chapter 5 “Electromagnetic Space” from Figuring Space

Session 3-The Critic of Averages: “The Average Man as Statistical Degradation of the Ordinary Man” from To Live and Think Like Pigs
Optional texts: “We Lived and Thought Like Pigs” by Liam Gillick, available at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/100/268837/we-lived-and-thought-like-pigs-gilles-chtelet-s-
devastating-prescience/
""Intro to Chatelet"" by Mohammad Salemy, available at http://thirdrailquarterly.org/wp-content/uploads/thirdrail_spring2015_final_msalemy.pdf

Session 4-The Angry Monist:
“Getting Hands on but with what?” from The Enchantment of the Virtual, Optional text: “Kant on Synthesis and Time,” Gilles Deleuze."
Publishing Workshop: Methodologies for Writing & Dissemination,"This Workshop presents publishing as a daily practice. Like memes, social media posts and conversations, publishing can take a meaningful role in the hyper circulation of information, if done reflectively, or just be a grain in a pile of sand, if just following the trends. This workshop looks to discern collectively between knowledge production and wishful thinking; between real obsessions and superficial purposes. It will focus on the publishing of Arts of the Working Class (AWC), a multi-lingual street journal on poverty and wealth, art and society. Both as a political pamphlet and a Gesamtkunstwerk (transdisciplinary art), AWC turns into a tool both of active organization and deep research. The two sides of this coin couldn’t be more contrasting For that reason, the Seminar invites Erin Segal, social worker and publisher of Thick Press, to talk about her work, as well as Jonas von Lenthe, to address the archival materials that are today.

Session 1-Introduction the structure and struggles of Arts of the Working Class: Publishing without certainties is to be certain about you look for in numbers, colors, contributions, paper materials, and shipping destinations. Introduction of the practical aspect of the Seminar

Session 2-Collaborating out of necessity and joy: A discussion with Thick Press (Erin Segal) as an example. as well as the presentation of their book projects. Disacussion of the name, form and content of the final project.

Session 3-Publishing as an interrelation to curatorial and archival work: The experience of Jonas von Lenthe and Wirklichkeit Books at Bauhaus Imaginista and Kunstverein München. Discussing and commenting on the final project's first draft.

Session 4-Wrap Up: How would you do it? Group Presentation, followed by peer-to-peer reviews, final look at the publication."
Metaphysics of Pop: The aesthetic structure of recorded music,"Pop music is probably the most impactful art form ever, even if only from a quantitative point of view. No other aesthetic category, movement, or object has ever reached that many people with such dominating force in a planetary scale. However, pop still lacks any serious effort to be understood in its own terms, that is, to be placed in a broader history of cultural artifacts as a galaxy of specific rituals and mythologies. Derived from the positions of Adorno or Bourdieu, the main theoretical pursuits to define pop so far have offered only its critique as a system of exchange, economic or symbolic. More than that: they have described pop as a variation of musical styles in addition of to a brand new art form shaped by recording media. These suppositions have inhibited a deeper survey of the signifying structures of pop, such as its common compositional morphologies, its relation to the electrical imaginary, its specific manipulation of time and space, its indexical performativity and construction of body doubles, and its unprecedented intimacy with processes of technogenesis. This Seminar will sketch a metaphysics of pop music based mostly on its aesthetic experience. Of course, such an analysis should not foreclose materialist notions – for example, the role that pop has played as a geopolitical weapon (i.e. the cold war), how it maps scenes onto territories, producing a standard historicization of the world or the very commodification of self in the name of """"democratizing genius"""". Of course, we cannot explain pop without discussing its continual uprooting of local traditions and racial formations and its claims of authenticity and universality. Pop is also the true and pretty face of the American military-industrial complex. Still, it can also be transcendental, and it possesses the most effective tools for worldmaking, for the design of atmospheres, for the embodiment of fantasies, and for the emancipation of collective intelligence through repetition, immersion, and dissociation. There is a phenomenology of pop listening and a poetics of the pop studio that philosophers and musicologists have ostensibly overlooked. The goal of this Seminar is to start bridging that gap.

Session 1-What Do We Mean By 'Pop'? We will discuss the most common theoretical approaches to pop music and sketch its short history, from folk to hyperpop, addressing issues of aesthetics, the socio-technical affordances, and the identity implications of globalized music.

Session 2-Poetics of the Studio: We will tackle the abilities awarded to music by the studio setting, such as free manipulation of time-space, indexical performativity, symbiosis with the technical apparatus, and the design of atmospheres, which lead to a common compositional morphology.

Session 3-Distribution, Mediation, Localization: We will address the aesthetic effect of the market and the media tools that archive, distribute, mediate, and localize pop music, detailing the phenomenology of listening to recorded music and the pop artist as the creator of a persona and a scene.

Session 4-Pop High Modernism: We will conclude by trying to see pop as an art form in itself, describing its rituals and mythologies of immersion, explosion, and emancipation to fit it into a wider history of art and agency.

This Seminar is offered in partnership with DIS. DIS is a New York-based platform for entertainment and education that invites leading artists and thinkers to expand the reach of key conversations bubbling up through contemporary art, culture, activism, philosophy, and technology."
The Draw of the Desert,"Nearly fifteen years after the publication of Cyclonopedia, twenty-one years after the English translation of Ibrahim al-Kuni’s Anubis: A Desert Novel, and fifty-eight years since the arrival of Frank Herbert’s Dune, this Seminar brings the logic of the desert in all its political, economic, technological, military and mystical mirages to the doorsteps of philosophy. Beginning with the rise of monotheism, moving towards esoteric tales of political strife by prophets, philosophers, travelers, soldiers, CIA agents and oil tycoons, we will embark on a journey where the idea of the desert coincides with the strongest ambitions of the humankind—failed or otherwise. This Seminar is designed to provide a set of armamentariums through which philosophers can be initiated to that Mundus Imaginalis we call the limit upon all thoughts, cunnings and discourses by those who still live on the planet earth."
Noise And Social Synthesis I: Reappraising Attali and the political economy of music,"The concept of noise has been the subject of a number of recent approaches. One may count amongst them Cecile Malaspina’s An Epistemology of Noise, Mattin’s Social Dissonance, Inigo Wilkins’ forthcoming Irreversible Noise, among many others. Common to these recent approaches is criticality towards the concept of noise as indexing a form of indeterminacy, or as embodying the negative, an approach that was exemplified, within a previous generation of noise theorists, by Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music. In a manner much of its own, the book offers a model of music as the sacrificial ritual of noise -modulating different forms the relationship of music to noise takes in the successive societal stages of representation, repetition, and, finally, composition. Far from being categories pertaining only to aesthetic theory, these are modes of organization of economy, foreshadowed, according to Attali, by the distinct connections music entertains to noise.

While agreeing with the more contemporary assessment of Attali’s “ineffabilism” in his use of the concept of noise, in this seminar we intend to critically reappraise Attali’s book under the light of two recent developments that are, in the face of it, unrelated to the concept of noise. The first would be Kojin Karatani’s reconstruction of the phases of political economy as different modes of intercourse as presented in his volume Structure of World History. The second would be the publication, by the collective Subset of Theoretical Practice, of its “Atlas of experimental politics”, where Karatani’s categories are used in a different context where they are seen as ways to operate (in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s parlance) social syntheses that beget different societal forms within a multilayered perspective on the constitution of social worlds. The initial hypothesis of the seminar stems from the possible coincidences between Attali’s periodization of the history of political economy, replicating his different aesthetic models of noise; and Karatani’s modes of intercourse: sacrifice/gift economy, or mode A; representation/plunder and redistribution, or mode B; repetition/capitalism or mode C. The parallel breaks, though in the prospective categories of Attali’s composition and of Karatani’s mode D, which corresponds to his idea of communism- to which a third hypothesis is adjoined in the figure of the STP’s communist hypothesis- that offers us an invaluable opportunity to discuss the prospective futures these frameworks are able to make thinkable.

Session 1-Introduction/Sacrifice: We introduce the basic tools to be referred to in the seminar while tackling Attali’s first mode of noise/music intercourse.

Session 2: Representation: We delve into the chapter on representation in Attali’s book. The enclosure of the space of performance and the use of money to purchase entrance makes it a hybrid category from the point of view of Karatani, mixing the State logic of enclosed spaces (mode B) with the fluid logic of value (Mode C).

Session 3-Repetition: The death of the author and the rise of molders are the object of the third session, which are read as symptoms of the stage of late capitalism in Attali’s book, which will be related to Karatani’s mode C. Also, the dependency relations between modes B and C, and the already capitalist stage of representation in Attali will be brought into the discussion of the category of repetition.

Session 4-Composition; Mode D; the Communist Hypothesis: The most polemical category, composition, is thought of by Attali as a way out of the control imposed by repetition. This category focuses on the disinterested pleasure in music-making, rehearsing a somewhat Kantian theme of emancipation from means to an end. But its focus on the individual makes it prone to Châtelet’s criticism of Attali as propounding an anarcho-mercantilist form of sociality. This will form an opportunity to propose anew a discussion of the communist hypothesis as presented by the Subset of Theoretical Practice, as the idea that the total space of possible organizations is bigger than the space of capitalist organizations. Whether this formulation is sufficient or not to escape Châtelet’s indictment will be the subject of the discussion."
Illusion Chamber: Unreality Laboratory 1,"This Seminar will function as an immersive laboratory that studies 15 varying chambers of illusion: Dream, Nightmare, Mirage, Hallucination, Fantasy, Figment (ghost/shadow), Spell, Simulation, Story, Vision, Rumor, Superstition, Miracle, Game, and Lie.

As we enter an age of virtuality, multiverses, inorganic life, and artificial intelligence, it becomes increasingly urgent to trace the long-winding and multifarious histories of illusion across time: from manuals of ancient alchemical circles to the prophetic episodes of medieval mystics, from narcotized poets to horror filmmakers, from contortionists, puppeteers, and circus performers to cosmetologists and mask-makers, from documented instances of mass hysteria to the secret languages of twins, from the folklore of shape-shifting beings to museums of optical, auditory, tactile, ambiguous, physiological, and cognitive illusions.

Each week’s discussion will rotate around the Seminar participants’ select findings as they bring whatever intricate, rare, and obscure examples from around the world to form an archive of the unreal. These examples can be derived from almost any region, era, genre, and medium so long as they experiment with the illusory category in question: mythology, literature, philosophy, anthropology, film, visual art, music, theater, dance, architecture, design, technological devices, video games, underground movements, urban legends, strange objects, ecological phenomena, biogenetic or perceptual distortions. Together, these samples will form their own display cases in an unparalleled collection, fragments that chart the many techniques at work across each rung of unreality’s ladder. If the Surrealists of 1924 wrote in their Revolution No. 1 Manifesto that “We are all at the mercy of the dream,” then our 2024 Lab will reverse this logic to claim now that “All dreams are at our mercy.”

Note: Since the content of each Session will be based on the participants’ individual catalogs, the only primary text we will read together throughout the entire Seminar is the recently-released, enigmatic Book of Sleep by Egyptian author Haytham El Wardany.

Session 1. Intro: History of Illusions
Session 2. Dream (sleep; wish) / Nightmare (fear; return)
Session 3. Mirage (despair; fatality) / Hallucination (drug; madness)
Session 4. Fantasy (wonder; impossibility) / Figment (ghost; shadow)
Session 5. Spell (concoction; utterance) / Simulation (spectacle; perfection)
Session 6. Story (recitation; turn) / Vision (future; radiance)
Session 7. Rumor (insinuation; shame) / Superstition (chance; ritual)
Session 8. Miracle (awe; otherworldliness) / Game (test; play) / Lie (distortion; malice)"
Philosophy of Thermodynamics,"Given the current climate crisis and its connection to energy extraction and consumption, philosophical reflections on scientific concepts such as energy, entropy, and information—each originating from the interrelated fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory—have assumed increasing theoretical and practical importance. Bernard Stiegler, for instance, coined the term ""Entropocene"" and dedicated a significant portion of his final writings considering how our current situation might very well be caused by an acceleration in the production of entropy at all levels, from the physical and biological to the psychical. If Stiegler's evaluation of the current situation is accurate, it is crucial that we research the history of these related disciplines' philosophical reception to grasp the current predicament's underlying causes and respond to it with prudence. This Seminar provides a succinct but thorough overview of the main philosophical currents that have turned to the study of thermodynamics, from the earliest reflections by neo-Kantians like Hermann von Helmholtz, Friedrich Lange, and Friedrich Nietzsche to the slightly later French reception by Henri Bergson and less well-known individuals like French epistemologists Pierre Duhem, Emile Meyerson and André Lalande. The Seminar will also cross the so-called disciplinary divide, discussing the mid-century Analytical accounts by philosophers such as Hans Reichenbach and Carnap and more recent work by Lawrence Sklar and David Z. Albert. Finally, it will summarize the present debates centered around figures such as Simondon, Stengers, and Stiegler. The scientific themes covered and the philosophical problems broached will include the direction and shape of time, the metabolic and energetic conditions of life, work, and society, the relation between entropy, information, complexity, and probability, the philosophical or metaphysical foundations of these related sciences as well as more speculative cosmological topics such as the beginning and end of the universe.

Session 1-Early Philosophical Reception of Thermodynamics: This first Session will give an overview of the science of thermodynamics, define the ""classical"" notions of energy and entropy (first and second law), as well as look at three early philosophical reflections: Lange's, Nietzsche's, and Marx and Engels'.

Session 2-French Epistemology and Post-War Philosophy: From Duhem to Simondon: We will look at the particularly French reception of classical thermodynamics, including several rather obscure figures who were themselves highly influential for Bergson's reflections on entropy and life, Duhem and Lalande. The Session will finish with an overview of some of Simondon's writings on energy and entropy taken from his work on Individuation.

Session 3-Statistical Mechanics and the Analytic Reception: Although remaining chronological, we will change tack to engage with the analytical response to statistical mechanics, which itself can be understood as the first major paradigm shift in thermodynamics, one that moved from a macroscopic understanding of energy and entropy to a microscopic probabilistic view. This Session will define the major differences between classical and statistical thermodynamics while looking at problems such as the law-like nature of entropy, chance, and the direction of time as well as foundational problems like science's requirement for theoretical reduction.

Session 4-Contemporary Debates: For many, the last Session will return to familiar ground and look at three contemporary authors: Stengers, Brassier, and Stiegler. The idea is that now having read the wider reception of thermodynamics by differentiating schools of thought from the 19th and 20th Century, it will now be possible to compare and analyze their claims and positions vis-a-vis energy, entropy, and information."
Post-Medieval Derangements V3.0,"In this experimental Seminar, we explore a wide range of derangements through texts about mental and spatial practices, strongly influenced by re-consideration of the post-medieval mind and post-medieval spaces as reciprocating mechanisms. The figure of the cornucopia (horn of plenty) will recur axiomatically throughout the Seminar as the exceptional discursive figure of hyper-desire, excess, wild production exessive proliferation, as well as profusion and pleroma. Fundamentally, we will expand the potentialities of a recurring medieval derangement of thought in our late modernity (new “dark ages”) - traced through select cases of obscure philosophy with populist psychic-fiction films - all for delivering desiring-production of alien temporalities and alien forms of thought for consideration. These include some examples of how untethering the linear mind of reason in favor of the medieval and surreal divergences can be made possible.

Session 1-Medieval Surrealism:The framing of this cornucopia comes from scent-select writings on medieval surrealism (from the Burn After Reading manifesto), which initiates our ride through the horn of plenty of theory. We will include clarification of plenitude through Pleroma, Pleromatica, and the automatic cornucopia that gives rise to automata and surrealist automatism.

Session 2-Neuro-Gothic Subjectivity: We will map the complexities of Gnostics and Neo-Platonists, the Bifurcated Soul and the Bifurcated Novum, soul-vehicles and distributed psyche, Gothic metaphysics, and a select Cyber-Goth Carnivalesque arising from the modern dust of austerity; and the judgment machines of loving grace for Sawing brittle spaces.

Session 3-Subtle Monstrous Body: We explore the discourse/figure interference patterns inside the subtle monstrous body; how new flesh demands new senses (and a substrate of non-sense); on becoming-chimera as a multiplicity of the self (one into many); on propagating the homunculus (initiating infinite recursions of the self); all figures deranged through some of Bataille’s excess expenditure protocols.

Session 4-Ecstatic Minds: We expand the ecstatic minds of creative derangement to come to a wider spectrum when turning to alien thought - from spirit possession and schizo-speech (influencing-machines, thought insertion, thought broadcasting); to consciousness bristling with hallucinations; and lesser forms of time travel (déjà vu, premonition and clairvoyance, blackout and psychogenic fugue).

This Seminar will project theory into multiple kernels of creative derangement practices, crossing, reconnecting, and assembling what interests the Students and Researchers by rapidly flowing free-style impulses out of the cornucopia of post-medieval mentalities, from one to many."
AI And the Cybernetic Lifeworld,"This Seminar proposes that AI and networked technologies more generally are hastening the establishment of a new and greater form of Edmund Husserl's Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) allowing for a radical reformulation of the ""we-subjectivity."" Presently there is a pervasively false assumption that AIs are and will be discrete entities, when in truth the social revolution caused by AI is about the interweaving of computational and informational systems into existing forms of being.

Beginning with Husserl's foundation of intersubjective historicity, this course will establish connections between its phenomenological method and its applications in science and technology, in particular Wilfrid Sellars's naturalization of Husserl's method and Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theory and its offshoots. ""AI"" as traditionally conceived will be shown to be only the tip of the iceberg and perhaps the future peak of a mountain, an inseparable part of larger and increasingly incomprehensible systems that I have termed as Meganets. In this Seminar, we will explore the form and function of our new, supra-human lifeworld.

Contemporary practical readings will supplement the theoretical material below.

Session 1-The Lifeworld in Technology and AI: Edmund Husserl
Session 2-AI's Doublet of the Manifest and Scientific"
Topological And Metabolic Approaches to Ontogenesis,"If asked what the world is made of, we can say it’s made of objects and categories, or we can say it’s made of stuff. This seminar takes the latter proposition, of stuff, substrate, field. But instead of asking what stuff the world is made of, we ask how stuff changes, how things, relations and sense resonate, emerge, transmute, and condition but do not determine one another. Repurposing Galileo’s legendary observation – Eppur si muove – we will read and discuss theories of dynamic, historicity, process, and temporality. Throughout this Seminar, we will:

Session 1: Workshop the most salient working notions from topological matter and dynamics so that they provide conceptual grips for subsequent sessions: transformation, process, continuity and field.

Session 2: Synthesize activating aspects of metabolism — beyond physics and beyond computation — from vegetal biology (Mauseth) and from emerging accounts of organism (Longo, Montevil, Kauffman);

Session 3: Alloy theories of ontogenesis and individuation (Alexander, Simondon, Sarti & Citti)

Session 4: Apply these notions to the problem of ""making sense in common"" (Brender, Deleuze, Morris, Stengers)."
"The Unique: Individualism, Egoism, Anarchy","This Seminar will delve into philosophies of anarchism and individualism that transcend or depart from the political and escape both identitarianism and collectivism. What does being individualistic, egoistic, and anarchic mean beyond common parlance? We will explore the existential autonomy of the anarch living outside of society and of social conformism through Max Stirner's 'The Unique'; the silent wine drinker of Michel Serres; the recluse aesthetes imagined by Decadent writers J.K Huysmans and Baudelaire; and the Brazilian witch Pomba Gira. Individualism, from these vantage points can be understood not only as a misadventure in fanciful delights but as a necessary part of the process of self-extraction. We will also unveil how only in caring for ourselves can we begin to care for each other as singular equals and not as generic representatives of groups, classes, identities, and states.

Session 1- Egoism with Adam Jones (Zer0 Books):
Max Stirner. Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own).
Jacob Blumenfeld. All Things Are Nothing to Me.

Session 2- Retreat:
J.K Huysmans. À Rebours.
J.K Huysmans. Hues of Red.

Session 3- Aloneness:
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh. 'Monomania (Aloneness)'. Part 20 of Omnicide.
Michel Serres. 'Tables.' Chapter in The Five Senses.

Session 4- Margins:
Catherine Crouch. Slaves of the Saints.
Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold. Pomba Gira and the Quimbanda of Mbumba Nzila."
Towards A Spectral Realism,"Death has always been a cosmo-politically charged, technically challenging, and philosophically salient issue. Concerns with overcoming it involve both taming its dynamics and minimizing its effects. The promise of some form of immortality – for example, through religious practice or trans-humanist projects – has been instrumental in various sorts of structures of governance. The quest for an afterlife has informed much of the human relation with their bodies and matter. In the tradition of Western metaphysics, immortality has been conceived in ways that associate its eternal presence and the suppression of the impact of time. This Seminar proposes to move away from metaphysics. Nonetheless, one must not reject this quest for immortality in favor of the transience of presences but rather consider immortality less as an eternal continuation of the present and more like an intermittence – much in the vein of what has been conceived as the effect of the specters.

Indeed, at least since Derrida’s early 90s reappropriation of the discourse on specters, there has been an interest in how the traces of death affect both social institutions and the natural world – perhaps bringing both the inorganic and the living together. This spectral turn is not fully unrelated to the contemporary speculative one that seemed to move away from Derridian deconstruction in favor of a fresh affirmation of some (post-)metaphysical realities. Derrida was adamant in claiming that the non-existence of specters was utterly irrelevant. But the irrelevance of their existence, combined with the relevance of their effects, poses some interesting problems concerning the character of reality – perhaps thought of as something other than medieval actualitas – and the way specters act. To look into these issues, the Seminar will deploy some considerations concerning memory – which will be taken as an incorrigibly intermittent phenomenon – that will enable a fresh look into deconstruction and some of its critics.

The Seminar will be composed of 4 Sessions:

Session 1-Hauntology and Messianicity: In this Session, the main issues of spectrality, diachrony, justice, and inheritance will be introduced in the context of the work of Derrida concerning Marxism and its ghosts. The unique and hauntological character of the reception of Marx in the last thirty years will be considered. This will serve as an introduction to the spectral in its contrast and its similarities with the speculative.

Session 2-The Spectral Turn: Specters appear to be not only unreal – and often the very paradigm of what is connected to appearance and illusion – but also elusive. The recent spectral turn paves the way not only for a different account of what is haunting but also for a critique of the very assumption that reality involves presences – in the present time – and not a network of resonances and disseminations.

Session 3-Violence, Death, and Specters (The Politics of Memory): There is a politics to the varieties of death – death is both a threat and an intensifier. Once politics is not a realm of the living, the dead are often reassembled differently to shift the face of the existing struggles. In this Session, we will look into other ways violence shapes the spectral, particularly in Latin American contexts.

Session 4-Towards a spectral realism: In this Session, my account of spectral realism will be presented in relation to the previous discussions concerning inheritance, memory, and immortality on the one hand and remarks concerning the nature of realism on the other. We will consider memory in its diachronicity and how it ushers in an approach to post-humanism that contrasts with the metaphysics of transhumanism."
Documentary Practice Workshop: Between Verification & Construction,"This Workshop introduces the participants to the investigative potential of audiovisual images. Through practical exercises such as spatially situated testimony collection, audiovisual reconstruction of places, and open-source intelligence (OSINT), participants will explore their personal research interests from a novel perspective and produce a piece in a medium of their choice.

We all carry cameras with us all the time, everywhere. This is why the narration of global events has undergone radical changes in the last decade. The impact of cell phone video and photography on documentary practice is evident in the documentation of social outbursts in Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Hong Kong. By finding dissemination on the internet, these audiovisual images bypass traditional channels of journalism and analysis, complicating the notion of source-truth. Their analysis and media framings play a vital role in worldmaking and the consolidation of political narratives. This Workshop will explore various research strategies, the conceptual development of projects, and innovative techniques to deal with testimony and editing.

Workshop outcomes:

-Fostering spatial analysis as a fundamental tool for the production of audiovisual narratives;
-Learning multiple forms of conducting interviews for the camera, including traditional interviews and situated testimonies;
-Strengthening critical thinking skills through verification and research tools;
-Exploring ways to investigate using audiovisual tools combined with open-source intelligence techniques;
-Understanding audiovisuals as tools for contemporary research and politics.

Session 1:
-Introduction to the students, workshop presentations, and objectives.
-Discussion of the final project and guidelines for the pitching exercise.
-Explanation of the technique of Situated Testimony and its relevance in contemporary audiovisual research.
-We will be referencing works by Gianfranco Rossi, Forensic Architecture, and Errol Morris to understand the application of situated testimony.

Session 2:
-Provide technical insights and support for the final project.
-Students propose/pitch their final projects, sharing their research interests and ideas.
-Introduction to Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and its role in audiovisual research and documentation.

Session 3:
-Exploration of soundscape, listening, and video editing techniques.
-Lecture on the significance of soundscapes in audiovisual narratives and how to effectively use them in investigative practices.

Session 4:
-Students will present their projects
-Each project will be critically evaluated and discussed by peers, providing feedback
-Review and discussion of various creative approaches and methodologies used in the projects. 
-Closing remarks."
Techne Beyond Monoculture III,"This Seminar consists of a series of discussions with guests from the fields of philosophy, art, media theory and digital humanities, taking aim at the idea that capitalist techno-rationality is the only available paradigm for technology. The use of the Ancient Greek term tékhnē, in the title of this seminar, signals a broader perspective on technology, situating today’s concerns, notably about the simulation of intelligence and the challenge of deep-fakes, in the context of the ancient distrust of tékhnē as a form of trickery or mere mimesis. This ambivalence toward technology, as something that is historically revered and feared as both remedy and poison (pharmakon), is in fact indissociable from the technical mediation of culture. This calls for a broader understanding of technology, encompassing the artful and skilful mediation of nature, as well as the invention of objects unknown in nature. While our understanding of nature has changed beyond recognition from that of the Ancient Greek, it is now more urgent than ever to discern the critical role that our attitude to technology plays, both as a catalyst of the climate crisis and as key factor of its (still) possible mitigation.
  
The Seminar will engage with the critical contemporary relevance of issues such as:

- The relation between Knowing and Doing (Episteme and Techne).
- The relation between Intelligence (Nous), Wisdom (Sophia)and Practical Wisdom (Phronesis/Prudence). 
- The challenge of Epistemological Noise (Malaspina) in the relation between the Human Sciences and STEM subjects.
- The formulation of transdisciplinary problems. 
- The Criteria and Virtues necessary for a Synergy of Cultural, Ecosystemic and Biodiversity.
- The role of Technodiversity (Hui) in addressing Climate Change.
- The emancipation of technology from Capitalist monoculture."
"Prompt-Writing Workshop: Hybrid Intelligence, Generative AI & Human Creativity","In this eight-session workshop split into two modules and featuring Guests who have been experimenting with these AI tools, we work within the emerging field of AI-powered content creation and tap into its potential to augment and enhance human creativity. Oriented toward the hybrid intelligence of the human and the machine to achieve a common goal, the participants will learn about prompt writing through exercises and managing the output of multiple AI tools. They will produce works that neither humans nor machines can achieve independently. Participants will work on their own animated storytelling project using ChatGPT and other tools AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, providing text-to-image, text-to-video, text-to-audio, video-to-video, and image-to-image output as well as voice creation. The aim is to craft narratives that go beyond the conventional boundaries of non-AI media. The participants will also learn to deal with the ethical implications of AI in content creation and the need for responsible use of the technology, including concerns about job displacement, bias in AI algorithms, and the political considerations around using AI to create content that can deceive or manipulate audiences.

Session 1: Course + GENAI introduction + ChatGPT script generation with Mohammad Salemy 

DESCRIPTION:

 \tA brief overview about the 8 sessions of our seminar with an introduction to generative AI. 
 \tStart working with ChatGPT to build a narrative for the final project.

READINGS:

 \tBoris Groys: From Writing to Prompting: AI as Zeitgeist Machine, e-flux notes (https://www.e-flux.com/notes/553214/from-writing-to-prompting-ai-as-zeitgeist-machine)

TOOLS: ChatGPT, WhyBot

OUTCOME: 1x Narrative Overview + 1x Script

Session 2: Image Generation
DESCRIPTION:

 \tWe teach you how to use Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and other image creation tools.
 \tHere we will experiment together and learn tricks for more efficient image generation.
 \tBuilding prompts to illustrate the narrative we created in session 1.

TOOLS: Midjourney, Stablediffusion, Dall-E, Real Ersgan

OUTCOME: 10x Images

Session 3: Prompting and Making a World  | Guest, Jon Rafman.

DESCRIPTION: Evolution of AI Prompting and its implications, discussions with our guest Jon Rafman.

READINGS: Text by JON RAFMAN: AI Prompt Manifesto and a Graphic Novel titled  MACHINE ELVES  available on the Class folder https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1mL9ZV4RJpSD9rl87ZvMjN-LTUDzlKhZH

Session 4: Video Generation | Guest: Neon Internet & Elliott Highmore
DESCRIPTION: We will teach you how to make videos with Runway_GEN2, Kaiber and wonder dynamics, exploring how to work with AI for video

Session 5: Guest: Rômulo Moraes
DESCRIPTION: We explore the relationship between sound as a support for imagery in a narrative setting. 

READINGS: 

 \tMusic, Spirit Possession and the Copyright Law: Cross-Cultural Comparisons and Strategic

Speculations by Martin Rudoy Scherzinger

 \tA Theory of Vibe by Peli Grietzer

TOOLS: Sound Generation: Voice Over, SFX, Soundtrack

Session 6: SFX Sound

DESCRIPTION: We continue the creative experiments with music tools for the final result.

Session 7: Guest: Erica Love
DESCRIPTION: We discuss the relationship between the future of work and the arts.

READINGS: Text recommended by Erica Love:

 \tMarcel Broodthaers, Interview With A Cat, Recorded at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Düsseldorf, 1970.Audio in French or translation and transcription in English: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/136/538900/interview-with-a-cat/ 
 \tYuk Hui, Imagination and the Infinite—A Critique of Artificial Imagination, Balkan Journal of Philosophy. Volume 15, Issue 1, 2023. 

TOOLS: Hugging Face, Google Research

OUTPUT: 1x Voice Over + 5x SFX + 1x Soundtrack

Session 8: Final Session

DESCRIPTION:

 \tWe watch all the final videos together and talk about what we have learned. 
 \tConversation about what will be the next logical steps for everyone"
"Cybernetics in China, an Introduction","Cybernetics, or ""control theory"" as it is known in Chinese, rose to prominence in the middle of the 20th century as the syncretic philosophical, social, and technical language of feedback systems. While the background of its founding figures in the United States, from Norbert Wiener to Gregory Bateson, are well-studied, less is known about the lineage of cybernetics in China. 

This Seminar will begin by focusing on the life and work of Qian Xuesen, the key protagonist of cybernetics in China, and his trajectory from being an engineer of ballistic systems to his influence as a theorist of social, ecological, and industrial systems. Alongside his work as a mathematician and engineer, the later Qian Xuesen was also a strong advocate of Qigong and paranormal research. Through Qian, we will examine the influence of cybernetic thought and its diffusion in the 20th century China in events such as the efforts to redesign the agrarian economy during the Great Leap Forward and the discourses around population modeling and control that underpinned the One Child Policy. 

We will then broaden our scope to consider China's experience of cybernetic thought as an expression of the ""organic materialism"" (Needham) found in the history of Chinese science and Taoism. As in the United States and the Soviet Union, the figure of cybernetics in China faded away towards the end of the 20th century through its subsumption into other social and scientific disciplines. We will explore the presence of cybernetics in Chinese scientific discourse and science fiction of the 1980s, approaches to AI research, and international relations.

The four Sessions will explore the following: 

Session 1, Intro to cybernetics overall; Qian: We will discuss the non-Western connections of cybernetics, including Norbert Wiener's own correspondences with Chinese colleagues, Chinese cybernetician Qian Xuesen's life and work, and the understudied project of the open complex giant system (OCGS) that he proposed in the late 1980s.

Session 2, Cybernetics and social theory: We will examine various social theories in China that were contemporary to and inspired by cybernetics, including science and mass movements in the socialist period, the debate on alienation in the 80s, as well as cybernetics-backed population control policy.

Session 3, Aesthetics of Chinese cybernetics: The popularisation of cybernetics in China has inspired art, sci-fi novels, and films since the 1980s. We will review a selection of works to decode questions such as man-machine relations.

Session 4, Scientific and political conceptual legacy: We will assess the political legacy of cybernetics in China, such as how complex system thinking manifests in theories of politics and geopolitics and its scientific legacy in science policy in China today."
"Open Worlds, Universal Design: Geopolitics of the Multiverse","Across eight lectures with guests, this Seminar invites leading thinkers and designers to present their current work engaging the impact of artificial intelligence and emerging infrastructures [blockchain/cryptocurrency] on 'worldmaking,' with a specific provocation asking what the role of open world and universal design thinking might be in advancing planetary scale transformations- of cities, architecture, infrastructure, culture, biology, and cognition. 

There are mathematical, formal & logical systems that underwrite nearly all the infrastructures within which we live today: increasingly subject to various 'formal systems' that subscribe to completely different ontologies of being and action. Thus for perhaps the first time in history, infrastructures and the Marxist notion of fixed (frozen/slowed) capital are sensitive and responsive to those alternate 'belief systems.'

What's at stake today is the extrapolation and amplification of  a moment in European history, at the end of WW2, when Kojeve wrote a recommendation to DeGaulle suggesting that the French Empire was no more and that the way forward was to foster a simultaneously linguistic, cultural, gestural, and quotidian practice that would bind France and the Latin Empire together - even into North Africa- thus making possible a coalition built on a form of what he termed ""neuropolitics."" 

We can ask to what degree neuropolitics might be part of a 'structure of feeling' (R. Williams) that would bring a people --a mass, class or group-- to awareness- or would bring them to a fever dream where, to paraphrase Goebbels' words, they knew the words of the song in their dreams without knowing how they knew it or even without knowing that they knew it.

A psychologically oriented neuropolitics has precisely transformed the game of designing planetary infrastructures/systems. But, instead of relying on low-resolution models and the preexisting knowledge of how neuro-capture might operate, the new companies, sensors, algorithms have microsecond-length engagements in fine details with hundreds of millions of pulsing entities consisting of humans and non human nodes. This Seminar will take up these themes in the context of the guests' work to speculate on tactics and strategies and to imagine near and mid-term design outcomes.

Guests recruited for this Seminar so far are Marcos Novak, Ezio Blasetti & Danielle Willems [MAETA Design], Lydia Kallipoliti and Jillian Crandall"
Archaeology of the Final Decade: System Design in Research & Exhibition-Making,"The ideas discussed across four Sessions of this Seminar cover the theoretical, methodological, and formal frameworks for a new form of exhibition-making while considering the ethics and politics of condemned, obscured, and precarious art histories. It grapples with issues pertaining to power, radical democracy, conflict, activism, art, and culture in peril. We will discuss models for dismantling conventional histories and concrete strategies for confronting dominant forms of thought, representation, practice, and interpretation. Based on the Instructor's previous series of exhibitions under the rubric of ""Archaeology of the Final Decade,"" the models discussed in this Seminar are forensic investigations, constructive system designs, and performative counteractions to escape, bypass or refute pre-existing knowledge systems and their manifestation in art culture and exhibition making.

Session 1: The Politics of Erasure: the theoretical layout of archaeological curation.
Session 2: Interconnectedness and System-Making: Methodological approach of the practice.
Session 3: Memory, Archive, and Form: Reanimating archives as the primary form of the practice.
Session 4: Conclusion, Student Presentations."
The Age of Computational Desire: Towards a New History of Culture in the 2020s,"By 2005 “postmodernism” had outlived its usefulness as a theoretical concept for understanding the present time. Instead, others suggested “network culture” and “metamodernism,” as new frameworks to understand a period in which the Internet became central to everyday life, culture, and economy. By 2010, it was clear to thinkers interested in the subject that network culture would last a decade, after which a new constellation would take hold.

This Seminar sketches the technological outlines of the post-COVID era. Old corporate models of network culture, characterized by the five most prominent global technology corporations, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FAANG) are decaying, cryptocurrencies are questioned and devalued as we see the rapid rise of various forms of Artificial Intelligence that, as yet, have no capacity for inherent cognition but uncannily predict the relationship of immediately-adjacent or related elements. This Seminar probes the consequences of these transformations, tracking how the very structure of networks transformed political forms and discourses. The Seminar asks, can a new political order be constructed around these shifting technological structures? What will this new era’s markets and economies look like?

Session 1: From Postmodernism to Network Culture. Marx, Jameson, and the concept of totality
Session 2: Network Theory. Social Networks, the perils of influence, and the promises of decentralization
Session 3: Artificial Intelligences and computational desire, or Hegel and singularity
Session 4: Jackpot Theory from Dark Accelerationism to Angelicism"
"Kants Critique of Judgment: Purposiveness, the Beautiful, and the Sublime","For this Seminar, we will read Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), also known as the third Critique. Despite Kant's earlier claim to have enumerated, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), all of the universal and necessary principles of the objectivity of objects, the later Critique of the Power of Judgment deals with several ""unruly things."" This is necessary since there are, Kant claims, several things that resist the supposedly universal and necessary conditions of objects of experience put forward in the Critique of Pure Reason. Upon encountering one of these unruly things, we are puzzled. But how is it possible to encounter such unruly things in experience and thus as part of nature, while it is at the same time impossible to a priori account for their possibility?

In this Seminar, we will look at Kant's claim that there is a specific sense in which one can ""make sense"" of such unruly things. It might not be possible to cognize these unruly things, specified as living and beautiful things. Still, by introducing a difference between determining and reflecting judgment, a difference that had not yet been in place in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that it is nevertheless possible to reflectively judge (beurteilen) them according to an altogether different principle. As we will see, this principle is called purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit). This two-part Seminar will introduce the Critique of the Power of Judgment within the context of Kant's overall project before focusing on the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, the book's first part. We will look at the function and structure of aesthetic judgment and purposiveness, before spending one Seminar each on the meaning and function of the Seminar and the sublime within Kant's critical philosophy. This Seminar will be followed by a second part, focused on the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment.

The Seminar will take place in English and work with the English translations of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy provided by Cambridge University Press:
–Kant, Immanuel, 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by P. Guyer, E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–Kant, I., 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated into English by Guyer and Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–Kant, Immanuel, 1996. Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy. Translated by M.J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press."
Learning How to Die: Socratic Discipline & the Philosophical Life,"This Seminar further examines the systematic integrity of Socratic thought in its theoretical and practical aspects. After our excursion into the Last Days of Socrates, in which philosophy becomes explicitly defined as the art of learning how to die with ease, the second part of this Seminar confronts key middle and late Platonic dialogs: the Theaetetus, Sophist, Parmenides, Philebus and Timaeus. In these dialogs, as we shall see, Plato enacts a profound re-elaboration of key metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical tenets of Socratic thought, realizing the synthesis of Parmenidean dialectic and Pythagoreanism announced in the Phaedo during Socrates’ final hours. Escaping the perceived skepticism of Heracliteanism and its maligned expression in Athenian democracy at the hands of the sophists, this proposed synthesis of dialectics with a mathematical realism also becomes key to transforming the Socratic conception of The Philosophical Life. In this way, we shall see, Plato’s articulation of Truth, Beauty, and Justice reflect not transcendent metaphysical platitudes but the systematically cohesive regulative ideals organizing the integrity of speculative, aesthetic, and ethico-political functions of thought.

We shall accordingly observe how Plato confronts a series of perennial philosophical questions and problems: the articulation between being and becoming; the dialectical tension between that which ""is"" and ""is not';"" the One and the Many; the analytic procedure of the method of division and its articulation with the synthetic method of dialectical ascent; the relation between pleasure and knowledge as they inform ethical reasoning. Along the way, we will engage in a continuous assessment of the critiques and appropriations of Platonism since the modern period and until today in different strands of materialist and realist thought: from dialectical materialism to structuralized psychoanalysis, neorationalism, structural realism, and speculative materialism."
Notes from Immediate Irreality,"Written from a hospital bed on the outskirts of Romania, Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a note from another world – one that becomes ours. Although it has taken almost ninety years to reach us, the immediate irreality that the text emerges from and that is intensified through its descriptions remains there for us to inhabit and expand upon. This Seminar explores variations on the unique fusion of presence and projection that opens a space of immediate irreality, both immediately perceptible to the senses and moving beyond the presumed limits of the real. We will trace passages into the hallucinatory, the virtual, the elemental, the animal, and the spiritual in order to seek out and intensify their stirrings. And we will do so especially through perhaps the most humble, ubiquitous, and least likely medium: the note. While notes (written, voiced, sounded, sketched, imaged, performed…) imply distance, separation, boundaries, and abbreviations, they also depend on unspoken affinities and are carried by open-ended and shared ephemerality. Notes from immediate irreality are evocations from elsewhere, inviting us to enter a space of collective fascination where our outlines and those of the world begin to blur.

Session 1. Imaginary–Presence
–Max Blecher, The Lighted Burrow (selections)
–Reinaldo Arenas, The Color of Summer (letters)

Session 2. Sensory–Movement
–Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (selections)
–Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (selections)

Session 3. Metamorphic–Flicker
–Bruno Schulz, Selected Letters
–Fred Moten, The Touring Machine (pt. 2)

Session 4. Inhuman–Vision
–Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild (selections)
–Ernst Jünger, Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon"
"Money, Desire & the Body: Economic exchange & perversion","Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency is a dense essay that denounces capitalism as a perverse regime of universal prostitution. As he explains, institutional norms are not substantially different from the rules governing the secret societies of crime described by Sade in his novels. In both cases, money is the condition for buying and selling bodies in order to provide oneself with the means to satisfy desires: the difference is that the Sadian pervert act for the sake of self-enjoyment under the spell of a phantasm, whereas economic agents are compelled by needs and they strive for acquiring the fabricated objects that are essential for maintaining their body for reproductive ends. However, as Klossowski claims, economic institutions are but the result of an impulse or a desire for the moralistic repression of the driving force of gratuitous (unproductive) self-enjoyment in order to preserve the integrity of the body, i.e., the basic property that allows for production and monetary exchange. 

In response to the destructive and repressive outcomes of Sade and the world of industrial fabrication, Living Currency is a thought experiment that imagines a reality finally free from prostitution (the monetization of bodies) since bodies are identified with currency: this would allow for the free exchange of bodies as well as for considering the body as wealth (the multiplicity that can be spent rather than the site of lack) by undermining the notion of an individual property. Despite its provocative originality, the influence of this essay cannot be underestimated: Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of desiring-production and Lyotard’s libidinal economy are directly inspired by Klossowski’s theory of pre-subjective impulses, while Foucault’s reflection on the function of money is derived from his concept of simulacrum. In the first part of this Seminar, we will read Living currency after having introduced its author. In the second part, we will investigate how Klossowski’s transgressive thought was appropriated and transformed by the main figures of post-structuralist economic theory."
Hegelian Logic & Analytic Philosophy,"It is trivial to say that the rejection of Hegel is foundational to analytic philosophy. According to standards introduced by Russell and Moore, Hegelianism, of which they were at one point acolytes, upheld a form of thoroughgoing Idealism that prevented the possibility of external relations, not only between thought and the world but between concepts themselves. One-sided as it is, this view has proven to be influential for a few decades within analytic circles. In contrast, these other two authors count as the principal harbingers of a sea change in these attitudes toward Hegel: Robert Brandom and John McDowell. But are they true to Hegel’s ideas?

This Seminar tackles the issue of the reception of Hegelian philosophy within analytic circles, addressing ambiguities such as the relationship between Kantian and Hegelian logic; the lingering influence of Aristotle on Hegel; the status of dialectics and contradiction, and its interpretation in the analytic reception of Hegel. For that aim, we shall use Paul Redding’s Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought as a guide throughout the Seminar while branching out to different sources and texts that may add to the problems within Redding’s texts.

Session 1. Two contemporary analytic routes to Hegelianism Focusing on Redding’s first two chapters, we present the appropriations of Hegel performed by Brandom and McDowell, in tandem with the first three sessions of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which works like a continuing thread to the Seminar, grounding Hegel’s critique of the Given while unfolding his inferentialism.

Session 2. The critique of transcendental logic Hegelian logic departs from Kant’s transcendental logic not only because of its embrace of contradiction (in a sense to be fleshed out in our last session) but also in its jettisoning of the separation between intuition and concepts. In this session, we trace some consequences of that critique in Hegel and its contemporary inferentialist appropriation.

Session 3. Between Aristotle and Frege, we examine the hybrid character of Hegel’s logic, which keeps some elements of Aristotelian term logic while developing some elements of Kantian logic that point towards Frege. This will enable us to differentiate between types of negation operative in Hegel’s logic in preparation for the subject of the last session.

Session 4. Using Redding’s chapter 7 and branching out to Michela Bordignon’s paper “Contradiction or not contradiction?”, we compare interpretations of Hegel’s contradiction, focusing primarily on the Brandomian conception of material incompatibilities and Graham Priest’s concept of the inclosure schema."
The Impetus of the Soul: Hume’s Philosophy of Force & Vivacity,"David Hume is not merely a footnote to Kant’s awakening from his dogmatic slumber, or for that matter, critical philosophy in its incandescent glory. He is first and foremost the trademark name for that unbridled worry and anxiety that philosophy subtly administers to the deepest recesses of any soul accustomed to its ways, and equally those who reject them. Laid bare in plain English and freed from all floral vapidities which often accompany intellectual hubris, Hume’s works are too crisp and pointed to be mistaken for anything other than what they really are: diamond wedges shot from a canon aimed at the fortified walls of various notions and manifestations of intellectual laxity, theoretical self-aggrandizement in the name of critique and most importantly, the unexamined tenets of all learnings in general. 

This two-credit Seminar engages with the sphinx of modern philosophy, David Hume. The focus will be Hume’s philosophy of force and vivacity as a processual doctrine of passions and ideas most notably examined under the rubric of imagination and its relation to time. In line with our previous Seminar, The Vicious Transparency of Time an inquiry into the nature of inner time-consciousness via Husserl, this seminar reanimates Hume as a cipher for philosophical revenge upon some of the most cherished orthodoxies of transcendental philosophy. Hume will be introduced as a philosopher whose method foils any premature attempt at a resolution made under either the aegis of empiricism or under the banner of rationalism."
Techne beyond Monoculture Part Two,"This Seminar addresses an aspect of the critique of technology that tends to conflate what is derogatively called techno-scientific rationality with the rationality of capitalism. Given the indispensable role of technology in addressing climate change, and its intrinsic relation to the natural and human sciences, this Seminar seeks to turn the tables of critique by asking: what are the conditions of possibility for science and technology, not only to serve the common good but to foster creativity and diversity that is sensitive to the dynamic evolution of cultural and ecosystemic specificities. In other words, how must we rethink the sprawling of contemporary tékhnē in order to emancipate it from capitalist monoculture and from the inanity of its performance principle?

2023 presents the second iteration of this Survey Seminar, which started in 2022. The inspiration for the first iteration of this Seminar was a presentation by Japanese Shokunin (master craftsmen) Shuji Nakagawa and Takahiro Yagi at Japan House on 2nd June 2022, which raised questions about the innovative relations between traditional crafts and high-tech design and industry, throwing into relief outmoded oppositions between hand-crafted objects that are valued as culturally representative of specific places or regions, and the industrial,- standardized production of objects that are devalued as tokens of a globalized consumer monoculture.

This Survey Seminar features innovative and leading thinkers and practitioners, ranging from philosophy to design, from engineering to political theory and aesthetics, to develop a transversal inquiry into the conditions of possibility for a technodiversity capable of espousing and synergizing with cultural-, ecosystemic- and biodiversity. The emphasis on the Greek term tékhnē intends to open a wider philosophical angle on the objects, dynamics, behaviors, and networks that mediate our relationship with the world and with others—as a timely reminder of the Greek correlation between tékhnē and governance, as well as rhetorics. What encompasses tékhnē is not only the exchange of ideas but also that of specialized materials and tools. This exchange is, as Levi-Strauss remarked, characteristic of humanity: isolated societies are inert societies, and only societies in contact with each other progress (Montaigne après Montaigne, Paris: Ehess, 2016). In turn, it is of the utmost urgency to question the grounds on which so critical a part of human inventiveness is cajoled into the capitalist performance principle and ensuing monoculture, to which techno-scientific rationality is all too readily reduced."
Exuberance & Extinction: On Why Anything Matters,"Any account of value, or why we should live one way rather than another, must face the challenge posed by the possibility of extinction. Let us consider the possibility that at some point in the far future, the universe will come to an end, taking intelligent life and all its achievements with it, leaving nothing at all behind. There are even comparatively smaller catastrophes that may consume our civilization, our species, or terrestrial life in its entirety. So much of our thinking about the nature of value depends upon some substitute for immortality, some unspoken eternity, that the mere possibility of extinction is enough to force the choice between faith and nihilism that philosophy has been trying to defuse since Nietzsche. To entertain the possibility of cosmological annihilation is already to admit the disenchantment of nature insofar as it unravels every organic purpose the cosmos and every fragile creature spawned within it might have, from the cancellation of apotheosis backwards. What’s at stake here is nothing less than severing the logical order of means and ends from the temporal order of origins and endings. This is the denaturalization of value that follows upon disenchantment.
 
This Seminar works out the parameters of the challenge of extinction and sketches a response to it – to outline an answer to the question, ‘Why does anything matter?’ In the process, we will consider the role that personal mortality, personal autonomy, and the architecture of selfhood and desire play in securing the possibility of meaning. We will examine anti-natalist perspectives that welcome earthly extinction and pro-natalist perspectives that demand we tile our light cone with as many happy faces as we can. We will explore the contrast between the monopolization of means implied by the logic of scarcity and the proliferation of ends encouraged by the economics of abundance, confronting survival and efficiency with exuberance and excess. This will lead us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and ethics and to exhibit an essential connection between the value of beauty and the flourishing of freedom."
The Child's Imagination: Studies of Cinematic Fantasy,"This Seminar explores the strange contours of the child's imagination and its relation to the fantastical. How does childish fantasy entertain a mode of pretending that is neither pure dream nor nightmare but rather something more exotically dangerous than both? To answer this, we will track the spaces and characters who haunt their visions through the prism of several iconic films of the 1980s: Labyrinth; The Never Ending Story; Legend; Time Bandits; Willow; The Princess Bride; and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (among references to others like The Dark Crystal, Where the Wild Things Are, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spirited Away, Alice In Wonderland, The Hobbit, Pan's Labyrinth, and The Wizard of Oz).

These excursions into the dark and light content of childlike perceptions will allow us to radically alter our innocence, fear, wish, and appearance philosophies. Moreover, their cinematic image worlds will come close to unlocking the child's attraction to eeriness, risk, malformation, secrecy, tantrum, wonderment, and desertion—all the while falling infinitely short as they remind us that these representations are still but the adult's idea of the child's imagination. Hence, we might challenge ourselves to speculate: What would the pure fantastical consciousness of the child actually look like?"
Writing the Impossible Object,"Writing the Impossible Object is a three-credit Workshop Seminar focusing on the creation and writing of theory, fiction, and theory-fiction. Aided by our Guest Speakers, we will chart a novel path through entangled canons of writing from and about ideas: bodies of writing in which theoretical and imaginative forms collapse into one another. We will emphasize the uncanonizable and ludic aspects of what has recently been gathered under the umbrella of theory-fiction, such that we may approach matters of genre with an attitude of ‘yes, and…’

Supported by breaks of either a fortnight or a month between Sessions to allow participants to write, they will be asked to produce several shorter pieces of writing and one more substantial text over the 7-month duration of the Seminar, and indeed to work in genres in addition to written prose. Podcasts, videos, essay films, long-form social media, and comics are all possible forms to be explored here. The majority of Sessions will begin with conversations with guests on their own writing and their advice for young writers. They include Reza Negarestani, Huw Lemmey, K Allado-McDowell and others to be confirmed.

These conversations will straddle genres and trouble the distinctions between them. We will examine techniques and processes for creating texts, spanning from the Renaissance commonplace book to avant-garde plagiarism. In the last hour of each Session, we will form smaller groups to give and receive feedback in an environment that fosters risk-taking and an understanding approach to feedback and criticism.

The Seminar will culminate in a publication featuring the work of course Participants, who will also be encouraged to create their own publications, solo or jointly, throughout the Seminar."
Groundless: An Introduction to Vilém Flusser,"The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser is now mostly known as a media theorist and techno-futurologist, due to a disproportionate academic interest by media theorists in his later works. However, these later works, originally written in German, in the 1980s, seldom capture essential aspects of Flusser's thought, his ulterior motives such as his deep connection with Jewish mysticism and eschatology, and programmatic developments such as his culture shock after migrating from a war-ridden Europe to an effervescent São Paulo. Adding to this complexity, a sizable part of his earlier work, originally written in Portuguese throughout a 30-year period, is either still untranslated or was translated by Flusser himself and altered into alternative texts in the process. 

This Seminar will provide a critical introduction to Vilém Flusser, with a focus on under-acknowledged works first published in Brazil and in dialogue with avant-garde intellectuals and cultural formations at the periphery of global discourses. We will approach Flusser as an interdisciplinary thinker with broader conflicting interests surrounding radical revisions and playful experimentations with art and philosophy, particularly with two seemingly opposing figures that shaped the 20th century: Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Above all, we will try to grasp Flusser as a non-systematic visionary who always put enthusiasm and vitality at the center of his thought, and who inadvertently pioneered contemporary frameworks such as speculative realism, theory-fiction, and synthetic philosophy.

Session 1: Flusser, the Uprooted Phenomenologist: We will introduce the Seminar sessions and recount Flusser's biography, as well as discuss his essayistic style of writing and intuitionist method of philosophy in the context of his religious existentialist and phenomenological background. We will also address Flusser's idea of ""groundlessness"" vis-a-vis his relation to Brazilian culture, especially concrete poetry.

Session 2: Flusser, the Philosopher of Language: We will discuss Flusser's radically constructivist theory of languages as worlds in themselves, his typology of gestures and the role of translation in his personal adventures with thought. The research, context and arguments of his first book will serve as a basis for us to understand all subsequent products of his reflections.

Session 3: Flusser, the Philosopher of Nature: We will discuss Flusser's radically immanent theory of nature as a diabolical game of permutations whereby history unfolds through incessant abortions of possibilities. We will address Flusser's critique of the scientific model, his exploratory ontology of animal life, and his para-fantastical notions of reality.

Session 4: Flusser, the Media Theorist, Revisited: We will revisit Flusser's popular trilogy of later works and the most common debates around his thought and character, positing those as later developments of his earlier works. We will reevaluate his most famous concepts such as apparatus, program, information, conversation, entropy, play, etc., in light of their origins on his general cosmovision."
Variations on the Great Refusal,"In this Seminar, we will put our finger on the pulse of the crepuscular aesthetics of our times. What are the vital stats of our imaginative powers of contestation in 2021? How do disenchantment and despair feed into contemporary variations on the theme of the Great Refusal? How does the speculative dimension of aesthetics co-exist with the erosion of the natural and cultural commons, the crises of mass migration in the context of climate chaos, or the feedback of vaccine inequity in the ongoing pandemic? 

In the historical conjunction marking our generation of creatives, two alternatives present themselves to the obsession with GDP growth and blind faith in technological solutions to the ecological crisis: on the one hand, we are confronted with the apocalyptic aesthetics of the Anthropocene, shearing the world into the options of doom or rebirth; on the other hand we see an escapist projection of the imagination onto a post-human future. However, traversing these great tendencies, and renewing the idea of the Great Refusal in unexpected ways, is a speculative vein in aesthetics and philosophy. 

In this Seminar, we will investigate the contradictory destiny of this expression, the Great Refusal, as punctuated by Dante Alighieri, Herbert Marcuse, and Alfred North Whitehead: as (1) denoting the abdication of responsibility before the events that life lays at our feet (those who refuse to step up, who are suspended in time, neither alive nor dead, in the antechamber of Dante’s hell); (2) a second sense, which implies the opposite of Dante’s contempt for the cowardly refusal to step up: the Great refusal of all forms of oppression and domination animating all revolutionary and emancipatory movements (Marcuse). (3) Lastly, there is the more subtle notion of the Great Refusal in Alfred North Whitehead. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead revives the poignancy of Dante’s expression, the great refusal.[1] But he directs the sting of its condemnation at the full breadth of its metaphysical reach. 

At stake are not only the events from which we cannot step back without becoming shadows of ourselves. Whitehead’s use of Dante’s expression, the Great Refusal, refers to the denial of a ‘vital truth.’ The vital truth that must be rescued from reductive rationalism is that all events are decisive in relation to their alternatives, whether or not they are cognized by us. Whitehead’s defense of this vital truth opens up the question of a speculative aesthetics in contemporary artistic and curatorial practices. How do artists hold out against the Great Refusal of a vital truth? In what ways do curatorial practices open up a space for vital truths to manifest in contravention of reductive discourse? 

This Seminar aims to restore the complexity attendant to the idea of the Great Refusal in artistic and curatorial practices. It will engage the idea of the Great Refusal as a field of tension and contestation, in which speculative aesthetics and reason intersect. At stake is the capacity of art and philosophy to outwit the pathologies of the great refusal. 

Indeed, the crepuscular aesthetics of our generation has a melancholic relation with the emancipatory verve of earlier historical instances of the Great Refusal. We must not forget that its ambivalence, is compounded by the motley reclamations of today’s culture wars: the clamour of anti-white, anti-male discrimination, decrying gender- and eco-terror in the name of an idealised liberal economy, along with right-wing activists accusing public policy and pandemic health measures as fascist infringements on individual liberty. These counter dynamics of the culture wars must be factored into the complex conjunction we are traversing: that of refusal and counter-refusal."
Bernard Stiegler's Thought on Technics,"The twentieth century witnessed an upsurge of European philosophical thought on technics, addressing the domains of skills, tools, instruments, and machines as the scientific meta-discourse on technology. Among the array of perspectives, the work of late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler stands out as one of the most lucid and fruitful contributions. This Seminar performs a close reading of Stiegler's thinking about technics. Following an introduction to Heidegger and Simondon's work in the first Session, each of the upcoming Sessions will explore a book in Stiegler's Technics and Time Vol 1-3 series, inquiring into the reading of the history of philosophy undertaken by Stiegler, as well as the horizon for future thought on technics, opening up beyond Stiegler's lucid philosophical interventions. 

The Seminar will take place in English and work with the English translations of Stiegler's series, published by Stanford University Press:

• Stiegler, B., 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Beardsworth R., Collins G. Stanford: Standford University Press. 
• Stiegler, B., 2009. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Barker, S. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 
• Stiegler, B., 2010. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Barker, S. Stanford: Stanford University Press."
Documentary Practices: Between Verification & Reality Creation,"We all carry cameras with us all the time, everywhere. This is why the way the narration of global events has changed radically in the last ten years. The documentation of events such as social outbursts in Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Hong Kong, show us the impact that cell phone video and photography have had on documentary practice. By finding a source of dissemination on the Internet, these audiovisual images bypass traditional channels of journalism and analysis. Devoid of the practitioners’ traditional agency, these videos complicate the notion of source-truth, and their analysis and media framings play a vital role in worldmaking and the consolidation of political narratives. Documentary filmmaking has always confronted the notion of truth, by complicating and expanding it, but more often than not, by accepting it as an anachronic binarism of truth vs. false. This Seminar will engage with the investigative potentials and shortcomings of audiovisual data. We will dissect different types of contemporary practices and their abilities to produce and affect the future through documentary language. 

Session 1, Truth versus False: We will explore the notion of source truth and verification and explore contemporary ideas looking past George Boole’s classical logic as exemplified in the binary values of truth vs. false. We will problematize the notion of “camera as a witness,” fundamental to the observational documentary’s positing of seeing as truth. 

Session 2, Truth and Testimony: We will explore different interview and testimonial techniques. We will discuss witnessing and memory as media for verification. Recollections of events are often encoded in the sensory perception of space. We will consider the role of false memories, lapses, and witness tampering in the process of truth-making in documentary practices. We will discuss examples of spatial techniques developed by researchers to help the witness remember past events. 

Session 3, Archival Truths: We will consider the evidentiary nature of archives and discuss their potential and shortcomings when researching towards documentary practices. 

Session 4, Embracing Fiction as the Limit of Truth: In the last Session, we will discuss the way that powerful players like governments, corporations, and media are creating public truths at blazing speed. The spread of disinformation forces the reality-based community to challenge the value of truth and verification by finding a place for fiction in truthtelling and worldmaking."
Real Abstraction & The Myths of the Given: On Post-Sellarsian Marxism,"There's been recently an interest in the possible connections between Wilfred Sellars and his heirs from the Pittsburgh school and Marx and the Marxist tradition. This Seminar contributes to this discussion by tackling the issue of real abstractions in the Marxian framework and the Sellarsian problem of the critique of the Given. It is usually accepted that there are two forms of the Given to be criticized in Sellars' oeuvre: the epistemic and the categorial givens. The epistemic Given corresponds to information that is both epistemically independent and epistemically efficacious- meaning it is something that is not the result of previous cognitive states while transmitting ""positive epistemic status to other cognitive states of ours"" (DeVries, 2005, p. 99). The second, as Sellars himself puts it, is the categorial structure of the world imposing itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on melted wax. (Sellars, 1981a: I, §45)"". Rejecting both forms of the Given yields in the Sellarsian picture a distinctive division of labor between sensible contents and conceptual workings. 

On the other hand, the idea of real abstraction as proposed within the Marxist tradition eschews traditional divisions between the mental and the real, the abstract and the concrete, the sensible and the conceptual. It commits to a causally efficacious figure of abstraction that ""is the form of the thought previous and external to the thought"" (Zizek, 1989, 19). This amounts to a ""veritable expropriation of abstract thought"" (Toscano, 2013, 280). For the prospect of a Post-Sellarsian form of Marxism the question then becomes: does the hypothesis of a real abstraction fall unto a form of the Given? What is the proper account of the relationship between thought (in the strict sense) and material practice that correctly attributes the roles of condition and conditioned? Under what conditions the thought of real abstraction is compatible with the Sellarsian framework? This Seminar will proceed by stages in the development of an extended argument for compatibility between Sellars and the advocates of real abstraction, but not without some caveats that will be revealed en route. 

Session 1: The myths of the Given: General intro to the Seminar and a presentation of the myths of the Given in the Sellarsian picture. 

Session 2: Enter Real abstraction: General introduction to the Sohn-Rethelian treatment of real abstraction in Intellectual and Manual Labour. 

Session 3: Real abstraction in the philosophy of language: Some attempts to recast the problem of real abstraction with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy of language. 

Session 4: The transformation problem of abstraction: Can Sohn-Rethel's hard thesis of the passage from real abstraction to thinking abstractions be fleshed out in its causal-rational circuits of transmission?"
Technē beyond Monoculture,"This Seminar offers multiple lines of inquiry, addressing a commonplace whereby the crafts are frequently presented as uniquely nurturing and preserving local and even national cultural individuality, in contrast with the monoculture brought about by the standardization of modern global capitalist technologies. It questions the intuitive opposition between crafts and technology on at least two fronts. On the one hand, the often promoted idea of crafts as preserving local or national identity belies the complex international networks that have historically enabled not only the exchange of ideas but the provision of specialized materials and tools–recall, for instance, Levi-Strauss's remark that this is characteristic of humanity, that in its very essence, human and social progress can only exist insofar as different centers of human culture are in contact, that isolated societies are inert societies and that only societies in contact with each other progress (Montaigne après Montaigne, Paris: Ehess, 2016). On the other hand, it is of the utmost urgency today to question also the grounds on which technoscientific rationality is commonly reduced to or held accountable for what Herbert Marcuse called the performance principle of capitalism. One could also argue that this is a facile critique of techno-scientific rationality that concedes too critical a part of human inventiveness to the logic of capitalism.

This Survey Seminar will unite highly original thinkers from fields as diverse as philosophy, engineering, design, political theory, developmental psychology, and aesthetics to reformulate the following problem in line with their own research: (how) can we can rethink and ultimately emancipate the sprawling of contemporary technē from capitalist monoculture and from the inanity of its performance principle, without relying on national particularities as an imagined panacea against alienation?"
Deleuze on Control & Resistance,"In ""Postscript on Control Societies,"" Deleuze announces the rise of a new social organization rooted in a mutation of capitalism. While the previous phase was characterized by the subjection of humans to motorized machines, the new one is marked by the appearance of a third type of machines: cybernetics and informational technologies. Rather than imposing social roles and fixed identities, the system's further deterritorialization requires a continuum variation of subjectivities, operating through a smooth modulation of fluxes. Individuals are no more cast by discipline in closed spaces of surveillance but, within an open network, they are constantly called upon to adapt to contingencies: “everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.” 

Thus, what differentiates the required fluidity of the present away from the revolutionary becoming that Deleuze usually invokes as a form of creative resistance against the normativity of power? What is an act of resistance against a system that appears to evolve unpredictably by dragging identities into its accelerating deterritorializations? To answer these questions, this Seminar proposes going through Deleuze’s final political writings and interviews to clarify the mutant logic that he attributes to capitalism and the role of information and technology in the continuous modulation of identities. Moreover, we will put into question his concept of creation as an act of resistance to understand the sense of the revolutionary role that it assumes for the artist and the philosopher. The Seminar asks: do art and philosophy still have the capacity of surpassing the impressive acceleration of technological and algorithmic creativity?"
"Human Nature & the Technical Object, Reading Simondon","The question of man’s place in nature today presents itself in the stark opposition between nature and technology. Locked in the end-game of an asymmetrical antagonism, technology is seen as threatening the viability of biodiversity on earth, raising dystopian visions of the obliteration of human life on earth and, consequently, of the recovery, or ultimate victory, of an indifferent cosmos. In this 1-Credit Seminar, we will revisit the notions of nature and human nature through a reading of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis: Univocal/Minnesota University Press, 2017). We will distinguish at least three nuances in his conceptualization of nature: in a structural sense, as a regime of elements; in a functional sense, as what lends itself to individuation; in a more fundamental metaphysical sense, as the unlimited, the formless or infinite ápeiron [ἄπειρον]. This will enable us to discern surprises in Simondon’s understanding of the nature of things according to their essence, which implies a startling understanding of human nature. In this Seminar, we will broach Simondon’s richly faceted conceptualization of nature as one that is not based on dichotomies between the natural and the artificial or between the human and other species, implying an ethics that abhors the mythical inclination towards technocracy, if anything, as a misunderstanding of technical essence or of the “nature” of technicity."
The Phoenix: Reconfiguring Nature,"For millennia now, humanity has been implicitly conceiving of nature as a phoenix, understanding its cyclical regeneration as a sign of its infinite capacity for rebirth from the ashes of its destruction. Hoping that such a dynamic would continue indefinitely, we keep literally burning the world down while awaiting its phoenix-like resurgence. Both individually and in groups, as consumers and corporations, states and energy companies, we continue to think and act as if nature were immune to irreparable devastation, as if it (and we, ourselves) were a miraculously resilient phoenix. Nevertheless, what is being annihilated today can no longer regerminate and be rejuvenated from ashes, receiving a new lease of life from death, as a result of soil degradation and depletion, desertification, and the expansion of hypoxic areas in the oceans, the catastrophic melting of Arctic ice and suffocating smog filling the atmosphere. 

In this Seminar, we delve into the ensuing rift, seeking a philosophy of nature for the twenty-first century in the contradictions, inconsistencies, asynchronies, and deadlocks of our shared predicament. Our work begins with a thorough questioning of the possibility and obstacles in the path of formulating a philosophy of nature in the twenty-first century. We will go through a critical exposition of the myth of the phoenix in relation to nature, from Ancient Egypt and other parts of North Africa to Greece and Rome. Subsequently, we will examine ancient Greek thinking of nature/phusis and German Naturphilosophie through the theoretical lens formed or informed by the figure of the phoenix. Finally, we will examine a selection from key traditions in Hinduism, Confucianism, and Russian “cosmism” in the same light, paying close attention to variations on the figure of the phoenix, replete with theories of immortality, reincarnation, and liberation from cycles of rebirth."
The Vicious Transparency of Time,"This 2-Credit Seminar is about a single tentative thesis: time-consciousness is the purest form of the unconscious. Building on the materials provided in Negarestani's previous SeminarThe Ape and the Sea: The Fragmented Legacy of Freud at the Dawn of Psychoanalysis,this Seminar examines time-consciousness as the basis of our transcendental-phenomenological experience of ourselves in the world. Through this investigation, the time of experience in combination with the experience of time are introduced as peculiar forms of an unconscious operation that habituates us to not only what we take as ‘our’ unshakable experience, but also an experience that is the de facto backdrop against which we take theoretical or practical stances towards our history—i.e., assessing the past and orienting towards the future. 

The Seminar is comprised of two parts: (1) A philosophical engagement with the transcendental phenomenological aspects of time-consciousness; (2) A critique of time-consciousness as an unconsciousness experiential transparency that through its blindspots and habituating mechanisms can lend itself to some of the most insidious pathologies of history."
The Great Game: Writings of a Lost Avant-Garde,"From 1928-1932 in Reims, France, four obscure youth formed a secret society devoted to exploring the outer boundaries of the universal. Such was the genesis of an association later known as The Great Game (Le Grand Jeu), an inner circle whose experiments with drug visions, near-death experiences, and anesthesia included: ingesting poisonous leaves, strychnine, opium, and carbon tetrachloride (a cleaning fluid and insect killer); mastering “sightless movement” by bicycling through their rural town blindfolded and attempting panoptic vision (seeing hidden visual phenomena without using the eyes); practicing auto-asphyxiation or holding sharpened instruments against each other’s throats while writing, and focusing their gaze on mirror surfaces for hours until the reflective image blurred and began motioning with strange, ghostly autonomy. 

This Seminar is an intensive study of the recently-translated writings of this short-lived alliance of The Great Game—envied by the Surrealist leaders who craved their subordination in several failed attempts, led by the mystical seer René Daumal and the “dark angel” Roger Gilbert-Lecomte who wrote of glimpsing “the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness.” We will study the newly published collection of their most intimate and influential writings, rescued from a silenced archive to win their rightful place as perhaps the most brilliant and daring lost souls of the avant-garde. Together, we will read texts such as “The Night Battle” and “The Seductiveness of Voltage” as prophetic formulations of the philosophy of fatal risk that never fully emerged, yet left behind remnants like no other. We will extract the most provocative theories behind their parapsychic trials and experimental metaphysics, their pseudonyms and secret gatherings, their rebellion and outcast status amid the dominant vanguards of their time, their near-lethal techniques of sensing the void, and their principles of “horrible revelation” sealed in a blood pact of four young geniuses. Moreover, we will use this Seminar to expand their thoughts and contemplate what next ventures they might have undertaken if not burning out and collapsing after just a few years of incendiary activity, or, as they wrote in their elegant omen of a Preface: “The Great Game is irremediable; it is played only once. We wish to play it every moment of our lives. It is a case of ‘loser wins’ since the aim is to lose oneself. And we want to win.”"
Reintroduction to Metaphysics I: The Speculative Return,"The end of metaphysics was a dominant theme in early 20th century philosophy. Even though the Western philosophical tradition sundered in two, one of the few things its analytic and continental halves seemed to agree upon was that the age of metaphysics was over, either because physics had finally usurped it or because philosophy had finally rooted out the pathological desires which drove us to speak of the fundamental structure of reality. The resurgence of metaphysics in the second half of the century in both traditions certainly came as a surprise, even if it has taken until the turn of the 21st century to become ingrained in both camps. However, despite its increasing popularity, there remains much confusion about precisely what metaphysics is: how does it sit within philosophy as a whole? How does it relate to the sciences (especially physics)? How do we go about doing it? The purpose of this seminar and its subsequent followup in Spring is to reintroduce metaphysics by considering these sorts of methodological questions, and to do so by explaining the history of its rise, fall, and rise again.

The Fall seminar, “The Speculative Return,” will examine the return of speculative metaphysics, focusing primarily on the emergence of 'Speculative Realism' and its ramifications. This will provide us with a way of framing the historical arc of the decline of metaphysics (correlationism) and some purchase upon what has potentially been overlooked in the drive to speculate (the critique of metaphysics). The seminar will address certain issues in contemporary metaphysics (e.g., is anything necessary? and what does it mean for ‘everything’ to exist?), but its principal aim will be to construct a historical narrative through which the related methodological questions can be properly articulated."
"Anthropocene Design: Infrastructure, Imagination & Experimentation at the ‘End’","The Anthropocene, our era of climatic and metaphysical upheaval, has outmodeed or rendered innefective most established modes of living, governing, and thinking. Exploring the Anthropocene as a time of both crisis and possibility, this Seminar examines the political, imaginal, and infrastructural dimensions of the experimental design strategies to respond to, adapt, and overcome contemporary sociol-ecological dislocations. Case studies and vignettes of urban adaptation, infrastructural islandization, design for autonomy, and attempted off-planet exploration will be used as jumping-off points for critical analysis of crisis discourse, resilience ecology and the back loop, ‘living’ infrastructure, planetary urbanization, human nonhuman entanglement thinking, ‘earthbound’ and/or ‘glitch’ subjectivity, and ‘cosmotechnics’ for governing or escaping existing systems (including that of Earth itself). The Seminar will cover contemporary work in geography, ecology, and political theory as well as art, film, design, and popular culture. Ultimately we will be concerned with questioning attempts by theory and design to delimit the meaning of human and nonhuman potentials at a time when limits themselves are withering away."
Geometry of Thought,"This course examines the central role that the idea of geometry has played in Western philosophy with the intent of critically examining the legacy of that idea for our thinking today. Since the Greeks, philosophers have often seen geometry as the highest form of knowledge towards which all others should strive, with the insights about simple shapes like triangles consequently serving as an image of thought in general. In this Seminar, we will strive to understand why geometry and the triangle came to serve this role for Western philosophy and what the advantages and limitations of this approach might be. How might recent advances in theories of complexity and computation require and allow us to rethink this basic orientation of the Western philosophical tradition towards geometry, and what other possibilities might there be? Readings will be drawn from major figures in the history of philosophy (Plato, Euclid, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Kant.) We will also visit popular histories of mathematics, and 20th century and contemporary thinkers such as Michel Serres, Benoît Mandelbrot, Stephen Wolfram, Eve Sedgwick, Gilles Chattelet and Catherine Malabou."
Studio Three: Cosmological Brain,"This Research Studio approaches its mandate to create and cultivate a cosmological brain. We ask: what are the sociopolitical genetics, the pedagogies of the general economy, and the environmental controls necessary to build a cosmopolitically inclined brain? What are the infrastructural captures of attention currently in operation on our planet which might lead towards or away from a general cosmopolitical agency with a mind?

We begin by temporarily distinguishing and isolating technical and conceptual parts of the ‘thinking entity’ to inquire into novel ways to design these sub-structures and bring them together in a renewed framework of assembly. The studio will explore and work with different aspects of planetary and universally scaled cognitive architectures and the systems through which potential General Intellects might operate- biological artefacts functioning across billions of years; cultural infrastructures; linkages of feelings from the viral scale to general principles of feedback and self-regulation and awareness; the necessary pathways for material, energetic, and information systems to interact across myriad timescales to yield a spectrum that can be called ‘mind.’"
"Signs, Designs and Sovereignty","This seminar considers the problem of political order as a matter of constitutional design, or as a question of the ordering of signs in time and space and across social difference. Special attention will be paid to the way that sovereignty, in the Western philosophical tradition, is understood as emerging as a symptom of the incompleteness of the law as an “algorithm” capable of producing decisions about any given state of affairs. This inherent incompleteness raises the specter of an unstable succession, or the potential failure of reproducing social order from the past into the future, and thus across the time of human generations and social reproduction. Readings will be drawn from classical and modern political thought — which may include Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Dante, Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, de Maistre, Cortés, Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Serres, Derrida, and other— as well as case studies on the rise and fall of institutions of constitutional order: the oracle of Delphi, the medieval church, and Bretton Woods and the dollar system. How might such an attention to the deep history of constitutions open possibilities for designing our world anew?"
Poetic & Cinematic Evil,"This Seminar explores Evil as a complex poetic and cinematic force. Accordingly, we will trace the dark experiments of four specific poets—Arthur Rimbaud, Anna Akhmatova, Georg Trakl, and Ahmad Shamlu—alongside four selected films as they traverse the following conceptual territories: decadence, cruelty, derangement, and mystery. We will note how the poetics of evil can inhabit the literary genres of the rant, the elegy, the riddle, and the nocturne; we will note how the cinematics of evil can feature figures of the deviant, the whisperer, the lunatic, and the killer. Furthermore, we will observe how these creative works apply certain rare techniques of language and image (tongue and vision) that unveil the intimate relationship between evil, seduction, atrocity, chaos, and rage; we will also ask overarching questions about the bond between evil and thought."
Ruining the Vibe: Resonance and Its Discontents,"In this Seminar we will pick up a thread that emerged during a recent international conference, Ecouter, Ecrire la Résonance: Entre Musique et Philosophie, Lyon (17-19 Nov 2021). During this conference, philosophers, composers, musicians, musicologists, and scientists discussed the concepts and phenomena related to the idea of resonance. This survey Seminar will pick up a thread that ran, like a background noise, through this event: the limits of idealized resonance. The positive connotations of the idea of resonance resound without difficulty: notions of harmony, amplification, synergy, and coherence animate its metaphorical reach. Upon closer inspection, however, the idea of resonance trails a shadow. 

The measuring of acoustic resonance, for instance, typically blindsides divergent and localised resonance (reverberation): too hard to measure and deemed irrelevant. The ideal of resonance, too quickly synonymous with harmony, also casts its metaphorical shadow over the prospect of compulsive social cohesion: a political ideal of a phase-locking, analogous to the ‘enslavement principle’ of synergetics in optical physics. As a simplistic ideal, finally, resonance may all too soon favour a state of denial about social and psychological dissonance, degrading the idea of concerted action into the suppression of jarring voices. 

Even in the rarefied realm of philosophy, an ideal of axiomatic resonance may lead philosophers to overstate the formal coherence and reach of its postulates. This survey Seminar will bring together leading and emerging voices from different fields, unseduced by a self-congratulatory fiction of harmonious intersubjectivity. 

How do these fields and their theorisation foster the potentials of non-consonant, jarring voices? How do theorists, artists, and curators nurture the ‘divided subject of partial identifications open to constant flux’ (Claire Bishop)? What can philosophy learn from contemporary artists and curators that may countervail the anxious fallback on overstated ideals of axiomatic resonance? The objective of this survey Seminar is to contextualise the ways in which the making and curating of art remain recalcitrant to the metaphorical simplification of resonance."
From Music & Cosmicity to Sound & Interiority,"On the 25th of February, 2019, Tom Goskar published the first article of a series asking this question: what is curating sound? The article tackled the practices and difficulties of curating sound today, addressing the scarcity of research on that specific topic. And scarce it is: the Sound Art Curating Conference took place in 2014; a book was published online on sound curating by the Leonardo Electronic Almanac in 2018, Curating Sound. And in 2021, the Saas-Fee Institute of Art held a series of conferences on the topic of Curating Noise: Reverberations and the Polyvocal. The scarcity of the literature on the topic should be approached as a symptom, not of the absence of a problem, but of the difficulty questioning sound curation as a practice, for the following reasons. 

First, sound and music are often the sides of a main visual course, of secondary importance. Second, the claimed connection between curating and knowledge confronts sound curation to a totally different scholarship than that of the history of visual and performance arts, that is, musicology and ethnomusicology. Third, music and noise are performed during gigs, where people and their bodies are moved in a very different way than the stillness and discipline of spectators’ bodies during exhibitions – curiously, one may reckon that managing to integrate music and sonic creation in exhibitions also happened through the abandonment of the notion of music, recuperating the critical interrogation of the concept since the beginning of the 20th century. We’ll investigate the movements of music and sound theories. Some movements are parallel to others, but the main movement transforms music from being an adequate means of describing the laws of the natural world (God’s creation) through various occult correspondence theory, to being an adequate means of describing (1) the social world and (2) the future, this corresponds to the sonic episteme (James, 2019); of (3) tuning to the world from another level of experience, this corresponds to the aesthetic and socio-anthropological theories of music. 

These three elements are parallel to technical transformations of our equipment for accessing to music and sound, recording music and sound, and broadcasting music and sound. As sound and technology met and merged, it challenged the site and object dependence of curation and exhibitions that music and sound art carry (London, 2018). 

This investigation will help us get a clearer grasp of the challenges music curation as a pedagogical and artistic act faces, which supposes either that one manages to craft a historical and musical objects (if they have to fit this description to be curatable – that is, amenable to curating acts and activities), and question the relevance of the concepts in which it is embedded (immersion, interiority, to name a few – Schrimshaw, 2018)."
The Ape & the Sea: The Fragmented Legacy of Freud at the Dawn of Psychoanalysis,"Year 1920: Freud has published Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in the vein of Copernicus, Newton and Darwin before him, he has disturbed the peace of this world in yet another way. But this new perturbation seems to be even more troubling in that it has agitated the alleged perpetual peace of our given world at a deeper level thus far considered as unshakable and a haven—the last bastion of human comfort in the face of a crumbling world and the birth of a new one no less prone to further and stronger disconcertments. It is as if once the human loses this one last trench, the flames of the war against this world forged in the image of the human will spread and burn the cities of Man and God to ashes. 

The focus of this eight-session Seminar is Freud and his legacy regarding three key topics, the unconscious, the nature of trauma in Freud’s work and his immediate legacy, and drive and drive-like behaviors. Other than the works of Freud pertinent to this Seminar, we will be reading comparable works penned by the members of the inner circle (Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank among others). During the Seminar, we will zoom in on such subject matters as the status of causal role or causal relevance, the hermeneutics of psychological etiology, the dynamics of memory and tongue and theories of unconscious motivations in Freud’s work and his collaborators. Covering both psychoanalytic and speculative dimensions of Freud and the inner circle’s project, the overall goal of this Seminar is twofold: (1) Rather than questioning the status of Freud’s version of psychoanalysis in relation to science or identifying it as a pseudo-science, we rather assume that Freud’s psychoanalytical method is compatible with the scientific method. Therefore, we instead seek to find out not only whether the findings of the Freudian theory of the unconscious and drive can be validated under scrutiny, but also whether such findings tell us something more than what natural and special sciences already tell us. (2) In tandem with 1, which parts of this project should be readopted, which should be fleshed out and which should be discarded."
Rule-governed Games in Analytic & Continental Tradition,"The analogy between language and the game of chess appears for the first time in the two initiators of the linguist turn: Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who proposed it independently. However, the father of structuralism and the father of analytic philosophy expressed quite different views on the similarity of language and chess. In this class, we will address the divergence of the continental and analytic from the standpoint of the recurrent comparison between rule-governed games and the linguistic activity through which a collectively shared reality is constructed. 

Following Saussure, structuralists like Levi Strauss (see the metaphor of the game in the structure of the myth) and Althusser consider a game as a structure that determines social roles within a system of oppositions. From this standpoint, individuals are like the pieces in the game of chess (socially constructed identities), the behavior of which is ruled according to the combinatory order of signifiers. While criticizing this static conception of the game, post-structuralists like Derrida and Deleuze tried to speculatively access the metaphysical conditions for the event, i.e., for the uncaused change of the structure that entails the actualization of a new organization and of a new distribution of social roles. 

Accordingly, they opposed the ‘free play’ – the creative activity of the philosopher and the artist – to the ordinary activity of the individuals who interact according to the norms of the social game (see Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” or Deleuze’s ideal game in Logic of sense). Following Wittgenstein, analytic philosophers consider human agents as rational players (rather than signifiers receiving an identity within the general structure of the discourse) who are engaged in performing linguistic moves according to the rules that determine how to displace the pieces (words) to get collective benefits (see David Lewis’ theory of conventions, Sellars’ “Some reflections on language game,” Brandom’s game of giving and asking for reasons). 

Here individuals are strategic players who learn the rules of the game by playing while taking part in a competition, the goal of which is to select the best possible strategies (moves or inferences) to obtain the desired outcomes. Rather than embodying given roles, agents here strive to improve their collective strategies (ruled behaviors) with respect to the progressive grasp of the structure of reality. As a consequence, rules for decision-making can be modified as far as they are proven to be more satisfactory with respect to the establishment of collectively rewarding modes of interaction."
From Blind Obedience to Normative Freedom,"Wittgenstein remains an enigmatic figure for contemporary philosophy. For some, a radical debunker of its pretensions toward totality and closure; for others, a conservative caretaker of what is as it is. This opposition is not the only one to be motivated by the unusual pathways taken by his thinking. 

A different juncture presents itself between the constructive Wittgensteinians- those who uphold that Wittgenstein’s philosophy does present positive theses and ways forward for traditional philosophizing, and the quietist proponents of the so-called resolute reading, wherein Wittgenstein is seen as a purely therapeutic philosopher, unmaking philosophical theses by a patient working through of their linguistic expression. Interestingly one can find the previous opposition reconciled in the quietist reading- instead of the image of a radical debunker, the conservative aspect stems from the deactivation of the philosophical drive towards acceptance of given Forms of life. 

While having its scholarly merits, the quietist does not necessarily have the final word, and the amount of systematic philosophy being pursued under Wittgenstein’s influence attests to the Prothean resonances of this thinker. Mostly against this quietist reading, a Wittgensteinian thread runs deep within the inferentialist line of thought- particularly the uncanny connection between this thread and a form of Hegelianism that currently shines in contemporary analytic philosophy. 

Meredith William’s Blind Obedience tries to carve a middle ground between the quietist and the constructive Wittgensteinian by offering a fine-grained analysis of the shapes and objects of Wittgenstein’s arguments in Philosophical Investigations. And by doing so, Williams revisits a large swath of 20th-century philosophy of language in the process, offering illuminating comparisons with the likes of Quine, Davidson, Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, among others. This two-credit Seminar will tackle Williams’ reading of the Philosophical Investigations, with an eye on the different models of semantic holism that are displayed in her book. 

By doing this, we hope to unearth the differences between diverse kinds of webs-of-belief/space-of-reasons holistic models of language, with different consequences to the concept of forms of life and their relations. This suggests the Wittgensteinian “Pragmatic challenge to analysis” (Brandom) as a possible site for the construction of an interface assembling different strands of contemporary philosophical thought. In doing this, we try to deepen the constructive vector that can be yielded out of Wittgenstein’s therapeutics, thus welding debunking and constructing in one and same dialectical tool. 

Each session in this 8-session Seminar will focus on one of the eight chapters of Williams’ book, adding the relevant sections of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and the interlocutors that are mentioned within the chapters. The Seminar continues an ongoing investigation on the logical concept of the form of life and its theoretical and practical consequences, but it can be followed independently of my previous Seminars for the New Centre for Research and Practice."
Daemon & Discord: Anatomy of the DAO,"This two-credit theoretical and practical Seminar will consider Decentralized Autonomous Organizations from many angles. Beginning with their science fiction-influenced prehistory before focusing on what DAOs are today - both technically and imaginatively - the Seminar will result in speculative group projects to design and present future histories of fictional DAOs.

Adopting Daniel Suarez’s Daemon (2006) and Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) as our starting points, we’ll discuss the conceptual framework within which DAOs emerge, emphasizing that contemporary DAOs have been fashioned within only a limited range of all their possible modalities and that DAOs could have taken and could yet take different paths of development. Stretching this notion to a speculative extreme, in the first Sessions, we will consider future histories of hypothetical DAOs from the vantage of the year 2035. The Seminar will then step back through time, examining both the principles and practices underpinning the DAOs of the present and the assumptions made about their past and futures. Presentations by participants in the first half of the Seminar will involve pitching ideas for DAOs to the group. Several of these will be chosen via a quadratic voting process for further amplification in the second half, in which we will proceed to create detailed future archives of the chosen DAOs. These will be presented for critique by experts in the last session.

The Seminar's second Module will take particular care to interrogate the dreams of decentralization and of autonomy (or perhaps automation) by which theorists of DAOs have sometimes been beguiled. The speculative nature of the group projects will allow the participants to explore these ideas to destruction without consequence."
Learning How to Die: Socratic Discipline & the Philosophical Life,"Alfred North Whitehead famously claimed that the whole of Western philosophy consisted of “footnotes to Plato.” This seminar takes this suggestion seriously, proposing an approximation to central exemplars from Plato’s dialogs to crystallize the birth of philosophical questioning across its metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions. 

More deeply, we will ask: what is the true meaning of the philosophical life, if the latter cannot be assimilated to a mere craft, specialized knowledge or ‘business,’ but involves something decisive and fatal, in which an ultimate pronouncement on the part of human beings takes place? This is to fearlessly confront Plato’s mysterious suggestion in the Phaedo, in which Socrates, in his last hours, defines philosophy as the art of “learning how to die easily.” As such, this seminar can be understood at once as an introduction to philosophy, seeking to understand the vital impetus that fatefully orients it as a technology for dying. The seminar is organized in two parts, each organized in four weeks. The first part follows a close reading of Plato’s early, so-called “Socratic dialogs,” which recounts The Last Days of Socrates. This set of works encompasses the following dialogs: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. 

As we shall see, already this set of works unearth the most fundamental questions of philosophy in their metaphysical, epistemological, ethico-political, and aesthetic dimensions, but also in their theoretical and practical inextricability. More fundamentally, these works propose a timeless and insuperable approximation to the demands of the philosophical life, illuminating the relation between the philosopher and its interlocutors, friends, and adversaries. These dialogs thereby interrogate the pedagogical and practical responsibility of philosophy to the city, in which the rapport between civil society and the state, the philosophical teacher and the youth, become key to decoding the crucial distinction between wisdom and knowledge, and finally between philosophy and the sophist or “men of the courts.” The second part proposes to follow key texts from Plato’s “middle-dialogs,” focusing on the central arc in which the tension between sophistry and philosophy approximates the possibility of a dialectical resolution between broadly Heraclitean and Parmenidean orientations of thought. 

These works encompass the following dialogs: Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Parmenides. Following this trajectory, we explore the consolidation of different methodological levers that philosophy assimilates and perennial problems that it confronts, in order to distinguish its own activity as much as its proper subject matter: the articulation between being and becoming; the dialectical tension between that which is and that which is not, and between the One and the Many; the analytic procedure of the method of division in which the separation of philosophy from sophistry becomes crystalized; the “war between names” revealed in etymological investigations between naturalists and relativists; the problematic articulation between perception and knowledge, and with it the embryonic distinction between empiricist and rationalist theories of knowledge; etc."
Analytic Marxism & the Pittsburgh School,"The neo-Hegelianism of Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and others invites the question of how we might re-imagine Marx and Marxism in light of analytic neo-Hegelianism. Do these new readings of Hegel as a philosopher of mind and of language make contact with the dimensions of Hegel that Marx appropriated, revised, and criticized? Can we understand capitalism as a distortion in the space of reasons or ideology as a cognitive-perceptual error? How can we merge the Marxist emphasis on labor with the analytic emphasis on language? We shall explore the possibility that reconciling the analytic emphasis on language and the Marxist emphasis on labor may require taking seriously aspects of Hegel that have not yet been taken up by analytic neo-Hegelianism, such as the concept of life."
Acid Ecosophy for a Kaleidoscopic Machinic Phylum,"This seminar will intertwine and proliferate certain aspects of unnatural nature, cinematic modes of living, and the wider spatial arts so as to spore new speculative modes of thinking the bio-mechanical lifestyles. From Bosch to bio-art, we will track and scan components of a dynamic ecosophy (as lucid vision and sense) following form with the current interest in Felix Guattari’s ecosophical aesthetics originating in his three ecologies: mental, social, environmental. This class takes on a hybrid thinking process drawing from aspects of philosophy intertwined with the spatial arts. We will learn some ways to operate concepts artistically to speculate on possible alternative collectives within the socius of the city. We shall draw down reality-shifting subjectivity from lurid theory, and we will pivot to some examples of the urban situated-ness of an emerging world of hybrid biology and mechanical arts. The Seminar refines sensitivity to the mode of living that is adventuring in a stratum of wonder, between soft machines and hard machines, as an available reality. We will show this reality is but a testbed for further experiments and mutations, a future bio-mechanical carnival of infinite nomadic circuits and intensities. 

Lecture 1: Multiple Intelligences, Multiple Ecologies 
Lecture 2: Enchantment-Engines and the Vegetal Carnivalesque 
Lecture 3: Strange Operations in the Machinic Phylum
Lecture 4: Acid Ecosophy for Terraforming the Unconscious 

Initial readings: N. B. Ecosophical aesthetics: Joseph Beuys, “social sculpture” + Felix Guattari’s “ecosophical aesthetics.”"
Elemental Ethnography: Encounters with Sensorial Analytics,"Ethnography has traditionally been understood at the study and documentation of “ethnos” —a group of persons defined in some coherent (or not so coherent) way by the ethnographer themselves, often predicated upon subjectivities and identifications with place, practices, values, or experiential criteria. In the present, when a global climate crisis and pandemic occupy our attention and eroding ecosystems and mass extinctions condition the future, it is increasingly clear that no “ethnos” can be thought abstractly outside of “enviros.” This Seminar proposes that by approaching the study of human encounters through the elements, we might better surface the entangled socioenvironmental processes that comprise our contemporary worlds. Earth, fire, water, and air represent the classical elements found in western philosophy; in the eastern traditions are these, with the addition of wood and metal. Through the abstractions and specificities of technoscience came the periodic table: the irreducible material of everything. Within the elemental turn in the human sciences, still nascent in form, we find the interplay between elements multiplied: from chemical relations to the sweep of storm fronts. 

In this Seminar, we explore four case studies that follow the elemental qualities of wind, water, and fire as foundational to shaping and sustaining worlds, human and otherwise. We also think through how we can engage sensorial encounters as a conceptual space to grow our analytic possibilities; participants will be encouraged to bring their own elemental observations to our discussions."
Atmospheres: From Gestural Ecologies to Non-Standard and Planetary Cognition,"""Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life... it binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism… We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet… We must use man as a constructive ecological force… to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape."" -Dune, Herbert

In this Seminar, four invited guests will each speak on their work in the context of atmospheres and planetary cognition, with Keller and Leitão acting as discussants and moderators. The Seminar functions as a survey of a radically expanded concept of envelope - buffer, threshold, strata, layer, medium, shell, background - reaching from the surface of our planet where relations embedded into bodies, ecosystems, landscapes, and river systems extend out to move and travel on currents, through aerial dust and hydrodynamics, global networks of information flow, energy, and capital, onward to the immediate near outer space of planet Earth. We choose this approach to the Atmosphere to generate new paradigms and models for design thinking, better suited to the ever more tightly interlocked yet vaporous stratifications of our planetary situation. Our planet’s atmosphere- its networked material, organic, informational, energetic layers-functions as both a conceptual model and a vast, superimposed circulatory system that links bodies from the smallest scale to the body of the planet at the macroscale. Today, we face the challenge of articulating all design decisions against the pervasive and ubiquitous networks of a new nature. Consider a forest, a tree, a bird, a beetle, a bee, a bacteria. These different scales of species have intricate coexistences and the very particular proportions of their bodies influence the coexistence between each other, up and down the scale. The feedback cycles promoted by these members in their ecosystems are in constant reinvention, spiraling in what only appears to be equilibrium, but is instead a slow frame in a process of co-evolution. We suggest that revolutionary concepts of sustainability and resilience may be found by deliberately interweaving path dependencies and potentials of another nature: positioning culture and technology as aspects of a universal system. The ATMOSPHERES lectures are positioned to explore and catalyze planetary forms of relation, life, computation and cognition leading to a more robust model of the ‘atmospheric’ system we live within, and possibly, a more survivable future."
Studio Two: Cosmos,"This seminar considers the surface of our planet and the world-buildings we have conducted across past centuries, and continues by leaping off earth to extra-planetary networks as an extension of design. We ask: what is an operational new nature, and when does architecture transform into landscape, extend beyond a horizon, link to systems off planet, and catalyze a revolutionary universality? Our planet itself is, indexically, a computer: meteorology, geology and biology act as computation. The earth has registers of massive addressability in river meanders which arc across millions of years, for example, which begs the question: where and how might a planet have ‘mind’ or ‘computational capacity’? What kinds of information processing takes place, what networks are folded into that, and how can we work as designers to access those flows of information and energy?

Part of this seminar’s intent will be to map and identify the kinds of bodies constituted by cosmological and cosmopolitical forces. This work will cross many scales, from the atomic to the galactic. What might we choose to design, to catalyze this new nature, a new set of universalist politics? Would we design a new law of physics? A new legal system? A new planetary infrastructure? Is this a design project for material systems, informational systems, biological systems? We can learn key lessons for a project like this from Stanslaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice, Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, or various other hard science fiction texts.

However, these questions must also be brought back to ‘earth’, as it were. We must turn our eyes to the sky and the ground simultaneously. What systems on our planet must be conserved in order to constitute the future? What ‘gestural ecologies’, to use Nandita Biswas Mellamphy’s term, can we deploy to work as designers of our planet and for our planet? A universalist notion of planetary ethics is called for, as Aldo Leopold has pointed out. What forms of radical empathy, co-living, co-evolving, mutualism, and shared ontologies do we catalyze as we care for ourselves and our planet? Ultimately, will we be tethered to our evolutionary world, the one that made us and where our bodies match up? Or will we bring it along for the ride, as a counterpart, a rear view, a pendulum, a harbor, a home, or a canvas to continue to draw from and upon?"
The Meaning of the Subject,"Since the vaunted ""death of the subject"" in the 1960s and 1970s, much critical discourse has fixated upon what comes after the petrified, metaphysical subject of Descartes and Kant. Should we, in the vein of Deleuze, pursue an essentially psychoanalytic de-centreing of the subject, so that it becomes a multiplicitous explicandum of the process of desiring-production? Should we, like Foucault, treat the subject as the byproduct of multiple points of knowledge-power, potentially remediable through the writing of the self? Or should we, as Reza Negarestani has more recently proposed, substitute the logical subject of sentience for the biological subject of sapience? While these propositions vary widely in their content, one thing they share in common is a tendency to mystify the category of the subject, by treating it as something that can be either dissolved or reformed through rational proposition, through the force of discourse. This is in a sense no coincidence: for ever since Lyotard penned the epitaph of the ""working Subject"" of Marxism, it is as if the abdication of the terrain of economic history has made it impossible for philosophy to ask not just what comes after the subject but what comes before it—and thus to construct a coherent genealogy. In this seminar, it will be argued that, while Lyotard was correct to criticize the hypostatization of the working-class subject of Marxism, the Marxist tradition has over the past half-century bequeathed us with the hermeneutic tools to analyze this question anew. Chief among these is Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of ""real abstraction."" For Sohn-Rethel, the discovery of the arché in Ancient Greece, and with it mathematics and geometry, was made possible due to the quantitative matrix of commodity-exchange. Thales’ claim that ""all is water,” or Euclid’s discovery of geometry, are both conditioned by a conception of abstract form that is summoned into existence by the real circulation of valorized commodities. These categories are in turn hardwired into the subject of epistemology in the age of Kant, once capitalism has generalized commodity production. Yet what Sohn-Rethel builds with his head, he destroys with his feet. For having cast the net of false consciousness so wide that it becomes—in his words—“necessary,” he is forced to posit the “working Subject” of Marxism as a deus ex machina of sorts, as a messianic vector of escape. This obfuscates his principal discovery, which has never been fully articulated: that the sweeping aside of the capitalism, of the value-form, must also be a sweeping aside of the epistemic privilege of the subject—as well as the rift between nature and society upon which it depends."
The Memeing of Mark Fisher: Art Production as Acid Communist Strategy,"Today, Mark Fisher’s first book, ""Capitalist Realism,"" is as relevant as ever. In the last two years, even Fisher himself has become a commodity, featured in memes whose circulation provides income for social media giants. This Seminar looks at the trajectory from the publication of ""Capitalist Realism"" and the theory-blogging community from which it emerged to the meme and YouTube culture of the post-Covid era, and asks if there can be any resistance to capitalism from the online or ""IRL"" cultural field. We will trace Fisher’s treatment of the neoliberal notion that There is No Alternative, predicated on the tendency of capitalism to co-opt all creative opposition, back to the Frankfurt School, which will provide us with the tools to analyze Fisher’s last unfinished work, ‘Acid Communism’. Adorno’s Shudder, Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria and Marcuse’s Great Refusal will all be contextualised in terms of their relevance to a post-Covid society in which a generation that has been denied its rite of passage, including drug and social experimentation, will emerge from lock down to meet a disillusioned mass of unemployed people. How will such a mass view the datafication of society? What resistance will there be to the normalisation of lockdown-era restraints?

In particular, the course will ask whether there can be any incisive critique of society from within the meme sphere or the wider cultural field so long as capitalist forces control the means (or ‘memes’) of production. Utilising the terms Acid Communism and the Acid Left, together with Fisher’s proposal that we foster a countercultural movement to raise class consciousness, we will ask whether a post-Covid society might be ripe for a culturally-oriented protest movement and how the tools of online and officialized contemporary art culture might be used alongside grassroots initiatives. To what degree does Fisher’s ultimately Adornian identification of the possibility of witnessing ‘glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities’ within the ossified whole remain valid today?"
Humanism & Its Discontents,"From intellectuals who proudly identify themselves as Kitsch Marxists, to critical theorists who are willing to endorse an uncritical materialist thesis in order to distance themselves from all strains of humanism, conservative or not, to scientists who find reprieve for their questionable political alliances in their cozy accounts of nature, and finally to philosophers who feel the need to sacrifice a little bit of their uncompromising thoughts in favor of being accepted by their academic and political allies, the intellectual landscape we are living in is, by all accounts, bleak. The so-called post-pandemic era has not even begun, but considering the sheer lack of theoretical and practical will and imagination that has gone into combating it, it is safe to say that we have not seen anything yet. The indiscriminate assault on the concept of the human has led us to an impasse where the emancipatory left increasingly displays the characteristics of an impoverished street activism that cannot even combat the anti-vaxxer crowd. While some assume that we should enrich our thoughts with a little bit of contingency or some ineffable outside component here and there, the ambition of this seminar is to revive the unexplored movement within the concept of the human towards its rational inhuman, that is to say, its historically critical ends. A slection of texts which will be presented and read in the Seminar includes Louis Althusser's The Humanist Controversy, Rosi Braidotti's Posthuman knowledge, N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Peter Wolfendale's Reformatting Homo Sapiens and Rationalist Inhumanism and Jean-François Lyotard's The Inhuman: Reflections on Time."
What Now? Contemporary Art & the Post-Pandemic Conditions,"The Covid-19 pandemic is altering many aspects of not only our lives but also our perception of the world, reshaping the individual and collective minds in still unmapped ways. Hard isolation during the lockdowns gave us a taste for schizophrenia: the modulation of routine in an infinite loop normalized silence, exhaustion, insomnia, and even subtle hallucinations. If “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone”, as Pascal once wrote, Covid-19 demanded that humanity struggles with the center of this supposed existential disquiet. At the same time that the pandemic abolished public spaces, providing only enclosed bubbles and transmission cables between them, private spaces were invaded by the public consciousness that crossed the membrane of our digital screens and speakers. Overall, home turned into a bunker inside of which we needed to act upon the world, with radical repercussions for our mental state. Habits and cores became rituals, contemplation was mandatory, and drugs (prescribed or recreational) provided synthetic enhancements or suspensions of experience. Dared to exist in a state of complete atomization, we learned to become tech-gnostics and self-hypnotists, applying whatever form of technology at our disposal to gain traction on our cognition and experience of our body in time.

In the smaller but no less consequential world of contemporary art, not only were value grids and the networks of production and distribution impacted by the pandemic, but new conceptual challenges were pressed against a fragile ecosystem, already under economic, ideological and philosophical pressures for meaningful transformation. The material costs of a rushed transition to online environments and the political barriers implied by the new normal are just some of the conflicts with which the art world has been forced to grapple. And while blockchain is a promising technology to help artists in the near future, the NFT market is already drying up, and the main questions still remain: how will art and aesthetics adapt to the profound shifts in political economy & perception brought on by the pandemic? And how will the art world keep pace with these shifts? This Survey Seminar will bring together artists, curators, academics, gallerists, cultural agents and technology experts to debate the future of the art world in light of the sweeping changes brought on by the pandemic. We will map the future conditions and expectations and figure out what the contemporary art of the future requires from us in the post-pandemic global landscape."
From Alienation from Above to Alienation from Below,"Alienation is back! From Xenofeminism to Afropessimism, and from Decolonial Studies to discussions around Artificial Intelligence, alienation is at the centre of critical discussions about capitalism, subjectivity, and agency. Whether it is to criticise essentialist notions of gender, to investigate the potential for rationality and technology, to explore and generate new strange worlds, to problematize a universal “we”, or to explore the concept of natal alienation in regards to the slave, there is something about the concept of alienation that seems necessary for grasping our times. During this four-session Seminar, we will explore the Marxian perspectives on the subject, juxtaposing them with recent discoveries in neuroscience in order to work through contemporary thinking on alienation. We will develop a new understanding of alienation that interconnects ""alienation from above,"" i.e. the socio economic forms of determination, to ""alienation from below,"" which are the neurocomputational mechanisms that produce what Thomas Metzinger calls the ""phenomenal self-model.""

In his work, Marx gives an account of alienation from above in regards to how human activity becomes alienated in the exchange abstraction. Importantly, inverting the histories of philosophy, Marx says Capital is the active subject and people are merely its object. However, at the level of consciousness, we often believe that we are subjects that can separate ourselves from the object. In this Seminar, we will develop an understanding of how the subjective and objective components of alienation are entwined. The key question we will look at is, then, if experiences are something unique and specific to the self or if they are manufactured through generic supersonal mechanisms, which they are used for ideological purposes.

The Seminar will incorporate the work of Metzinger to aid our understanding of alienation from below. Metzinger explains how selfhood and the first-person perspective emerge out of subpersonal representational mechanisms. By analysing different phenomena such as Out of Body Experiences, pathologies such as Cotard Syndrome, or experiments such as the Body Transfer Illusion, he develops a theory of how self-consciousness comes to be, through what he defines as a ""phenomenal self-model"" (PSM). The study of Metzinger on this course will help us to go beyond the Marxian critique of ideology. His work will aid in the exploration of how self-consciousness activates this phenomenal self-model. We will relate this to the different Marxian approaches that we study on the course. Metzinger is able to give us clues in regards to how our perception of selfhood functions. In doing so, his work offers a powerful critique of phenomenology and theories based on the first person perspective of experience. Our Seminar complements Metzinger through an account of how self-consciousness is determined at the socio-economic and cultural level. In finding out the interrelationship between alienation from below and alienation from above, we can develop a better understanding of the leverage points against capitalist social relations. Key questions that we will deal with across the Seminar include:
 - What is the conceptual first person perspective and how does it create a
 sense of ‘minenes’?
 - What does alienation mean in Marx’s work and how does it differ from this
 first person perspective?
 - What is the interconnection between existential and economic meanings of
 alienation and why is there so much confusion about it?
 - How is our understanding of subjectivity determined by capitalist
 reproduction?
 - How can the philosophy of Thomas Metzinger elaborate on the Marxian
 understandings of alienation?
 - How does Fanon and Wynter’s notion of sociogeny help us to understand the
 intersection between alienation from above and alienation from below?
 - What are the psychological consequences of alienation and how do they
 relate to what Cecile Malaspina calls the mental state of noise?"
The Great Unlearning: From Inferential Art to Aesthetic Inferentialism,"The critique of indeterminacy in aesthetics has been on the rise for some time in neorationalist-adjacent circles. Its targets are well known: from John Cage to relational aesthetics, the supposition of either a “noisy” or unbounded indeterminacy, or of an unconstrained openness of the work to its signifying outside would grant political valence to contemporary works of art independently of any determinate demand or concrete formal unfolding. But what if indeterminacy is not so much an end point as a local suspension of constraints that could enable the reconstitution of the wiring diagrams that constitute aesthetic practices themselves?

Richard Kostelanetz offers in the short essay “Inferential Art” an interpretation of John Cage’s seminal piece as triggering off the proper localization of the work through the process of its inferring from the sensible input: “Once she [the listener] grasps the implications of 4’33’’ she can infer that literally everything she hears within that frame (...) belongs to the piece”. Henry Flynt offers the concept of Constitutive Dissociations as a means of understanding such aesthetic devices: the changing of the aims of a practice without declaring the change, the fashioning of a “contrived enigma”.

This Seminar will work with ideas that while enabling the cult of indeterminacy might also be used as a lever to reroute the inferential pathways that constitute aesthetic practices. The local suspension of preconceptions regarding the structural constraints can be thought of as an enabling condition of the dissolution of practical Givens. Inferentialism, here, as a term stemming from the philosophy of language of Sellars, Brandom and others, is an index of the connections to be remade - between intuitive contents to be restructured and practical commitments to be revised. It is also indicative of a form of aesthetic rationalism that is not oblivious to the pragmatic constraints and procedural requirements of both political and aesthetic action. This amounts ultimately to a practical examination of the conditions of rational freedom consistent with Reza Negarestani’s dictum: “In a strict sense, freedom is not liberation from slavery. It is the continuous unlearning of slavery.”"
Capital: Form or Flow?,"Marx calls ""production in general"" a rational abstraction. While production is always production by social individuals at a definite stage of social development, the concept of ‘production in general’ allows us to distinguish those elements common to every stage of production from those specific to some. As a rational abstraction, production in general is not to be reified. Ignoring this caveat, Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Marx “the discovery of an activity of production in general and without distinction” (Anti-Oedipus 302). This allows them to suggest that their unification of social and desiring production, or political and libidinal economy, is Marxian in spirit, if not in letter. Yet it is neither. For while social and desiring-production are twin attributes of production in general, the latter is substantialized as desire, whose machinations – connective, disjunctive, conjunctive – are transhistorical. The syntheses of desire are the postulates of a speculative rather than rational abstraction, removing the vicissitudes of the drives from historically specific relations of production. This speculative conjunction of drive and production (“drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves” (Anti-Oedipus 35)) turns capital from a historical nexus of social forms and relations into an avatar of cosmic productivity. For Deleuze and Guattari, the flows of desire are coded at the primary, molecular level, but socially overcoded at the secondary, molar level (by the despot and the state, respectively). By decoding what has been socially overcoded, capital promises to free desiring-production from the fetters of social production, releasing what human sociality has hitherto repressed: desire as ‘production for the sake of production’. On this account, capital is no longer primarily a social relation but the conjunction of two decoded flows: a flow of labour and a flow of money. What Marx called ‘surplus-value’ is redefined as the incommensurability between these two flows, rather than as the difference between the value of labour-power and the value it produces. Capital is no longer the conjunction of the commodity form and the class relation. Labour is no longer the commodified source of commodity production. Where for Marx living labour is required to convert the value of fixed capital into surplus-value, Deleuze and Guattari render labour tributary to a ‘machinic surplus-value’ inherent in the means of production as such. Capital’s self-moving power is rendered independent of its social relation to labour, which becomes its inert appendage. The limit to capital is no longer the ‘moving contradiction’ between the expansion of surplus-value and the reduction of necessary labour time, but the moment of antiproduction (the disjunction of flows) immanent to capitalist production itself. Overcoming this disjunction entails the generalized conjunction of flows reuniting humanity and nature beyond subjectivity and objectivity. This last is certainly consonant with Marx’s vision of communism as the social organism’s reunion with its inorganic body, nature. But at every juncture, Deleuze and Guattari replace Marx’s analysis of social forms and relations with a description of flows and codes. They replace the critique of political economy with a metaphysical economy that naturalizes social relations and libidinal drives. The result is a metaphysics of production that turns the overcoming of capital from a macropolitical program targeting the commodity form and the class relation into a micropolitical ethos maximizing the conjunction of flows, which is to say, the intensification of desire."
The Reality of Structure: Structural Realism and Structuralism in Contemporary Philosophy,"This seminar proposes to explore different iterations of the structuralist and structural realist thesis in contemporary philosophy. It will integrate this understanding into a comprehensive view concerning the role of the concept of “structure” within philosophical history. While the term “structural realism” is first introduced by John Worrall in 1989 in the context of providing an account of scientific progress across theory changes, in a broader sense, the core tenets of structural realism can be traced to the origins of the history of philosophy: the view according to which it is mathematics or mathematized languages that allow us to pierce beyond the realm of appearances and access the real. Accordingly, structural realism is oftentimes backdated to and associated with a kind of Platonism or Pythagoreanism that posits mathematics as the key to escape the delusions of common sense, natural language, or the veil of sensible presentation. In this broad sense, structural realism captures the thesis according to which the formalized kernel of scientific theories or mathematical languages can assume a positive ontological or epistemological role. In its most radical forms, it posits not only that mathematics plays an ontological role, but that the forms described by mathematical or formalized vocabularies designate in the last instance all there really is, i.e. that the world of observable objects and their properties, of middle-sized objects and qualities, compose a fabric of appearances in relation to the real ‘unobservables’ posited by scientific-mathematical languages.

This basic conception is reiterated across philosophical history, and subjected to different variations. In Kant’s theory of experience, for example, the formal idealities identified by Plato become inflected onto the representational activity of the transcendental subject, such that the forms of intuition that structure the contents of all possible experience are aligned with specific mathematical and scientific paradigms: Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry as structuring the form of space as outer sense, and arithmetical succession as structuring the form of time as inner sense.

With this said, the concept of structure is hardly univocal between philosophical registers and historical periods, such that different versions of structural realism emerge in relation to how authors privilege specific formal vocabularies and scientific theories, appropriated in the search for solutions to specific problems. Following from Worrall’s definition, “ontic structural realism” emerges as a lever toward a naturalist epistemology of science and a scientific realist ontology, one that above all escapes the anti-realist consequences associated with Thomas Kuhn’s thesis of incommensurability when accounting for the logic of scientific revolutions. In contrast, within the 20th Century French post-war tradition, extending ‘structuralist’ approaches to the social sciences and psychoanalysis became the key toward a reconstituted materialist philosophy that negated the idealism or quietism following post-Heideggerean historicist, existentialist, and phenomenological approaches. In these divergent vectors, the lines dividing naturalism and Platonism, pure mathematics and empirical science, become progressively blurred, as different formal paradigms become reified or privileged as providing the relevant conception of structure: geometry, formal logic, set-theory, category theory, type theory, information theory, structural semiotics, the differential calculus, etc.

In the first introductory session, we will engage in a protracted history of structuralism and structural realism within philosophy, from antiquity and until the present, from its implicit Platonic inception to its contemporary iterations. During the second session, we explore the 20th Century extension of structuralist approaches to psychoanalysis and the social sciences in the post-war French context attempt to forge new materialist epistemologies and ontologies, focusing on key texts by Jacques-Alain Miller, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze. In the third session, we explore the contemporary extension of ontic structural realism as defined by John Worrall in the philosophy of science, where the preservation of mathematical structure across discontinuous theories provides a realist epistemological framework to understand scientific progress, looking also at works by James Ladyman and Steven French. In the fourth and final session, we explore the extension of the structural realist thesis into a structural systematics through reading the work of Lorenz Puntel, in which the ambitions of German Idealism become rekindled and the concept of structure becomes rigorously clarified."
Material Interfaces: Synthesizing Bodies Between Matter and Information,"This four-session Seminar introduces the core concepts and practices of contemporary nanotechnology and materials science from a transdisciplinary perspective, providing a general conceptual toolbox for both scientists and philosophers. Although our material culture has privileged a view of technological bodies as inert, rigid, and vertically assembled, our growing understanding of materials and the rapid development of the practices of nanotechnology have unveiled their ability to self-organize in complex and dynamic structures. In the face of this emerging and emergent material intelligence, establishing new and flexible boundaries between mind and body, subject and object, natural and artificial, living and non-living, has become a critical technological and theoretical challenge. At the heart of our investigation will be the concept of the interface, which designates the superficial region where bodies meet, generating complex material networks. While our use of electronic devices suggests an increasing dematerialization of the interface, the challenge of nanotechnology is building more and more extensive and complex interfaces where new material and interconnected systems can emerge. This process of dynamic assembly raises fundamental questions concerning our relationship with technology. Guided by four specific nanomaterial configurations (the spiderweb, the virus, the quantum dot, and the photographic emulsion), we will investigate how interfacing bodies transmute matter into information.
Session 1, Spiderwebs: The model towards a new paradigm for our relationship with technology
Session 2: Viruses. Self-assembling material systems across and beyond nature
Session 3, Quantum dots: Engineering the boundary between matter and information
Session 4, Photographic emulsions: Feminist nanomaterials and the interface behind representation"
Introduction to Future Theories of Intelligence,"To study intelligence is to study the power and potential of thought itself. This course will examine this most difficult of topics from a scientific and philosophical perspective. It is a research seminar that proposes a four-fold taxonomy of theories of intelligence with the goal of extending our conception of the limits of our mental capacities. The study of intelligence as utility, computation, knowledge, and reflection, I will argue, provides a foundation for severer and more advanced speculation at thought’s frontier.

Intelligence is not only a theoretical problem. It is also a political one, and has been understood as everything from a distraction from moral virtue to an existential threat to human survival. It plays a central role in political theories ranging from Plato’s golden souls and Hobbes’s rational agents to Hayek’s decentralized capitalism and Anglo-American bureaucratic meritocracy. The era of “thinking machines” places more weight than ever on the notion of intelligence, with machines of beyond-human intelligence expected to both resolve our material needs and usher in a new era of mentality."
On Kant's Opus Postumum,"In this seminar, we will read Kant’s last, unfinished work, the Opus Postumum (Nachlasswerk), a collection of 527 handwritten pages of manuscript that Kant worked on during the last decade of his life. Most of Kant’s writings went through a meticulous editing process that consisted of several stages, creating the solid and sometimes impenetrable, but rhetorically convincing form of Kantian philosophy. Written in part on the back of letters and newspaper clippings and interspersed with autobiographical notes, the Opus Postumum was, to a large extent, never edited by Kant himself. When reading the Opus Postumum, one can thus hear a different voice come to the foreground, a voice which is agonistic, self-contradictory, and at points very personal, as one accompanies Kant during his final years in his daily practice of philosophizing until shortly before his death in February 1804. Despite the marginal role that the Opus Postumum plays within the canon of Kantian philosophy, the manuscript contains what Kant himself reportedly claimed to be his “Hauptwerk” or “Chef d’oeuvre,” providing, at last, what he believed to be the keystone to his entire doctrinal system.

This Seminar will read the Opus Postumum in four complementary sessions. The first session will begin by outlining the problem that Kant set out to tackle in the Opus Postumum as well as the thoroughly unsettling methodological and systematic consequences that it poses for Transcendental Philosophy and Post-Kantianism. The second session will focus on the earliest draft, the Oktavenentwurf, written in 1796, in which Kant first attempted to bridge the gap between metaphysics and physics by deducing the system of the moving forces of matter (elementary system of matter). The third session will move on to parts of the manuscript written between August 1799 and December 1800, in which Kant revisited central tenets treated in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), that is, self-affection and self-positing. The fourth and last seminar will then turn to the very last pages of manuscript, written between December 1800 and April 1803. It is here, at the very end of his life, that Kant reconceived of the structure of reason and put forth, at last, his system of Transcendental Philosophy."
Myth of the Master: Philosophy of the Unstoppable,"This seminar explores the figure of the Master as a will to chaos: namely, one combining elements of the unparalleled, the visionary, and the unstoppable. We will look to those strange, iconic personalities who led underground movements, secret societies, forbidden associations, cult gatherings, urban gangs, martial arts orders, outlawed guilds, artistic circles, and rebel cadres. We will study the Master’s dark/enchanting shadow as a delicate orchestration of concealment, seduction, domination, obscurity, awe, and sacrifice.

What specific prototypes of power and becoming belong to the Master alone—revolutionary, criminal, aesthetic, religious, mystical, magical, or avant-garde? What specific criterion, rituals, or tests establish this right to supremacy? How does the Master attain the farthermost levels of human imagination to form a creative-destructive pendulum-like no other? From Friedrich Nietzsche’s ""Thus Spoke Zarathustra"" to Antonin Artaud’s ""50 Drawings to Murder Magic,"" from Joyce ""Mansour’s Screams"" to Helen Cixous’s ""Laugh of the Medusa"" and several lesser-known works, a textual hall of mirrors will arise on all sides. Moreover, we will follow 8 conceptual ciphers—those of The Enemy, The Tower, The Chasm, The Planet, The Omen, The Corpse, The Storm, and The Labyrinth—in order to unlock dimensions of the Master’s destiny."
Starting With Plants: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life,"Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers, trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants. Thus the vegetal world has the potential to rescue our planet and our species; it offers us a way to abandon past metaphysics without falling into nihilism by bringing thought back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.

The aspiration of this seminar is to elucidate what it means to start living and thinking with plants. In the course of our discussions, we will observe that this starting point is not equivalent to an origin or even to a beginning. Rather, following plants, we will commence our experiment in the middle, from which beginnings and ends will appear in a new light. As much a methodological probing as an ontological foray, we will aim to shift our perspective on time and existence, the vegetal as much as the human."
"Abstraction, Paranoia, Transcendental Philosophy, and the Limits of Thought","This seminar traces key moments in the history of transcendental philosophy, departing from its overt elaboration in Kant’s critical method. At the most general level, transcendental explanations or argumentation can be understood in terms of two central postulates: i) that it is the job of philosophy to analyze the conditions of access to the world and correspondingly of empirical cognition, however these conditions, the world, or cognition themselves are ultimately to be conceived; ii) that there is a deductive schema that can show how these conditions are invariant constraints or structures of all possible experience, however experience is ultimately conceived. 

Departing from this minimal, methodological core, the history of transcendental philosophy has unfolded as a progressive radicalization of its incipient, Kantian formulation in terms of the investigation into the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments within a representational account of experience. Thinkers after Kant have accordingly sought to interrogate both the forms of mediation that condition our experience of the world beyond those explored under Kant’s account of apperceptive consciousness, as well as the cogency of the deductive procedure proposed therein in the form of a ‘transcendental logic.’ Such attempts have thus expand our understanding of experience beyond the sensory and conceptual forms examined by Kant, exploring practical, linguistic, historical, and cultural, forms of mediation. From neo-Kantian attempts to naturalize Kant’s insights in the wake of developments in the natural and social sciences, to Husserl’s formal ontology and phenomenological account of intentionality, to Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein’s’ being-in-the-world, to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricist account of larval subjectivation, to Laruelle’s non-philosophical project for a “first science” for both philosophy and science. In this trajectory, we shall see, transcendental discourse follows a vector of increasing abstraction, at every turn revealing uninterrogated assumptions in previously identified forms of intentionality and experience. In the name of science, philosophy, or post-philosophical ‘thinking’, the prospects of “laying the ground” for metaphysics turns out to harbor latent metaphysical prejudices, that transcendental inquiry seeks to exorcise and conceptualize.
As the conditions of all possible experience turn out to be in themselves conditioned, laden with dogmatic assumptions, the very resources of a transcendental logic or theory become increasingly precarious. Accordingly, as this vector of radicalization proceeds, transcendental inquiry progressively leads philosophy into a general crisis. For as the investigation into the conditions of all possible experience can never secure a stable foundation, the very possibility of freeing philosophy from dogmatic metaphysics becomes ever more elusive. As critical epistemological, fundamental ontological, and ethical vocabularies become themselves interrogated, the critical impetus to examine the conditions of all possible experience or access to the world devolves into a generic methodological paranoia, eroding the constructive and positive pretensions of philosophical discourse as a whole.
In the first week, we examine the initial configuration of the transcendental method in Kant’s first critique, and its subsequent problematization in Fichte’s attempt to ground the positional reflexivity of the subject of apperception.

In the second week, we examine the elaboration of the transcendental project into a formal ontology in two successive arcs: the formal ontological investigation of intentionality proposed by the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and its proposed mathematical formalization into an eidetic geometry by Jean Petitot, and Martin Heidegger’s displacement of objective intentionality within an existential analytic of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, reaching its terminal crisis as he attempts to derive human temporality from time as such.

In the third week, we examine the attempts to pursue a materialist transvaluation of transcendental idealism in Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricist program, and Gabriel Catren’s recently elaborated ‘phenoumenological’ project.

In the fourth and final session, we examine the attempts to draw out the transcendental conditions for immanence, looking at Michel Henry’s account of radical immanence, and Francois Laruelle’s attempt to leverage a non-philosophical, ‘axiomatic’ ‘first science’ that subtracts transcendental inquiry from philosophy and functions as a mode of discourse according to the condition of Real immanence or “the-vision-in-One”."
"Programmed Ontologies, How to Code a World","Our world is the manifestation of complex, adaptive and intelligent systems. This workshop draws parallels between existing models of complexity in material, biological and physical systems and extends further than the mere replication of ‘matter’ and ‘nature’ . Algorithmic design research blurs traditional disciplinary boundaries, bridging multiple scientific and artistic fields and has the capacity to develop a deeper dialogue with a variety of scales and their interrelation. The ubiquity of our digital tools has made design and the manipulation of information inseparable. Our speculation is that computation is not solely digital but omnipresent. Matter is increasingly indiscernible from media. A plethora of different scales of time, from the genetic to the geological, are in direct contact with our abstract predictive models, computational infrastructures and technical apparatuses. In our contemporary post-human context, our hybrid languages increase their potency of affection of the ‘real’ through a procedurally bound acceleration. We seek novel elements and patterns of organization, structure and articulation as informational systems with spatiotemporal manifestations.  
The workshop focuses on the creation of adaptive algorithmic systems and coded worlds. The research will showcase the organizational and spatial characteristics of algorithmic procedures. The goals of the research include the careful calibration of each process of formation, the curation of precise interactions between an ecology of algorithmic logics and datasets and the study of the entropy in their generative phase spaces. The study of algorithmic formation is always a process of negotiation: data and its manifestation withdraws relative to different perspectives. Notions of projection, intersection, mapping and embedding are lenses of perception of abstract figures, whose structure always escapes a complete representation. All different data dimensions enter a flat ontology, with no preconceived hierarchical relationships between them. The generative potentiality is encapsulated in a non-representational and almost anti-figurative nexus of qualities."
Studio One: World Post Planetary Universal Design,"The research/design studio: WORLD operates as a probe to take stock of the current situation, consider the disequilibrium of multiple systems in spirals, and compile an index of research/design possibilities. As architects, urbanists, infrastructural designers, systems thinkers, economists, ecologists, we navigate and negotiate with the intertwined webs of human energy expenditure and information flow, and their impacts on civilization and all species on Earth. The challenge is to envision new configurations at the edge of our planetary comfort zone. Architecture’s conception of itself as a discipline has depended for centuries on a model of the artificial in relation to the natural, and the primal human action in the wilderness: to build a hut or make a bonfire? This tension between codecs of preservation or rituals of conflagration also configures the very base of organic and planetary life and the ‘negative entropies’ of design. But our contemporary models of the world might deploy an alternative to the dialectic of ‘conservation of energy or expenditure’: what we can call a next nature or a third nature, within which all disciplines can operate.
In thinking planetary solutions, we cultivate a design approach that embraces dynamic annotation, massive addressability, scripting, and a companion species-ship with data. Being able to see with a new kind of perception aided by data, while still formulating design ideas generated through the intersection between human input, the automatic, and the autonomous. The problem of the Anthropocene is usually framed by the need to implement a concept of geoengineering we often hold in our minds- that the making of planets has to do with an almost totalitarian restoration or implementation of an ideal equilibrium- yet on our planet we face irreversible, future-deep-time lines of past and present activity interlaced with complex models of equilibrium. This research studio will support the discovery and invention of ‘interloped activities’ in the service of a universalist approach to complete system design. We will identify points of intervention and develop models running the gamut from designed buildings to urban interventions, designed biology, governance, and new forms of ultimately designed intelligence for world environments yet to come. This research process reflects on new constructions of and for the surface of our PLANET, from building to city to landscape to ecosystem, reorganizing its architectures and providing new models and structures to navigate flows of energy, information and culture. We keep in mind as well that subsequent semesters will scale out to wider design challenges for Atmospheres and Cosmos. This studio will work closely with the workshop / seminar Programmed Ontologies taught by Ezio Blasetti and Danielle Willems."
"Artistic Methodology, The Parasitical Turn","This Seminar is inspired by the French philosopher Michel Serres’s book The Parasite, which defines the parasite through three commonly held perspectives of the term, as biological, social, and communicative (since “parasite” is also the French word for noise). Serres discusses the parasite as a vehicle for introducing ‘irritants’ to any given order, causing subtle changes that can be productive and cumulative. This 8 session Seminar will look at how artists have operated as “parasites” by intruding into spaces where they are not welcome, parodying and inverting certain roles/systems/formats/contexts, and redistributing resources from one space to the next. The figure of the parasite extends to artists a means of surveying, articulating, questioning, and contaminating relations. It is a tool to determine loopholes, complicities, and power positions within any given system. By invading channels of communication and interrupting social relations and the operations of institutions, one can extract surplus, introduce unexpected elements, and force the system to evolve and adapt. Through discussions with artists and thinkers, this seminar will examine a wide range of tactics for creative infiltration and will consider what these acts tell us about how systems work. In order to survive, the parasite becomes an expert in their host’s habits and a manipulator of its codes. Such efforts not only make visible a system’s internal criteria but also lay bare the parasitical interrelations within the system itself. These relationships are what parasites feed on; parasites exploit routines of exploitation, interfering with perceived balances and legitimacies by deferring the normal route. Moderated by Post Brothers, the sessions will address logics of exclusion and unequal exchange within the cultural field and within economic, biological, and sociopolitical structures, illuminating the hidden pacts of hospitality and property so as to question our dependencies and assumptions regarding how we act and work together. In addition, this seminar will consider how acts of resistance are often co-opted and implicated in the very structures they seek to undermine and will explore methods of survival and subversion in an increasingly flexible albeit precarious world.

June 6: Introductory Lecture by Post Brothers
June 13: Goldin+Senneby
June 20: Minerva Cuevas
June 27: Jill Magid
July 11: Christian Jankowski
July 18: Chris Evans
July 25: Janek Simon
August 1: Concluding Lecture by Post Brothers"
Cybernetics and Psychology in Sellars’ Scientific Image of Mind,"The long-neglected Wilfrid Sellars has been rediscovered thanks to the warm reception that his epigones, especially Robert Brandom and John McDowell, have received in both ‘analytic’ and “Continental’ philosophical audiences. Yet the recent Sellars renaissance neglects his profound debt to the “sciences of the mental” in the 1940s through 1960s. Without an appreciation of this side of Sellars’s thought, we run the risk of misinterpreting his most famous ideas, such as what he called “the Myth of the Given.” The two “sciences of the mental” that influenced Sellars were cybernetics and behaviorism – both of which need to be rescued from obscurity of their own. In cybernetics, the nascent science of information theory developed by Norbert Wiener and others, Sellars found the concept of a feedback loop. In behaviorism, especially the version developed by Edward Tolman, a positive role is found for cognition in the explanation of behavior. The cognitive behaviorist Tolman and the cybernetician Norbert Wiener were drawing deep on influences in American pragmatism: cognition and action cannot be theorized independently. These influences gave Sellars a theoretically important point of departure for his appropriation of his father, the critical realist Roy Wood Sellars, as well as of Carnap and Wittgenstein. In this Seminar we will examine how Sellars drew upon cognitive behaviorism and cybernetics to carry out his grand plan of “naturalizing idealism”: how to place the crucial philosophical insights of Kant and Hegel on the ‘gold standard’ of empirical scientific inquiry. We will examine how Sellars’s use of examples such as guided missiles and robots opened up a space of philosophical speculation that resonantes with recent developments in enactive cognitive science, ecological psychology, and the new rationalism of Brassier and Negarestani."
Restructuring Enlightenment: From Carnap’s Aufbau to Conceptual Engineering,"As a direct continuation of The Enigma of Carnap’s Aufbau, this eight-session course will continue to chart the development of Rudolf Carnap’s thought, from the problems arising in Aufbau to their solutions in light of Carnap’s subsequent works starting from The Logical Syntax of Language to Logical Foundations of Probability. All in all, the aim of this seminar is to make an overall survey of Carnap’s main philosophical ambition that begins to crystalize with Aufbau and The Unity of Science—that is, the a philosophy equipped sufficiently to rethink and restructure the Enlightenment as a project of systematic universalism where the unity of all sciences and the translatability between statements made within psychological, physical and cultural domains have not only profound implications for philosophy and science but also for an egalitarian universalist politics. 

From the cautious pluralist attitude of Carnap with regard to constitution systems in Aufbau to his paradigms of conceptual engineering and the principle of tolerance, Carnap shows his philosophy to be a new philosophy aimed at rekindling the Enlightenment. And in that reinvigoration of the Enlightenment—which is at once, constructive and critical—philosophy is reinvented anew, and the project of Enlightenment is restructured in accordance to the developments in areas encompassing science and engineering, economy and politics.

As part of the syllabus for this course, supplementary materials will be introduced in advance. Yet we also take the liberty to sidestep from the listed reading list when required."
Thinking Between Worlds and Forms of Life: On Orientations of Thought and their Consequences,"Extending our research on worldmaking as symbolizing activities, the Seminar will tackle the issue of the embeddedness of worldmaking as understood by Nelson Goodman within forms of life that themselves get caught in the transformative web of language use and the ensuing revision of thought and sensible categories. In this Module, we retreat in order to better advance by examining some of the background assumptions that may guide different conceptions of language and how they determine to specify the possible moves within thinking and forms of life. The decision between the primacy of ontology or of language comes to the forefront, as much as their intertwinement, while we examine different orientations of thought.

Session one: The first session tackles the possible relationships between ontology- as pertaining to that which we take as being- and language as the means we have of determining it. Peter Wolfendale’s understanding of the concept of ontology in the XXth century is explored in order to get an initial grasp of the concerning issues.

Session two, Local & universal conceptions of language:
The ontological question yields the division between language as calculus and language as universal medium as having different consequences. In this session, we approach Hintikka’s framework, having as example the interpretation Martin Kusch gives of the distinction as he applies it to both Husserl and Heidegger.
Session three, Forms of thought and forms of life: The frameworks examined in the first and second sessions are pit against and compared to the division operated by Paul Livingston in the contemporary philosophical scene, between 4 different orientations of thought : the sovereign, the constructivist/criteriological, the paradoxico-critical, and the generic. A further comparison is examined as brought forth by philosopher Bento Prado Jr, between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Session four, On form & scale: Last session tries to locate the points of inflection necessary for a transcendental realism that countenances the necessary difference in frameworks and the embeddedness of these within a natural world. Scale will be an essential tool for recasting our thoughts on universal perspectives and perspectival universals, either bringing worlds into ever expanding logical environments that integrate them, or considering them apart of any linguistic-integrative possibility."
Capital & Power,"This Seminar is focused around a close study of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s Capital as Power, which presents an analysis of the theoretical shortcomings of both neoclassical economics (based on the concept of utility) and Marxism (based on the concept of value) and offers an alternative view which rejects the possibility of separating economic value from political power. Capital, they argue, is not an “economic entity,” but rather a “language in which the capitalist ruling class conceives and shapes society.” Instead of understanding economic modernity as an epoch in which the “disembedded” and autonomous logic of the economic comes to dominate and subordinate political power to itself, Nitzan and Bichler offer us the tools to understand the way in which political struggles and strategic confrontations always lie behind the appearance of an autonomous economic process, and, indeed, make it possible in the first place. By moving beyond the categories of value and utility towards an economic theory based around the concepts of the optionality of power and the social production of liquidity, it is possible to conceive of political-economic systems as contingent and open to political contestation rather than being determined by “immanent laws” or a natural, objective equilibrium. Supplemantary readings will be drawn from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Ibn Khaldun, Thomas Munn, Marx, Veblen, Mirowski, and Robert Meister."
Existential Hope + Maturity: Visions of Possible Achievements,"Civilization can be thought of as a process that canalizes nature’s energies toward intelligent ends, converting and restructuring blind physical flows into intelligent systems of welfare and value. Across our species’s history, this undertaking has been accomplished at increasingly intensive and extensive scales. Human civilization is now a major factor in the Earth system; but, arguably, we have not seen anything yet. What might be the full scope of what can be achieved?
Ever since the Enlightenment, philosophers have written about what they called the “maturity” of civilization as an important goal and standard. This has been conceived, invariably, as some growing degree of independence or autonomy from the constraints and dictates of brute nature (including our own evolved psychology). Construed in this way, we can draw a continuous and consistent line from the early C19th Socialist Utopians all the way to Nikolai Kardashev and his classification of planetary, stellar, and galactic echelons of a civilization’s energetic capture.
Tracing this thread from the Enlightenment up to the present day, this course will explore the increasingly ambitious and bold visions of what can ultimately be accomplished by intelligence within the physical cosmos. In the growing research surrounding existential risk, we are becoming sensitized to what the various ‘fail states’ might look like for civilization, but there is also an important tradition of thinking about the possibility space of ‘big wins’.
So, what are the different ways we can construe of civilizational maturity? What are the different ways—normative, physical, technological, etc.—of classifying and measuring this putative state?
From the Enlighteners to early techno-utopians like J.D. Bernal and J.B.S. Haldane, from the Russian cosmists to Soviet pioneers like Iosif Shklovsky and Stanisław Lem, from Freeman Dyson and SETI to contemporary experts on the topic of grand futures, this course will explore the lineage of visions of what intelligence might ultimately physically achieve."
Bayesian Reasoning: A New Science of Knowledge,"Bayesian statistical inference and theory of decision are widely employed today in many different domains of enquiry such as physics, social sciences, economics, medicine, law, cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence. Even though Thomas Bayes wrote the theorem for conditioning the probability of hypothesis during the 18 th century, it has been difficult to use it in scientific induction until the introduction of algorithmic techniques that rendered the calculation practically accessible and suitable for make any sort of prediction based on big data exploration. Bayesianism is much more than a theory of probability: it is a paradigm for reasoning and learning that allows to explain how knowledge evolve, how beliefs converge towards the most reliable hypothesis and how conventional rules for coordinating practices can emerge to support collective interests. Moreover, Bayesian decision theory provides the model of rational agent in economics and for programming artificial intelligence. However, despite the remarkable achievement and the promises, Bayesianism has been criticized for being a normative and idealizing perspective on rationality that do not take into account real computational limits and the logical impossibility of achieving inductive certainty. The seminar aims to provide the basic tools to understand Bayesian methods and to grasp their potentialities and limitations. We will explore the history of probability theory and we will compare different interpretations (von Mises, Carnap, Keynes, Ramsey, de Finetti) and their application to scientific induction in order to situate bayesianism within the wider epistemological turn at the beginning of the 20 th Century. We will introduce algorithmic probability (Ray Solomonff) and the hypothesis of “Bayesian brain” in cognitive sciences (Friston, Dehaene) to understand why it has been considered as suitable for programming artificial intelligence. We will deal with the game theoretic perspective on decision theory (von Neumann and Morgestern, Harsanyi, Lewis) that supports economic modeling (Savage, Friedman) and automated trading. Finally, we will turn to criticism (evolutionary game theory) and we will try to think about the philosophical implications of Bayesian epistemology."
"Turbid Media: Fog, Froth and Foam in the Age of the Device","This course observes the prevalence and expansion of forms of fog, froth and foam in our device-filled world and in our language: e.g. in pollution and the urban atmospheres produced by particulates hovering in the air, in tear-gases directed against protests, in streams and seas clogged with toxic foams and froths – results of chemically effluence and climate change, in space-time foam, a new Ether, and, metaphorically, in Cloud and Fogging computing, in speculative ‘frothy’ financial markets, in constructions of the social as foam and as bubbles in social theory. Foggy and foamy forms are turbid, a perceptible quality defined by Goethe as generative of vision per se. Media too can be turbid. ‘Turbid media’ is the name given by physicists to muddy water or particularly polluted air in which the particles of poisonous dust are so dense as to be visible. This project explores turbid media, not from the perspective of the physicist measuring propagation of light and other optical properties for determined ends, but from the perspective of a viewer speculating on a moment of optical engagement in which particles float on the air or gather atop a latte or lend a name to pixel-based cultures. What matter and media are fog, froth and foam? How do these forms remake our worlds in their light and through their productions?"
AI as Disinformation Engine: Exploring the Deep Fake/State,"In less than half a decade the world has witnessed the rise of the synthetic media: the deepfake, near human-level generation of text, image/video, speech, and music generation. Last year reached a critical mass of generational apophenia and growing fears of deceptive fictions: techno-aesthetic fakery as a political tool. Is AI remaking the world (without us)?

This will be the paradigm we will approach in nondisciplinary manner: part Computational Epistemology, part Computer Science, and a practical lab component in which we will experiment with state-of-the-art models in operation. The course does not require any specific background, all disciplines are welcome as this technology is pervasive and its influence complex. 

The format of this course will be separated into seminar/lab/debriefing groups. Much of the course will be in a group discussion online with the instructor and invited experts. The seminar sessions aim to provide the proper context of each coding lab session. The reading for the course will be diverse: from reading computer science articles, exploring audio-visual archives, as well as technical documentation and developer tutorials. Each reading will prepare you for the labs where we collectively break into the black-boxes of machine learning models. The debriefing sections include writing responses, sharing with the group, and contributing to collective documentation. ‘Lab’ sessions will be offered. The skillsets of each participant will determine the pace of these sessions and what we can accomplish. We will provide the basic knowledge of training model-based machine learning (model architecture, custom datasets, fine-tuning hyper-parameters). The focus will be on more recent approaches like Generative Adversarial Networks (Deep Dream / GAN) and Reinforcement Learning (OpenAI / World Models) will be the focus. We encourage the participation of those with no coding experience. A genuine interest in the technology is the only requirement. There will be step-by-step tutorials to get everyone through. Coders also welcome (difficulty adjustable). Synthetic media is an emerging challenge at speed and scale. It seeps into all of our lives; literacy and agency are (if not, will be) imperative and they will meta-theoretically construct the core tenants of the paths as we foray into the world of generative aesthetics."
Philosophical Topology & Planetary Politics,"This Seminar is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavour at the intersection of philosophy of science and technology, political ecology, geopolitical theory and visual culture. Its main premise departs from an idea that genres of knowledge production that concern socio-political and ecological realities can be studied in a unified manner via technique of philosophical topology, understood as a toolbox for ideation and examination of figures, spaces, and tropes implicit in a given genre of knowledge production. Philosophical topology is paired in this Seminar with a materialistic ontology of culture,  anchored in the tools of visual culture studies, German media theory, and the concept of diagrammatic thinking inspired by Gilles Châtelet. These tools allow for a survey of two applied domains of philosophical topology: comparative cosmology and comparative planetology. The first domain – comparative cosmology – draws upon an idea that historical change is not driven by changes in institutional settings and decisions by prima facie political actors but by shifts in the deeper conceptual topology, identified by Bentley B. Allan as cosmologies. The second domain – comparative planetology – develops a series of geopolitical propositions for Post Anthropocene, conditioned by the emergent discourse on the concept of the Planetary and on the ongoing discussions about geoengineering and geodesign. The Seminar culminates in the reading of the present geopolitical situation with respect to climate crisis from the standpoint of the ecological thinking that sees the socio-political and the scientific-technological as the continuum of the ecological, thanks to the technique of philosophical topology."
"Coemergence, Contemporary Criticism & Eastern Praxis","Art has long sheltered close to power with the attendant fate of being held too tightly, at times, and, at others, of being banished to the periphery. In struggles over the meaning of the word—its heft, reach, and projectile force—warring scholars have nevertheless insisted on the necessary praxis of reading-writing-worlding. In the early 20th century, debates on the problem of literary realism, which often had matters of life and death in the balance, made multiple claims on the revolutionary power of narrative without fully accounting for the source of its affective power. The related problem of reflection in critical thought, which sought to decolonize the episteme of imperial systems of representation by utilizing the praxis of self-reflexivity, left incompletely answered the question of what vitalizes that performative turn to itself.
This Seminar proposes to map an older terrain onto this familiar modern route within critical theory by engendering four new encounters in thought between the contemporary field of criticism and Eastern philosophy (limited here to select instances in Chinese philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism). From the latter, we will draw on concepts related to perception, affect, sign, and vision that open up dimensions of the aesthetic experience as the direct basis for transformation.

Methodologically, our inquiry recognizes from the outset that the ground for comparison is far from stable. In particular, the rhetoric of Eastern instruction, which will feature in some of the primary texts, differs from the language of philosophy and literature and how it may affect our ability to hold (as pure idea) contrasting notions of praxis. The basic curiosity we harbor over the question of how an aesthetic experience changes us will have to be re-articulated repeatedly as we shift our intellectual terrain. In this sense, the course will be conducted in part as itself an experiment in the praxis of aesthetic form. Reading materials will include Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, Francois Jullien’s Detour and Access, Gidi Ifergan’s Longchenpa on Praxis, Its Negation and Liberation, Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies, and Gilles Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy, as well as selected excerpts from primary philosophical texts. Additionally, in our discussions, we will refer to varied examples from literature, film, and visual arts, as we explore our own critical abilities to think, and to write, through the key concepts of the course.

In a series of four brief encounters, we will try to pinpoint the very instant of creation as such. To this end, we will look into paintings, sculptures, installations, embodiments, and atmospheric phenomena."
Charismatic Image,"Charisma is an unavoidable force of aesthetics and politics: it can be viewed as “charm” in its positive or affirmative version, or as tyrannical manipulation and a will-to-dominate in its negative form. But the mysterious etymological root takes us back to the ancient Greek word kharis, meaning “grace” or “favor”. Charisma is therefore a form of a gift, something received from the unknown elsewhere. But how exactly is it attained (cosmically, divinely, artisanally)? And how does it turn from grace into a curse? 

This Seminar looks at charisma in relation to the image in which it is embedded. An image, an object, a line of writing, a situation, or the presence of a person, gains the power to inspire and attract at the level of temperaments and barely perceptible impulses. Charisma in this sense is a micro-climate, both natural and supernatural. The goal of our weekly investigations will be to usher its movement, like that of weather phenomena, from a divine gesture to an atmospheric disposition. For even miracles relate to changing atmospheres (solidifying water in order to walk on it, reducing gravity in order to levitate, etc.). Changing the atmosphere means reformulating the laws, both divine and natural. 

In a series of four brief encounters, we will try to pinpoint the very instant of creation as such. To this end, we will look into paintings, sculptures, installations, embodiments, and atmospheric phenomena."
"Neomadness, Studies of Dream and Derangement","This seminar attempts to break the prime law of all psychoanalysis by dreaming of still-unborn forms of madness. Thus symptomatology is projected forward into the alleys of imaginative possibility, conceiving an experimental method whereby the psyche itself becomes a narrative plaything (following a “choose your own adventure” model). In essence, to ask what lies beyond the known outer limits of delirium and derangement.
Consequently, this seminar will supersede the categories of schizophrenia, mania, neurosis, delusion, paranoia, melancholia, and obsession by allowing lunacy to enter those prismatic chambers of conjecture and hypothetical reinvention never seen before. A Pandora’s Box of inexistent psychoses or hidden labyrinth of insane consciousness. To achieve this end, we will resurrect some of the most iconic lunatic writers of the past centuries from across the world, asking what they might have experienced otherwise (shadow-diagnosis), abandoning analysis of “actual” syndromes in order to turn their words/sensations elsewhere (toward our own prisms of neo-madness). No longer the interpretation of dreams, but rather the dreams of interpretation (bordering on hallucination)."
Navigating the Lost Scales,"The Soviet rural economy launched the grand-scale nature transformation process during which all temporalities and creatures became embedded into the upbuilding of the communist future. This process unfolded within two dimensions: on the one hand, post-war industrial intensification of cities distorted the geological structure of the planet and its temporal synchronization; on the other, agrobiological approach to nature radically changed the form of terrestrial surface and species composition while generating toxic biological hybrids (e.g. Sosnowskyi’s Hogweed). Such a complex geo-ecological transformations led to the disorder of original co-relations between human and non-human scales. That closed the door to default anthropocentric cartography, according to which expansive human order remained secured from local non-human scales. In the post-Soviet world, where different orders and temporalities are enmeshed, we can find the ‘lost’ scales of powerful non-human politics. Today invasive hybrids of Lysenko’s agrobiology, Soviet mechanical engineering, and cosmonautics have returned to the wild and formed their own political alliances against which human statehood is engaged in a struggle. Treating the ‘lost’ scales as ferals, we propose a new cartographic method. It investigates possible ways of navigation between human and non-human scales to re-establish the opportunity of shared map. During the Seminar we will try to consider the Russian Ferations’ map as a possible form of community in the condition of erosion of common politics and future.

* Russian Ferations project is a map designed on the basis of field research of local territories. The map links the real distribution of feral politics with multiple research models (natural sciences, sound art, bio art, generative art, theory and philosophy). Biological strains, soundscapes, 3D-scans, narratives and alternative forms of thought uncover the multilayerness of the worlds creating by ferations."
From Worldmaking to Lifeforming I,"In The way the world is, Nelson Goodman argues for relinquishing the idea of a singular world to be described adequately by philosophy, science, or to be pictured by our artistic practices. Instead, he argued for the idea that there isn’t such a thing as a world independent of any symbolizing activities. The question concerning how such a world could be can possibly receive no answer that does not already presuppose some descriptive framework of our own making. What Goodman had in mind, though, was not the abandonment of knowledge as such, but a redefinition of this notion. “Worldmaking” is the term he coined for the activity of knowing-through-reconstruction that was developed in his later writings. This has consequences for the concept of an epistemological Given, on which any foundationalist picture of knowledge rests. Knowledge is always already enmeshed in the symbolizing activities that are part and parcel of our forms of life. But what about the remaking of forms of life themselves? With the de-absolutization of a metaphysical foundation proposed in and through the works of Carnap, Sellars and Goodman comes the priority of conceptualizing practices embedded in a contingently constituted form of life. The contingent character of this form of life- which acquires post-facto necessity for us- is then pit against its role as a condition for knowledge. This Seminar intends to tackle this double character of Forms of Life within worldmaking practices. It offers an introduction to worldmaking while reflecting on Wittgensteinian forms of life as materials for reconfiguration. The political valence of worldmaking practices as means for reconfiguring the social world hangs upon such questions.

Session 1: The critique of transcendental structures
A quick and brisk introduction to the idea of worldmaking Session 2: World and Worlds: the question of realism, perspectivism and of the reality of perspectives. / Session 3: The deprivatisation of mind, the switch from self-evident truths to their axiomatic alternatives and their effects upon Forms of Life. / Session 4: Scale and forms of life, gatherthing sthe conclusions of the Seminar pertaining to the issues of realism and the subject position by engaging the problem of scales in the concept of sensibility."
On Sound: Unsound,"Sound: The vibrational force that enters our ears, encapsulates our bodies, shakes our worlds. Unsound: The vibrational force that exceeds our ears, goes beyond our bodies, inhabit the world.

The interdisciplinary research field of sound studies has in the last decades established a flourishing mesh of sound theories and listening practices. In Unsound:Undead (Urbanomic: 2019), the research group Audint presents essays challenging the prevailing notion of what sound can be and how the world can be thought sonically. By addressing sound through its potentials as a vibrational continuum on the limit and beyond human hearing Unsound: Undead disentangles sound from its anthropocentric notions, revealing a world of sound out of sound.

Through inquiries in philosophy, cultural theory, and sonic arts, this course asks: What can inaudible sound do? What are the consequences of vibrational theories? How do these perspectives alter the way we understand audible sound? During the Seminar Sessions, these questions will be addressed in collaboration with six theoretical researchers and sound artists who all have engaged with sound beyond sound, each through their theoretical and artistic practice, approach, and methodologies. Additionally, the Seminar will touch upon and address concepts such as sonic materialism, politics of vibration, and posthuman listening.

October 11: Jacob Eriksen
October 18: Leslie García
October 25: Steve Goodman/Kode9
November 1: Lawrence Abu Hamdan
November 8: Eleni Ikoniadou
November 15: Toby Heys
November 22: Christoph Cox
December 6: Jacob Eriksen"
The Commons = X: Inventing The Non-Given Commons,"This Seminar focuses on understanding the non-given form of the commons. We will posit that this common = X. The common = X will not be given, but would be constructed from the heterogeneity of our knowledges. This is therefore a seminar on invention, philosophical and non-philosophical. We will look for an X in contemporary art, in ethics, in the sciences, in mysticism, and we will do this, especially through the lens of their ‘impossibilities’. It is within the designation of the impossible that these domains of thought find their epistemic limitations, our task will be to transform these philosophical, mathematical (etc.) impossibilities in order to use them to treat the problems of our actual world. We will call this the rethinking of integrative objects. At the practical level, this Seminar will use practice-based workshops to explore and develop new languages and methodologies, new names and forms, and work through concepts pertaining to the unknown and the impossible. The workshops will create new ways of thinking and seeing beyond theory and practice, which leaves room for both contingency and experimentation in developing the situated knowledge that will be indigenous to all working groups. This will open up practices for translation and application as methodologies in dealing with non-given forms of the commons and our ‘impossibilities’ as conduits for inventing non-given commons. At the theoretical level, through these workshops and seminars, we aim to develop a new use-conception of language. This language will not be conceptually isolated (i.e., as gramma-text), but rather one that possesses an idea of forcing and a transformation of metaphoras (i.e., as tele-phore) leading to a mutation and operative use of language. We will thus not develop a language for language’s sake. We will start from invention, which is often understood mono-disciplinarily in philosophy, art, science, etc. We will, however, broaden the subject by adding fiction as a distinguished operator to our domain of invention. We explore how fiction prepares for the diversification of various disciplines, and finally, how creation touches more closely the forms of reality, being indifferent to disciplines while making use of them.

Logistics
We will be reading selections from the latest book written by Francois Laruelle Tetralogos (rough translations of selections into English will be provided). Other articles, essays, and media will be provided in advance of discussions. as a group, we will be collectively constructing a glossary, each will participate in leading discussions, acting as respondents, and presenting Our unique perspective throughout the Seminar. The final output will be a culmination of the workshops, presentations, and a short reflection.  The eight-week Seminar is split into four thematics: (1) INTRODUCTION (2) ARCHITECTONICS (3) FICTIONS & THE REAL (4) METHODOLOGY

INTRODUCTION - Common = X & The Impossible
Session 1: The Common = X  Session 2: Impossibilities, ARCHITECTONICS - The Interdisciplinary Device for Inventing & Discovering the Commons  Session 3: Tetralogos  Session 4: Schemas & Framing: what is to be born under X? FICTIONS & THE REAL - The identity of constructing and discovering  Session 5: Generic & the Construction of the Commons  Session 6: Philosophy without Foundation, METHODOLOGY - Impossibility as Method  Session 7: Ethics as Orchestration: from without to with & the multiplicity of right  Session 8: Impossible as Method"
Pedagogy of Captivating Technologies,"This Seminar will create a space for our shared online classroom by utilizing Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hook’s Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Acknowledging that there are as many people in the room as there are teachers, agreeing on a set of shared conditions for working collectively, and leaving room for invention and play will be the pedagogical infrastructures implemented in this Seminar. Simultaneously, we will read Ruha Benjamin’s edited text Captivating Technology from 2019 to engage with critical questions around socio-technical systems. The text deals with the physicality of carceral corrections that come with the technosolutionism of wanting to solve all problems through technology: What social groups are classified, corralled, coerced and capitalized upon so that others get a chance to tinker, experiment, design, and engineer the future? We will ask: To what end do we imagine? How can inventing new political, cultural, and social norms advance the practice of freedom? And, how might technoscience be reimagined towards more emancipatory ends? These readings will guide the participants to see how radical pedagogical strategies can rewire our social relations in the ever-growing technologically constructed spaces around us. We will ask: what kinds of technologies need to be built to make the present more emancipatory and collective? Together, we will set our guideposts to reset the classroom space expectations, engage with the queerness of technology’s production, and cherish forms of engagement that are assumed to be apolitical. This Seminar is an opportunity to slow down, focus on the possible, engage with the impossible and follow the edges of critical engagement to see what role technoscience has on formalizing the present and what role critical pedagogy has in undoing the stable and the normal."
The Nature of the Subject & the Subject of Nature,"This seminar probes the vexed relationship between nature and subjectivity across the history of philosophy, from antiquity to the present. More precisely, we shall examine how by thinking about these two concepts, philosophy articulates two theses that often appear in dramatic tension with each other; on the one hand, the thesis of the continuity between nature and the subject; on the other hand, the thesis of the uniqueness of the subject in the order of nature. The Seminar focuses on the concomitant problems and controversies that emerge when one attempts to either assimilate one term into another or make the two terms autonomous. The first Session details the historical background underlying this complex issue of nature versus subject across different epochs of thought. In the second Session, we begin by attending to Aristotle’s account of the formation of the “ethical character” in the Nichomachean Ethics, which essentially associates human subjectivity with practical wisdom, and the latter with a kind of “second nature.” Attesting to this second nature requires expanding notions causation beyond the realm of natural law, so that, rather than localizing the rational kernel of the subject outside of nature in a kind of supernaturalism or reducing the latter to natural, such an account proposes to amplify our conception of nature and causation, to accommodate the practical life of thinking beings within it. In the third Session, we see how philosophical modernity recodes this problematic in various epistemological and metaphysical attempts to coordinate the concepts of mind and body: (1) Descartes’ substance dualist account of the cogito and extension; (2) Spinoza’s coordination of a property dualism of extension and thinking, and a substance monism that distinguishes between nature as self- determined or productive (natura naturans) and as derivative or produced (natura naturata); (3) Kant’s transcendental idealist attempt to assimilate nature to subjectivity in his account of representational cognition, and his simultaneous separation of nature as representation and the real as unrepresentable; (4) Schelling’s attempt to coordinate thinking and being by way of transcendental materialism that supplements and undercuts the skeptical and idealist consequences of critical philosophy. In the fourth Session we look at two attempts to reincorporate subject into nature at end of the 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century, by proposing a “genealogical critique of Enlightenment rationality” (as Brandom calls it) that erodes the rational kernel of the human will, and voluntarist conceptions of the subject: the Freudian psychoanalytic account of the unconscious as unearthing a domain of bare subpersonal drives beneath the affordances of deliberative cognition; (2) the Marxian materialist transvaluation of the idealist dialectic, diagnosing suprapersonal structural relations that underlie psychologistic intentions and individual-collective decision making procedures, and its attempt to distinguish between the relation of thinking and being in the “two theses of materialism”; (3) Heidegger’s historicist attempt to undermine both the concept of subjectivity and nature that characterize the scientific impetus of the modern age as determined by ossified metaphysical biases that distort our notions both thinking and being, carries from Greek times. In the fifth Session, we focus on Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images of man in the world, in the context of thinking of a speculative anthropology that details man’s self-conception in its relation to the natural world. As we shall see, Sellars’ distinction between the “images” corresponds to two ways of articulating the bind between causes and reasons or more precisely, between the order of causal regularities, which understands man as a complex physical system, and the logical space of reasons which understands man within the framework of ‘persons.’ While Sellars follows Kant’s understanding of cognition as a normative structure, we shall argue, he also follows Aristotle’s idea that our concept of nature and naturalism must be amplified to include subjectivity within our scientific worldview. In the sixth Session, we attend to how Sellars’ “naturalism with a normative turn” (O’Shea) gives way to the divide two divergent orientations of thought: first, so-called “left Sellarsians” avow Sellars’ normative account of thinking but take issue with his naturalism, and those “right Sellarsians” that avow the naturalist thesis of integrating man into nature, but take issue with the naturalist views. As an example of the former orientation, we focus on how John McDowell proposes to rehabilitate Aristotle’s distinction between first and second nature in his magnum opus Mind and World, to declare the necessity of incorporating normativity into our conceptions of nature to avoid the perils of both a “bald naturalism” that fails to account for subjectivity, and of a “rampant Platonism” that reifies subjectivity metaphysically in dualist or idealist key. As an example of the second orientation, we focus on Paul and Patricia Churchland’s proposal for an “eliminativist materialism” that reduces the framework of persons and intentionality to the domain of causes within a neurobiological register, thereby collapsing norms onto nature. In the seventh Session, we see how more recently many thinkers have sought to find new conciliatory paths that between a naturalism that reduces subjectivity to the causal order, and a normativism that places subjectivity beyond nature altogether. We focus on two such attempts. First, Joseph Rouse’s Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image, which follows the Sellarsian attempt to amplify our conceptions of nature so as to account for the normativity of thought, without thereby indulging in reductionism, tracing a diagonal across the debates in the philosophy of mind, and heeding to recent advances in contemporary life sciences. Second, Adrian Johnson’s synthetic work Second Natures in Dappled Worlds, which attempts to problematize the very normativist conception of subjectivity that describes the latter as a rational being as much as the mechanistic view of nature that describes causal laws as reducible to efficient mechanisms, drawing from the works of Nancy Cartwright, Jacques Lacan, and Catherine Malabou. In the eighth and final Session, we observe certain attempts in post-humanist and Platonist philosophy to traverse the piety of an anthropocentrism or humanism that reifies subjectivity as somehow in exception to nature, the better to reconceive of a subjectivity that uproots itself from the natural order as it intervenes upon the latter, transforming both in the process. We focus on Danielle MacBeth’s Realizing Reason and David Roden’s Posthuman Life, where the transformation of subjectivity in the wake of techno-cognitive transformation also involves a transformation in our conceptions of nature, and the relation between the two."
"Night, Movements of the After Dark","This Seminar explores the fascinating paradoxes of nocturnal experiences, treating Night as a domain for the rarest orchestrations of mood (those of fear, pleasure, calm, mystery, vengeance). To achieve this end, we will engage Night through the tactics of its most dynamic practitioners, those who keep strange hours and navigate the hidden potentialities of the after-dark: the thief, the runaway, the beggar, the drunkard, the insomniac, the revolutionary, the prophet, the madwoman, the storyteller, and the sorcerer. We will also seek out its conceptual relations to solitude, forgetting, secrecy, monstrosity, nothingness, violence, adventure, and intoxication.

By covering texts and images encompassing ancient mythology, medieval mysticism, modern philosophy, avant-garde literature and poetry, as well as contemporary visual art, film, and architecture, the Seminar will wager itself across the many perceptions of Night that have emerged across different epochs, cultures, and mediums. Moreover, our inquiries will be based on new materials not included in the instructor’s own recent book titled Night: Philosophy of the After-Dark (2020), using an alternative collection of sources in order to map further atmospheric and material dimensions of the twilight, evening, midnight, and pitch-black.

Seminar 1. Ancient Gods, Rituals, Cosmologies of Night / Seminar 2. Medieval Night Journeys and Nocturnal Mysticism / Seminar 3. Philosophies of Night / Seminar 4. Decadent, Modernist, and Avant-Garde Literatures of Night / Seminar 5. Poetics of Night / Seminar 6. Aesthetics of Night (visual art, film, sound, performance, installation, architecture) / Seminar 7. Spaces, Phenomena, Objects of Night / Seminar 8. Visions of Permanent Night (doomsday theory)"
The Enigma of Carnap’s Aufbau: Logical intertwinement of experience and knowledge,"This eight-session Seminar provides a critical and constructive reading of one of the central texts of analytic philosophy, The Logical Structure of the World (Aufbau) written by Rudolf Carnap in 1928. An immensely consequential and at the same time controversial, Aufbau’s main mission is to put forward a new form of philosophy rather than serving an old philosophical wine in a new formal bottle. The book in its entirety is a daunting, ambitious, and technical project that borrows its elements from scientific enlightenment, neo-Kantianism, gestalt theory, and phenomenology among others, all glued together by the might of a new logical and epistemological framework. Roughly, two entwining movements are present in the book, one decentering into the elementary lived experiences of human agents and the other ascending from such experiences to the edifice of scientific knowledge. The medium that supports this ascent and descent are provided by phenomenology and the new logic in the form of constitution systems—systems of piecewise construction. Through the study of the first three parts of Aufbau (with the help of supplementary critical and constructive reading materials) we not only engage with the beast of analytic philosophy but also recover an image of Carnap often misunderstood or distorted in the contemporary history of philosophy both by analytic and continental traditions. The enigma of Aufbau is revealed to be the enigma of Carnap as a philosopher of enlightenment. Given the scope of Aufbau and its tessellated richness whose end product is an imposing multi-faceted architecture, we will engage with supplementary materials as part of the syllabus but also take the liberty to sidestep from the listed reading list when required."
O MAPa e a desterritorialidade: do CCRU ao Xenofeminismo,"“Quero falar sobre os problemas que circundam o conceito de experiência. Mas começarei com uma genealogia aceleracionista, com a posição a partir da qual muitos de nós nos orientávamos nos anos 90, Nick Land, Landianismo. Era uma espécie de Hiper-Deleuzianismo, um Deleuzianismo Dark, mas que ainda era organizado ao redor do problema da experiência, eu acho. Podemos traçar isso de volta a Bataille, esse tipo de busca impossível da experiência não só maximamente intensa, mas, além disso, da experiência a partir de uma posição em que a própria experiência não é mais possível, isto é, da morte, da morte como limite.  

Penso que um dos movimentos cruciais dos últimos tempos foi o movimento contra a experiência, na verdade. Em vez de perseguir esta experiência impossível, apontar o contraste entre a cognição e a experiência. Assim, a morte – não apenas a individual, mas a hiper-morte, e não apenas o inexperienciável, mas a evaporação da possibilidade mesma da experiência, por meio da extinção –, passa a ser constrastada com a experiência. (….) A extinção se torna um desafio cognitivo e especulativo.” (Fisher, M. “Practical eliminativism: Getting out of the face, again” In: Speculative Aesthetics. London, Urbanomic, 2014) 

Nesta citação, Mark Fisher traça uma importante transição ocorrida dentro de um certo contexto filosófico contemporâneo de língua inglesa: a transição entre uma concepção de experiência como a experiência do limite e uma concepção do limite como o limite da experiência, que permite sua descrição racional. Essa passagem pode ser vista seguindo o deslocamento do centro de gravidade da pesquisa filosófica de um grupo de pensadores que faziam parte do círculo mais amplo em torno do que foi chamado de CCRU – a Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (“Unidade de Pesquisa em Cultura Cibernética”), liderada por Nick Land e Sadie Plant – à recuperação de questões filosóficas relacionadas à representação e ao realismo no contexto do chamado Realismo Especulativo. Este curso pretende acompanhar algumas linhas dessa transformação através da leitura e comentário de textos selecionados, de modo a recolocar a questão da relação entre pensamento abstrato e experiência no contexto de uma alternância especialmente radical entre ambos os pólos. 

Além desse deslocamento do praticismo hipersticionalmente determinado (CCRU) para questões epistemológicas relativas à representação, e ontológicas relacionadas ao realismo (SR), uma mudança política é sentida em segundo plano - entre a imagem de um capitalismo que é ele próprio o motor de aceleração da destituição do humano e uma concorrente, em que o seqüestro deliberado desse processo por sujeitos coletivos é tematizado como uma tentativa de produzir uma ordem político-econômica para além do próprio capitalismo. O leitor pode reconhecer nessas duas imagens a transição da chamada aceleração de direita para o aceleracionismo de esquerda. 

Em quatro seções, pretendo oferecer uma introdução rápida e suja ao arco que vai do CCRU ao Aceleracionismo de Esquerda e ao Xenofeminismo para o público lusófono da The New Centre for Research and Practice. Dentro desse contexto de discussão em língua portuguesa, também procuraremos trabalhar textos produzidos por autores lusófonos que tratem dos problemas colocados por essa conjuntura recente do pensamento contemporâneo. 

Sessão 1. A CCRU e a sede de aniquilação
A primeira sessão pretende abordar brevemente alguns princípios do que a CCRU estava fazendo nos anos 90, lendo alguns de seus textos e recuperando seus pressupostos teóricos na história da filosofia - especialmente suas preocupações com a cibernética e o trabalho de Deleuze e Guattari. Seus compromissos com a atmosfera cultural da época (Jungle, Cyberpunk) são dignos de nota e devem ser mencionados, vinculando esta sessão à segunda, sobre Mark Fisher, que então possuía ampla produção como crítico cultural. 

Sessão 2. Fisher e racionalismo frio
Saindo das fileiras do CCRU em 2003, Mark Fisher começou a construir uma sucessão de diferentes programas de pesquisa: racionalismo frio, espectrologia, realismo capitalista como um problema e comunismo ácido como uma possível solução. Na segunda sessão do curso, examinaremos rapidamente as posições de Fisher que mais influenciaram ou refletiram as tendências a serem abordadas nas próximas sessões, a saber, racionalismo frio e comunismo ácido. Do racionalismo frio, tiraremos conclusões que se comunicarão com os problemas do realismo especulativo na sessão 3 e do comunismo ácido com aqueles que guiarão a reorientação esquerdista do aceleracionismo na sessão 4. 

Sessão 3. Realismo especulativo e o Fora
Em 2007, o colóquio chamado Realismo Especulativo foi realizado na Goldsmiths em Londres, reunindo quatro filósofos de orientação continental, interessados ​​na reabilitação do realismo filosófico. Entre estes estão ex-associados do círculo mais amplo da CCRU, como Iain Hamilton Grant e Ray Brassier. Seguindo a proposta para o “fim da experiência” anunciada no parágrafo de Fisher, esta sessão examinará brevemente as quatro orientações presentes no evento Goldsmiths, com ênfase especial no Nihil Unbound de Brassier e suas conexões com o After Finitude de Quentin Meillassoux e sua reformulaçãodo realismo filosófico em relação ao arqué-fóssil e à extinção como oportunidades para remodelar a imagem contemporânea do pensamento.   

Sessão 4. Mapeando o Futuro
O MAP-Manifesto para uma política aceleracionista é lançado em 2013 como uma resposta política a perguntas que vieram com a ala racionalista do realismo especulativo: a centralidade da razão, a análise sistêmica e a crítica da experiência local enquanto garantia de valência política que seus autores chamariam ""folk politics"" ​​(o qual tem um eco interessante na ""folk psychology” criticada por Brassier a partir de Sellars e Churchland). Uma abordagem ao Manifesto Xenofeminista do coletivo Laboria Cuboniks complementa esta última sessão."
Introduction to Algorithmic Literacy,"The division of cognitive labor, which starts with the two-way ideological isolation of STEM at schools, is an attack on our collective capacity to read. What is getting lost is the medieval multiplicity of readings of a recipe: as an alchemical instruction, an ethical injunction, or an allegory, with different castes of people being able to engage with the same text in a different way. Learning to properly read the technology is the first and necessary step to any usage or critique of it. Algorithms are rarely engaged with as pure works of writing. At the same time, the algorithmic writing rewrites the world. Even the very words appropriated by the algorithms find themselves commonly used in the same restricted or amended way. The limitations that algorithmic thinking imposes on the world are acquired, naturalised and shared by the society as a whole. In this seminar we will learn to “read” algorithms on a variety of levels. From the source code to the typical format of input, from the history of an algorithm’s discovery to the peculiar marks it leaves on the output, from the cognitive economy of labor that the programmers perform to realise it to the infrastructure necessary for its operation at scale - we’ll learn how to understand and recognise an algorithm. We’ll engage with the fundamental algorithms little-known outside of the tech world, as well as the ones that are currently in vogue. This seminar will not try to impose any particular philosophy of computation, or even to explore their variety. Rather than that, it focuses on particular technological artifacts, ethnography, archives, and anecdote. The cultural research around particular algorithms is little-to-not existent, and we’ll have to reconstruct the multi- sided overview ourselves."
Analytics & Continentals: Historical Fragments of a War,"This seminar explores the bifurcation between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions since its inception, focusing on some of the central debates, methodological approaches, and canonical figures that animate its historical unfolding. Above all, we shall clarify how different conceptions of what constitutes philosophical practice become progressively forged throughout this historical split by identifying key moments and themes that define it and attending to periods of oftentimes frustrated exchange.

After a brief excursus into the historical antecedents leading to the consolidation of the split, during the first session we focus on the critique of psychologism prosecuted by Husserl and Frege, in which central methodological tenets in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language become first crystallized.

In the secpnd session, we focus on how this incipient separation was also accentuated and mediated by divergent responses to the legacy of German Idealism. exploring the response to British Hegelianism pursued by Moore and Russell, as well as the development and growth of phenomenology from the neo-Kantian tradition with Husserl and Ricoeur. As we shall see, if phenomenological thinking radicalized the transcendental Kantian approach, then semantic analysis unerstood the rot to have begun already with Kant.

In the third session, we explore how the logical empiricist and historicist hermeneutic orientations of thought proposed two competing narratives concerning the ‘end of metaphysics’: one in the name of a ruthless positivism aligned to the modern ideal of scientificity, the other in the name of a comprehensive critique of modernity and the conception of philosophy as a science derived from its Greek beginning.

In the fourth session, we revisit the debate between Searle and Derrida during the mid-70s, which emerged in response to J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and in which the constructive aspirations of speech-act theory and the deconstruction of metaphysics of presence give way to not only different conceptions of language, communication, but also intentionality. In parallel, we attend to the debate between Chomsky and Foucault in 1971 concerning the question of human nature, where the aspirations of generative linguistics and the archeology of knowledge reflect two conceptions of ethico-political practice: a universalist avowal of invariant human values and the need for concrete engagement on the side of the former, versus a genealogical approach which tracks the dynamics of power with skepticism regarding the naturalization of the concept of ‘human nature’ and the dangers of concrete engagement.

In the fifth session, we explore how different strands of Sellarsian school proposed to rehabilitate the legacy of German Idealism in the wake of new naturalist and functionalist approaches to the philosophy of mind. Looking at works by Jay Rosenberg, Richard Rorty, John McDowell,Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, and Sebastian Rodl we will see how this tradition attempted not only an approximation to several canonical figures commonly associated with the Continental tradition but also thought of an integral philosophical practice which would include the concerns of both traditions.

Extending on this trajectory, in the sixth session, we look at the contrast in contemporary approaches to Hegelian scholarship and the valences of the dialectical method today: the Pittsburgh Hegelian school on the side of the analytic tradition, and the Lacanian-Slovenian school on the side of the Continental tradition.

In the seventh session, we delve into contemporary ontologies of world-building and systematic philosophy in both traditions, contrasting the modal realist metaphysics proposed by Nelson Goodman in Of Mind and Other Matters to the transcendental phenomenology of worlds proposed by Alain Badiou in Logics of Worlds.

Finally, in the eighth session, we briefly survey some prominent contemporary attempts to destratify the difference between the continental and analytic schools altogether, bringing a holistic approach that would synthesize the methods and insights of both traditions at once. We show how this contemporary approach challenges the myopia of specialization characteristic of the analytic tradition, while refusing the relativistic and skeptical tendencies associated with much of the Continental tradition, attending in particular to certain works by Fernando Zalamea, Lorenz Puntel, Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani."
A Paradigm Shift: Curating & Exhibition Making in the Age of Continuous Mediation,"Is it possible to define curatorial practice today without extending its horizons through rethinking the educational, institutional and also the paracuratorial? How will the brief history of curating evolve into future? Do current forms of mediation and negotiation in the art world really function for diverse audiences? Bringing the recent roles attributed to “the curator” such as an activist, comrade or educator, this Survey Seminar engages critical methodologies from leading curatorial research and practices. Firstly as a mental space for thinking through and together with artistic practices, curating is not only a dramaturgical setting in the sense of a spatial and conceptual staging of artworks and their interconnectedness, but also a series of audience-engaged, discursive processes aimed to connect to the larger real of social. As A series of conversations, the Seminar will focus on the questions of curating and exhibition making as an extended field for new publics. Moderated by Misal Adnan Yıldız, it will connect significant collaborations, networks and projects with shared commonalities of ethics, community, collectivity and political agenda in the field.

August 16: Prologue by Misal Adnan Yıldız
August 23: Maria Lind
August 30: Mohammad Salemy
September 6: Çağla İlk
September 13: Fulya Erdemci
September 20: Binna Choi
September 27: Agustín Pérez Rubio
October 4: Epilogue by Misal Adnan Yıldız"
The Problem of Narrative: Visual Arts,"while in the past storytelling dominated visual arts, the field has been more interested in ""deconstructing,"" “critiquing” or “questioning” narratives than constructing new ones. As James Elkins explains, “narrative isn’t dead, but it’s a dead issue. The avoidance of narrative is one of the great dogmas or working assumptions of art production, criticism, and instruction.” The situation described by Elkins was brought about by pre-modernist scholars and artists like Jacob Burckhardt, Konrad Fiedler and Maurice Denis, who felt that mythological, religious or political narratives endangered the autonomy of art. While narrative has never been rejected by artists across the board, the time when painters constantly invented new ways to retell well-known stories or even invented new ones are long gone. But while painters largely abandoned storytelling, visual narrative found a home elsewhere: cartoonists, illustrators and comics draftsmen have never stopped to seek innovative ways to tell stories in pictures. As for high art, this seminar will seek out  interesting storytellers among installation artists and also look into illustration, painting, and drawing. Concerning installation art, there is however no proper theory for narrative in the (truly) spatial arts. We will attempt to not only convey the state of the art on the matter, but also to go beyond, by introducing new concepts which can better explain how artistic narratives function, and even allow to invent new spatial narratives. We will compare contemporary artworks with works from Greek antiquity, Flemish painting, William Hogarth’s Modern Moral Subjects, but also abstract painting and comics. Lastly, we will assess the role played by stories that are not told in artworks, but about them. In the first session, we will discuss influential arguments advanced by G.E. Lessing in his 1766 Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry and by Clement Greenberg in Modernist Painting and assess their repercussions in current art theories and practices. In the second and third sessions, we will discover how art historians and theorists like Franz Wickhoff, Ernst Gombrich and Ann Landi have approached visual storytelling. This session will introduce the experimental research at the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History in Vienna and details what theoretical conclusions can be drawn from their findings. In sessions 2 and 3, we will analyze different artworks, applying the concepts and tools we have acquired earlier, focusing especially on modern and contemporary painting, photography and installation art. In the fourth session, we will analyze artworks as specific kinds of enriched goods and discuss the role narratives play for the recognition and spread of knowledge about conceptual artworks. For the fourth and last session, participants will suggest artworks they find relevant and would like to discuss from a narratological perspective."
Guarding the Border: On the technological threshold of human and unhuman,"Today’s war on terror, refugees, migrant labor, minorities and the immunocompromised mediate what counts and does not count as human. This process is activated through images of humanity’s alters and antagonists; all those bodies which lack humanity and consequently define the human through excommunication. The monstrous, grotesque and the unhuman political technologies cannot mask and distort a determining political reality lying behind such images but are in themselves formative and structuring forces by which an order and dis-order of bodies are crafted in acts of political speciation. In this Seminar, we will engage the core concepts and methods of a materialist media archeology of the body as a counter history of the present. We will retrieve the submerged layers of sensory and spatio-temporal practice embedded in the biopolitical body and its technological unconscious. The Seminar will navigate and interface multiple foundational genealogies of the mediological and political body:

Genealogy 1) Aristolean-slave prosthetics, Hegelian Master/Slave dialectics and the rabble, Lacanian mirroring decorporeality, Fanonian bodily colonialism, Wilderson’s Afropessimism and Derrida’s beast and the sovereign;

Genealogy 2) Nietzsche's punition and somatic memory, Hertz’ death and the right hand, Mauss’ techniques of the body, Foucault’s scopic regimes, Agamben’s anthropological machine, Benjamin’s Unmensch, Esposito's and Derrida's auto-immunity;

Genealogy 3) Stoic incorporeality, Marx’s Fragment on the Machine, Sohn-Rethel's broken machinic bodies, Canguillhem's monstrosity and the abnormal, Simondon's transindividuation, Deleuze’s optico-tactile equilibrium, Stiegler’s retentional incorporeal prosthetics;

Genealogy 4) Uexküll’s biosemiotics, Heidegger’s animal impoverishment, Arendt’s animal de-natality, Levinas’ defacement of animality, Derrida’s carnophallagocentrism and zoo-anarchism."
Ghost in the War Machine: Martial Life in the Informational Episteme,"The historical emergence and contemporary ubiquity of computation and telecommunication technologies and their associated informational episteme are deeply entangled with the experience and conduct of war. Catalysed by the intense technoscientific mobilisation of the Second World War, the information sciences have transformed our understanding of the world and ourselves, proliferating information-processing systems into every facet of social life. More than ever they shape the landscape of armed conflict today in the age of global push-button warfare, hyper-networked operations, and cyborgian assemblages. This seminar will explore the long-standing bond between information and war, tracing it through its pre-conceptual history to its scientific forging during World War II and early Cold War, and its extension into the present of network-centric warfare, remote control interfaces, military robotics, and artificial intelligence. Particular attention will be paid to foundational work and thought of key figures such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and John Von Neumann with their momentous legacies in cybernetics, information science, and computing. Essential concepts such as control, feedback, teleology, homeostasis, and negentropy will be critically examined alongside their instantiations in military systems that will include anti-aircraft defences, guided missiles, nuclear command-and-control, and lethal autonomous weapons. We will consider the extent to which information and telecommunication technologies are still tributary to their martial origins as well as the how they have recasted the phenomenology of war. Finally, we will attend to the posthuman subjectivities secreted under the informational regime and the challenges these pose to notions of agency within the contemporary war machine."
On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons,"From myth to philosophy, from ancient scripts to modern literary works, the problem of evil have preceded by demons as limited cases of vices and by the same token virtues. For precisely, the demonic does not signify the essence of evil but elaborates evil by way of its contextual unfoldings and consequences both in thought and practice. A demon, in this sense, highlights the nebulous outer rims of a thinking and practicing self, the moment when the self ceases to be a self—a mechanical shadow of what can possibly be said or done regardless of any intervention by the conscious ego. The demon is thus another name for the blind will to live, simultaneously displaying its myriad of possibilities, but also its murderous will to kill. This three-credit seminar is a historical survey of the fascination with demons as spiritual matrixes. Each session will focus on a case study borrowed from myths, anthropology, western and eastern religions, ethics and literary fiction. We shall begin with the birthplace of the legion in the fertile crescent only to land at the doorsteps of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Demons and Beyond, Good and Evil."
Essay Events,"Expanding from concepts like “essay film” and “visual essay,” this Seminar examines time-based artistic practices and processes that build arguments through images, sound, duration, liveness, and spatial relations. With presentations by artists and scholars working in film and video, performance, sound, and multi-disciplinary methodologies, individual sessions demonstrate how arguments coalesce in visual, aural, or putatively abstract forms. Moderated by curator and writer Rachael Rakes, these sessions on one hand reveal the roots of essay aesthetics in a cognitive, cooperative and sensory experience, and on the other hand consider a variety of approaches to the development of non-linear concepts. As our guests present and discuss individual works, we can produce new loose schematics and methods for building ideas through durational events, and imagine different forms for the pacing and structuring of visual politics.

April 12: Introductory Session
April 19: Netta Yerushalmy
April 26: Jumana Manna
May 10: Luisa Greenfield
May 17: Ali Cherri
May 24: Agnieszka Polska
May 31: Hassan Khan
June 7: Final Session"
Machines Before the Machines: A Prehistory of Cybernetics,"This Seminar will address the reconstruction of modern philosophical theories, with a special focus on those which envisage and prepare the rise of cybernetics and systems theory. The Seminar will pay special attention to the ideas of force vive, feedback loop, material, automatic, and living manifestations, goal-seeking machines, and the finitude of nature, as well as the materialization of the souls and the spiritualization of matter. Each session will be supported by the reading of some of the most representative thinkers in this historical frame.

May 30: Cybernetics defined: things move themselves (Norbert Wiener, Pierre De Latil, Katherine Hayles). Science as knowledge of motion can be seen in different ways: as a human artifice, as a technique of nature, as an art, as a philosophy. We will consider a time before the increase in complexity of social systems and before the differentiation of the sciences. Cybernetics key-notions introduced: homeostasis, telos, error, matter, effector.
June 6: Leonardo’s playful science. Our starting point will be Leonardo da Vinci, as the heir of the ancient technology-art (Hero’s ‘steam engine’, Archimedes’ lever, Ctesibius’ water clock) and a path-finder of modern science. We’ll see how Leonardo’s optical theory (the eye as a retroactive machine) and its experimental inventions of perpetuum mobile implicitly introduced cybernetics.
June 13: Where is the cause of a phenomenon? The third section will be devoted to Francis Bacon’s method, as stated in Novum Organon: the cause is the rule of the process (a phenomenon has its internal rule). A description of Robert Boyle’s laboratory and his tools will be an example, together with Galileo Galilei, introducing error in experimentation and its retroactive character (margin of error being the basis for scientific truth).
June 20: Force vive without vitalism. This section will focus on a specific discussion about matter. Does matter have its own devices to govern itself (force vive by Leibniz) or is it inert and it is moved by an outside energy (Descartes’ force morte)? (Margaret Cavendish: matter is indivisible. Emilie du Chatelet: “Mister Newton is wrong”). This debate inaugurates the bifurcation between the scientists’ practice and the philosophers’ theories, what is testable and what is not but rather needs to be justified metaphysically.
June 27: Cybernetics in nature, history, economy. This class will explore the opposition between two epistemological views: Nature is both creator and creature in Spinoza’s analysis. Nature is an inert machine moved from an energy external to it, in Descartes’ analysis. Giovan Battista Vico can also guide the discussion through his verum factum theory: humans know what they make; history can cybernetically generate its own effects. Adam Smith too may be seen as the philosopher who identifies a cybernetics of economy.
July 4: How can a machine have an aim? In this session we will address the issue of man as a complex (or infinite) machine: La Mettrie’s man-machine and man-plant. Diderot (D’Alembert’s Dream): indistinction between matter and life. If matter does not need an external force, its internal force must be at the same time mechanical and teleological. The answer is in the correlated notions of error and effector.
July 11: Nature is a technique. In the XIX century Samuel Butler’s Erewhon imagines a new science: Hypothetics, studied in the Colleges of Unreason. In the same years and on the other side of the ocean C. S. Peirce suggests a theory of knowledge that must consider the laws of nature in constant evolution, that is, in constant self-reproduction and self- regulation.
July 18: Conclusion. The invention of the natural occurs through the artificial. Technology will appear at last as an omni-pervasive phenomenon of nature. A glimpse at the ongoing discussion of these matters through Friedrich Nietzsche, Katherine Hayles, Roberto Cordeschi."
Objects in the Realm of Shadows,"Philosophy, amongst other things, is a process of decluttering the theoretical space, by framing the objects or the concepts that populate it not as things, but as reflective abstractions. The universe of theory is a “realm of shadows”, as Hegel puts it, a space of contours, forms and reflections, where the object of thought gets its shape and specificity. It denies thus the seeming “concreteness” of things as well as the evident character of immediate experience and dispositions. As such, far from being just a method, philosophy has a core of theoretical commitments, which will be the topic of this seminar. As it will otherwise run the danger of generating a caput mortuum, this Seminar will not only enumerate a series of principles, but will also deduce them by setting them in opposition to other trends in the cluttered field of contemporary theory. Instead of searching for common ground, as one of the commitments that will be discussed, we will proceed as if truth is a matter of distinction. Therefore, if we try resisting various domestications of Hegel, both in the analytical philosophy and psychoanalysis, we will discover a much weirder author, one who can help us formulate irritating theses for philosophical, artistic and political practice in our world. We will use the notion of the object as a guiding thread in the reconstruction of Hegel’s Logic, a work that will be framed as being the furthest away from today’s post-critical theory and various forms of object-oriented ontology."
Artistic Methodology: from Research to Praxis,"This seminar will explore different methodologies employed by contemporary artists that expand the possibilities of research-based practice. Most contemporary artistic production is based on some kind of research, but when foregrounded, research can often endow the semblance of depth and rigor to projects which might otherwise meander between disciplinary categories. Research can frame an episteme, dispositif, apparatus, or an ensemble but praxis remains a practical activity that must face the techno-social conditions of our given era and provide it with forms. In our shared historical moment it is not adequate to simply resist or deny every bad object. Pleasure, intimacy and desire are deeply entangled with capital. What can art do inside and beyond these givens? How can artistic output be made relevant and actionable? An amassing of facts-based research is no guarantor of political leverage. An ascetic disposition will not hold the world at bay – particularly as the labyrinth of information is now the domain of the machines and algorithms. Moderated by João Enxuto, this seminar will feature artists who have recently made significant contributions by developing new artistic methodologies.

February 2: Introductory Session 
February 9: Constant Dullaart 
February 16: Seminar canceled
February 23: Aliza Shvarts
March 1: Julieta Aranda
March 8: Tyler Coburn
March 15: Monica Narula & Jeebesh Bagchi
March 22: Ami Clarke
March 29: Final Session"
Modern Monetary Theory: The Sixteenth Century Challenge,"The aim of this Seminar is to present a sixteenth century challenge to Modern Monetary Theory or MMT. The central idea of MMT is that a United States Treasury Bond (public debt) and a Federal Reserve Note (paper money) are both the accounting liabilities of the state, and that therefore what happens when the state pays its debt is that it is simply swapping one form of liability for another. The MMT theorists draw the conclusion that a state which 1) issues its own currency, 2) taxes in its own currency, 3) denominates its debt in its own currency, and 4) is not tied to a pledge to back the currency with a commodity is a “monetary sovereign” which can never be forced to default on its obligations and whose ability to run a fiscal deficit, aka its fiscal policy, is constrained only by inflation and not by monetary scarcity. In other words, the state can never “run out of money.” Therefore, MMT is an important intervention into austerity politics which dominates almost all of our public discourse about the limitations of government expenditure. The Seminar's approach is both literary and historical. In our search for MMT's sovereign we will examine the reign James I Stewart of England, the first European monarch to run a permanent peacetime deficit. James I's reign also coincides with career trajectory of William Shakespeare. In studying Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy beginning with Richard II, we draw also on a secondary historical literature: Private Money and Public Currencies: The Sixteenth Century Challenge by Boyer-Xambeau et al. which suggests that the late sixteenth century witnessed a “crisis in the European monetary system. We will read the four most directly political plays of Shakespeare, which are deeply concerned with questions of debt, money, and witness the structural transformations in money and the state which ushered in the “modern monetary regime,” in the hopes that they might have something important to teach us something about the concept of monetary sovereignty."
"Transformations of Dialectic: Idealism, Materialism, Recursivity","Since Plato, dialectic has been considered a sound philosophical method for seeking truth. Dialectic was meant to provide reasons for accepting and refusing claims within a dialogue in order to highlight the distinctions between opinions about the real versus real knowledge. However, as a philosophical method, dialectic has been criticized with respect to its ambitions, procedures and meaning. Kant’s transcendental dialectic is the analysis of the antinomies of reason, the illusions that prevent reason from accepting the limits of knowledge and the finitude of our understanding. Hagel showed us that the contradictions that reason encounters while seeking the truth are productive steps towards the production of knowledge. This way, he inaugurated the modern dialectics. His dialectic, as the historical unfolding of truth through contradictions, influenced Marx’s and Engels’ materialism while becoming the explanatory dynamics of social, political and economic conflicts.

Since then, dialectic has undertaken further transformations into different directions: as materialism (Althusser, Deleuze, Badiou), as critical theory (Adorno, Habermas), as recursive logic (Gödel, von Foester, Turing), as abductive logic (Peirce, Popper), as inferentialism (Sellars, Brandom). This Seminar aims not only to describe the transformations of dialectic, but investigates how, as the method for seeking truth, it can serve our contemporary need to take responsibility for knowledge in order to unfold the future. The seminar is articulated around weekly selected readings following a chronological order and different opposing perspectives. It will cover ancient, modern and contemporary philosophy from both the continental and the analytic traditions. Through the proposed readings, we will explain the philosophical strategies that motivate specific transformations of the dialectical method and the consequences of the specific moves on the meaning of reason and its objectives. We will reflect on the role of dialectics for present philosophy and how they can be used critically to address the rhetorics of liberalism."
Deception Theory: Movements of the Liar,"This seminar explores Deception as a philosophical art-form of the highest order, one requiring intricate mastery of the varying states of unreality: the dream, the nightmare, the mirage, the fantasy, the hallucination, the simulation, the vision, the memory, the enigma, the story, the wish, and the apparition (ghost, shadow). Along these axes, we will also unravel the particular techniques of distortion, riddle, and encryption that make up the vast arsenal of the liar. To diagram such chimeric possibilities, a series of philosophical, literary, poetic, and aesthetic works will be summoned to the seminar’s forefront, each rendering acute insight into the performativities of stealth, manipulation, seduction, and intelligence behind acts of great deceit.

For Deception radically alters our understanding of knowing, sensation, desire, body, and imagination through carefully-designed prisms of intimacy and betrayal, play and violation, enchantment and disenchantment. Following the supposed last words of a medieval Persian assassin (the Old Man of the Mountain)—“All is illusion, thus all is permitted”—we will seek those typologies of artifice that bring thought to their extreme limits. For what are the most subtle procedures of insinuation (and its delicate interplay of proximity and distance)? What images induce curiosity, entrancement, infatuation, obsession, or self-destruction? What are the strange ethics of transformation, vulnerability, and subversion held by the charlatan, the trickster, or the saboteur? So it is that we will study the captivating dimensions of the lie, its obscure codes of concealment and unveiling, in all their complex manifestations."
The Man Who Knew Nothing: Between Neurodiversity & Practical Schizophrenia,"DESCRIPTION This 8-session Seminar presents an overview of the theoretical and practical problems of selfhood and the care for the self. Given today's assimilation of individual experiences by brutal economic forces, the rise of cyberzombies on social media, emotional passivity and exhibitionism as well as the ensuing depressions, manias and personal tragedies which we witness among ourselves, the ethics and politics of the care for the self and the ludic take on madness are now more pertinent than ever. Everyone can be creatively crazy but who can be playfully mad without being a sociopath? And more importantly, what does it mean to commit to a life-long and perhaps multi-generational project without becoming despondent or a self-immolating pessimist? These are questions which not only bear ethical significance but also political consequences. To answer these questions, this Seminar provides a view of the self and technologies of self-care from four different perspectives, (1) ancient ethics, (2) Middle Eastern philosophy, (3) Psychoanalysis, and (4) Neuroscience. Assuming that we know nothing about our selves, this Seminar considers care for the self not as a matter of phantasy but disciplined experimental programmatics."
From Leibniz to Google: Five Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence,"DESCRIPTION What does it take to create intelligence--and to recognize it? These are the two concerns that have animated the field of artificial intelligence over the last 80 years. This Seminar situates the AI field in the larger traditions of philosophy in order to make explicit the frequently unrecognized foundations of AI--as well as how those foundations have shifted several times alongside AI's fortunes. AI always brings with it many post-Kantian questions of epistemology, ontology, subjectivity, and phenomenology, but these dependencies are often left implicit, even as they undergo large paradigm shifts.

This Seminar will examine the transitions between a successive series of paradigms of artificial intelligence, with very approximate periods of dominance: (1) Speculative (to 1940), (2) Cybernetic (1940-1955), (3) Symbolic AI (1955-1985), (4) Subsymbolic AI (1985-2010), and (5) Deep Learning (2010-present). We begin with the prehistory of AI, examining dreams of machine reasoning from Leibniz to La Mettrie to Lovelace and onward. While AI's most famous definition was given by Alan Turing in his visionary 1950 paper, ""Computing Machinery and Intelligence,"" his functional approach had already been anticipated in the cybernetic research of Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, William Grey Walter, and Frank Rosenblatt. In conceiving of AI as fundamentally embodied systems in a feedback-driven relationship with their environment, cybernetics is a more radically intersubjective and yet in a battle similar to the analytic vs. continental duel in philosophy, cybernetic-derived approaches lost out in favor of the rationalist Symbolic AI paradigm theorized by Herbert Simon, Alan Newell, Marvin Minsky, and Noam Chomsky, among others. Drawing explicitly from logical positivism and the Vienna Circle (Rudolf Carnap in particular), the Symbolic AI leaders posited AI as a matter of centralized logical symbolic representation--a matter of a disembodied ""mind"" manipulating representational symbols in order to reason. It was this paradigm, which came to be known as ""Good Old-Fashioned AI"" or GOFAI, that subsequently took center stage for much of the latter half of the 20th century.

The rationalist symbolic AI (or ""GOFAI"") paradigm, and its major exponents including Herbert Simon, Alan Newell, Marvin Minsky, and Noam Chomsky. Rooted in the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap and the Viennese circle, symbolic AI often goes unrecognized as the most significant attempt to apply logical positivist analysis to reality itself. Its results are the best evidence available for both the strengths and failures of logical positivist, verificationist, and atomistic epistemologies. The rationalist paradigm failed to make good on its promise, leading to the ""AI winter"" of the 1970s and 1980s. It was then that subsymbolic approaches, hearkening back to cybernetics, began to reappear, with the machine learning and statistical innovations of Rumelhart, Sejnowski, and others. We shall look at the extent to which the subsymbolic approach represented a rejection not just of symbolic AI but of cognitive rationalism itself. By turning its back on the analytic philosophical tradition that had grown out of the Vienna school of logical positivists, AI set the tone for a larger philosophical shift in social discourse: the abandonment of claims to a logical structure first of the mind, and more broadly of the world itself.

Subsymbolic AI achieved far greater prominence when it was combined with technological and corporate developments to produce the Deep Learning boom of the last decade. Only with the enormous computing power provided by Moore's law, and with the massive data stores accumulated by Google and Facebook, did the subsymbolic approach reveal its true potential. Google's revealation that it had conquered the game of Go through machine learning, blowing away decades of research, was a stunning monument to the victory of the opaque and inscrutable systems that machine learning had birthed. Philosophically, it is every rationalist's nightmare: the triumph of the inexplicable over the clear, and that of the probabilistic over the deterministic, obtained through the combination of collected private data and non-symbolic networks. Here Charles Sanders Peirce's tychism and Georg Simmel's dynamism will help us understand what these developments mean for the future of human (and machine) subjectivity.

This Seminar will treat AI and its roots in computation and algorithms not as digital artifacts but as human conceptual structures, out of which actual computing is only one manifestation and perhaps not even its most crucial. Influenced by the German philosophical anthropologist Hans Blumenberg, The seminar probes the ways in which the fundamental substrate of human understanding lay in certain “absolute metaphors” such as light, water, fire, and other primitive and omnipresent concepts, adding to the list several more concepts such as number, probability, and data. They do, however, depend on the usage of the same absolute metaphors of number, probability, and data that simultaneously informed developments in computational theory. And in each stage, those absolute metaphors have been necessary tools for understanding the increasing scale of the world and the individual’s seemingly shrinking place within it.
Readings will be drawn from the above-named, as well as histories and treatments of AI by Margaret Boden, Stanislaw Lem, Rom Harre, Pedro Domingos, Juan Roederer, Eden Medina, and others. In addition to Carnap, Peirce, and Simmel, we will consider a number of other philosophers to provide broader context for the issues raised.What is required to create intelligence--and to recognize it? These are the two concerns that have animated the field of artificial intelligence over the last 80 years. This course situates the AI field in the larger traditions of philosophy in order to make explicit the frequently unrecognized foundations of AI--as well as how those foundations have shifted several times alongside AI's fortunes. AI always brings with it many post-Kantian questions of epistemology, ontology, subjectivity, and phenomenology, but these dependencies are often left implicit, even as they undergo large paradigm shifts."
Images of Reason: Scientific Method in Contemporary Culture,"DESCRIPTION In critical theory, post-structural thought and critical cultural practices, technology, reason and science have been labeled as the tools of both socio-political dominance and emancipation. This Seminar asks how we might purchase scientific reason in the context of culture today, that is, without a comprehensive explanatory system of logic, nor a tenable proof from empirical correlations that would offer symmetries between world and word, reality and referent. How do we judge the content of our expressions, explications and communications manifested in culture? Can they be labeled as a form of scientific reason? Images that are claimed to explicate the structure of reality produce concepts, politics and behaviors expressed in the lived world. These cultural expressions come in a range of poetic, representational, abstract and sensory forms. But are they adequate to reason and the real, or is their critical value based in explicating their failure in a perennial dissatisfaction of their own capacity in which their destiny is to expand the world as mythology? If reason acts as the force that divides, dis-identifies and deconstructs the concept and the image then what is the future for philosophy or art if the former cannot be adequate to the image that it presents or the latter adequate to the concept that it locates? Can art be understood as a constructive space within which new forms of reason are possible and if so what philosophy is this? Moving between the problematic necessities of non-teleological and regulative principles, we ask how a project of science can take place for art and philosophy, within the complexity of categorical given. Our four-week seminar begins with negative dialectics, moving to read across Continental and Analytical philosophy. We will examine the question of idealism; science and the absolute, the practical consequences of principles, and how the question of identicality between the idea of a science and what constitutes the world, can be distinguished axiomatically as correlative and process-time-based. In each of these sessions we will draw together what might be seen to be disparate modes of inquiry and forms of culture in order to experiment with the question of language and the actual practicalities we face in the world of images. In doing so, we will develop methods by which to posit speculative proposals for a new realist approach to the images we use to communicate our understandings."
Introduction to Narratology: Narratives & the Question of Subjectivities,"DESCRIPTION This seminar will investigate the role of stories in shaping personal and collective identities. Stories contribute to the perceived value of things and can even make or break elections and trials. How exactly stories function is, however, subject to dispute and so are the values and risks of storytelling. In our seminar, we will focus on three questions: What is narrative? What are the important functions assumed by narratives in our lives, arts and political economies? Why and how can storytelling be problematic for ideological or aesthetic reasons? The stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives and those we exchange in daily conversations dwarf the sophisticated and explicit narratives that have been written down or handed down orally from generation to the next over the centuries as part of our literary heritages. Throughout the seminar, we will move from the personal to the collective, starting with stories about the self and then opening up towards stories in the social setting. In the first session, we will discuss different definitions of narrative and distinguish it from cultural practices such as description or argumentation. In the second session, we address effects of storytelling on the narrator and others according to philosophical and psychological theories; we will engage with critical reflections concerning the universal importance of storytelling for defining the self. To better understand the impact of stories on society, in the third session we will then analyze how stories are used by different actors in the social sphere. In the last session, we will discuss the role of storytelling in art and distinguish different kinds of readers. Among others, we will discuss works on narrative by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jerome Bruner, Peter Kivy, Galen Strawson, Luc Boltanski/Arnaud Esquerre and Christian Salmon."
Queerness & Labor,"DESCRIPTION This seminar will think queerness outside and beyond the framework of identity, looking at its historical and contemporary relationship with labor. Is queerness a form of socially productive labor? How does it intersect with work, and the power relations between workers and capital? We will approach queer sexuality as a question of everyday life; as a series of institutions within which people interact and describe their experiences. In the first session, we will develop an evolving understanding of one particular vision of queerness-as-labor: beginning with readings of socialist feminist texts on reproductive labor and then diving into 1960s and 1970s activist conversations about queer sex, spirituality, and social institutions. The second session will examine the history of queer union organizing (including the 1930s Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, sex worker organizing among male hustlers, gay male flight attendants, and more). The final two sessions will be devoted to guest lectures and discussions of contemporary critical viewpoints on these topics: first, from Michelle Esther O’Brien, on trans-led union organizing in the retail sector, and second, from Sophie Lewis, on surrogacy and reproductive accelerationism."
Postcolonial Theory as Cinematic Fantasy,"DESCRIPTION The archive and its geography stand out the most in Hugo-Olsson’s film Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, a film following Franz Fanon’s philosophical exegesis The Wretched of the Earth. The amount of attention paid to geography in the film has an ontological relation to colonialism. Geography is central to imperial expansion, as the foremost tool of colonial navigation. The focus on the archive is similarly obsessive, giving the illusion that all African anti-colonial movements occurred at the same time. This point of view is admittedly skewed. Irit Rogoff’s prediction that these movements in Africa ruptured the historiography and political culture of America and Europe is useful in contemplating Göran Olsson's film. However, the genesis of these many events is hardly narrated.

Postcolonial Theory has so often taken the premise of events happening in the outside rather than the inside; and ""over there"" rather than ""right here."" This externalizing tendency creates a distance both geographically and temporally, translating in film as cinematic distance. Cinema remains one of the foremost fields in which fantasy signals temporal distance, nostalgia, violence, as well as the geographical disparity of events taking place elsewhere or another continent. Thus, if we consider an understanding of ""cinematic distance"" as something between temporal and geographic disparities, how can we analyze the cinematic interpretations of postcolonial theory? How do we look at these fictions through their entanglements with alternate histories taking place in Africa? Further, how can we incorporate an economic analysis of cinema and its appropriated contexts? This Seminar combines readings of select ""postcolonial"" cinema in the form of film reviews, scripts, as well as scholarly articles, on the one hand, with readings of violence, settler colonialism, and on the other hand history. The Seminar will also look at he following films: Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Chris Marker, 1953), Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense (Göran Olsson, 2014), Two Meetings and a Funeral (Naeem Mohaiemen, 2017), The Battle of Algiers (1966), In the Year of the Quiet Sun (Otolith Group, 2013), Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, 1995)"
Formalizing the Subject: Dialectics & Cybernetics in Cahiers Pour L'Analyse & CCRU,"DESCRIPTION This Seminar examines two unique think-tanks to emerge in philosophy in the last 50 years: The Cahiers Pour L'Analyse and the Cybernetic Research Culture Unit. These two research groups paved the way to an unprecedented experimental and interdisciplinary practice which reconfigured the classical philosophical dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism in the wake of new advances in the sciences and arts. They also opened a lever to overcome the stale dichotomy between analytic and continental approaches in the contemporary context. As we shall see, both vectors of study are not just accidentally paired, but can be seen as two poles that answer in divergent ways to an integral and cohesive set of imperatives, following thus overlapping theoretical and practical aims. Central among these was the pursuit of a formal and interdisciplinary experimentalism, leading to an uncompromising rejection of postmodern relativism and of the post-Heideggerean phenomenological legacy, including its historicist and Derridean textualist sequels. In doing so, both vectors conceived of parallel projects for a thorough formalization of the subject. This would overcome the residual humanist piety which lingered in 20th Century philosophical attempts to radicalize the critical impetus of Enlightenment rationality.

Using either mathematical formalization or cybernetic functional mappings outside the realm of regulated scientific practice, they lead to varied figurations of the post-human future and a reconsideration of the scope of the revolutionary process after Marx. These convergences, however, also reveal a crucial methodological dividing line, within which diametrically different views about the relationship between the subject and the world are forged, and within which the future of collective ""humanity"" becomes problematized. Thus, as we shall see, the Cahiers followed above all the anti-humanist spirit of the Lacanian attack on the figurations of ‘ego-psychology’ in an attempt to re-integrate these into the philosophical imaginary, in continuity with the Althusserian rekindling of the philosophical dialectic and revolutionary subject in the horizon of structuralist thought. It also expanded the formal epistemological orientation developed by Bachelard and others. In doing so, they would take mathematical-semiotic formalization as the means to reconceive of the traditional aims of philosophy in its materialist scope, and of the Marxist-oriented revolutionary subject. In turn, the CCRU exploited an alternative, ‘schizoanalytic’ model and machinic ontology closely aligned to the works of Deleuze and Guattari against the perceived idealist and structuralist excess of Lacanian psychoanalysis, exacerbating the anti-humanist impetus of unearthing an impersonal subjectivity which could not be reconciled with traditional forms of revolutionary practice. Accordingly, decanting all residual vitalist or humanist tropes from the Deleuzean text, the CCRU progressively produced aberrant theory-fictional mythologies in which cybernetic theory and non-mathematical numeracies served to construct a ‘hyperstitional’ practice that resisted recapture by the traditional valences of philosophical narrativization. They ultimately forecasted a productive intellectual mechanism not tractable to the resources of deliberative cognition or collective resistance within which human temporality was not only dislodged from a phenomenological individual horizon, but precluded the possibility of incorporation into a communal subject guided by normative-historical imperatives. Finally, we shall extend our study into the historical antecedents which guide both of these trajectories, as well as their prescient influence in the contemporary philosophical landscape across a variety of registers.

The Seminar begins with an introductory Session providing the historical and theoretical background guiding our investigation. during the following two weeks we will examine a variety of texts from the Cahiers Pour Analyse, following closely the debate centered around the relation between structure, concept and form. This interrogation leads to profound questions concerning the legacy of structuralism and the role of mathematical formalization beyond its narrow application in the social sciences and psychoanalysis, probing the limits and interface of scientific and philosophical practice. During the following two sessions, we shall engage with the recently published collected writings from the CCRU in a systematic manner, and trace its attempt to forge a 'hyperstitional' practice in which Lovecraftian mythology and cybernetics converge toward the experimental practice of 'theory-fiction', and in which Deleuze and Guattari's machinic ontology becomes subverted from a philosophical register into an alien register. During weeks six and seven, we will examine some of the contemporary ramifications of these two think tanks by focusing on two vectors of research within philosophy and theory in which the influence and tensions between their orientations of become prescient and intensified: A) The speculative realist sequence, and B) the so-called 'neorationalist' resurgence of universalist-systematic philosophy, in which one also finds a re-evaluation of the legacies of modern rationalism and empiricism after the 20th Century 'deconstruction' of metaphysics and critique of Enlightenment rationality. Finally, in the last session, we will briefly consider the emergence and development of the different versions and political inflections of the accelerationist program, and the practical horizon within from which the future draws its gradient."
Computation & The Real,"DESCRIPTION What is Computation? This naive question appears – eighty years on from the pioneering work of Alonzo Church – as an insistence that the computable domain lacks theoretical closure. A figure which presents itself as mere procedure, simply a recursive mode of calculation, has cast its shadow over a fundamental rift in modern mathematics. Its advances call for a reappraisal of Turing orthodoxy – the image of a Universal Machine endowed with Boolean logic – as no more than an ossified icon limiting the conceptual scope of what it means to compute.

The seminar will examine an alternative model of computation, proceeding from developments in three corresponding areas of 20th Century thought – constructive mathematics, intuitionistic logic, and type theory. We will explore the relation between propositions and types, proofs and programs, realizability and truth – discussing the work of LEJ Brouwer, Per Martin-Löf, Steve Awodey, Jean-Yves Girard and others. We develop a unified perspective on computation, logic and mathematics based on univalent foundations, exploring its ramifications in interactivist paradigms, sketching out a notion of computation as a ‘dialogics’ of reason."
The Return to the Abyss & The Revenge of Reason,"DESCRIPTION Ever since the critical assault against dogmatic metaphysics initiated by Kant’s transcendental epistemology, philosophy has understood that any discourse attempting to answer the question “what is Real?” must first interrogate how subjective experience mediates the knowledge, disclosure, or constitution of being. In this seminar, we examine some of the ways in which post-Kantian philosophy has proposed to articulate the complex relationship between sensing, thinking, and being in response to the Kantian predicament, clarifying the methodological role of ontological and epistemological questioning in philosophical investigation.

In this second part of this seminar, we follow our historical diagnosis, and explore the methodological conditions for philosophy to avoid at once epistemological foundationalism and metaphysical dogmatism, paving the way for a functionalist theory of the subject and a realist ontology. We begin by rekindling the Kantian problematic of the “faculties” and the crisis of representation following from the encounter with noumenon, which Heidegger diagnosed as having forced a “recoil before the abyss”, and whose irreversible historical effects for philosophical thought Land denominates “the trauma of the exterior”.

Upon “returning to the abyss”, we introduce an alternative answer beyond the various attempts at radicalizing and overcoming critique after Kant, which becomes first elaborated in the works Wilfrid Sellars, and which avows the irreducibility and propriety of epistemological explanation, while reconciling it with the prospects of a materialism. Strategically drawing from various so-called “neorationalist” configurations in contemporary philosophy following downstream from and in response to Sellars’ rekindling of the German Idealist legacy, we then assess the prospects of overcoming epistemic and metaphysical anti-realisms within a systematic philosophical project, engaging with works and insights by Robert Brandom, Lorenz Puntel, Johanna Seibt, Jay Rosenberg, Reza Negarestani, Danielle MacBeth, Fernando Zalamea, Gabriel Catren, and Ray Brassier, among others. As we shall see, in avoiding the pitfalls of vitalist and Platonist “subjectalisms” as much as humanist ""correlationisms"" (Meillassoux), a genuine ""revenge of reason"" takes place in the articulation of cognitive functionalism and metaphysical naturalism, providing an answer to the abyss of being."
Architecture After the Internet,"DESCRIPTION This seminar will focus on how the introduction of computation and algorithms to architecture practice has impacted the field and how the increasing automation of the traditional responsibilities of architects liberate them from the past to think more broadly about the role of architecture in approaching the future of built environments, infrastructure and problem solving. Moderated by Leonardo Dellanoce & Francesco Degl'Innocenti, this seminar will feature seven architects and architecture theorists who have made a major contribution to architecture in the last five years. The seminar will concentrate on their specific methodologies to think about urbanism and the future of architecture.

August 4: Leonardo Dellanoce & Francesco Degl'Innocenti /// Introductory session

August 11: Arthur Röing Baer /// User-owned spatial protocols and platforms
Discussing three projects that explore the potential for outcomes more akin to public utilities or unions than privatized platform monopolies within urban mobility, trucking, and mapping.
August 18: Keller Easterling /// Medium Design

On the flip side of dominant cultural logics, you would take a hard pass on emancipatory manifestos or aspirations to be new, free, radical or right. Being right is too weak. It doesn’t work against dangerous political superbugs. But maybe there is a very ordinary and practical perspective that has simply been eclipsed—a cultural blind spot that is right before you and a terra incognita where you have already been. Maybe there is no end or modernist succession but more middle or medius. On this flip side, it may be easier to see at a different focal length. Beyond declared ideologies is a matrix or medium of activities and latent potentials—the undeclared dispositions that are something like culture’s muscle memory. Just as medium thinking inverts the typical focus on object and matrix, maybe it can offer some alternative approaches to intractable problems that outwit the most cunning superbugs.

September 22: Daniel Young ///Aureli, Borges, Young & Giroux 

To think politically about urban space we need to understand what it actually is. From a concrete discussion of the city to the endless horizon of the architectural imaging system.

September 29: Christine Bjerke /// The FX Beauties: Power in Networks

By reworking the relationship between domesticity, cultural gender politics, financial systems, and decentralized social networks, the FX Beauties demonstrate both the fragility and fortitude of gender norms in a neoliberal economy, as well as the ways that digital spaces encroach on domestic ones.

October 6: Alessandro Bava ///Architecture or Revolution
in 1922 Le Corbusier wrote in ""Verse une Architecture"" that 'it is building which lies at the root of the social unrest of today’. Is it still the case? The presentation will attempt to question what an architect can do (and cannot do) in a quantified world.
October 13: Charles Stankievech ///EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS

This talk will map a material history of military Early Warning Systems that established the current protocols of communication. Using a methodology of fieldwork, geopolitical and architectural realities provided the framework for analysis versus theories of the digital and the cloud.

October 20: Benedict Singleton & Marta Ferreira de Sá /// TBA"
Towards a Panoptic View of Art History,"DESCRIPTION Through exclusion and compression, art history contributes to the creation of mythically charged objects of art. Art history has often been regarded as a given, a discipline that defines how we interpret art in the present. This seminar will attempt to find a new purpose for Art History in our contemporary moment marked by the technological flattening of all temporalities into that of the virtual present. Moderated by João Enxuto, this seminar will feature seven art historians who have made a major contribution to their field in the last five years. It will concentrate on their specific methodologies as a way to rethink the production of art history and historiography for the future.

October 27: Introductory session

November 3: Judith Rodenbeck

November 10: Leo Goldsmith

November 17: Stefan Heidenreich

November 24: T'ai Smith

December 1: Clementine Deliss

December 8: Jeff O'Brien

December 15: Jaleh Mansoor"
Curatorial Expediency & Algorithmic Organization of Exhibitions,"This Seminar will focus on the influence of algorithms on the practice of curating as much as on the programmatic essence of curatorial practice in the historical perspective. The automation of curatorial practice might accelerate the reformation of the art world or go even further and realize the emancipatory dream of building a brand new world of art on the ruins of the old. By introducing the methodologies of a range of practicing guest curators, this seminar will focus on how the emergence of automated and algorithmic curation, like any new paradigm in meditation and communication, can provide opportunities for reforming the art world and injecting egalitarianism in the system. Moderated by Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus, this seminar is lead by curators who have made a contribution to the field in the last five years.

 

April 7: Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus /// Introductory session

April 14: Monika Szewczyk /// New Ancient Things

In her session, Monika Szewczyk will discuss her methodology in the context of her participation as a Curator in Documenta 14 as well as her work on the exhibition titled""The needle, the haystack, the thread"" at the Arts Club of Chicago

April 21: Misal Adnan Yıldız /// Sky as a screen: Rethinking exhibitions and audiences

Originally written as proposals and selected through open calls, three exhibition projects; There is no audience (Montehermoso, 2009), A history of inspiration (Palais de Tokyo, 2013), and Mutterzunge (ongoing since 2017 in Berlin as a multi venue programme for events, installs and workshops; Curate Award co-organised by Fondazione Prada and QAM) clearly share a common ground for rethinking exhibitions and audiences. Potential links between imagination, inspiration and expression as well as location, environment, and reception including a list of references, experiments on exhibition format, display techniques and institutional tone will be related to a cognitive approach for imagining sky as a screen.

April 28: Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula and Jeebesh Bagchi) /// Curatorial and Distributed Discursive Justice

Over the last two decades, curatorial practice has gained momentum and expanded beyond its formative cultural and intellectual composition. The expanded field of both cultural and knowledge production — and its transformation into economies of substantial scale — has brought in variables that were not anticipated before. Even though the domain of what transacts as “contemporary art” is insignificant in terms of economic value, yet it’s symbolic value, and prestige, power and privilege have risen. Furthermore, the enactive boundaries of contemporary art and it’s public interfaces are increasingly more porous, and with blurry edges. It is our understanding that a collision around epistemic equality and an alertness towards the questions raised around it, give curatorial modes and modalities their potency, and edge. It is within this context that we propose that curatorial practice has to be understood as a deliberation on distributed discursive justice.

May 5: Charles Esche /// The Demodern Possibility

The talk will discuss artistic and museum activities that seek to contribute to social change. Society and culture seem to be at a transition point and the modern / postmodern / altermodern explanation of the world no longer holds. The question is how to embrace a different way of seeing and thinking. The talk will suggest how we can begin to answer to that challenge.

May 19: Clémentine Deliss /// Clashing curatorial venues: reconsidering the metabolism of art research and production

This session focuses on curatorial theory and practice in relation to the constraints and complaints surrounding the current ramifications of the three key civic institutions in art: the museum, the university and the art academy. Questions will be jointly debated on the potential for developing new, experimental infrastructures for knowledge production that embrace transdisciplinary positions and center on the rights of access to sequestered ethno- colonial collections held in European reserves. What dramaturgical and technical configurations could contribute to the definition of a ‘museum of the commons’, enabling physical collections to become accessible and open-source? Can the museum as a quasi global organism, which is generating as yet unknown techne, begin to reformulate earlier conceptions of ethnographic collections and, in doing so, critically consider the architectural apparatus of museums, their economic imperative, and the constitution of audience relations? How can curatorial practice begin to remediate and thereby redefine the implicit conditions that frame our understanding of what a museum should be? Can we move away from the centralised museological ‘church’ to the peripheral, rural, or short-term 24-hour institution with its collection in a suitcase and the hawker as curator? Is this the disguise unconsciously adopted by biennials?

May 26: Serubiri Moses /// Autopoiesis and Affective Collaboration

The presentation follows The School of Anxiety, a project within the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2018). The School of Anxiety was an unteaching environment focused on subjective anxieties. Between August 2017 and August 2018, and travelling from Johannesburg to Nairobi to Berlin, the project brought together three members from diverse disciplines to collaborate on research and the exchange of ideas. The project aligned itself with terms such as unlearning, becoming, autopoiesis, self-production, entropy, and redundancy. The presentation will consist of an overview of collaborative practice within the year-long project in relation to cybernetic processes and psychoanalysis theories on affect and being.

June 2: Bassam El Baroni /// Computation as Curatorial Muse, Curating as Computational Muse

This talk looks at some of the ideas in circulation around curating in the post-internet era and attempts to understand what the implications of these are for curating moving forward. Computation is often interpreted as an algorithmic aid to the human curator and/or considered speculatively to signal the emergence and gradual realization of robo-curation and the withering of the human curator as was once understood. Both views seem to be highlighting curating in its “sortal” capacity as a form of selection and matchmaking but stop short of considering how the pressures exerted by computation contribute to the transformation of curation, seemingly directing it toward more epistemic concerns and an emphasis on conceptual synthesis. Between essentially thinking curating as a particular form of sorting, and, thinking curating as a practice with stakes and a role to play in the epistemic construction of world(s) is a type of gap; it is perhaps a “useful abyss” that dreams (or, for some, nightmares) about computational futures help bring to the fore. In what sense can the further automation of curatorial processes influence and shape the discussion on curating, its labor, and its education?"
Pattern Recollection: Modalities of Contemporary Thought Processes,"DESCRIPTION This seminar will focus on contemporary philosophy and theory as an exercise of thinking about the future in the past tense. Moderated by Davor Löffler & Patrick Schabus, this seminar will feature seven philosophers, thinkers and theorists who have made a major contribution to their field in the last five years. They will be focusing on the epistemological dimension of their practice, showing how their work addresses the social, political and cultural realities of contemporary life on a computationally interconnected planet earth.

 

June 9: Davor Löffler & Patrick Schabus /// Introductory session

June 16: Inigo Wilkins /// Partial Recall: Counterfactually Equipped Predictive Models and Multi-Level Integration of Theoretical Frameworks
We will look at how the predictive processing (PP) paradigm in contemporary neuroscience can be fruitfully thought as developing models proposed in Ashby’s cybernetics, according to which perception can be understood not as an accurate copy of the external world but as a partial (in both senses, i.e. biased and incomplete) representation geared towards the maintenance of the system within the viability boundaries of its essential variables. However, we will argue that the uncritical generalisation of the PP framework tends towards politically debilitating ideology (overextension of physics terms to social systems), and that this can only be countered by a dynamic mechanistic framework that pays careful attention to the integration of the explanatory-descriptive purchase of diverse theoretical frameworks operating at multiple levels and scales.

June 23: Patricia Reed /// Horizonless Orientation 

Transforming co-existence for a planetary scale firstly requires this scale becomes amenable to cognition if any sort of political tractability is to be constructed. Otherwise said, this scale demands the construction of interfaces that can better correlate with the scope of its largely insensible, complex manifestation. This seminar points to the importance of language and spatial representation as interfacial vehicles, and how they contribute to the articulation of new frames of reference, from which other reasoned modes of mobilising within our condition, cascade.

June 30: Aaron Schuster/// The Brothel as a Paradigm of Power: Contemporary Politics in Light of Jean Genet’s Theater

A fantasy factory, a media empire, a political rally, a sexual orgy, a modern church, a glorified tomb, a profitable business, and a theater: Genet’s brothel, the main setting of his play The Balcony, ought to be seen as a paradigm of modern power, on a par with Bentham’s Panopticon, Kafka’s Trial, or the Network of critics of control society. This seminar will involve a close reading of The Balcony, written in the mid-1950s, as a cipher for understanding some of the challenges and impasses of contemporary politics. How does Genet theorize enjoyment as a political factor? How does he address the comedy of politics, while offering a severe critique of the limits of satire (here we shall read the play together with J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”)? The Balcony portrays the shift from a society ruled by church, law, and army to the technocratic universe of capitalism, whose representatives are an entrepreneur (of the illusion industry) and the chief of police. We will look at how his shift has generated various paradoxes of authority, including an authority that incorporates resistance to the system.

July 14: Nina Power/// Rethinking Anti-Psychiatry: David Cooper and RD Laing for the 21st Century 

This seminar session will examine the ideas of Cooper and Laing, both of whom took their influence from late Sartre and whose approach went on to inform Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari, in the context of today's social climate. What has happened to our understanding of the group, off and online and what are the 'politics of the family' today? What can we say now about Laing and Cooper's turn to psychedelics, experience and, in Cooper's case, the defence of revolutionary violence? The seminar will both defend Laing and Cooper's approach while also acknowledging crucial political, social and cultural differences between the late-60s/early-70s. What is at stake, overall, though, is a plea to think carefully and structurally about group dynamics and the possibility of collective psychoanalysis/group work, particularly when so much of our existence today seems to take place without face-to-face contact or touch.

July 21: João Florêncio /// Thinking with Antiretrovirals: Gay sex, the body, and antiretrovirals

This session with reflect on the ways in which, in the years since their introduction, antiretroviral drugs biochemically triggered the emergence and remediation of ""post-AIDS"" gay bodies. No longer haunted by the spectre of AIDS, antiretroviralised gay bodies have become one of success stories of neoliberal self-management. Yet, it is also worth asking: “Could antiretroviral biopolitics open new pathways for thinking queer bodies not as who they are but as what can do?""

July 28: Václav Janoščík /// From Slaughterhouse to Instagram
Art Education in late capitalism and abstraction after the Internet 

Annotation: I want to begin with three stories - Reykjavik (Slaughterhouse), San Francisco (Barracks), Zurich (Office) - to feature and articulate three distinctive models of current art education. Hopefully, this not only gives us some sort of solid ground for situating ourselves but also connects art and social problems in sound and straightforward way. This is where Louis Camnitzer comes to assist with his concept of art thinking - often overlooked capacity common to all of us - artist, curators, viewers, writers, researchers, humans and inhumans. If we wonder what is the challenge - why art thinking and art education are so relevant in respect to social realm - lets turn to abstraction. Since this is not just formalist approach to art, it is the core of extraction of value (postfordism) and even meaning (semio-capitalism). And in this way art is not only turing revisiting social issues, but finds them in its utmost center.

August 4: Jaya Klara Brekke /// Defining a political crypto economics: the sensible, insensible and dissensible

If the field of cryptoeconomics entails systems employing cryptography, computer networks and game theory then the design and governance of these systems would entails a field of political cryptoeconomics. But how should we conceive of the political in relation to decentralized socio-technical systems? In what ways can we take into account the way that agency, intentionality and responsibility is distributed, diffused and automated? In this seminar, Brekke draws together thinking in the fields of economic, political and computational  in order to delineate an approach to the emerging field of political cryptoeconomics."
Methodologies of Artistic Practice Now,"DESCRIPTION This seminar will focus on the intersections between artistic practice and new technologies and how these can reshape contemporary artistic production. While the seminar will concentrate on each artist’s specific methodologies and career track, its overarching topic is how contemporary artistic practice can breach the normative notions of production and critique and transcend them. Moderated by Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus, this seminar will feature seven artists who have made a major contribution to contemporary art in the last five years.

 

February 3: Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus /// Introductory session

 

February 10: Julieta Aranda /// Passing as; passing through 

The session will be an investigation on topics / demands / strategies of artistic production and how they present themselves vs how they really function in our contemporary economic and geopolitical landscape. Can we choose to be poor, or is passing a requisite? 

 

February 17: Ahmet Öğüt /// Tools for a Collaborative Practice 

With Happy Together: Collaborators Collaborating, Öğüt revisits past collaborations, explores the agency of those who participate in a work’s production and the nature of collaboration itself. The artist foregrounds the status and value of labour within the production of art, provoking a critical consciousness that calls into question the ethical and relational implications of the role of the artist and their work within the world. 

 

February 24: John Gerrard /// Western Flag (near Spindletop, Texas) 2017

An indepth look at the production of the simulation Western Flag (near Spindletop, Texas) 2017 alongside contextualising works such as Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) 2007.

 

March 3: Agnieszka Polska /// Immersiveness and the mimicry of emotions as tools against normative patterns 

In my presentation, I will use examples from my recent video works (“The Demon’s Brain’, ‘New Sun’) to talk about strategies of audio-visual stimulation that intentionally manipulate the emotions of the viewer. I will consider how such strategies might induce behavioural change and the ethics of the process. 

 

March 10: Renzo Martens /// Plantations and White Cubes 

Historically, plantations have funded the building of many European and American museums. Rather than (critically) rehearsing the problem, we aim to put art’s capacity to better use. We move beyond critique, and install a model in which art’s capacity to attract capital, visibility and legitimization is put to strategic purposes.
With the launch of the OMA-designed White Cube on a former Unilever palm oil plantation in Congo, the ambition is to slowly build a network throughout the world’s plantaton zones, kickstarting an international movement of artist-plantation workers buying back their own land. This isn’t art that points to inequality. It is art that provides the inspiration and the capital to build inclusive, ecological post-plantations. 

 

March 17: Marwa Arsanios /// Why artistic research? 

In this session we will go through different art research practices and look at specific methodologies in order to understand how artistic research affects the political and in its turn is affected by it. 

 

March 24: Navine G. Khan-Dossos /// Without images, without figures. 

This presentation will look at the role of aniconism in the painting practice of Navine G Khan-Dossos. This idea of the non-figurative derived from Islamic art forms the basis of the artist’s approach to her subject in the internet age, and informs her choice not to re-present the body at the centre of her artistic concerns."
On the Riddles of Ontology: The intersections of art & experience,"DESCRIPTION The problem of the ontology of artworks has been very much at the front of analytic aesthetics in the last decades. Ever since the publication of Nelson Goodman´s Languages of Art, a whole plethora of positions have emerged in this regard. From Goodman´s nominalism and Gregory Currie´s 'eventural' Platonism, to David Davies' performative theory, analytic philosophy has been trying to cope with the variability of art practice and its conditions of existence.

This seminar takes this variety not just as a disagreement regarding the ontological status of art, among which one can choose, but as a symptom of a difficulty stemming from the practice of art itself. In this sense, the first part of the course intends to be a presentation and a critique of most of the existing positions within the analytical ontology of art. By taking ontology (and the variability exhibited therein) as a symptom rather than as a solution, we propose to expose the ontological approach as concealing rather than explicating the dynamics proper to the practice of art itself.

The second part of the seminar changes modes, from the presentation and description to the prospective, our central hypothesis is then used to guide us through an elaboration of two different tendencies present in the field of aesthetics which tries to either supersede it or ""hack"" it from within: those that we thematize under the heading “experience against art”, represented in this seminar by the thought and practice of the Cagean avant-garde; and those we call “art against experience”, in which the autonomy of artistic practice is used as a means to criticize not just empirical reality, as Adorno would have it, but the normative infrastructure that is responsible for the emergence of artworks.

This last hypothesis is equivalent to the taking of the normativity of action (as depicted among others by Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom) as material for so-called ""aesthetic"" practice, offering a critique of that which, by virtue of being concealed behind experience, is a condition of aesthetic experience itself.

1- The Ontology of Art and its Limits.

The first module addresses briefly a number of different positions regarding the ontological status of art, trying to isolate the four components of the questioning itself: what is art? What are artworks? How do we know something to be an artwork? How do we know something to be the artwork that it is?

2- The Critique of Ontology

The second module investigates a few critiques of the ontological impulse itself. For instance, Goodman´s own question ”when is art?”, which purports to displace the classic “what is art?”; Arthur Danto´s return to the Hegelian thesis of the end of art; Lydia Goehr´s critique of ontology as regarding particularly music, and as articulated in her Imaginary Museum of Musical works amongst others. The purpose of the class is, by approaching a number of critiques, to displace ontology from the definition of the objects of art towards an investigation of the constitution of the field itself which conditions the emergence of such objects.

3- Experience against art

Peter Bürger proposes a reading of the avant-garde as a demand for aesthetic experience to surpass the autonomous sphere of art, and dissolve into vital praxis itself. Notwithstanding Bürger´s denunciation of what he calls the ""neo-avant-gardes"" of the sixties, we see John Cage´s thinking as especially fitting this description. Cage´s exhortation to ""let sounds be sounds"" would be akin to an opening to what Adorno calls ""the empirical"" that lies outside of the work in its monadic character. This class proposes a critique of institutional critique by examining some assumptions and consequences of the Cagean artwork.

4- Art Against Experience

The opening of art to experience has exposed to view not only the limits of what counts as the artwork, but the normative functioning of the artwork itself. Here, art´s autonomy serves as a convenient leverage to construct a laboratory for the exploration of the normativity of action itself: the rules that were once constitutive of what counts as an artwork are now subjected to the labour of elaboration. Dialectically, art´s autonomy serves then also as a means for its un-autonomization: the outside which in Cagean aesthetics was supposed to pass through to the inside was always already constitutive of the practice. Constitutive dissociations, as philosopher and artist Henry Flynt proposes, make explicit art as a species of the generic practice of production, turning it into a production of generic practices."
Responsibility & Existential Risk,"DESCRIPTION Anti-anthropocentrism, broadly construed, is in vogue across contemporary theory and continental philosophy: the topic of ‘human extinction’ its natural bedfellow. And yet, despite popularity (alongside parallel proliferation of ‘geological’ epochs, subtype pessimisms, and various schools of tenebrosity), theoretical engagements with our future extirpation emerging from ‘critical’ post-humanism are often, on closer inspection, surprisingly uncritical. The conversation, in other words, is conceptually premature concerning one of the topics it holds most dear. As shall be explored during this 4-part course, this is precisely due to the field’s deep-set—and ongoing—obsession with ‘proliferation’ itself: whether as voluptuous difference, the muscular mindlessness of becoming, or, the patchworks of swarming experimentation.

Elsewhere, in entirely different quarters, the topic enjoys similar visibility but for different reasons. This refers to the recent maturation of ‘future studies’—and its cousin, ‘macrostrategy’—and its focus on measuring and mitigating ‘existential risk’ in relation to humanity’s long-term trajectories. Pioneered by scholars from Bostrom to Ćirković, extinction threats have here become the target of an emerging field of quantitative, rigorous, and scientifically serious study.

In the Seminar, we will address this latter, as a counter to some aspects of the former, through an exploration of how it is that investigating our existential precarity is inseparable from acknowledging some basic responsibility for the activity we call ‘thinking’. Engaging themes from modality to SETI, the course will be of suited to students interested in the philosophy of science and the history of philosophy."
Generative Structures: Reasons of Being & Reasons of Knowing,"DESCRIPTION This Seminar takes the question of philosophical systems and the conditions which allow for their autonomous construction. How can different philosophical architectures conserve their inner validity while addressing a variety of conceptual structures? Are we rationally allowed to believe in the productive power of reason?

This seminar will try to answer these questions by dealing with different strategies for constructing philosophical systems since the beginning of modernity (Descartes, Leibniz) until present days (Meillassoux, Badiou) and passing through post and neo Kantianism. A particular attention will be dedicated to the articulation of the two series of the “reasons of being”, concerning the genesis of the real, and the “reasons of knowing” i.e. the conceptual formal structure of thought. A comparison is proposed between the philosophical and the mathematical creativity (Lautman, Cavaillès) and capacity of producing, in an autonomous and non-history dependent way, new domains and objects available for knowledge. The goal is to set the conditions to reflect upon the productive power of reason and on the real effects of the activity of a thinking."
Future of Intelligence in the Age of Intellectual Scarcity,"DESCRIPTION This Seminar consists of polemical arguments against three apparently dominant scenarios concerning the rise of future intelligence, whether in the domain of artificial realization or in the realm of political thought. Each session of this seminar presents an elaborate criticism of a series of ideas put forward to unshackle intelligence—technological or social—from the yokes of humanism and rationality. To this end, we shall engage with the deep game theoretic account of intelligence (Land), speculative risk and uncertainty (Malik, Roden), technological singularity (Bostrom, Chalmers, Yudkowsky), so as to uncover the shared threads among them. Subsequently, it will be argued that despite the great sophistication and the weight of their critical insights these trends not only fail to untether themselves from the aforementioned shackles but regress into a form of conservative humanism—if not dogmatic and precritical thinking—that they initially set to overcome.

Session 1: David Roden, a disconnected future: what is disconnection and how it ultimately reconnects back to what it set to diverge.

Session 2: Suhail Malik: a risk beyond reason: how the absolutization of uncertainty repeats the gestures of precritical philosophy?

Session 3: Nick Land, cosmological game-theory: Why game-theory fails to be a grand unifying theory of intelligence and even if it did not, why it fails to imagine a future intelligence?

Session 4: Bostrom, Chalmers, Yudkowsky, the singularity we were promised: How to detect the traces of biased heuristics in the discussions around singularity and how to expose it as a scholastic theological discourse?"
One Thousand & One Nights and A Handful of Plateaus,"This seminar is not offered as part of any Certificate Program. If you have any concerns or questions about this please contact student services at studentservices@thenewcentre.org
DESCRIPTION A series of topological analyses of philosophical issues in relation to science, politics and art and their permutations in terms of emergent fields, this twenty-session Seminar promises to rekindle the project initiated by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus in a new vein: A world consisting of multiple scales and multitude of elements and processes—scientific, philosophical, occult, technological and military—and from which a new craft—a vehicle of cosmological thought—can be forged.

This seminar goes beyond Deleuze and Guattari, from machinic assemblages to systems collision, from desiring machines to AI agents and from the archive to neural networks, from a Nietzschean reading of Whitehead’s processes to a computational view of interacting processes. This is how fidelity to the philosophy of A Thousand Plateau actually looks like in the future. Nomads armed with the latest paradigm of stability analysis, witches equipped with post-Boltzmann notion of statistics, outlanders who are now paragons of rogue complexity sciences. All in all, we, more or less, signed up for this vision of the world. It is now time to take it to its farthest conclusions.

In this seminar we will engage once again with rationality, imagination and sensation but this time we shall reinvestigate them through the context of complexity and computational sciences as a probing into past classics (e.g., Plato’s cave, Locke’s tabula rasa, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hume’s bundles, Kant’s aliens, and other philosophical models in the ‘classical ages’ of reason and rationality.) This reconstruction of A Thousand Plateaus replaces the implicit geometric language of ATP into a an explicitly logico-geometric language, and substitutes its scientific metaphors with actual scientific theories.

As such, this seminar is built around four constitutive investigations into philosophical, political and aesthetic perspectives: Foundational physics, Biological sciences, Mathematics and Computer science.

Targeted audience: those who are interested in the philosophy of Deleuze and Gauttari, but also those who dream of abolishing the so-called distinction between the Analytic and the Continental."
Theories of Knowledge in the Age of Planetary Computation,"DESCRIPTION Organized exclusively for the Digital Earth Residency Program, this theoretical seminar will be hosted by Mohammad Salemy and Patrick Schabus. It will feature seven philosophers, thinkers and theorists who have made a major contribution to their field in the last five years(Reza Negarestani, Inigo Wilkins, Mi You, Boris Ondreička, Patricia Reed, Katerina Kolozova, Alexandra Mason). They will be focusing on epistemology and other relevant issues at the heart of their practice, showing how their work addresses the social, political and cultural realities of contemporary life on a computationally interconnected planet earth.

 

October 2: Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus /// Mythopoesis versus Necropoesis

Salemy's and Schabus' presentation focuses on the role of what they call Mythopoesis (myth-making) in constructing new realities in the past and present and fixing and/or preventing futures. Their presentation emphasizes a renewed need for mythology in the era of planetary computation which is marked by:   1- increasing reliance on mathematical measurements and measures for maintaining and expanding abstractions needed for the management of social, political economic and cultural systems, and  2- the chaos and violence resulting from the clash between the modern and the enlightenment-oriented world (1500-present) and the new emerging orders.

 

October 9: Reza Negarestani /// Quandaries of Induction for A Universal Leaning Computer

This presentation focuses on the possibility of constructing a universal learning machine (ULM), essentially an AI that is capable of optimally find or predict the simplest data model for any arbitrary data distribution, using formal inductive methods and probability logic. We shall assess the possibility of ULM from a particular perspective: Problems of induction, old and new, from Hume to Russell, Goodman and Putnam.

 

October 23: Inigo Wilkins /// Compression, Prediction, and Complexity

I will talk about a new paradigm in cognitive science and AI based on compression and prediction, how this relates to platform capitalism, and how phemomena at the level of social behaviour exceeds this inductive framework and requires an integration of bottom-up data-driven processing not only with top-down Bayesian priors but structured around theoretical resources including logico-conceptual inference, normative-linguistic commitment, and the semantic complexity of natural language.

 

October 30: Mi You /// Eurasia / Speculation

The seminar will juxtapose old and new networks, from the nomadic cosmological ones, the
“Eurasian imaginative highway”, to the contemporary supranational infrastructures. By
doing so, we will try to construct a bridge between speculation and materialist production.
In other words, we will try to think beyond the ‘dismal science’ by exercising and enacting
speculative thinking, while assessing the productive potentials of, for example,
‘cosmotechnics’ and the scales of engagements it entails. A further point of inquiry is, how
does the speculative figure in the revaluation of value, and henceforth in (re)production?

 

November 6: Boris Ondreička /// Against Vitalization

The presentation will deal with material illiteracy as a source of ecological confusion on one hand and the ambivalence between the theory and the poetry and the practice on the other.

 

November 13: Patricia Reed /// Cosmologies towards a Horizonless Future

Cosmology, Bentley Allan has argued, underwrites a sense of purpose, providing a framework of orientation to legitimate certain actions and decisions in the world. His study looks at how certain scientific developments throughout history came to influence not only how we understand the world, but also our place within it and why manners of navigating it come to make sense. This seminar examines the chasm between the profound transformations of our historical present on the one hand, and what amounts to our ‘cosmological stagnation’, on the other hand, addressing the violent incompatibility between them. This chasm, however, reveals a crucial site of labor for the arts and humanities to intervene in the narration of these changes, and how they ought to be conceptually, pragmatically and ethically integrated. The second part of the seminar examines how epistemologies ‘resituate’ us, departing from Donna Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges’, and extrapolating upon her initial theses in view of complex objects, wherein the agency to better grasp the systems creating our reality cannot be located in a single human agent, but is distributed among humans and machinic intelligences.

 

November 20: Katerina Kolozova /// The Exploitation of the Inhuman: of the Pure Catogories of Matter and Automation

Language is technology, and technology is techné, not philosophia: techné exacts operations over and through the physical, not in order to “transcend it” but rather to use it in ways that help weighed-down animals, including human animals, in the physical reality they inhabit. Acceleration or flight is not concerned with transcending the physical but rather with its greater fullness and the exhaustion of materiality through expression. The signifying chain without agency – like any signifying automaton – is indifferent to goals like “the rule of reason” and “transcendence of physicality,” including the philosophico-theological hierarchies they may establish.

November 27: Peli Grietzer ///Theory of Vibe 

Whenever theory needs to construct a nexus between aesthetic, social-material, and affective loci of analysis, concepts of ‘ambient’ structure – analytically ineffable subjective/objective structures like mood (Stimmung), habitus, cultural logic, tone, or style – do the heavy lifting. In this talk, I introduce a mathematically informed account of the ontology and the epistemology of such ‘ambient’ structures, based on the geometry of generative neural networks

December 4: Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus

 

Image credit: Sternberg Press, 2016"
Methodologies of Artistic Practice Today,"DESCRIPTION Organized exclusively for the Digital Earth Residency Program, this artistic practice seminar will be hosted by Mohammad Salemy and Moses Serubiri. It will feature seven artists and art professionals (Marwa Arsanios, Stephanie Bailey, Kimberly Bradly, Hugo Canoilas, Marina Fokidis, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Ahmet Ogut) who have made a major contribution to art and culture in the last five years. The seminar will concentrate on each individual’s specific methodologies and career track. Through researching, understanding and articulating the work of these individuals, Digital Earth residents will develop a group exhibition from concept to implementation featuring works by themselves or other artists to be exhibited online.

 

October 4: Mohammad Salemy & Moses Serubiri /// Art, knowledge, information, poetry & language // Networks & Production of Contemporary Art

By looking at two recent texts written for exhibition catalogues, Mohammad's presentation concentrates not only on the possible functions of art in the 21st century, but it develop an approach to understand the poetics of research-based artistic practice.
Moses' presentation engages the networks of art making, and art production, concerning contemporary art in Africa. He will also touch on recent debates and historical arguments about art production, and networks of African artists.

 

October 11: Marina Fokidis /// The Living Together and its Entanglements / Curatorial Practice as a Continuous State of Human Encounter

How can one describe the space, which an event an exhibition-a biennial- or a periodical publication occupy?
Can geographical and territorial distinctions be still accurate to describe this space? Or do distinctions like these faction just as pure allegories?
Does the question of local and world-while, have any meaning in the era of digital mediation and social media?

 

October 18: Stephanie Bailey /// A World Affair

This text is an introduction into what has been an ongoing study into the dynamics of the art world industrial complex, which takes into account my position as both complicit participant and professed infiltrator in the field.

 

October 25: Kimberly Bradly /// Interpreting an artist and her oeuvre: methodologies and processes

 

November 1: Marwa Arsanios /// The Cinematic As a Research Tool

In this session we will look at the ways cinematic tools, apparatus and methodologies can be used within research, which in its turn can be translated into a work through montage.

 

November 8: Navine G. Khan-Dossos /// Getting Things Unfolded

A seminar using two texts that Navine G. Khan-Dossos considers crucial to her practice, the session will explore ideas around Aniconism, practice as meditation and mediation, and the influence of Islamic Art on the artist's thinking. She will focus on the importance of 'doing' as an individual but also the value of working in the multitude.

 

November 15: Hugo Canoilas /// Under the volcano experience - working methodology on an eight-year-long work

""I will make a description and self-reflexion on how different typologies of work come together in an expanded cinema and meta-film project.
This analysis raises an ethics of work, ideas about art, society, and all he tangibilities attached to a work of such scale as Under the volcano was.""

 

November 22: Ahmet Ogut /// Short-Term, Long-Term, Life-Time

Ahmet Öğüt will talk about a selection of his early works up until the present day, some of them are stolen, censored, attacked or appropriated, as well as he will give an introduction into his overall practice from interventions to long term projects.

 

November 29: Mohammad Salemy & Moses Serubiri

 

Image credit: Flux Year Box 2, c.1967, a Flux box edited and produced by George Maciunas, containing works by many early Fluxus artists."
Of the Tautological Universe of Value Production,"DESCRIPTION What is exchanged in patriarchy is not merely women as a form of use value for reproduction, but also femininity itself, or fetishised femaleness as surplus value. The pure value “femininity,” as abstracted and dematerialised femaleness, is exchanged in the same way as the commodity: adding value to the tautology of exchanging the same for the same: M-M or P-P, in order to achieve M-M’ or P-P’. The structuralist analysis proffered by Claude Levi-Strauss divulges the reality of patriarchy as a value/signifier exchange system: women are currency, whereas what is maintained and grows is the cultural form of sexual reproduction: patriarchy.

This exchange serves not only to increase and enforce the capital of masculinity, but also to add sheer surplus value to it, an excess in value (not libido) as a marker of erected phallic power. Power seen not as materiality, but as value is a set of signifiers: a patriarch, the guardian of the household or oikos, individual and collective or of oikos and the oikonomia of a state (or any form of organized community), and potent reproducer of the same – the human as man, homo (Latin) and, finally, l’homme (in French). Family is hom(m)osexual (in Irigaray's sense) by its inherent laws, i.e., it is patriarchal: there is no form of family that could subvert this norm as its material determination in the last instance is the signifying automaton of patriarchy.

In this seminar, students will engage with Marx, Laruelle, Saussure, Irigaray, and Haraway (amongst others), to consider how “sexual identities” equal commodity in the overall automaton of hom(m)o-sexual identification and value exchange. They will explore how sexuality might place itself beyond human morphology and its residuals, such as fetishisations of maleness and femaleness, straightness and gayness, and their many variations."
"Thinking, Sensing, Being: Epistemology & Ontology in the 21st Century","DESCRIPTION Ever since the critical assault against dogmatic metaphysics initiated by Kant’s transcendental epistemology, philosophy has understood that any discourse attempting to answer the question “what is Real?” must first interrogate how subjective experience mediates the knowledge, disclosure, or constitution of being. In this seminar, we will examine some of the ways in which post-Kantian philosophy has proposed to articulate the complex relationship between sensing, thinking, and being in response to the Kantian predicament, clarifying the methodological role of ontological and epistemological questioning in philosophical investigation.
The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, we shall critically examine how proponents of the so-called “ontological turn” in 20th Century philosophy proposed different solutions to Kantian epistemology and its construal of experience. We focus on two diametrically opposed historical trajectories. First, we follow the empiricist vector following downstream from the work of Henri Bergson, developed above all in the work of Gilles Deleuze, which reaches its terminus in Nick Land’s machinic practicism. Second, we follow the rationalist vector following the Hegelian, dialectical tradition, most rigorously elaborated in the work of Alain Badiou, and reaching its most radical expression in the work of Quentin Meillassoux.

In the second part, we schematically draw a constructive response to these empiricist and rationalist ontological solutions, by rekindling the Kantian project for a transcendental epistemology, drawing insights from the works of Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, Ray Brassier, Lorenz Puntel, Peter Wolfendale, and Reza Negarestani, among others. More specifically, we examine how the resources of a functionalist and computationalist theory of cognition provides the required methodological tools to understand how mind relates to world according various functional-experiential modalities, whose structural integrity also provides the basis for a realist theory of knowledge."
"Simulating the World & Remodeling Philosophy: Models, Diagrams and Toys","DESCRIPTION Long ignored by philosophers of science and epistemologists, only recently the concept of models has come to the forefront of philosophical scrutiny. Nevertheless, since the dawn of discovery and invention, engineers, designers and craftsmen have in one way or another treated models as the most treasured tools in their armamentarium of available equipments and methods. This twelve-session seminar engages with models, broadly understood. We will study a wide range of models, from diagrams to scientific models and children toys, only to arrive at their true significance in simulating our world and re-fabricating it. The first six sessions are centered on the study of models, old and new, in order to grasp what actually counts as a model and learn its range of applications. In the second half of the seminar, we will investigate a model-centered vision of discovery and invention, where philosophy, art, design and science not only are integrated but also help us to rethink and build a different world. The ideal audience for this seminar are people interested in the history of philosophy, science, engineering and design."
Artificial Neurosis: AI & Psychopathology,"DESCRIPTION If we succeed in creating intelligent machines, machines that can learn and are self-aware, machines that possess freedom and desire, will we also not necessarily create neurotic, psychotic, and perverse machines? In other words, won’t intelligent machines also suffer from mental illnesses? Though there is a lot of talk today about using AI to treat human mental illness, less attention has been given to the prospect of non-human psychopathologies, the maladies that might befall hyper-advanced computer systems: artificial neurosis. Where is Freud for the digital age? If the idea of engineering general intelligence and even consciousness inspires contemporary research programs, what about the prospect of a computer unconscious? The Seminar will explore the maladies of artificial intelligence through a philosophical and psychoanalytic lens, with a focus on depictions of AI in popular culture: films, television, and science fiction literature. We will examine how the presentation of “machines gone mad” illuminates deadlocks of contemporary society and subjectivity, while also asking how emerging technologies affect the very notion of the desiring subject. Materials may include, among others, episodes from Black Mirror; Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects; Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville; Ridley Scott, Blade Runner and Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049; Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld series; Casper Kelly and Nick Gibbons, Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough; Steven Shaviro, Discognition; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Max Tegmark, Life 3.0; Jean Pierre Dupuy, On the Origins of Cognitive Science and “Cybernetics is an Anti-Humanism.”"
Compression: A philosophical and technical Introduction,"DESCRIPTION In this introductory seminar, participants will be familiarized with the political stakes of a media theory of compression. The seminar will rigorously consider the implications of compression—both as a concept and a technical process with a specific history. The participants are asked to think about the epistemological consequences of a shrinking world and expanding data for our media ecology and our politics. Geert Lovink and Marc Tutors, for example, suggest that our current political emergency might have something to do with the power of compressed ideas in the form of memes such as those that helped put Donald Trump in the White House. As Lovink and Tutors suggest, “it is in fact the reactionary right that been most successful in recent years with their oft-repeated slogan that ‘politics is downstream from culture.’” If the forces of political reaction have been the ones to apply the politics of idea compression for their own ends, the liberal imagination —in everything from Democratic Party campaign strategies to digital humanities departments in the university— has been captured by “big data”. The seminar explores how in addition to using data analysis and complex computational operations, “smaller” data streams are desired for a revitalized political project on the left. In the era of over-saturated media environments, perhaps a compression of thought is needed now more than ever. The seminar will also consider concerns related to compression and their aesthetic implications like resolution, fidelity, and definition."
For and Against the Avant-Garde: The Genealogy of an Argument,"DESCRIPTION What does the term “avant-garde” really mean? When we come across a painting, book, or film that strikes us as particularly innovative, demanding, or productive, we call it, among other things, “avant-garde.” We tend to use the term loosely to indicate that that work is powerful, dynamic, or charged in some way. How have artists, intellectuals, and critics understood the term? Has it always had a positive connotation? Have there been moments when ambitious artists, intellectuals, and critics have wanted to avoid being seen as “avant-garde?” In this seminar we will unpack these questions. In addition to providing an all-purpose account of the term in the broadest sense, recovering its formal and philosophical foundations, we will track a number of distinct artistic “avant-garde” variants as they developed in the European and American contexts over the course of the twentieth century. More specifically, we will chart moments when European and American understandings of the avant-garde converged and diverged. Re-assembling a conversation that played out in statements, symposia, and essays by the most important artists, intellectuals, and critics of the period, the seminar will deepen and complicate our notion of the “avant-garde,” providing a textured and nuanced understanding of twentieth century artistic and critical practice. The seminar will consist of two four-session modules. In Module One, we will discuss the development of the historical avant-garde in Europe and its reception in America, focusing on a series of debates that took place in the New York-based literary magazine Partisan Review. In Module Two, we will consider the American and European fallouts of that debate. In addition to art-intensive sessions dealing with the test-cases of Dada and Surrealism as they did (or did not) influence the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, we will consider a number of developments in art criticism, including the rise of the “social history of art,” discussions of the “neo-avant-garde,” and recent comments reconsidering the notion of the “avant-garde” as such. By the end of the seminar, participants will have a grasp of what the term “avant-garde” has meant to various people at various times; the range of commitments that have been associated with it; how its position has changed within a broader artistic, critical, and political landscape; and what its status is in contemporary discourse."
Philosophical Invention & the Silence of the Future,"DESCRIPTION This seminar is concerned with redefining the relationship between the future and philosophy. We will study how the future is not only a time, supposed to occur after the past and the present, but above all a modality capable of intervening in the present. If we do not know the future in its forthcoming developments, we know intimately that this unknown will introduce changes in our present.

Philosophical invention is implicitly motivated by the call of the future. But this is an imagined future, and rather inchoative, with snatches and sketches of images, time and places; a general idea that motivates invention. These fragments of the future, partly unknown and never completely given, are what allows a philosophy to inhabit space and time, and to find its individuation among other philosophies. The future that often gives rise to apocalyptic or science-fiction narratives is one already determined and received from the outside. However, the kind of future that stimulates philosophy is not engaged with existing narratives, but with the diversity of modes of invention of philosophy itself and of the imagination and fiction peculiar to them. Philosophical invention cannot be separated from the future, but this is a future that resists narration, and which, from this point of view, contains a driving charge of silence.

The seminar is both a review of existing literature regarding the connections between philosophy and future and a forum for generating new associations between the two realms. Throughout the seminar, students will work individually and collaboratively to work on practical exercises concerning the following:
Considering the future does not depend on any discipline and it can be apprehended by each. We propose exercises of philosophical invention, of which we will give elements of methods, from future developed by the students according to their discipline of origin and/or their activity.

The Instructors have previously worked with each other to arrive at the concepts presented inn this seminar. Ann-Francois Schmid and Lucy Rekab have developed theoretical means for new solidarities between art and philosophy (Liverpool, 2018). Schmid and Tony Yanick have developed a dispersive negation in contemporary integrative objects, those that do not support synthesis, to invent by abduction new links between these objects and philosophies (Milwaukee 2017 and Lisbon 2017). Joevenn Neo works on Schmid’s principal concepts in philosophy of sciences and is translating her latest book (Philosophical Scripts). These four instructors will work together according to their skills, in order to respond and deepen the problems proposed by the students.

REQUIREMENTS: The seminar is composed of eight two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. During this period material written by the participants about the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Both the reading list and the student's responses will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of an extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Worldmakings & Worldendings: An Alternative Geology of The World,"DESCRIPTION Numerous universes might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost, many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried out during infinite ages in the art of world-making” - David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Building upon ANON's Altwoke Manifesto, as well as their previous seminar Collapse & Reconfiguration, this seminar will explore the conflation of the world as the map with the Earth as its territory by focusing on how similarities and differences between geology and geography have contributed to such conflation. Geology, as is it is typically defined, is the science of dynamic processes and the physical history of the Earth. A contemporary use of the Greek word eidos is in the phrase “eidetic memory,” which is the clinical term for photographic memory. The original greek root eidos was used by Aristotle in his articulation of metaphysics, eidos denoted the form of a thing as distinct from the matter of the thing. Another sense in which we can understand this dichotomy is in Spinoza’s metaphysical division between ‘extension’ and ‘thought’.

In the first module of this seminar, participants will expand the notion of geology to explore how material, social, and economic processes converge into The World, an auxiliary ecosystem of matter and paradigms within the Earth. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s method of nomadic thought, this seminar will move across disciplines such as epigenetics, multidimensional psychology, linguistics, and mysticism to trace the processes which provide the structural components of the World over time, symmetrical to the Earth’s development. The World’s genesis begins with the universe’s intelligibility as a cognitive map for human subjects.

Turning worldmaking inside out requires us to think rigorously about the notion of narrative in relation to the impact of our cognitive-behavioral assumptions, and their implications. Using this as a starting point, in the second module, we will employ a transdisciplinary approach to the history of rituals to understand how superstition operates in politics and economy, and the ways in which semantic content and material extensions complement one another. The second module also explores the political implications of apocalypse, in both its paradigmatic and common biblical dimension. Participants will learn about cataclysms and how it can be bootstrapped for the cultivation of new growth."
Disassembling the Trust Machine: An introduction to a political economy of blockchain,"DESCRIPTION This seminar carefully disassembles the components of the Bitcoin proof-of-work algorithm in order for the students to get a first glimpse of the technical, economic and political concepts, techniques, assumptions and ethics that are mobilized in order to make the protocol work. The seminar introduces the core aspects of blockchain and cryptoeconomics from a radically interdisciplinary angle, and so is an essential introduction – for both newbies as well as those who are already working in the fields of, or familiar with, blockchain, cryptocurrencies and cryptoeconomics."
Phenomenological Intersections in Aesthetics,"DESCRIPTION
In this seminar, which is structured topically as a series of probing into some fundamental concepts, methods and tasks of phenomenological research in relation to aesthetics and art, we will hone on how Husserlian and post Husserlian phenomenology intersect with contemporary aesthetic discourse. Aesthetics stands here for both a ‘radical’ conception of an underlying principle organizing perception as well as a normative (or deviant) ‘applied’ or ‘embodied’ aesthetics of art.

Our main readings and analyses will be from Husserl’s various texts but we will examine also writings by Brentano, Heidegger, Stein, Fink, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze and Lyotard as well as Varela and Petitot.

Key topics will focus on intersubjectivity and the lifeworld, genetic and static constitutions, empathy and the body, first person perspective and perception and the question of naturalizing phenomenology."
Improbable Noise: A Multilevel Account of Randomness and Unpredictability,"DESCRIPTION
This seminar develops a multi-level account of noise, exploring the associated notions of randomness and unpredictability across different disciplinary contexts. This will include its scientific conception in information theory and cybernetics, and its relation to thermodynamics, dynamic systems theory, evolutionary biology, and complexity theory. It will show how noise can be understood within a functionalist-computationalist philosophical framework, drawing on Hume and Kant via Sellars’s inferentialist account of reason, and elaborating its pertinence to the project of Artificial General Intelligence. It will examine the dynamics underlying the neurophenomenological experience of noise, and how it is understood within the predictive processing architecture postulated by contemporary cognitive science. We’ll then look at how noise can be understood in economic theory, before exploring the particularly sonic aspect of noise and its use in music. The aim is to demystify noise - to counter the neo-liberal politics of self-organising randomness and the tendency to fetishize indeterminacy in contemporary art - by showing how constrained randomness is intrinsic to the functional organisation of complex dynamic systems, including higher cognition, and how the navigation of noise is a necessary condition of reason and consequently of freedom."
Introduction to African Political & Aesthetic Philosophies,"The seminar considers debates on both aesthetic and political practices as they appear within the field of African philosophy, a highly interdisciplinary field which in addition to art and political theory also includes literature, history, and anthropology. The seminar engages the students from a range of disciplines in order to facilitate a critical engagement with contemporary and 20th century African epistemologies. The seminar is structured to provide a foundational understanding of past and recent debates in the field of African philosophy as they appear in Placide Tempel’s Bantu Philosophy (1945) and John S. Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969), among others. The seminar will contextualize these writings with parallel debates in African socialism associated with figures such as Julius Nyerere, Leopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah in order to better observe how these ideas might have been received or instrumentalized in the African politics of 1950s and 1960s. It is imperative for the seminar to not only consider singular contributions to the field of African philosophy, but also view these contributions as part of larger social and political movements such as Pan Africanism, Negritude, and African Socialism. Finally, the seminar reviews the work of artists who consider African philosophical, aesthetic and political questions. We will achieve this by reviewing Jean Pierre Bekolo’s film on philosopher Valentin Mudimbe; Helen Sebidi’s painting ‘Tears for Africa’; and Issa Samb’s own writings in ‘Parole! Parole? Parole!’ The intellectual history covered in this workshop stretches across the African continent, into the Caribbean, African diaspora, and the European and North American continents."
"Theory & Object: Philosophy of Science in the twentieth century, from Carnap to Grünbaum","This course provides a survey of motivations, trends and directions in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. During twelve sessions, we shall engage with both introductory materials and in-depth issues when necessary. In addition to underlining the pertinence of philosophy of science today, we shall focus on trajectories which specifically engage with the problems of modern philosophy from Hume and Kant to Wittgenstein and Russell and in doing so, they also point to new problems and conceptual territories hitherto hidden to or ignored by general philosophy. To this end, we will closely examine the works of such leading figures as Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach, Stegmüller, Putnam and Grünbaum."
Promethean Democracy: Speculative Governance on a Planetary Scale,"Left critics of “democracy” often argue that, while they might constitute noble political experiments, the more direct forms of it seen in the antiglobalization and occupation movements are ultimately impossible to scale any level higher than relatively small, local groups, and that even representative democratic forms are best suited to nation-states, such that they cannot be expected to function on either macro-regional or planetary levels. Further, for some, the concept of democracy as such is habitually reduced down to its specifically liberal, capitalist form, or reduced to a strictly Western or otherwise privileged instantiation that cannot be apply universally. Yet, various forms of “global democracy” have been evolving for quite a long time, from many demographic and regional quarters, and with considerable tension and divergence over what it is accurately constituted by. In this seminar, we will explore radically democratic “delegative” alternatives to both direct democracy and representative democracy that are scalable on the level of the planetary and that draw upon the most promising aspects of both of the more well-known forms. Following an introductory session, each of the remaining three weeks will focus upon the practical potentialities of a single concept - sortition, isonomia, and diagonality - and will engage artists, theorists, and collectives concerned with the question of how to actualize them into actual decision-making structures on the level of the world as a whole."
Introduction to Forensic Audio,"DESCRIPTION
The seminar focuses on my research & practice as an artist: the architectural aesthetics of sound and voice and its application to politics and law. The seminar will focus on new methodologies and novel forms that can potentially be developed to respond to the prevalence of surveillance technologies. Through the exploration of listening practices the participants will focuses on the forensic use of acoustics, language and phonetic dimensions of legal or political issues. The seminar will also explore the changing role of the image and its proximity to sound in the age of the Internet and mass distribution of signal."
Simondon & Technology,"DESCRIPTION
Simondon’s discourse on technical objects lays down the foundation for a philosophy of technology which aims to give a new ontological status to technical objects in order to establish a technological culture or a technological humanism. This consists of the effort to save technical objects from misunderstanding and ignorance of them as functional objects or mere utilities and understand the genesis of technical objects according to its own rationality and at the same time a problem and possible solution to alienation described by Marx. What underlies in Simondon’s ambitious project is the construction of a new metaphysical ground (against hylomorphism and substantialism) as well as a new philosophical anthropology described as a genesis of technicity. In this seminar, we will examine the main philosophical propositions of Simondon in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (as well as in other writings and courses) and its significances for understanding the contemporary technological condition."
Marx & Philosophy I & II,"DESCRIPTION
Marx’s analysis of capital continues to haunt contemporary theoretical discourse. As capitalist globalization enters its world-dissolving phase, Marx’s account of the logic of capital provides cognitive traction on this process. Understanding the theoretical and political stakes of his analysis remains an urgent contemporary task. This course will try to reconstruct the movement linking Marx’s critique of philosophy to his critique of political economy by elucidating the fundamental concepts of Marx’s critical theory: alienation, practice, labour, production, commodity, fetishism, value, contradiction. We will examine Marx’s relationship to Hegel and Feuerbach as well as the ongoing controversy between Hegelian and anti-Hegelian interpretations of his work. Lastly, we will consider the stakes of the distinctions between humanism, anti-humanism, and post-humanism in contemporary philosophy and critical theory."
Social Networks: From Metaphor to Diagram to Machine,"What difference does the 'social' make to the network and the network to the 'social'? Social Network Analysis is usually considered by critical media studies as a regressive ontology of the social, which it reduces to quantifiable relations between individuals and which can be then dismissed to a material enactment of the ideology of neoliberalism. The course proposes a different interpretation of SNS which combines a media archaeology of the stratifications of Internet protocols (from TCP/IP to HTTP to the Open Graph) with a genealogy of social network analysis as a model of society according to a genealogy of the descent (herkunkf) and emergence (entstheung) of the social network as model and medium. The course traces the genealogy of the social network from structural anthropology and sociometry to mathematical studies of the spread of 'contacts and influence' in populations towards the more recent turn towards big-data based network science and social physics.

It considers the ways in which this genealogy/archaeology can be seen to produce a shift from the deployment of the social network as metaphor to diagram and finally machine in contemporary hypersocial media assemblages. Is it possible to force an interpretation of the social network which does not reduce it to a manifestation of an underlying neoliberal ideology but also as diagram of relationality inducing a widespread experimental and speculative form of reasoning transversal to humans and machines? Can the networked social be seen as less a collection of individual and more like an entangled milieu entailing the proliferation of 'differences without separability' in Denise Ferreira de Silva terms?"
"Ontologies of the Fold:  Leibniz, Simondon & Deleuze","DESCRIPTION
This seminar explores Simondon's concept of individuation and Deleuze's account of the fold as models of how being is to be thought. Responding to Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy and his thesis that beings are withdrawn and never relate, it is argued that the concept of the fold avoids the twin perils of undermining and overmining by preserving the singularity of beings, while also accounting for their relatedness and providing a rich account of subjectivity. It is argued that beings are pleats or folds within being that integrate other beings in their ongoing processes of individuation. For example, a sun tan is a sort of origami where sunlight is pleated into the body producing a quality in the form of the shade of the skin. What emerges is a profoundly ecological conception of being where entities can never be thought in isolation, but rather must always be thought in communication and relation to other beings.

Students participating in the seminar will be required to present the material for one course in the form of questions that arose from the assigned readings on that day and will be required to write a 15 – 20 page essay on a topic of their own choosing related to the material. Readings will include Leibniz's Monadology, selections from the Discourse on Metaphysics, selections form Muriel Combes Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, and Foucault."
"Structuralism, Poststructuralism & the Pure Form of the Subject","The course will revisit some of the themes present in my publication from 2014, The Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press). We will focus mostly on the question of subjectivation. It will be based on a close reading of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, and in particular of what I see as the amalgamation of their theses, namely Psychic Life of Power (1997) by Butler. We will do so through the lenses of de Saussure’s structuralism, Marx’s objectivism and Irigaray’s critique of the speculative reason. The crisis of the poststructuralist theory of the subject is tackled in The Cut of the Real, and so it will be addressed once again, in the original terms of the book, but also enriched with some readings from de Sausure, Marx and Irigaray. The perspective of Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy is the method that pervades the entire book and will be one of the main methodological backdrops in the course as well. In that way, the course will function as yet a careful pedagogically conceived intro in Laruelle’s method.

Required Readings: Structuralism, poststructuralism and the pure form

Butler, Judith (1997) Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Redwood City CA: Stanford University Press.

de Saussure, F. (1959) Course in General Linguistics. Ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Reidlinger. Trans. from the French by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library.

Foucault, Michel (1991) Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.

___.  Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:

Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977

Irigaray, Luce (1985) This Sex Which is Not One. Cornell University Press, 170-197.

Kolozova, Katerina. Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), the first chapter.

Lacan, Jacques (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company 

Laruelle, F. (2012) Théorie générale des victimes. Paris: Fayard.

___.  (2000) Introduction au non-marxisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

___. (1989) Philosophie et non-philosophie. Liège: Pierre Mardaga.

Levi Strauss, Claude (1966) Savage Mind.Chicago University Press.

Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness. Rodney Livingstone (trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.

___. (1959) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers (from the online version of the Marxist Internet Archive: 2000; 2007), URL (consulted April 2017): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf

___. (1887) Capital: Volume I. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishing (from the online version of the Marxist Internet Archive: 1995; 1999), URL (consulted April 2015=7): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

Meillassoux, M. (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. from the French by Ray Brassier.  London: Bloomsbury. 

Petrovic, G. (1983) “Reification,” In Tom Bottomore et al (eds.) A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978) Intellectual and Manual Labor: Critique of Epistemology. London: Macmillan.

Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, available at Gutenberg project."
Uncurated: Theory & method for a non-curatorial exhibition practice,"DESCRIPTION
The goal of the seminar is to prepare an uncurated, collaboratively organized art exhibition, to be held in 2018. The discussions about my text ""Against Curating"" led to the decision to set up a platform infrastructure for a new type of art exhibition. It includes social media, public participation in the selection process, collaborative and open discussions, and a globally distributed geo-located form of display. The research for the show will take a look at historical examples of non-curated exhibitions, namely the salon des refusés, the salon des indépendants, and artists' societies and Künstlervereine of the 19 century. Results of the research will help to launch a crowdfunding campaign and inform the design of the infrastructure and the display."
"Layers of Generativity: Axial Age, Modernity, Technological Civilization, (Reconstructing Futures II)","DESCRIPTION
When, where, and why did the mode of abstraction “philosophy”, esp. “the universal” as a relational point of collective commensurabilization appear? Why are there distinct epochs of mathematical renderings of the world? What causes time regimes such as the cyclical, oscillatory, absolute or linear to emerge and what are the differences between their onto-generative potentials? What time concept will emerge after the linear time of Modernity? How does the cumulative increase of abstraction in the course of history relate to historical types of aesthetics, subjectivity, and cognition? How can the apparent co-evolutionary relation between media, economy, metaphysics, cognition, and world-relations be conceptualized? Which transformations of mind and society caused by the current innovations can we expect in the future? These questions can be answered through the extrapolation of the evolutionary trajectories in the history of culture and mind. The examination of the “Expansion of Cultural Capacities” (Haidle et al.) surfaced a formal pattern of macroevolution which informs about these evolutionary trajectories: each historical stage of reality structure appears as the abstraction and operative recursion of the previous reality structure. The pattern of recursion continues beyond early cultural evolution and unfolds as civilizational history. This course will examine civilizational history under the notion that developmental stages like the Axial Age or Modernity can be conceptualized as matrices of event-realization, wherein each stage forms a layer of generativity which is recursively integrated by the following one, unfolding a new continuum of events and relations. The Greek Axial Age is characterized as the “Zenon-Matrix” of event-realization, which is recursively integrated in Modernity, and which is defined as the “Laplace-Matrix” of event-realization. With the emergence of the Technological Civilization, we are witnessing another recursion in which Modernity’s “Laplace- Matrix” of event-realization is abstracted and recursively integrated, rendering “genetic spaces” (Karl Chu) into objects within the newly emerging “Conway-Wolfram-Matrix” of event-realization. The extrapolation of the onto-generative pattern of recursion not only allows for a “deep futurology” as the macroevolutionary informed deduction of future types of cognition, temporalities, and world-relations, but also for asking the question whether the force that chiseled history through humankind into the world will at some point detach from its medium again, establishing a posthuman reality that marks another major evolutionary transition."
"Art & Meaning I: Mood, Vibe, System, and Data Geometry","DESCRIPTION
This seminar constructs a mathematically informed interpretation of a classically romantic literary-theoretic thesis: that a work of art can aesthetically communicate an ineffably complex holistic understanding of the real world, which we might call the work’s ‘aesthetic meaning.’ Drawing on a generalization of ‘deep learning’ (“artificial intuition”) systems and on elementary algorithmic information theory, we describe a kind or aspect of aesthetic meaning—‘ambient meaning’—that may have a special resonance with Modernist and avant-garde approaches to aesthetic meaning, as well as with the concepts of aesthetically sophisticated cultural-materialist thought of the kind that theorist like Sianne Ngai, Jacques Rancière, or Raymond Williams practice.

‘Ambient Meaning,’ as we’ll call it, is the sensible ('sensate') representation of a virtual, diffused, immanent structure -- the representation, by a work of art, of some systemic real-world structure akin to a mood (Heidegger), cultural logic (Jameson), sensorium (Rancière) or even ideology (Althusser/Ngai). In part I of this seminar, we will familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of deep learning theory and information theory, and offer the hypothesis that the ‘ambient meaning’ of a work of art is, mathematically, the lower-dimensional manifold structure of the work's imaginative landscape in intersubjective input-space.

(The seminar requires no prior mathematics or computer science background, but patience for deductive reasoning is recommended.)'"
The Reality of the Derivatives Market,"DESCRIPTION
1. We present the Black-Scholes-Merton model of derivative pricing, the problem it has solved and the problem it has created (known as ‘the volatility smile problem’). This problem is very challenging, not only computationally but also theoretically and philosophically. It is the reason why critical thinkers of finance who are not familiar with it have a narrow view of the derivatives market and its meaning, especially in relation with the future.
2. We investigate the foundations of abstract probability theory. The concept or ‘random variable’, introduced by Kolmogorov in 1933, and its success in formally showing the strong law of large numbers, point to a conception of randomness that lies deeper than the intuitive view of randomness and random generators. It shows distinctions that thought has to make, when it thinks the world, between what we call the ‘concrete’ and the ‘real’. It is at this level of the archaeology of thinking that the category of money emerges. Money is an alternative way of wiring the logic of the concrete and the real, hence an alternative way of introducing the matter of contingency inside the formalism of possibility and probability.
3. We extend the argument from money to the material exchange of derivatives and their pricing technology. When the advent of the Black-Scholes-Merton model is interpreted as a technological revolution which involves actors (market-makers) and technological means (writing of derivatives), it is shown that the market, thus understood in its full writing capacity, recaptures the full concreteness of the world, and hence of the future, in ways that escape abstract probability theory. The consequence, however, is to give a new meaning to the word ‘reality’, which may be incompatible with the one issuing from possibility and probability."
Collapse & Reconfiguration I & II: Introduction to Alt-Woke Praxis,"DESCRIPTION
Social relations are determined by economic forces. Agrarian surplus sustained nation states, necessitated labor, and bore the development of innovative tools, which contributed to migration and collective learning across the planetary social sphere. Acceleration describes economic forces as a levelling process and this process as the primary driver for dynamic social transformation. Acceleration emphasizes the role that capitalism plays as a revolutionary-historical force, intensifies this process, and forces it to transcend the threshold of its monopolist barriers, to fulfill its imperative:the crisis of its self-destructive enclosure. As articulated most explicitly in Marx’s Capital Vol. III, acceleration is the process itself: capitalism- creates the conditions necessary for its collapse.

Acceleration-ism is a theoretical orientation, a political epistemology, and a post-vitalist topography of this unbound process of accelerated, self-destructive capital that flows through the nodes of economics, technology, culture/society, and politics in intersecting and intensifying feedback; the fractal-complex of these correlational and codependent domains propels history toward novel, alien plateaus: futurity. The fundamental tenet of accelerationism, the article of faith which underpins the discourse, is an understanding of history in which productive relations determine social and political relations.

Futurism is a misnomer as it implies an anticipation of futurity, when in reality the “future” has already arrived. Etymologists disagree over the exact origins of the polygenetic word “hip” within AAVE lexicon. Most chart its origins to the Wolof word “xipi”, which means: “to have your eyes open, to be aware.”

Cybernetics derives from the Greek κυβερνητική (kybernetikos) -- meaning “good at navigating” or “good at steering.” “Hip,” “hep,” and “woke” speak to a tendency to navigate the contours of this process through the lens of Blackness out of necessity -- to be aware so that one can survive. “Stay woke” implied that this tendency was an implicit, intuitive mode of existing.

“Woke” - a term we’ve always hated and have come to hate even more - represents an epistemology limited in scope as it only processes a time-space where there are no true futurities, due to the ways a capital-driven economy operates and all notions of a future are compressed into the present. “Woke” informs a reactivity and a nomadic entity connected to this modern mode of reactionary politics.

Within this seminar, we plan on exploring the concept of what it means to be ""altwoke,"" through a series of readings and guest lecturers. Each invited speaker will help advance the coordinates that works together to construct a larger framework.

The first module will describe the nature of Collapse, the event horizon of this process, its origins, how we facilitate it further, and why anyone would advocate “accelerating the process” at all. Here we dispel the notion that the process is entirely blind as it can’t really function without the actors in its network who determine the interrelational causes which determine its direction over time. Instead our focus is more about aiding abetting the process via specific agents.

The second module will center around Reconstruction after the debris settles. Swapping out old frameworks for new ones, these are some potential new ways of thinking and being that we propose."
Kant's Circle of Revenge: A close encounter with Critique of Pure Reason,"DESCRIPTION
Throughout this course, Jay Rosenberg's succinct yet fairly accurate observation that ""Kant is hard to access"" shall be our presupposition in engaging with the work of Immanuel Kant.

This seminar promises a close reading and engagement with one of the most significant works in the history of philosophy. Over the course of twelve sessions, we shall tackle the hydra of philosophy which is the Critique of Pure Reason. In our engagement with Kant's magnum opus, we will investigate the historical context within which it has been written. Using Marburg School's motto 'Back to Kant' as our guiding principle, this course offers a syncretic perspective on Critique of Pure Reason through commentaries of neo-Kantian figures such as Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp as well as more contemporary exegeses by the likes of Wilfrid Sellars, John Niemeyer Findlay, Jay Rosenberg and Sebastian Rödl."
"Virtual Virilio: Speed, Politics, Potentiality","DESCRIPTION
Along with acceleration, the concept of “speed” has become an increasingly central thematic in 21st century technological, cultural, and political theory. First invoking and deploying the term as far back as the 1970s, Paul Virilio, the French “critic of the art of technology,” is perhaps the most-invoked figure associated with the thematic of speed. However, his work has largely been misunderstood as a wholesale rejection of technology and acceleration, even while Virilio himself affirms both at least as rigorously as an art lover or art critic would affirm art - by proceeding critically and selectively. In this two-module seminar, we will read and discuss Virilio’s works as well as secondary texts upon them, through the lens of selective affirmation, emphasizing those in which he suggests not simply a negation of technology and acceleration, but rather a rigorous engagement with the actual and material in the service of the virtual and potential."
Difference & Repetition for the 21st Century,"Published nearly fifty years ago in the tumultuous year of 1968, Difference and Repetition is increasingly recognized as Deleuze's primary magnum opus. This seminar will be devoted to a close and careful reading of this work, paying particular attention to his critique of representation, as well as the prevailing ontologies premised on identity, his alternate ontology of difference, his alternate account of time, and his alternate account of individuation. And yet, unlike many seminars on this book which might simply take a historicist approach, the beginning assumption in this case will be that the real question for today is how this text speaks to us in the present, and how it might begin to speak to us differently, in the unfolding future. While every text always already exceeds its historical horizon, the form and content constitutive of Difference & Repetition in particular, demands a fundamentally different approach: that it itself be read differentially.

REQUIREMENTS: Participants in the seminar will be required to present one day of assigned course readings and write a 10 - 20 page essay over Difference and Repetition at the end of the semester."
Mathematics of Inhuman Existentialism,"[videogallery id=""mathematics""]

DESCRIPTION:Is it possible for philosophy to occur in and through the tension between two apparently incompatible demands: for thinking to be answerable to a mathematical ontology no longer conflated with logicist regimentation, and for it to participate in an intimacy with existence no longer confined to the categories of the human? That is, is a contemporary mathematical existentialism—as Lucca Fraser provocatively baptized it—possible? Or, to ask the question yet a third way, what can being-in-itself and being-for-itself mean for us, now, at the null point of inflection which is our contemporary technological and political situation? In order to pursue this question, we will engage in a joint reconceptualization of two all-too-famous works, aiming both at making them speak to the projects of those coming to them for the first time, and at a strict defamiliarization for those who have previously taken their measure in the context of received interpretations.
1) Mostly ignored by academic philosophers and sloppily embraced at the level of a cultural phenomenon, Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness has long been a source of inspiration and frustration to its few close readers. In our consideration, there will be no attributions of inauthenticity to food-service workers, no holes and slime, and Pierre, thankfully, will have left the building to a second degree. Instead, we will work at explicating the difficult and incompletely figured logic of reflexivity and detotalized-totality which underlies the book's most stunning intuitions. A guiding goal of the seminar is to arrive at a new interpretation of what can be called “Sartre's theorem”, the central nerve of Being and Nothingness: that being-in-itself-for-itself, the structural key to the interpretation of existence as the value which haunts it, is a contradiction. This theorem has never been explicated in a fully satisfactory way, in large part because the phenomenological tools available in Being and Nothingness are sufficient at most for suggesting and announcing it, but not for explaining its necessity or for understanding the possibility-space in which it is located and whose structure it expresses. Thus, if Sartre's theorem is to become useful for us again in the context of contemporary philosophy, it has to be liberated from the moribund phenomenological tradition which forms its ostensible methodological basis. 2) Enter Badiou's generation-defining Being and Event, which, as we propose to read it, enacts the first successful transplantation of existential logic into the alien soil of mathematics. The joint reading rebounds on both texts. We shall read Being and Event as a realization of a strikingly Sartrean program on vastly improved ontological hardware, while at the same time reading Sartre as a thinker of the event (one of the most crucial terms in Being and Nothingness), of the necessity of contingency (an explicit Sartrean thesis which has been revived in one way by Meillassoux—we shall explore others), etc.
The significance of the breakthrough is undeniable, however Being and Event is only the beginning of the project of a mathematical existentialism, not its end. The point of the joint reading is rather to enable us, by focusing on this act of radical translation between existential philosophy and mathematical ontology, to think more deeply into the ground of the remarkable phenomenon explaining the success and even the necessity of the graft, along the vectors of our own projects. That ground, I propose, is metalogic-metamathematics, the concept of which will occupy our reflection as both content and method. The phenomenon is that of a striking emergence by which the classic themes of existential philosophy, indeed of philosophy itself, which are rightly and inevitably repressed at the outset of logico-mathematical investigation, return by their own necessity, in critically clarified but infinitely more powerful form, when we cross the threshold from first-order logic to metalogic-metamathematics. In order to continue the project of philosophy under contemporary conditions, we must cross this threshold."
The Concept of Acceleration: The 21st Century Critique of Political Economy,"DESCRIPTION
The objective of this two-module seminar is philosophical rigorization of the concept of “acceleration” as it is encountered in various species of contemporary thought. It is anticipated that such cultural tendencies will proliferate and intensify, although that is itself a self-reflexive characteristic of the social process which the seminar seeks to abstractly model. The first module provisionally, though not dogmatically, assumes a level of conceptual invariance across different species of accelerationism -- broadly coincident with the term 'acceleration' itself in its recent and often merely impressionistic philosophical usage. The second module will enter into a more active, technical, and critical mode, as it attempts to work with the concept of acceleration, investigating its capacity for further escalation. Reinforcement, intensification, or acceleration of acceleration, is the inevitable expectation. The entire content of the seminar is presented as a disputable and disputed contemporary controversy. The political temperature of the seminar environment will be dependent upon student demand, but the baseline will be absolute coldness."
"Post-Philosophy II: Marx, Laruelle, Irigaray and Braidotti","DESCRIPTION
Humanity is a theologico-philosophical creation and it is – as a consequence – always naturalized. Thanks to philosophy and theology, nature is always humanized. As long as the technological component of the radical dyad called the cyborg can be humanized or transformed into pure transcendence constituting the only accessible reality (= pure rationality), it is neither monstrous nor inhuman. It is not posthuman either. It is profoundly humanist. As a consequence, it will also be naturalized. The rationalist mind determined by its anthropocentrism in the last instance will unavoidably mimic and reproduce nature. Therefore, in spite of the commitment to hybridization it will never be inhuman or monstrous. The technological extension and the biological body are both alien to subjectivity which is essentially and unavoidably a philosophical creation, they both assume the position of the real vis-à-vis the subject. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is always already philosophical. It is nothing but the automaton of signification which re-presents the human or constitutes it as representation. What makes in (non-)human is precisely the subject’s failure to fully represent. Technology precedes subjectivity – just as the body does – and it cannot, therefore, have an ontological status – it is pre-philosophical. It precedes it as téchne (τέχνη) precedes philosophia (φιλοσοφία). It is the real vis-à-vis the subject of language. The hybridization of the two constitutes a category of society or the “species being” of humanity. Perfecting the imperfect nature – because “irrational” – cannot be its purpose since the idea that nature contains meaning or sense, i.e., a certain causa finalis, is theological-philosophical. In order for something to be susceptible to perfecting, it should contain the tendency to be perfect. Minimally, it should be grounded in the possibility to constitute a meaning, a purpose. It should contain a telos, i.e., it should be a theological category. Marxist and post-philosophical investigation of the hybridity at issue does away with philosophy’s self-sufficiency and resorts to materialist argumentation making use of philosophical material in a scientific manner. The latter refers to the position with regard to the instance of the real rather than to mimicking mannerism. There will be a remainder in this process that will be called metaphysical and our claim to science in post-philosophical terms will be concerned with accounting for such metaphysics. In this course we shall explore the question of whether and to what extent we can speak of materialist, feminist and Marxist metaphysics without philosophy. In our investigations we shall resort to Karl Marx, François Laruelle, Luce Irigaray and Rosi Braidotti."
"Plato, a Reality Game in Four Levels","DESCRIPTION
In a time when proclaiming oneself as a philosopher or worse as a Platonist is an open invitation to the public charge of elitism, idealism, logocentrism, patriarchy and even fascism, reengaging the work of Plato seems to be more of a tasteless attempt to undo all the great achievements of the late twentieth century theoretical thought and its fight against philosophical haughtiness and human exceptionalism than an ill-advised academic career choice. But provocation – objective, disinterested, formal and persistent – is the job of philosophy, that is the courage of truth. Taking its cue from Rosemary Desjardins's reconstruction of Plato’s rational enterprise and Alain Badiou’s Plato’s Republic, this course aims to elaborate and rekindle the nature of this philosophical provocation by presenting Plato as an archetype Promethean thinker. Our reading methodology will be informed by analytic and continental readings of Plato as well as the Tübingen school of Platonic studies that seeks to integrate the formal and dramatic aspects of the dialogues into a recipe for a fully-fledged cosmological thought."
"Beyond Price & Profit: Art, Finance & the Question of Value","DESCRIPTION
How can the art sphere function as an experimental ground for producing and circulating financial logics that deviate from those of financial capitalism? This seminar explores different theories of financialisation and how these may be applied in understanding the relationship between contemporary art and finance. Particular attention will be given to socio-cultural analyses of finance and the possibilities that these may open up for art as a platform for speculative modulation. Apart from textual references, the seminar will be based around a series of case-studies from the art field, both historical and current, while each session will involve a guest-speaker whose practice or current project is targeting different aspects of art’s potential as a vehicle for socially valuable financial paradigms.

22 March 2017 — Session 1

Deloitte and ArtTactic (2016) Art and Finance Report.

Ivanova, V (2016) Contemporary art and financialisation: two approaches. In: Finance and Society, 2(2): 127-37.

Knorr Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (2012) Introduction. In: Knorr Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-12.

29 March 2017 — Session 2
with special guests, João Enxuto and Erica Love

Gupta, V. (2015) Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s future.

Projansky, B. and Siegelaub, S. (1971) The artist’s reserved rights transfer and sale agreement.

12 April 2017 — Session 3
with special guest, Alexandra Pirici

Appadurai, A. (1988) Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In: Appadurai, A. (ed.) The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, R. (2012) A precarious dance, a derivative sociality. In: The Drama Review, 56(4): 64-79.

26 April 2017 — Session 4
with special guest, Emily Rosamond

Dowling, E., Harvie, D. (2014) Harnessing the social: state, crisis and (big) society. In: Sociology, 48(5): 869-886.

Rosamond, E. (2016) Shared stakes, distributed investment: socially engaged art and the financialisation of social impact. In: Finance and Society, 2(2): 111-126."
Archeology of Abstraction (Reconstructing Futures I),"Module I: Archeology of Abstraction 

DESCRIPTION: This seminar is based on the materials from the upcoming publication, “Generative Realities: On the Temporality and Metaphysics of Technological Civilization”

Starting around 1880, with the fusion of industry, capital and science, the sphere of human domestication expanded into the realm of sub-mechanical, sub-corpuscular, sub-organic, sub-conscious, and sub-phenomenal processes. The interface to this realm of generative processes was “information”. Cast into cybernetics, it first allowed for the rendering of all kinds of dynamic relations as accessible units, while later in the form of algorithmization, it proliferated an entirely new continuum of objects, agencies and ontologies. Today, these developments are eroding modernity’s phenomena at all of its fronts – social, economical, political, scientific, industrial, cognitive, metaphysical, temporal, anthropological – thus heralding the beginning of a new civilizational stage, a fundamental shift in human-world-relations. But where does it lead? To answer this question this seminar will travel back in time to where it all began. Based upon the recently developed cognitive-archaeological “Tübingen Model of the Expansion of Cultural Capacities” we will examine stages in early cultural and cognitive evolution (3Ma – 25Ka) for developmental patterns and principles that might help us to understand the current transformation of the human structures by locating it within the progression of civilizational expansions. This formalization of the outside of cultural and social evolution will enable us to extrapolate forms of mind, society, temporality and metaphysics that we can expect to emerge both during and after our existence.

Readings

5/20/2017
Session 1: The Search for the Second Sun

Meillassoux, Quentin: After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity on Contingency. London/New York: Continuum 2008
___pp. 5-7, 9-18, 27

Luhmann, Niklas: Introduction to Systems Theory. Cambridge/Malden,MA: Polity Press 2013 ___pp. 63-71

Mühlmann, Heiner: Nature of Cultures. A Blueprint for a Theory of Cultural Genetics. Wien/New York: Springer 1996
___pp. 2-12

Ogburn, William F./Thomas, Dorothy: Are Inventions Inevitable? In: Political Science Quarterly, 1922, Vol. 37, No. 1, 1922, 83-98
___pp. 83-98 (especially the list of 148 multiple discoveries pp. 93-98)

Simonton, Dean Keith: Multiple Discovery and Invention: Zeitgeist, Genius, or Chance? In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1979, Vol. 37, No. 9, 1603-1616
___pp. 1603-1605

Tennie, Claudio/Call, Josep/Tomasello, Michael: Ratcheting up the Ratchet: On the Evolution of Cumulative Culture. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 364, 2009, 2405- 2415
___pp. 2405, 2407-2409, 2411-2412

5/27/2017
Session 2: Operational Chains, Depths of Time and the Evolution of the Mind: The Tübingen Model of the Expansion of Cultural Capacities

Guest: PD Dr. Miriam Noël Haidle, Research Center “Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans”, Institute of Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology, Tübingen/Germany

Haidle, Miriam N./Bolus, Michael/Collard, Mark/Conard, Nicholas J./Garofoli, Duilio/Lombard, Marlize/Nowell, April/Tennie, Claudio/Whiten, Andrew: The Nature of Culture: An Eight-Grade Model for the Evolution and Expansion of Cultural Capacities in Hominins and other Animals. In: Journal of Anthropological Sciences, Vol. 93, 2015, 43-70

Haidle, Miriam N.: How to think tools? A Comparison of Cognitive Aspects in Tool Behavior of Animals and during Human Evolution. In: Cognitive perspectives in tool behavior, Vol.1, 2012 http://tobias-lib.uni-tuebingen.de/frontdoor.php?source_opus=6014
___pp. 196-198 (only cognigrams of animal tool use)

Lombard, Marlize/Haidle, Miriam N.: Thinking a Bow-and-arrow Set: Cognitive Implications of Middle Stone Age Bow and Stone-tipped Arrow Technology. In: Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2012, 237–264
___pp. 244-258 (only cognigrams and tables of bow-and-arrow-assembly)

6/3/2017
Session 3: Formalizing Technogenesis / Noogenesis

Suddendorf, Thomas: The Gap. The Science of What Separates Us from other Animals. New York: Basic Books 2013
___pp. 91-111, 216 (Chap. “Time Travelers”)

Leroi-Gourhan, André: Gesture and Speech. Cambridge,MA/London: MIT Press 1993 ___pp. 237-255 (Chap. “Gesture and Program”)

6/10/2017
Session 4: Probing the Threshold to Civilization: Coupled Minds, Excentric Insulations, Aesthetical Membranes

Tomasello, Michael: A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge,MA/London: Harvard University Press 2014
___pp. 120-123, 133-141 (table on p. 140)

Mühlmann, Heiner: Nature of Cultures. A Blueprint for a Theory of Cultural Genetics. Wien/New York: Springer 1996
___pp. 11-24, 29-40

Sloterdijk, Peter: Foams. Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. Cambridge,MA/London: MIT Press 2016
___pp. 362-500 (Chap. “Anthropogenic Islands”)
___For a summary of this chapter see: Rouanet Freitag, Bárbara: The Trilogy Spheres of Peter Sloterdijk. In: IOP Journal, Vol. 21, 2011, pp. 73-84, pp. 79-83)

Donald, Merlin: The Exographic Revolution: Neuropsychological Sequelae. In: Malafouris, Lambros/Renfrew, Colin (Ed.): The Cognitive Life of Things. Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. Cambridge/Oxford: Oxbow Books 2010, 71-79"
Integrative Objects II: Art Practice & Philo-Fiction under Collective Intimacy,"In this course we will continue the development of the concept of the integrative object. Implementing it in art and in philosophy under the condition of collective Intimacy, as began in the first New Centre seminar. This condition brings the gestures and styles of invention present within these two fields into relationship through practice. Within this course it is our desire to decompose the gesture of the philosopher, calling for a point of exteriority in the form an artistic creation, however this cannot be interpreted without the collective intimacy of all the ingredients of both philosophy and art. To understand the creative act of the artist we need collective intimacy without concept, but this is not possible without a point of exteriority of a common life or common a sense. The link between a work of art and an opus of philosophy is an asymmetrical connection. Schmid and Rekab therefore, will explore this connection through a series of 4 seminar meetings consisting of taught lecture, reading, discussion and practical work.

REQUIREMENTS: The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended white paper on a research topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Project for a Post-Monetary Economy,"The purpose of an economy is to distribute goods and to allocate tasks. Matching-algorithms and artificial intelligence could devise better procedures for distributing goods and tasks, leading to a post-monetary economy. For now, money will still govern all economic transactions, but the monetary regime may only be a transitory phase. From the viewpoint of media history, there is strong evidence that points its demise.As David Graeber has recently shown, coins and currencies replaced earlier notation based methods of crediting. By compressing the data, money facilitated a stunning growth in quantity of trade, far beyond the capacity and the extension of then existing notation systems. With data systems that can track and compute all transactions, we can start to design non-monetary modes of organizing distribution and allocation. The technical requirements have existed for nearly a decade. Methods governed by algorithms or artificial intelligence can theoretically allow for more efficient, just, and productive forms of economy exchange. To be clear: the concept of the post-monetary is not about substituting money with digital currencies like bitcoin. The aim is to replace money altogether, with all its inconsistencies and drawbacks, with its psychologically disturbing need to assign quantifiable value to everything and its socially destabilizing inequalities. One of the revolutionary side effects of a post-monetary economy would be to limit huge accumulations of wealth.
The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks. It will take the format a research & development group meeting. In first part, I will present the initial proposal for a post-monetary economy as published in the book, “Forderungen” (German only, Merve: Berlin, 2015). The second part will contribute to an upcoming publication, “Money. Project for a Post-Monetary Economy”

REQUIREMENTS: Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended white paper on a research topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Infrastructural Intelligence: Cryptology & the History of Technology,"This course explores the infrastructuralization of artificial intelligence techniques including deep learning and convolutional neural networks along with the autonomization of capitalist processes in tools and entities like blockchain, DAO and Ethereum. By approaching them in the context of their cultural, philosophical, political, social, economic, and ecologic entanglements, students will gain a much more critical perception of the potential implications they carry than they might otherwise encounter. Of course, technological infrastructures have long become ecological both in terms of material needs requiring a restructuring of old and establishment of new infrastructures (such as rare earth mineral mining, transport, recycling, waste, etc.), and through which the Anthropocene has long become the Technocene. The ubiquity and behavior of these infrastructures both in IoT objects, as well as distributed systems, has been modeled after the techno-ecologic thought of the Baroque and Cybernetics and are thus in critical need of analysis. From institutional critique to infrastructural critique, the course develops countertactics in theory and practice, while closing with a hands-on cryptology workshop (PGP, TOR, encrypted messaging, introduction to Tails Linux etc.).

REQUIREMENTS: The seminar will be composed of eight two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended white paper on a research topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
The Future Is Unmanned: Technologies for Corrupt Feminisms,"“...it was a hundred years before anything akin to Ada’s software would find the hardware on which to run...but technical developments are rarely simple matters of cause and effect” -Sadie Plant

DESCRIPTION: Instead of beginning, this seminar will submerge itself into the middle of a swamp of feminisms parthenogenetically spawned from the algo-digital mire. We will survey the strategic insurgencies and tactical affective gestures of technologized feminisms, analyse incompatibilities and system failures and play in the ludic space of anti-re/productive slimes with the aim of encouraging a proliferation of ever-new and divergent permutations of future-oriented feminisms at ease with computation. In a world of increasing global complexity and technological mediation, our understanding of gender, race, and other areas of subjectivity are being transformed at their core leading to profound cultural shifts that must be responded to and pushed in a progressive direction. In a retrochronic feedback loop we will look forward in order to look back, trans-generationally, to see how current and future technologized feminisms have created space for earlier progressive cyberfeminist concepts to become operational, and how these futures are sporulating ant-arboreally and creeping slime-wise. The increasing emergence of collaborative ventures like Laboria Cuboniks, Cybertwee, FemTechNet, Black Quantum Futurism, TransHackFeminist, GynePunk Collective, DeepLab and other collective cyber/feminist, hacktivist and futurist projects are demonstrative of the abiding importance and the tentactular reach of progressive techno feminisms across the membrane of sciences, technology and culture.

REQUIREMENTS & Details: The seminar--stretching across four two and a half hour sessions--will be structured as a collaborative reading and discussion group. sessions will navigate the feral domain of technologized feminisms with the aim of intensifying the strategic insurgencies of early cyberfeminists. A tentacular scattering across the membrane of feminisms. Each session will begin with an introduction to the set texts by the instructors, followed by prepared student presentations and class discussion. Session Preparation: Students are expected to do the required readings assigned for each week, along with participating in presentations and discussion both in session on Google Hangouts On Air and asynchronously on the discussion board provided by the seminar (Google Classroom). In addition, each student is expected to prepare a presentation related to one of the texts dealt
with in the course and lead a group discussion on this material. These will be assigned in the first session."
Emergency Government: The Political Theory of Decisionism,"“My officers have the right to go home at night”: with this statement in August 2014, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson both justified the summary execution of 25-year old Kajieme Powell and captured the essence of a political theory tradition of which he was most likely unaware: that of “decisionism”. Historically, decisionist political thought has sought to preserve the prerogative of the sovereign to remain unencumbered by the letter of the law in situations deemed to be emergencies, however an emergency might be defined. In recent years in particular, decisionism has not remained constrained to the domain of theory alone: indeed, Dotson’s justification emerged in media reports at the same time that another summary police execution (18-year old Michael Brown in Ferguson) had triggered mass protests that brought the National Guard into the streets. Such events, like the rise of City Council-displacing “Emergency Managers” in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, and elsewhere, demonstrate the increasing ubiquity of a localized emergency governance that can no longer be separated from the globalized market economy that is its looming geopolitical frame. From postimperial theaters of worldwide war to local postindustrial and newly-industrialized municipalities, the rise of decisionist structures has been matched by an intensification of decisionist rhetoric: as Kevyn Orr, Emergency Manager of Detroit put it when questioned in May 2013, “I’m free, I’m not a politician”.

This seminar traces and reshapes the past and future of decisionism in political thought and state practice alike, providing an introduction to the thematic appropriate to the early 21st century, a time in which, as Deleuze & Guattari put it, “the totalitarian State is not a maximum state but rather... the minimum State of anarcho-capitalism”. We consider the 17th, 18th, and 19th century precursors to decisionism in the absolutist and monarchist reactions against the revolutions of England, Western Europe and the United States, including those of Thomas Hobbes, Hernando Donoso Cortes and Frances de Maistre. We also engage the 20th century decisionism of Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola, reading these in light of the radical political thought of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. Overall, the seminar concerns arguments for and against the manner in which liberal governance structures retain monarchist / absolutist features, moving quickly to early 21st century thinkers for whom the need to think beyond neoreactionary and modern/postmodern liberalism alike are imperatives for our time, including Achille Mbembe, Jasbir Puar and Reza Negarestani. In tracing, rethinking and reshaping the decisionist form, we encounter the relationship between freedom and equality, the market and the state, grappling with the paradoxes that ensue from the fact that today’s decisionism renders freedom authoritarian and equality the privilege of a few."
Qwernomics: Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality,"DESCRIPTION
The format of the Qwerty keyboard illustrates the production of a destiny. Even in the epoch succeeding the mechanical type-writer, and its specific design imperatives, the legacy layout of alphanumeric keys settled during the 1890s has remained frozen into place without significant revision. In the language of complex systems analysis, this is a special example of path-dependency, or irreducible historicity, characterized by irreversibility. Qwerty persists – arguably, as a suboptimal keyboard solution – due to identifiable ratchet-effects. Based upon this privileged model, the historical, technological, and economic process of ‘lock in’ through positive feedback is called QWERTY-nomics (and here simply ‘Qwernomics’).

This two-module course will (1) re-visit the late 20th Century debate on qwernomics as an illustration of central themes in complexity theory (and the cybernetics of positive feedback), then (2) re-open the discussion of Qwerty as a techno-economic manifest destiny, and thus a gateway into the workings of modern historical time.

The first module will reconstruct the theory of path dependency, with Qwerty as its key. The second module will be primarily devoted to the exploration of Qwerty as a semiotic fatality. How can Qwerty be most rigorously apprehended as an abstract object, or number pattern? What are the exoteric and esoteric consequences of this convention having been robustly installed within global history?

The most fundamental pre-requisites for the course are a Qwerty keyboard and a basic competence at alphabetical ordering (or alphabetical ordinal arithmetic).

Preliminary Readings
‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’ (1985), Paul A David
http://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/Ec100C/DavidQwerty.pdf

‘The Fable of the Keys’ (1990), Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis
https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

‘10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It is?)’, from A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
(Worth reading as a cryptic disquisition on the keyboard, among all its other merits.)"
Maths & Ideas: From Antiquity to Renaissance,"DESCRIPTION
This course provides a basic introduction to mathematical thinking and elementary mathematical concepts. We will survey the history of mathematical discoveries from the antiquity to the end of Renaissance by analyzing case studies and situating them in the context of advances in philosophy, logic, physics and technology. For example, how developments in banking system, bookkeeping methods and maritime navigation advanced the theory of magnitudes which in turn contributed to developments in Kinematics and what is now called linear algebra. By looking at different case studies and examining thoughts and methods behind these discoveries, the course aims to portray mathematics in a different light as a field where intuitive thinking, formal rigor and creative experimentation come hand in hand.

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks.

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
The Stack to Come: Synthetic Sensing/ Intelligence (and The New Normal),"DESCRIPTION
This 8 session seminar will explore the design philosophy of systems at diverse scales: from planetary-scale computation (through Bratton’s recent book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty) to molecular-scale sensing/intelligence (though his recent work and research with D:GP at University of California, San Diego).

Our condition is one that links seemingly distant and different things, one into another. Ecological flows become sites of intensive sensing, quantification and governance. Global computing infrastructure spurs platform economics and creates virtual geographies in its own image. Cities link into vast discontiguous urban networks as they also weave borders into enclaves or escape routes. Addressing systems locate billions of entities and events into unfamiliar maps. Interfaces present vibrant augmentations of reality, standing in for extended cognition. Users, both human and non-human, populate this tangled apparatus, an accidental megastructure that Bratton, calls The Stack.

The seminar will include a discussion of The Stack and several discussions, with invited guests, and demonstrations of recent design projects and technical research programs. Some presentations and discussions may also intersect with design development at D:GP at UCSD and Bratton’s seminar at SCI_Arc.

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks. Each module consists of two lectures and two sessions of extensive discussions

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Contemporary Readings of Hegel,"DESCRIPTION
Hegel famously characterized philosophy as its own time comprehended in thought. Today, 185 years after Hegel’s death, several contemporary philosophers have enlisted Hegel in their attempts to comprehend our time in thought. What is striking however is that these philosophers invoke Hegel as the inspiration for radically antagonistic comprehensions of our present. Since the spontaneous comprehension of our present is as a time of catastrophic crisis it is unsurprising that the comprehension of crisis should be riven by a crisis of comprehension. The power of Hegel’s thought, and its contemporary salience, so this course will argue, is that crises of comprehension must yield comprehensions of crisis that obligate their critical overcoming. 

The necessity at issue is rational and it is precisely the status of rational necessity that is at stake in these antagonistic reactivations of Hegel. The claim that Hegelian rationalism is committed to converting crises of comprehension into their comprehensive overcoming will be tested against those who emphasize the conciliatory, integrative aspect of Hegel’s rationalism at the expense of traumatic discontinuities, but also against the attempt to convert Hegel’s thought into a tragic meditation on the impossibility of rationally overcoming trauma. We will trace the schism between these integrative and disintegrative reactivations of Hegel back to conceptual issues about the status of rationality, metaphysics, critique, dialectics, and the absolute in Hegel’s thought. We will also try to understand how these conceptual antagonisms give rise to fundamental political antagonisms, not only between social democratic reformism and revolutionary communism, but also between communism as a possible object of affirmation and communism as an impossible lost object of mourning.

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks.

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Integrative Objects: The invention of Philo-Fiction,"DESCRIPTION
“This way of working leads us to consider the new objects of science no longer as complex, but as ‘integrative’. The complex object corresponds more or less to the stage of the open work, where the creation of a discipline of itself no longer allows us to apprehend the objects which it works with, but requires the interpretation of others. This state of affairs supposes the convergence of disciplinary perspectives upon partially-given objects—just as the Klavierstücke are always the work of Stockhausen, but only become audible through the intermediary of a performer who is not only implicitly the ‘translator’, but explicitly the ‘composer-translator’. The ‘new objects’ have very different characteristics. They superimpose fragments of knowledge according to a discipline+1. They also comprise the non-knowledge of each discipline in relation to these objects: disciplinary non-knowledge which, by iteration, allow us to reformulate in each discipline the knowledge that it masters and the non-knowledge that it constructs. The only unity these objects have, a partial and momentaneous unity, is that of the intentions of particular researchers, which never entirely encompass them as a whole. Ultimately these objects are no longer manipulable; they are not constructed in a phenomenological distance which separates the researcher from his or her object. They are radically non-synthesizable. Just as the concept of ‘uncertainty’ has passed from the margins of science into its heart, that of the non-synthesizable is beginning to afford a certain methodological access to created objects (GMOs, the product of nanotechnology, of synthetic biology, etc.) and objects of study (obesity, depression) which involve numerous disciplines and which do not converge. We need to invent scientific methods that will allow the construction of methods of invention within this non-synthesis.”

Fiction and philosophical invention are not the same. The first is an operator which permits passing from one real punctum to another, the second concerns philosophical knowledge and its structure. But is it possible, and now necessary in the new ways of philosophical writing, to associate the two. These new affinities are the theoretical and practical topics of this course.

As already suggested, these connections are new and not given and can be forged indirectly. The role of what Anne Francoise Schmid calls the Integrative Objects is to render them possible with entire new varieties of fiction, not only in the site of literature, science or art, but also in the tradition of philosophy. The unexpected associations these operations provide appear in a generic space, and need our labor for their articulation.

Philo-fiction is made possible by three conditions:

\tA point of exteriority –Integrative objects are not immediately visible, but absolutely necessary
\tGeneric and Ordinary Human, Order and Resistance – Painting is not possible in an exclusively ordered space (see Maurice Matieu, the mathematician and painter), but creating new relations between philosophy and science requires an order. The philosophies which concern the “ordinary” are searching for the same gestures which connects science and philosophy. In return, Fiction enables the passage from order to resistance and to the shift in potentialities.
\tThe Architecture of Knowledge versus the Architectonic –Architecture often comes first, with repetitious rhythms and rhetorical constructs (see Vitruvius against ancient and modern rhetoric). However, architectural operations are not sufficient for philosophical constructions which require a combination of both empirical-a priory and transcendental materials with a ratio of 2 to 3.

The seminar is both a review of existing literature regarding the connections between philosophy and fiction and a forum for generating new associations between the two realms. Throughout the seminar, students will work individually and collaboratively to work on three practical exercises:

\tWriting a philosophical fiction
\tDescribing a philosophical invention
\tInventing a link between one to another

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar is composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. During this period material written by the participants about the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Both the reading list and the student's responses will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of an extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
"Post-Philosophy: Marx, Laruelle & the Possibility of New Metaphysics","DESCRIPTION
This seminar departs from the conventional readings of Karl Marx, by way of François Laruelle’s non-philosophical methods of operating with “transcendental material,”. It will aim to identify a theoretical kernel in Marx whose critical and interpretative force can be employed without reference to its subsequent philosophical interpretations. The students will explore why Marx considered his project “scientific” and in what extent his science appears as post-philosophical. 

The seminar will establish parallels with Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy and the participants will closely investigate of Laruelle’s project of non-Marxism. The Seminar will engage in critical explorations of the status of concepts such as, “speculation,” “the real,” “value,” “abstraction,” “physicality,” “the human,” “the animal,” among other key concepts in both Marxist and Laruellian strands of non-philosophy. Another major theme of the course will be “metaphysics.” Marx’s rigorously descriptive language by way of unraveling the radical core of capitalist economic processes also reveals the metaphysics of capitalism. The symptomatology of this reading will display the impossibility to “overcome metaphysics,” identifying the obsession with this as a philosophical fixation. The seminar will attempt to recuperate if not also emancipate the notion of metaphysics by the virtue of radicalizing thought’s encounter with the real. Discussions will move from the already announced generic themes to the concrete issues of contemporary finance industry, automated speculation via highspeed trading (as the core of the 21st century finance industry and of capitalist metaphysics more generally speaking), the post-2008 financial crisis, the status of technology in late capitalism, sexual difference and gender, and the human and non-human body’s subjugation by Capital.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar is composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. During this period material written by the participants about the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Both the reading list and the student's responses will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of an extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Remediating Political Theory / Repoliticizing Media Theory,"DESCRIPTION
Within the academic context, political theory has generally been housed only in political science departments - or, in the form of political philosophy, within philosophy departments (traditional political science departments also sometimes retain the latter nomenclature). Media theory, on the other hand, has developed within a much wider array of academic frames: communication, english, and even art departments, or media studies, liberal studies, humanities, and transdisciplinary environments. And yet, political theory and media theory alike derive from comparable attempts to move beyond disciplinary methodologies and canons, so as to engage the always political question of mediation. Whether expressed in the form of modes of governance, modes of production, perception, communication, or representation, each of these modes mediate the manner in which people are enabled to, or disabled from, interfacing with the world.

This seminar concerns the divergent geneses of the fields of political theory and media theory, as well as the tensions that have occasionally emerged between the two as a result, particularly in recent years. While media theorists read political theorists, political theorists rarely read media theorists. The outcome of this asymmetrical relationship is that the mediating conditions of possibility for contemporary modes of governance and modes of production remain little-understood by political theorists. Conversely, those media theorists who are not interested in political theory not only ignore the political conditions of possibility that privilege some modes of perception and communication over others, but also circumvent potential resonances between the two fields.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar seeks to address this impasse, identifying particular threads of political theory that engage media theory and particular threads of media theory that engage political theory. At the same time, it seeks to survey the prevailing approaches to interdisciplinarity, indisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, addressing the question of how critical engagement alongside, within, and between them might be more effectively transversalized. The seminar’s objective will not be the celebration of one point of departure in opposition to another point of arrival, but the engagement with moments of resonance between multiple, differently-situated, yet overlapping fields of research & practice."
Curatorial Practice III: Curating the Future Now!,"This seminar was held in person in Prague in the Spring of 2016 as a series of workshops with no video recordings.

DESCRIPTION

The 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, witnessed the emergence of a new class of cultural producers named curators who worked with with artists, museum officials, and private collectors to organize art exhibitions. Through an ongoing process of self-specialization, curators began to play a decisive role not only in the production of art, but in shaping the function of the individual artist as well. Over the course of the last two decades, in turn, many universities have begun to offer curatorial studies programs, focusing on the development of the curator’s role in constructing associations between art, artists and audiences, as well as elaborating the significance of exhibitions as the key space for approaches to contemporary art and society.


REQUIREMENTS
This seminar is the final module of the Curatorial Practice series of seminars.* It will consist of 6 strictly hands-on workshops which continue the work of the seminar from the previous module. Participants will collaborate closely with the instructor in small groups, and at times will work on an individual basis, in order to utilize the cybernetic strategies developed in the previous module.** The seminar will assist in the further development, installation & presentation of the planned exhibition and conference in March at Prague’s TranzitDisplay. In addition, the seminar will focus and contribute to the production and publication of the events’ catalogue."
Outer Edges: 21st Century Spatial Metapolitics,"DESCRIPTION
This Seminar is concerned primarily with the tradition and prospects of geopolitical anarchy snd its related literature, as exemplified by the principle of Dynamic Geography theorized by Patri Friedman. The other significant theorists of this tendency whose work will be reviewed and discussed are Robert Nozick, and Scott Alexander. The object of the seminar is the cultural current that counterposes dissociation in space to resolution in time. ‘Metapolitics’ – in this sense – designates the strategic perpetuation of ideological irresolution into (fractured) space. Geography is thus advanced as an alternative to dialectics. 

Central preoccupations of the seminar will include: Universality, particularity, peculiarity, singularity; the ‘meta-’ function in philosophy; cognitive investment of space; exit and voice; nationality as an epochal construct; spatial subtexts in the conception of property; politics and diplomacy; boundaries, borders, and frontiers; seasteading and space colonization. 

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks. The first module will concentrate on political philosophy, the second will ramify the discussion into historical and science fictional / futurological territory.

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Mediating Freedom: From Human Rights to Contemporary Art,"DESCRIPTION
Both human rights and contemporary art may be approached as regimes of mediation inscribed into larger projects of global ordering. From producing archetypes of universal subjecthood to organising how agency, ethics and reality are conceived, these two regimes have historically functioned as image-makers for different strands of the global liberal project.

The seminar will explore various sides of the argument that contemporary art has effectively stepped into the shoes of the human rights project as a system more attuned to the needs of neoliberal deterritorialisation. How does the concept of an individuating subject become activated in the two regimes of contemporary art and human rights? How do human rights and contemporary art deal with political and aesthetic change and to what ends? What are the limitations of these two regimes’ mediating powers and are they relevant in dealing with the issues that face the world and humanity today?

We will use texts, films, artworks, specific case-studies and presentation by a guest speaker as the basis for class discussion. For the final session, students will be asked to respond to the main arguments of the seminar by producing either a paper, a presentation or any other form of digital content that can be shared with the seminar participants.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar is composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. During this period material written by the participants about the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Both the reading list and the student's responses will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of an extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
The Limits of 21st Century Capitalism,"DESCRIPTION
At the end of the 20th century, capitalism appeared stronger than ever before. The alternative economic systems had disappeared, inflation had become manageable, and the threat of major crises receded from the core capitalist countries. Proponents declared that we had reached 'the end of history', while economists assured themselves that their expertise led to a 'great moderation' that had overcome the business cycle. The fall from grace of the new economy in the early 2000s led to minor concerns, but economists and politicians were still confident in the security and success of global capitalism. 

The 2008 crisis changed all this. Even as neoliberalism continued apace, economists suddenly became aware that something was amiss. Subsequently, the mainstream of the profession has become vocally concerned over the long-term problems facing capitalism. Larry Summers (ROLE PAST PRESENT) speaks of a ‘secular stagnation’, Joseph Stiglitz (ROLE PAST PRESENT) identifies the current moment as a ‘great malaise’, while economists like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen warn that the glory days of American growth are over. This is paralleled by the long-standing criticisms coming from the usual places – Marxists emphasising the decline in the rate of profit, or the expanding surplus population, while post-Keynesians warn of financial instability. All is not well.

REQUIREMENTS
This course will examine the long-term trends of contemporary capitalism – what it will undergo in the next few decades – and examines the major problems of global capitalism today. It will try to answer the question, what is the long-term outlook for capitalism?"
Temperature Check: The Making of a Biennial Where Art is Centre-Stage,"DESCRIPTION

Eight sessions divided into four “duo-sessions” with one artist and one text connected to this artist’s practice as the focus points for each. Maria Lind and one of the other members of the curatorial team is responsible for each duo-session.

This course is drawing from the concerns of the upcoming Gwangju Biennial, opening 2 September 2016, and the process of its making. In the midst of infra-structural focus in the sphere of art in many parts of the world, among worries about commercial interests and populist programming, art itself seems to be partly forgotten. We want to direct our attention to art works and projects, addressing the performative aspect of art, not performative art, in terms of the question, ""what does art do?"". A central part of this is art’s capacity to project, to say something about the future.

Within this direction, a handful of strands have emerged through the practices and works of the artists who have been invited so far and our research process in general: “above and below ground” – on struggles over land, natural resources and the faculties of the earth; “the labor point of view” – the persistent engagement of artists with changing working conditions and their effects on daily life; “between molecules and cosmos” – how the minutest and invisible elements have wide-ranging effects at the same time as cosmos becomes a stage for action; “new subjectivities” – the enlightenment subject is continuously challenged by the pharmaco-pornographic paradigm as well as both old and new models of performativity; “the right to opacity” – how strategies of abstraction can produce artistic and other kinds of space to maneuver.



 

Session 1 – Tuesday April 5
artist presentation: Tyler Coburn
Moderation: Margarida Mendes, Maria Lind

Session 2 – Monday April 11
group reading
Moderation: Margarida Mendes, Maria Lind

Session 3 – Monday April 18
artist presentation: Doug Ashford
Moderation: Michelle Wong, Maria Lind.

Session 4 – Monday April 25
group reading
Moderation: Michelle Wong, Maria Lind

Session 5 – Tuesday May 3
artist presentation: Walid Raad
Moderation: Azar Mahmoudian, Maria Lind

Session 6 – Monday May 9
group reading
Moderation: Azar Mahmoudian, Maria Lind

Session 7 – Monday May 16
artist presentation: Apolonija Sustersic
Moderation: Binna Choi, Maria Lind

Session 8 – Monday May 23
group reading
Moderation: Binna Choi, Maria Lind"
Thinking Fictions I: Topias & Invention,"DESCRIPTION
Can a proper boundary between fiction and speculation be made? Whereas Kant attempted to construct a critical net to limit the excesses of idealism, recent forays into speculation and ontology have raised questions regarding the reality of fictions, the status of speculations, and the actuality of models and simulations which push against critical limits. 

Philosophy has always flirted with fictional terrains, possible worlds, utopias, metaphysical entities, and the like, but it has always raised itself above the fabric of the fictional in the last instance. Since Reza Negarestani’s theory-fictional Cyclonopedia, and the subsequent exhumation of the fictional/hyperstitional entities of the C.C.R.U., fiction has fought against the fangs of its parasite philosophy. In a different way, Francois Laruelle has claimed that philosophy overly distances itself from the material it claims to understand. Laruelle’s philo-fiction, rather than abandoning the fictional, recasts it as hyperspeculation. This self-referencing or looping method constructs a radical fiction according to its material, rather than of its material.

In addressing the role of fiction and philosophy, and following two semesters of coursework on hyperstition and science-fiction, this two semester course will examine the question of thinking fiction across a spectrum of conceptual worlds: hauntological (Marxism never lived but is now dead), possible (what could be that is as real as the actual), impossible (what could never be logically and materially), and hyperstitional (making fictional entities real). Can the radically new escape archives fictional or impossible if invention and creation necessarily follows from the actual? In addressing the more specific question of archives and conceptual invention, we will address how the past is philo-fictionally treated as material across these conceptual worlds, examining how the creation of worlds theoretically and fictionally lend themselves to the interconnection of ethics, politics, and time (eg. how the past is reactivated or not). 

TOPIAS & INVENTION (Module 1 of 2):

In this seminar, we will attempt to understand how fictions function philosophically and politically as an invention and/or as a temporal or spatial augmentation of the present. This will require not only exploring various utopias, dystopias, and other speculative places and times, but also an exploration of the specific function of fictions as a philosophical tool.

More specifically, the first half of the course will focus on utopia and dystopia as they are deployed in AfroFuturism broadly construed. Afrofuturism is conceptually generative here since the tensions between fiction and political-social reality, local constraints and futuristic dreams, and technology and colonialism, are all simultaneously deployed. In short, AfroFuturism makes it painfully clear that the necessity of the utopian or dystopian imaginary has to acknowledge, but also break with, the local conditions of its genesis that are either productive and/or critical.

In addition, this makes the question of how the fictional functions very basically in terms of whether and how the imaginary departs from actual, a salient question.

REQUIREMENTS

The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be split between an lecture of around 30-60 minutes and a group discussion of around 90-120 minutes. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to engage in group discussion in the seminars and on the google classroom page in between sessions. In addition, we will collectively develop and manage a wikipedia page to map out the various fictional worlds and possible futures that we come across during our sessions. The final assessment will consist of at least a 1500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance. We are open to other ideas to supplement the writing assignment: i.e. film essays, short stories, and other forms of media output."
Anti-Oedipus: Deleuze & Guattari Beyond the State,"DESCRIPTION
The hypothesis for this seminar is that the State is essentially a theological structure. In conceptualizing theology as a State structure we should take care to distinguish this structure from religion and the supernatural. Although many forms of religiosity are, in a sense, theological, the distinguishing mark of theology is not the presence of the supernatural or the divine, but rather that of the sovereign that overcodes all other elements of a particular social field. There are thus purely secular theologies as in, for instance, those forms of sociality organized around a sovereign leader, a master-signifier such as “the party”, or ontotheologies like Nietzsche's where all of being is subordinated to a key term such as the “will to power”.  

This structure is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “Oedipus” in Anti-Oedipus. Thus, Oedipus should be thought as much broader than a particular structure of the family or a psychoanalytic theory and instead as a theological form of thought that manifests itself in forms of labor, thought, science, metaphysics, politics, art, and, of course, religion. The thesis of this seminar is that it is essentially this theological structure of thought and practice that Deleuze and Guattari target in their politics.  Deleuze and Guattari strive to go beyond the State, and therefore propose an a-theism, an anarchism, or a form of thought, practice, and politics where the site of the overcoding sovereign is void or absent. Through a close reading of Nietzsche & Philosophy, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, and Anti-Oedipus, this seminar will explore the mechanisms by which the State is formed, how it functions, and why subjects become so ineluctably attached to these theological formations. Above all, we will look at the strategies of flight from the State and how these formations might be contested.

REQUIREMENTS
Participants in the seminar will be required to write one weekly post addressing some issue in that week’s reading or the prior week’s seminar discussion.  In addition, students will be required to respond to one other student's blog post each week. Blog posts and responses are to be posted every Saturday prior to the Tuesday seminar meeting to the classroom’s page .  At the end of the seminar, students will be required to write a 2000 – 3000 word essay dealing with some of seminar's themes or to produce a media or artistic artifact based on the issues discussed over the semester.  Students are free to propose other projects as well.  These projects will be due two weeks after the last seminar session."
Grothendieck & A Theory of Contemporary Transgression,"Professor Zalamea‘s lectures will introduce the groundbreaking work of twentieth century French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck in relation to the work of C.S. Peirce, Novalis, P. Valéry, theories of topoi and sheaves, networks, art, and music, towards a generalized theory of transgression for mathematics, philosophy, and contemporary culture in our transmodern world.

*In Conjunction with the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, at Pratt Manhattan Campus, The New Centre for Research & Practice will be live-streaming the lectures.

DESCRIPTION
The lectures (90' lecture, 30' discussion) will address the heritage of Alexander GROTHENDIECK (1928-2014, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the XXth Century), from an all encompassing perspective where mathematics, philosophy, literature, art and music come together to propose a large THEORY for the understanding of (local/global) obstructions/transits (=TRANSGRESSIONS) in our CONTEMPORARY world.

A dialogue will be proposed between Grothendieck's mathematical ideas, explained along their rich conceptuality, and many dense expressions of contemporary thought (Collapse, Networkologies, Topos of Music, Glass Bead). The dialogue will be further supported on an underlying dialectics of transformation in the past 200 years (1800: Novalis; 1900: Peirce, Florensky, Valéry, Warburg; 2000: Czech's Atlas of Transformation - AoT).



ARCHIVE


 
Session 1: Grothendieck’s Main Mathematical Ideas – Sheaves, Schema, Topoi, and Motives
SLIDES FOR SESSION ONE
 
Session 2: Philosophical Themes of Grothendieck’s work as Theoretical Approach to Our Transmodern World
SLIDES FOR SESSION TWO
 
Session 3: Sheaves and a Local/Global Theory of Gluing – Novalis, Pierce, and Collapse
SLIDES FOR SESSION THREE
 
Session 4: Shemes and a Theory of Non-Separation – Novalis, Florensky, and Networkologies
SLIDES FOR SESSION FOUR
 
Session 5: Topoi and A Gestural Theory of Space – Novalis, Valery, and Music
SLIDES FOR SESSION FIVE
 
Session 6: Motives and a Theory of Diagrammatic Synthesis – Novalis, Warburg, and the Glass Bead Game
SLIDES FOR SESSION SIX
 
""Why Zalamea Matters: Philosophy, Media, and Culture,"" by Christopher Vitale, Assoc. Professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute
SLIDES FOR VITALE TALK
 
Session 7. Saturday, Oct. 24: Final Roundtable on Contemporary Transgression (with Zalamea, Mackay, Negarestani, Vitale, Mazzola, and other guests)
SLIDES FOR VITALE SECTION OF ROUND TABLE"
Entangled Legacies: Institutional Collections and Curatorial-Editorial Agency,"DESCRIPTION
According to Michel Foucault, the project of the nineteenth century bourgeois museum organized more than collections. It also attempted, through the combination of display, contemplation, and education, to determine museum visitorsʼ sense of place in society. From this angle, institutional collections—especially for the natural history museum—perform a dual function. They are the basis from which academic scholarship is generated while at the same time they are the mechanism through which the correct relationship between nature and scientific knowledge is suggested to the public. The aim of this course is to study the shifting concerns of contemporary collections in the context of the twenty-first century.

One of the most striking reorganizations of knowledge systems signaled by the so-called Anthropocene is a radical destabilization of the modern Western distinction between nature and culture. It seems all but impossible today to study nature independently from human impact. This shift requires multiple fields of inquiry to reevaluate the stories they tell regarding our place, as humans, in the world. In the seminar, we will develop the question of the postnatural and postcolonial collection in relation to the possible meanings of collecting, collections, and curatorial practice.

We begin, therefore, from the following questions. What does the Anthropocene thesis imply for museums and the collections they contain? How do environmental and geopolitical concerns transform traditional exhibitionary practice? And, what is the potential of curatorial-editorial agency for alternative forms of collecting and presenting in the Anthropocene? The goal is to examine such exhibition and publication projects that have confronted the entangled legacies of institutional collections in order to illuminate and compare how exhibitions communicate divergent concerns through a variety of media presented in spatial constellations.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will consist of readings and discussions about thematic and visual strategies. An introductory contextualization to the history of exhibitions is provided through excerpted readings of seminal texts. Students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. These pieces will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 1500–2000 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
"Complexity and Computation: An Introduction to Measures, Paradigms and Programs","DESCRIPTION
This seminar is an introduction to two widely popular yet often culturally misconstrued topics, complexity and computation. Why are social sciences no longer tenable without an extensive restructuring around theoretical and applied dimensions of these two subjects? Why is in the absence of a systematic engagement with the all-encompassing consequences implied by the findings and advances in computation and complexity sciences, philosophy's regression to antediluvian platitudes inevitable? And at the same time, why should the vogue culture surrounding complexity and computation be approached with a critical vigilance and extreme caution? By presenting a survey of some of the key ideas in complexity sciences and computation which have direct implications for philosophical and political thinking, this seminar sets out to tackle and answer these questions.

Even though complexity and computation are fundamentally entangled topics, given the introductory nature of the seminar and the intricacy of the subject matter, they will be studied under two separate modules:

The first module begins with one central question: What is meant by complexity? To answer this question, we will look at different measures of complexity, their strengths and weaknesses and how they deviate from or intersect with the commonsense concept of complexity. Subsequently, we will examine these measures in relation to two questions, 'what is a complex structure' and 'what is a complex function'. This inquiry will lead us to a more fine-grained investigation of complexity in natural and socio-cultural phenomena. Complexity in the order of being and in the order of thought, dynamic systems, structural stability, statistical complexity, logical depth, hierarchies or dependency-relations, generative entrenchment, intrinsic emergence, mechanisms and functions are among the topics that will be discussed in the first module.

The second module focuses on the correlations between complexity and computation particularly in the context of computational complexity and classification of computational problems in relation to measures and hierarchies discussed in the first module. However, depending on how we answer the question of what we mean by computation, the notion of computational complexity can be approached differently. To this end, we will look into what Samson Abramsky calls the two puzzles of computation, 'why do we compute?' and 'what do we compute?'. This will open a discussion on the distinctions between those paradigms of computation centered on the issue of computability and those concerning the fundamental problem of what computation is. In this respect, some of the most significant challenges to the Church-Turing thesis that underlies the current dominant paradigm of computation will be addressed. We will particularly concentrate on the recent paradigm shift in computer science toward understanding the fundamental duality of computation and the interactive nature of computing. To conclude this module, we will review the two major programs of computation established by the Church-Turing and the interactive paradigms, contrasting their capacities in engaging with the question of complexity and evaluating their scope of application. Some of the key terms covered in this module are hierarchy theorems, computational classes, intractability, computational cost, sequentiality, concurrency, algorithmic computing, interaction as computation, design vs. description and the strong informatics thesis.

Drawing on the discussions presented in the first and the second modules, the third module deals with complexity and computation in the domain of cognition, particularly in the context of the linguistic scaffolding of thinking and the computational picture of language. We will primary concentrate on how social / interpersonal interaction shapes the functional architecture of language and conceptual thinking. But the question is that what is exactly 'social' when we refer to social linguistic interaction. To answer this question, the social-interactive dimension of language will be introduced as a computational framework that is directly linked to the generation of semantic complexity and high-order cognitive abilities. The objective of this module is to determine what is exactly computational about social linguistic practices and how linguistic interaction generates complex cognitive abilities. To this end, we will expand on the role of computational dualities – introduced in the second module – in linguistic interaction. The point of entry to our discussion regarding the connections between computational dualities of interaction, language and cognition will be the concept of game. In line with the theme of this module, we will examine Wilfrid Sellars's account of language as rule-governed games and Robert Brandom's game of giving and asking for reasons in light of recent works in logic and computer science on interaction games, most notably, the works of Andreas Blass, Samson Abramsky and Jean-Yves Girard.

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Philosophy as System: An Introduction to German Idealism,"DESCRIPTION
German Idealism has been slandered as that school of thought which 'ran through the door that Kant only wished to peak through' thereby appearing as a crude return to dogmatic or pre-critical metaphysics. However, the speculative ambition of the German Idealists was far from opposed to Kant’s critical restraint, but rather, their characteristic systematic impulse was derived as much from Kant’s methodological concerns as his transcendental idealism. The aim of the present course is thus to thoroughly demolish this stubborn caricature of German Idealism. Beginning with the architectonic of Kant’s system, we will show how he and his successors created new forms of systematic philosophy which risked accusations of subjective idealism in order to grasp not only the fundamental structures of thought, but how thinking itself alters, and is embedded in, the world. In addition to providing a historical overview of four major thinkers (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling) and contextualizing their philosophical contributions, we will aim to connect concepts drawn from their work to contemporary philosophical and extra-philosophical concerns.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be split between a lecture between half an hour and an hour in length and a group discussion covering the remaining time. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Anthropol: The Future of Human Insecurity,"DESCRIPTION
The topic of this course is the prospect of Artificial Intelligence, considered as the object of a threat analysis. Its method is dramatization, through systematic scenario construction. Our question: How would a global bureau, tasked with – and seriously committed to – the protection of human interests against a strategically-competent synthetic agency, formulate the problem it is dealing with? (With the persistent under-rumor: Would this problem be anything other than the challenge posed historically by Capital to Scientific Socialism, exotically re-stated?) The distant ancestor of the question is posed by Samuel Butler, in his The Book of the Machines:
“There is no security … against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?”
The proximal ancestor is the identification of existential risk (‘X-risk’) and its speculative Friendly AI (‘FAI’) solution. Here we find not only a threat analysis, but an institutional crystallization (i.e. a prototypical ‘Anthropol’, though with only a hint of the social authority it might consider ultimately essential to its mission). This germinal organizational response, represented by The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), among other entities, provides us with a concrete point of departure.  The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks. The spiral menace of self-escalating machine intelligence draws the abstract diagram of the course structure: beginning with a tightly-focused examination of the specific anxieties explored by the X-Risk / FAI institutions, and then (in Module-2) revisiting them within a widening gyre of expanded historical and theoretical scope. Topics include intelligence explosion (the ‘Foom Debate’); simulation, dissimulation, and substitution (the Imitation Game); coordination problems and human interests; and robot terror as media spectacle. 
This is a seminar open to an arbitrary degree of ironization. For those with such severe skepticism-control problems that the question “Why are robots going to kill us?” appears irreducibly ridiculous, the questions “Why do we think robots going to kill us?” or even “Why are we being so insistently told that robots are going to kill us?” can frame the entire discussion without loss of information.  If Butler’s Erewhon is excluded, because treated as an honorary theoretical text, the classic literary reference is still (and forever) William Gibson’s Neuromancer. (‘Anthropol’ is exactly our name for Gibson’s ‘Turing Cops’.) 

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute 400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics weekly. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
The Horror of Security: Contemporary Geopolitics in a Permanent Beta Phase,"DESCRIPTION
Contemporary geopolitics as curated by the United States is in a permanent beta phase. Neuro-torture, algorithmic warfare, drones strikes, cybernetic nation-building are not means or ends but tests. Can a polis be engineered? Can the human operating system be reformatted? Can violence be modulated until legally invisible while all the more lethal? Each incursion, each new actor or actant, new terrains from brains to transatlantic cables, all find themselves part of a grand experiment. Over the course of this seminar we will explore how classically Realist concepts of order and national interest have been subtly displaced by subterranean violence entrepreneurs that populate the transversal battlefield of security politics. Doomsayers like Paul Virilio, Lewis Mumford, and Martin Heidegger who foretold a kind of terminal and self-annihilating velocity of security's technological saturation are today being shown to have been optimists. Security doesn’t know totality or finality: it bleeds, mutates, and reforms. Furthermore the peril of biopolitics seems now almost romantic. The care and concern for life’s productivity is increasingly subsumed by plasticity—forming and reforming without regard to the telos of productivity, division, or normative order. There are of course orders in our geoplastic age but they are almost unrecognizable as such when so many are directly invested in the intensifying failure of publically-stated strategic ends. In an attempt to confront the particular differences that mark our historical moment we will explore thinkers and practices that organize violence and pain beyond the limits of identity and mortality. We are witnessing creative and horrifying experiments in the affirmative production of dying that also deprive those targeted, in some cases whole population, from the relief of death. The horror of security politics is not tragic. Tragedy redeems. The horror of contemporary security politics is precisely that there is no relief, no reason, no victory, no defeats, no exit. Throughout this seminar, therefore, we will explore the problem of life and identity in the age of sustainable warfare.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be split between a lecture between half an hour and an hour in length and a group discussion covering the remaining time. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Plateau Infini: Capitalism & Schizophrenia in the 21st Century,"DESCRIPTION
Deleuze and Guattari were exceptional among the French thinkers of 1968: they did not embrace the linguistic turn, correlationism or anti-realism, nor did they champion social constructivism. Rather, they developed a robust realist and materialist naturalism that spoke profoundly to science, ethics, art, and politics. However, the realist singularity of their thought in a setting dominated by anti-realist, linguistic idealism has often been overshadowed by attempts to assimilate their work to postmodernist thought. With the advent of New Materialism and Speculative Realism, it has become possible to read their thought anew through a realist lens. Through a close reading of A Thousand Plateaus, this two-part seminar does just that.

Part 1 is devoted to Deleuze and Guattari’s naturalist ontology of existence. Throughout the history of Western philosophy and culture, nature has been understood as the domain of essence, and the natural as ineluctable and deterministic. By contrast, culture has been understood as the domain of freedom and creativity. Deleuze and Guattari develop a realist ontology of nature in which nature is understood to be the domain of the singular and creative and where culture is continuous with and constitutive of nature.

Part 2 is devoted to their politics and ethics. Unlike so much political theory of this period where power is seen to reside solely in the ideological, signifying, and discursive, Deleuze and Guattari develop a rich political theory that also explores the role that non-human material agencies play in social assemblages.

REQUIREMENTS

Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2000 – 3000 word essay on a topic of their choosing or do some equivalent project upon completion of this 2-credit seminar."
Artifice & Alienation: SF Cinema as Critical Political Thought,"DESCRIPTION
In this seminar, we will explore the relationship between science fiction (SF) cinema and critical political thought via the thematics of utopianism, dystopianism, and materialism, as they might be actualized through multiple conceptual personae, including the alien / hybrid, the robot / humanoid, and automation / artificial intelligence. We will pay special attention to the classical political theoretical questions. First, of nature: good and evil; second, of legitimacy: property and the state; third, of community: minorities and majorities; and fourth, of decision: democracy and dictatorship. In the process, we will engage multiple SF subgenres, including Afrofuturism, alien invasion, biopunk, cyberpunk, feminist SF, hard SF, social SF, and tech noir, amongst many others. With a temporal focus centered upon 21st Century SF films, students will engage the political as it has been presented filmically, in form as well as content, over the last two decades.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be split between a lecture between half an hour and an hour in length and a group discussion covering the remaining time. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 1500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
#Accelerate II: The Accelerationist Reader,"“The Most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must be called an accelerationist politics at ease with the modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” -Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

DESCRIPTION: This two part seminar will introduce the concepts of acceleration and accelerationism through the reading of the newly published book #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic/ Merve Verlag, 2014). The seminar follows the thematic structure of the book, focusing on concepts that anticipate, formulate, and shape the future of left accelerationist thought. It will examine and respond to the core accelerationist arguments and terminology proposed in the Reader which are becoming increasingly influential on political and theoretical debates. For example, the insufficiency of local politics in light of larger global problems; the failures of the Western left, both Marxist and poststructuralist; challenging the onslaught of neoliberalism; the rejection of the total destruction of capitalism; the proposal for salvaging usable parts of the current geopolitical system in our post capitalist future; and, finally, the embrace of science and technology both as practical but also as conceptual tools for restructuring the humanities and cultural studies. The wide historical spectrum through which the volume suggests for Accelerationism allows this two-part seminar to focus on materials from Marx, Veblen, Deleuze, Comte, and Lyotard, to more contemporary sources contemplating capitalism and technology, such as the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU), Nick Land, Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani. This Fall seminar will also feature conversations with some of the contributors to the volume as well as its skeptics who have partaken in the shaping of the accelerationist discourse.

REQUIREMENTS: The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be split between an hour and an hour and a half lecture and around an hour of group discussion. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

This is the second module of a two-part seminar."
"Towards Xenofeminism: Gender, Technology, and Reason in the 21st Century","'Leaving aside the traumatic, self-proclaimed POST of their alumni, what Deleuze and Foucault teach us is how to transit, how to enter and exit modernity in many ways and from many perspectives. What was awoken by the second half of the twentieth century – an age of the TRANS, if ever there was one – is better called transmodernity […] the prefix TRANS seems, therefore, far more indicative of our condition (and the mathematical condition) than a premature POST.’ - Fernando Zalamea

DESCRIPTION: In an era characterised by ubiquitous technological mediation, abstraction, and unprecedented complexity, invocations of authenticity, organicity, or a ‘return to nature’ are either politically untenable (as possibilities available only to a small and privileged portion of society), problematically ineffective on a global scale or, quite simply, foreclosed. Striking out from the conviction that a retreat from technological modernity is neither possible nor desirable, this course will grapple with the unique socio-political problematic facing twenty-first century gender politics from a transfeminist perspective, focusing on the emancipatory potential of technology, biological and ontological alienation as liberating vectors, issues related to notions of selfhood and scalability, and an examination of the historically fraught relationship between feminism and rationality. ----------

Moving from a critical to a constructive feminism for which the future remains open as a site of radical recomposition, key historical precedents to the above nexus of ideas will be examined alongside contemporary texts with the aim of sketching out a set of positions responsive to the demands made by twenty-first century conditions on any realistically future-oriented transfeminist political project.

REQUIREMENT: This course will be structured as a reading group with texts set for each session. Students will be expected to prepare a presentation related to one of the texts dealt with in the course, lead a group discussion on this material, and publish a post on the course blog. Participation in the online discussions will be assessed and a final assignment consisting of a 2500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructors will be due after the final session."
Curatorial Practice I: Here & Now,"Jens Hoffman: “How, in just a few short years, did we reach this point of self-referential saturation?” /// Elena Filipovic: “Implicit in the question is thus not so much what the meaning of the exhibition is as a category/genre/object, but what it does, which is to say, how exhibitions function and matter, and how they participate in the construction and administration of the experience of the items they present.” /// João Ribas: “Are we perhaps so concerned with the contemporary because we have failed to reconcile with finitude? That is, to conceive of a future beyond ecological disaster, technological singularity, or terror-fueled millenarianism?”

DESCRIPTION: The 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, witnessed the emergence of a new class of cultural producers named curators who worked with with artists, museum officials and private collectors to organize art exhibitions. Through steady self-specialization, curators started to play a decisive role in the production of art and shaping the function of living artist. Over the last two decades, many universities have begun to offer curatorial studies programs, focusing on the development of the curator’s role in constructing associations between art, artists and audiences, as well as elaborating the significance of exhibitions as the key space for approaches to contemporary art and society.

The first in this two-module seminar, “Here & Now” will look critically at the role of curators in the systemization of art practices, as well as the globalized dissemination of contemporary art in the current decades. Throughout the seminar, the students will examine the impact of the growth of interest in contemporary art by different levels of the government and private sector, paying particular attention to the interaction and competition between cultural, political, and financial capital for shaping the future of the art world. In addition, we will engage how the evolving forms of nation-states on a global scale has contributed to the transformation of the idea and practice of curatorship locally. With a focus on both the inside and outside views of today’s curating, the seminar covers texts written by leading contemporary curators as well as contributions by theorists and thinkers who have problematized the practice of making and showing contemporary art. Each session will examine ideas discussed by curators against actual exhibitions and analyze their successes/failures in terms of realizing the curator’s own goals and objectives."
#Accelerate I: The Accelerationist Reader,"“The Most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must be called an accelerationist politics at ease with the modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” -Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

DESCRIPTION: This two part seminar will introduce the concepts of acceleration and accelerationism through the reading of the newly published book #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic/ Merve Verlag, 2014). The seminar follows the thematic structure of the book, focusing on concepts that anticipate, formulate, and shape the future of left accelerationist thought. It will examine and respond to the core accelerationist arguments and terminology proposed in the Reader which are becoming increasingly influential on political and theoretical debates. For example, the insufficiency of local politics in light of larger global problems; the failures of the Western left, both Marxist and poststructuralist; challenging the onslaught of neoliberalism; the rejection of the total destruction of capitalism; the proposal for salvaging usable parts of the current geopolitical system in our post capitalist future; and, finally, the embrace of science and technology both as practical but also as conceptual tools for restructuring the humanities and cultural studies. The wide historical spectrum which the volume suggests for Accelerationism allows this two-part seminar to focus on materials from Marx, Veblen, Deleuze, Comte, and Lyotard, to more contemporary sources contemplating capitalism and technology, such as the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU), Nick Land, Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani. This Fall seminar will also feature conversations with some of the contributors to the volume as well as its skeptics who have partaken in the shaping of the accelerationist discourse."
Understanding Memetics,"This roundtable proposes a Critical Philosophy of Polymodal Discourse, taking memetics not as a subsidiary internet studies phenomenon but as an epistemological framework for analyzing contemporary cultural production. The capacity of memes to destabilize boundaries between aesthetic practice, philosophical intervention, and collective psychic individuation is what makes them worthy of academic research. Memesis offers critical analysis of memes without translating them into the sterilized language of institutions, and without fully descending into internet jargon. Falling constantly into the abyss between scientific and artistic communication, memes embody mixed media as artifacts of folk vernacular culture. Their participatory affordance is achieved through polymodal discursive nature; the interdisciplinarity of memetic communication renders it nearly invisible to monomodal discourses, demanding new synthetic discursive instruments.
Memesis occupies the space between institutions and the dispersed fragmentation of memes across the internet, and raises the question of a possible future institutionalization of memes within philosophy, art, and critical thinking. Long relegated to low genre by critics, memes are treated here as serious epistemic objects.
Moving beyond Dawkins’ original biological metaphor, the course develops a Laruellean non-memetics while simultaneously employing Simondonian process ontology to map memes’ metastable becoming. We examine how meme logic performs Laruelle’s principle of philo-fiction: just as non-philosophy clones philosophical concepts to expose their limits, memes clone cultural forms (academic discourse, political rhetoric, religious iconography) to render them operationally useless while paradoxically amplifying their circulation. The Laruelle-Simondon dialectic offers participants both a critical weapon against reductive interpretations and a constructive framework for studying meme ontogeny.
Session 1: Memes as Philosophical Practice
This session constructs a speculative genealogy of memes as vehicles for philosophical intervention, beginning with Kierkegaard’s ironist as a subject in perpetual negation, whose contemporary avatar is the dank meme enacting what Hegel feared as infinite absolute negativity. We map the memetic potential of Chan koans, where mimetic illusion demonstrates the illusory nature of reality, and examine liberation through absurdity from Dadaist anti-art to Surrealist Twitter bots, contrasting Deleuze’s vision of humor as resistance with Baudrillard’s silent majorities.
Building on this genealogy, we introduce Laruelle’s non-philosophy to radically reconfigure the meme’s epistemic status. Where traditional philosophy seeks to interpret memes through established frameworks, non-philosophy forces us to confront memes as already-theorized objects that resist philosophical colonization. The meme’s viral persistence and resistance to hermeneutic saturation mirror Laruelle’s determination-in-the-last-instance: memes operate through a radical immanence that precedes and exceeds philosophical capture. We develop a structural typology of irony’s gradations — the stable signifiers of ironic memes, the deadpan abyss of post-irony, and meta-irony’s self-canceling signifiers. We also analyze the meme’s infiltration of subjectivity through Bourdieu’s habitus, reframed for 4chan’s lurker class, whose internalized meme-grammars function as digital doxa.
Session 2: Memetic Individuation and Polymodal Translation
This session theorizes the meme’s ontology through a tripartite schema: the Platonic eidos (Wojak as sadness-in-itself), genre-families and clusters (templates and their modifications), and singular deployments as instances. We explore the universal nature of memes where Loss.jpg crosses cultural thresholds, and examine polymodality through video memes (GIFs as Bergsonian durée compressed into loops), audio memes (samples as acoustic punctuation), and behavioral memes (TikTok challenges as Foucauldian technologies of the self).
Simondon’s theory of individuation replaces static classifications with a processual account of meme-becoming. His concept of the preindividual (that realm of potentials preceding form) describes the metastable state of a meme-template before actualization. The Wojak template exists in a preindividual state of pure affective potential, what we call meme-matter, until individuated through specific deployments as incel icon, leftist critique, or existential cipher. We develop a Simondonian reading of meme propagation as transduction, the process by which a structure reorganizes itself by propagating through a field of potentials. This explains why successful memes exhibit metastable virulence: their capacity to maintain identity while continuously differing. Platform algorithms are analyzed as meme-physical environments that modulate individuation.
Reading List

Søren Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)
Jean Baudrillard, “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” from In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983)
François Laruelle, “Philo-Fiction,” from Philosophie non-standard (2010), trans. Jeremy R. Smith
François Laruelle, “On the Determination in the Last Instance,” from Le principe de minorité (1981), trans. Jeremy R. Smith
Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” from Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (1988)
Gilles Deleuze, “Humor, Irony and The Law” (1967)
Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures and The Habitus,” from Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977)
Henri Bergson, “The Multiplicity of Conscious States; The Idea of Duration,” from Time and Free Will (2001)
Gilbert Simondon, “Collective Individuation and the Foundations of the Transindividual,” from Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2005)
Seong-Young Her, “Metamemetics,” from Critical Meme Reader III (2024)
Seong-Young Her, Postnaturalism (2020)
Phil Wilkinson, “Disassembly and Reassembly: Theorizing a Meme-Rhizome,” from Critical Meme Reader III (2024)
Nate Sloan, “Beyond Based and Cringe” (2021)"
The Emergent Poetics of Winding Oars,"This workshop takes the metaphor of winding oars (instruments of creation over which the writer has limited control in the rapids of thought, preference, and expression) as its guiding figure. It weaves allusions to what biologist Michael Levin calls the morphospace: a field of possibilities in which embodiments can exceed the material.
We argue that morphic refactoring -- the improvised, on-the-fly repurposing of biological material under pressure -- has been practiced by many poetic schools of the 20th and 21st centuries in ways that transcend trauma-informed, confessional, or memorialistic modes. These practices take mental and bodily shrapnel, ruins and fragments of experience, and depart from the writer's self: from what is proper to the individual, caught in severity, deformed by geopolitical violence, historic cruelty, or the technological metabolisation of the subject.
Somatic practices, and writing workshops grounded in Western trauma scholarship, often reinforce the coherent self as the site of healing -- ready to be digested into neoliberal, colonial subjectivity. Instead, this seminar contemplates creative forces that reorganize subjectivity at its root: dissolving calcified selves, channeling supra-personal forces.
We have chosen poets who invoke third spaces and their signals -- not yet known -- with assertoric energy and analytical gentleness: anti-confessional, militant, re-constitutive, breaking literary expectancy with a murmur beyond repair or emancipation (itself a liberal aspiration).
Against Promethean calls to unmake oneself in the pull of the Outside, and equally against fatalistic self-immolation that rejects any restoration, this seminar explores writing that lets the self cohere around a convergence of morphic intents: an authorial ""I"" that becomes a chorus, temporary, manyfold, coordinated.
Session One: Stolen Time, Rotten Conditions -- Misprisions and Anti-Confessional Writing
We read Anna Mendelssohn and Tom Raworth in symmetrical dialogue, tracing how poets move through their grounding in experience and biography toward a force that transcends both. From there we map poetic modes that mishear, mistreat, or refuse the ""I"" as site of truth or recovery -- practicing fragment, interference, and dissonant form against the compulsive coherence of the liberal subject.
Prompts: Collect one week's worth of words from your surrounding reality -- readings, searches, meals, conversations. Compose lists and indexes, draw, write around them. Then, starting from Mendelssohn's edict that ""Poetry does not deserve evil keepers,"" imagine a keeper worthy of poetry: what species is it, to what order of existence does it belong? Write around it in 4 x 10-minute sessions (details tba).
Session Two: Neural Wounds and the Second ""I"" -- From Reactivity to Emergence
This session traces the faultline between poetic reactivity and suprasubjective force, writing not from the wound but through it. We explore how neural, bodily, and social zones can be reorganized as sites of collective sensing rather than personal crisis, moving toward the conditions of emergence: how the second ""I"" becomes possible not through transcendence but through the reorganization of what passed through the writing subject.
Prompts: Isolate a plot-cell or a Volta (Petrarch). Draw your plot material as circuitry. Ask not ""what happened to me?"" but ""what passed through me?"" What does this event disrupt, channel, organise, refuse? The session closes with no readings -- live writing prompts, work presentation, exchanges, observations, reviews, and suggestions."
"To Draw Away, Matter Space and Time form Media and Meaning","To Draw Away takes its name from the Latin root of abstraction: abs-trah?, to pull away from the material object, and from the Greek aphairesis, things that exist from removing. Drawing itself, originally figurative, names the act of dragging a stylus across a surface. This seminar follows that double etymology across the entire historical trajectory of abstraction in visual and broader cultural production, from paleolithic mark-making to the present, drawing on physiology, ophthalmology, neurology, psychiatry, theology, art history, philosophy, and politics.

The ""surface"" of Abstract Art is globally accessible precisely because it operates outside the structures of formal language, untethered from any single cultural context. Non-figurative, non-objective, non-representational: abstraction is defined by negation, yet what it negates opens onto an esoteric inner vision touching the transcendental and metaphysical. It encompasses revelation and apocalypse, entoptic phenomena produced directly by the central nervous system, and the involuntary imagery of psychedelic intoxication or sensory deprivation. It was also, after World War II, an American export, deployed in the promotion of individualism against Stalinist Socialist Realism. Without the Abstract, as the seminar argues, we cannot get closer to truth or its knowing.

This seminar is suitable for students of art and art history, emerging curators and artists, collectors, and all serious lovers of art. It is a first installment of the long-term Intercentric Curatorial Studies program beginning in September.

Session One: On Abstract, Abstraction and Abstract Art in General / This session establishes the conceptual and historical ground, tracing abstraction from its etymological origins through its development across cultures and media. Students are introduced to the core paradox: that to draw away from the object is also to draw closer to something essential.
Session Two: On the Spiritual, the Psychopathological, the Entoptic and the Neuroaesthetical / This session examines the inner sources of abstraction, including aniconic and iconoclastic traditions, the visionary and hallucinatory, and the neurological. Students explore how Abstract Art operates at the threshold of the rational and the involuntary.
Session Three: On Specificity of Understanding and Tacit Knowing / This session addresses what it means to know and understand abstraction beyond formal language. Students engage with intuition as heuristic insight and examine the range of stimuli and irritants that bring it forth.

Session Four: On the Personal, the Relational and the Political / The final session situates abstraction within lived experience and political history, from its role as an instrument of Cold War ideology to its capacity for somatic self-knowledge and catharsis."
"Road to Neofeudalism: Technology, the Left, and the Politics of Defeat","This roundtable offers a critical intervention into the rising discourse of “neofeudalism.” We argue that neofeudalism is less a coherent theory of a new social order and more an enchanted, neo-conservative project—a political imaginary where, to paraphrase Gillian Rose, “mourning has become the law.” This framework establishes the defeat of the collective subject, turns its back on epistemology, and suffers from a basic digital market determinism. From the symbolic ground of Greece—the romanticized cradle of Western rationality—we challenge the pressure to ‘call it a day’ on collective struggle. Using the Greek leftist concept of “aristerometro” (the ""measure of the left""), we will dissect the politics of radical posturing and explore how this neofeudalist horizon forecloses alternative futures. The roundtable questions this status quo by (1) critically diagnosing the “neofeudal capture” of leftist thought and (2) surveying conceptual ""lines of flight"" that could meaningfully exit this politics of defeat.

Session one: WTF is Neofeudalism? / This Session is organised around the required reading this article on Neofeudalism. The article is very dense in an interdiscplinary fashion, so we will start with a short lecture on dominant approaches to tehcno/virtual/neo/name it feudalism, focusing on epistemology, romanticism, neoclassicism, and the collective subject. Greece is involved not only cause Korinna Patelis is Greek but also modern Greek is a unique natural language difficult to proccess (NLP). So we take a look at why technology and its mediations are treated as a societal ill—a black box whose workings remain unexamined. Metaphysical considerations are absent, whether approached in isolation or tied to temporality and events. This lack of engagement with technology’s philosophical and empirical dimensions reflects a wider crisis in epistemology due to pivotal shifts (e.g., AI, and so on). From then, each of the participatns need to have identified one dimention of the argument they are ambivilent about and try to counter it. So you present, and then file your counter argument in any form.

Key Questions: Is ""neofeudalism"" a useful metaphor or just melancholy defeat? Do media/tech giants enforce serfdom in a different way then before? Are the epistemologies and binarisms embedded in neofeudalist discourse, notably West/East, Rationality/Irrationality, Natural/Digital the problem?

Reading: Patelis, K. (2025). ""Have I Got News For You: The Road to Neo-Feudalism"". Media Theory Journal, 9(1). [URL: HYPERLINK

Session Two: “Aristerometro” and “Calling it a Day” / Our second Session is about the future and how radical politics could be designed. We will have already talk about how many collectives you wan to form in answer.....We are using a “gauge” for thinking about the future! The Greek leftist concept of “aristerometro” (from “measure” and “left”). We shall explore why we are all being told “it’s over”—and, even worse, how we measure each other’s radicalness as a politics of defeat. Enclosure: The pressure to ‘call it a day’ in the neofeudalism debate and no only —the idea that history is somehow calling on us—is deeply problematic. Dialectics are excluded from this debate, replaced by an urgency and manufactured temporality promoted by neofeudalist authors.

Key Questions: How does aristerometro (the ""measure of the left"") expose the politics of radical posturing? Why does neofeudalism demand we ""call it a day"" on collective struggles?

Reading: Patelis, K. (2023). ""Aristerometro: Measuring the Unmeasurable in Greek Leftist Praxis"" [unpublished manuscript]. (To be provided)"
Necrophilanthropy: Nonprofit Killers and the Carceral State,"Indebted to the benevolence of grantmakers and one-percenters, liberal 501(c)(3) organizations have consistently absorbed, defanged, and profited from radical movements for social transformation over the past forty years. From a workers' perspective, the web of public and private interests that constitute the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) might be experienced as constant negotiations between domination and subjugation, exploitation and genuine pleasure. ""Necrophilanthropy,"" the neologism at the heart of this Seminar, invokes necropolitics and necrophilia to probe deeper into the seductive death drive of capital.

The first half of the Seminar surveys the NPIC's structural underpinnings through lecture and discussion, from the late-nineteenth-century ""scientific charity"" movement through the fall of the welfare state and rise of mass incarceration. We then narrow in on art and culture to historicize the 1990s rise of ""social practice,"" examine how artists have been instrumentalized to beautify the carceral system, look at the contemporary wave of (arts) nonprofit labor struggle, and the US “nonprofit killer” bill—planning to revoke nonprofit status of organizations deemed to be “terrorist supporting” with no recourse, targeting even the most mild Palestine solidarity. These factors and more have brought the liberal 501(c)(3) to its current existential crossroads.

The second half of the Seminar will be responsive to the particular needs and interests of participants. Collaborative student presentations may use case studies, power mapping, and lived experiences to consider what it means to evade mechanisms of elite capture. The Seminar will culminate with individual final works in the form of an essay, presentation, direct action, or workshopping a speculative organization. Themes of death and seduction will remain front and center as we strive toward a range of artistic, administrative, and agitational strategies toward the question of how cultural production, within or against the NPIC, can be materially useful to revolutionary movement work today.

We will study materials by artists and thinkers like Robert Allen, Chloë Bass, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Larne Abse Gogarty, Jarrod Shanahan & Zhandarka Kurti, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Jeniffer Wolch. Readings and other assignments will be adjusted based on collective capacity. Artists and cultural workers—salariat or precariat, waged or unwaged—are particularly encouraged to register, though we are eager to study with folks from other sectors who are interested in the broader themes.

Week 1. Pre-reading: Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” chapter 3 (2019), Rodríguez’s “The political logic of the non-profit industrial complex” (2016) (also: introduction to Kurti/Shanahan’s “Skyscraper Jails,” Shanahan’s “Explosive Elements Beneath the Surface of the City of New York”). Review syllabus, requirements, deadlines. Lecture: intro to necropolitics & nonprofit industrial complex, NPIC early history.

Week 2. Pre-reading: Allen’s “Black Awakening in Capitalist America” excerpt (1969), Gilmore’s “In the shadow of the shadow state” (2016), introduction to Gogarty’s “Usable Pasts” (2022), Petrossiants / Arts Workers Inquiry zine excerpt (2025). NPIC history continued 1930s-today via art/culture. Film discussion.

Week 3. Student text presentations (anti-work horizons, ideal alternatives, power research, organizing methods).

Week 4. Necrophilanthropy reflections, flexible for leftover reading/lecture discussions, briefly share final works.

IMAGE: Live Aid Concert, 1984

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Marx's Capital in the 21st Century,"Capital, Vol. 1 is both a totally unique literary masterpiece and the most insightful book ever written about the economic order that continues to shape all of our lives. It's full of both technical economic points illustrated with mathematical precision and a dense web of references to Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Dante, Greek and Roman history, and more. Add the complications of reading it in translation, and it's easy to get lost very deep in the weeds.

In this Seminar, we zoom out to cover the core themes of the book, taking on two of the eight sections per session. Instead of getting lost in what can, at worst, become a sort of secular socialist equivalent of scriptural exegesis, we think hard, with care and analytical rigor, about Marx's core arguments in each of the eight sections. What was the most important case he was trying to make in each case, and how does it all fit together on a high level?

Session 1: Commodities and Money; The Transformation of Money into Capital / Marx on commodities, value, and money, transition to analysis of capitalist class structures, simple commodity circulation versus the circuit of capital, source of profit in labor-power

Session 2: The Production of Absolute Surplus Value; The Production of Relative Surplus Value / The beating heart of Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation, necessary labor and surplus labor, capitalism's historical uniqueness, mute compulsion and vertical market relations, horizontal competition between capitalists

Session 3: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value; Wages / Recap from a different perspective, disconnect between exploitation and legal forms of compensation, time-wages versus piece wages, capitalism as a global system

Session 4: The Process of the Accumulation of Capital; So-Called Primitive Accumulation / Simple reproduction versus runaway accumulation, wealth at one pole and social misery at the other, organized labor and the welfare state, the true horrors of capitalism's origins

IMAGE: Ludwig Engelhardt, Marx and Engels Monument, Berlin,1986

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From Magic to Media: A Hermetic Genealogy of Optical and Communication Technologies,"This Seminar examines the genealogy (in a Nietzschean sense) of technical and optical media—from pre-cinema technologies through film and beyond—through its occulted roots in Hermeticism, magic, and alchemy. With the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and artificially constructed images of illusion and deception, it is becoming increasingly imperative to trace the history of our technologically mediated realities to the little-known genealogies of shamanic performance, ritual, and Hermetic magic, and to question the cultural, philosophical, and political significance this knowledge holds for our time. The intersection of magic, technology, and art—especially occult technologies such as alchemy and talismans—reveals the predecessors of much of what we consider technical media and optical technologies: photography, film, the internet, social media, and AI.

To provide a sample of what we cover: we examine Giovanni Fontana's influential treatise Illustrated and Encrypted Book of War Instruments, written around 1420 CE, an illustrated book of military instruments, optical media, and automata. This treatise contains one of the first ever depictions of an early version of the magic lantern or lanterna magica in Europe. We trace how such optical devices and automata as military technologies appear in the literature of Islamicate or Arabic Hermetica by excavating its earliest sources in the little-studied Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, much of which was influenced by Harranian astral magic. We consider figures such as the enigmatic Balinus or pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana, a disciple of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, called in the sources ""the lord of talismans"" (sahib-i tilismat). In these texts, Aristotle or Balinus creates automata called ""talismans"" (tilismat) for the purpose of helping Alexander conjure illusions to deceive and frighten his enemies in battle—precisely the function of the optical device illustrated in Fontana's manuscript, considered an early version of the magic lantern. The early magic lantern device described in Fontana's book is a talisman (Arabic: tilism, Persian: telesm) with its genealogy in the literature of Hermetica transmitted via Arabic and Persian sources into Europe. In this way, the Seminar contributes to discourses on decoloniality by decolonizing the largely Eurocentric narratives of the history of media technologies.

We also consider how the very technological devices we use and hold in our hands today—smartphones, AGIs such as ChatGPT—may be understood as talismanic media rooted in Hermetic magic, possessing different operationalities from their current forms and uses under late capitalist and neoliberal regimes. What is at stake today and for the future is who controls and wields these powerful talismanic media. We think through these issues with theorists and philosophers including Ernst Bloch, Yuk Hui, Gilbert Simondon, Siegfried Zielinski, Vilém Flusser, Ernst Kapp, and Friedrich Kittler, Perso-Islamicate philosophers such as Suhrawardi and Ahsai, and the writings of early avant-garde movements such as The Great Game and Surrealism.

Session 1: Introduction / A Hermetic genealogy of technical media, decolonizing Eurocentric narratives of media history, talismanic media and Hermetic magic, late capitalism and neoliberal regimes, who controls talismanic media

Session 2: Archaeoapocalypse / A Hermetic archaeology of technical media, Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge and media archaeology, archaeoapocalypse as alternative methodology, the motif of discovery of hidden and arcane knowledge

Session 3: Media as Talismans / Theorizing talismanic magic, Fontana's Illustrated and Encrypted Book of War Instruments (1420 CE), the lanterna magica, Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, Harranian astral magic, Perso-Islamicate sources, optical media's magical heritage through to cinema

Session 4: Cinematic Cosmos / Islamicate philosophy and cinema theory, decolonizing Eurocentric media and film discourse, the concept of hūrqalyā, Suhrawardī and the Illuminationist school, Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī and the Shaykhi school, the world of images (ʿālam al-mithāl), correspondence between cosmic and cinematic ontology

IMAGE: Vera Dg, Calligraphy Abstract Expressionism, 2017

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Tektologus Autodidactus: World-Engineering from Desert Islands to Corrigible Utopias,"The Seminar studies a sequence of philosophical constructions of solitary intelligence and collective organization: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān, Ibn al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Each work marks a different configuration along the path from desert island consciousness to objective spirit: the self-taught islander, the rational theologian reinserted into community, the revolutionary visitor confronted with a completed communist planet, the dissident physicist inside an exhausted anarchist order, and finally the collectivist construction site whose utopian project digs itself into non-viability. The concern is not socialist literary criticism but the use of these constructions as conceptual instruments for questions about collective labor and the maintenance or breakdown of complex social forms.

Utopian arrangements here are treated as models of organization with a computational profile: they specify inputs, update rules, channels of transmission, and costs. The seminar will ask how much logical depth—buried work, irreversibility, dependence on long chains of prior decisions—is condensed in the institutions, norms, and feedback mechanisms that sustain these worlds, and how that depth is rendered legible or left opaque. A central concern is structural tenability: how these constructions propose to withstand scarcity, conflict, and metabolic constraints without collapsing into predation, stagnation, or self-cancellation. Here, The Foundation Pit is included as a limit case in which the organizational project becomes an open-ended algorithm of descent: work and resources are sunk without convergence on a tenable structure, as the utopian project collapses into its own excavation—an ever-deepening object where labor and history are stored as depth that no habitable form can occupy.

Across four sessions, the seminar alternates close reading with explicit philosophical thought experiments. Island scenarios, organizational redesigns, and counterfactual modifications of key institutions are used to stress-test the constructions and to extract from them a set of problems about orientation, coordination, and the reparability—or irreparability—of complex systems.

IMAGE: Vladimir Lenin plays chess with Alexander Bogdanov, 1908

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Category Theory for Arts and Humanities,"Whether orders, morphisms, algebras, or mappings, the appearance of categories in pure and applied mathematics is ubiquitous. Because of its synthetic nature, its acceptance has foreshadowed the set-theoretic foundational approach to mathematics: that which would otherwise have been a behemoth construction using purely an ""analytical"" method like set theory, or subject-specific techniques, has become a dynamic foundational medium. Its diagrammatic appeal is undeniable—this is why we see its importance more and more outside of a purely mathematical context.

By Cx Tx, we mean a placeholder: Critical Thinking, Culture Theory, Cybernetics Theory, Conspiracy Theory, CosmoTechnics, Cthulhuism, etc. Attendees are required to devise an input for Cx Tx.

This Workshop is an introduction to category theory as a thinking tool. Attendees are required to showcase their learnings through an interdisciplinary project. Participants are guided to complete a mixed media: categorical formality ⊕ Cx Tx. Be it a 3D animation or an academic essay, the work must be accompanied by proper formality and an improper Cx Tx, respectively.

Session 1: Categories and Functors / Objects, arrows, and functors through formality and intuition, basic literature and tools, category-theoretic building blocks, functoriality as translation tool, Cecilia Vicuña's Palabrarmas (arm-words), breadcrumbs for project development
Readings Spivak, Category Theory for Scientists, pp. 15–22, 69–101, 113–128 (recommended but not required)

Session 2: Natural Transformation through Cybernetics / Adjunctions and natural transformations, formalizing autopoietic systems using category theory, systems theory and cybernetics, Cartesian closed categories, relational biology, Allende's cybernetic vision for Chilean politics
Readings: Louie, ""Relational Biology"" (2017), Louie, ""Essays on More Than Life Itself"" (2011)

Session 3: Categories of Models / The abstract notion of model from the semantic approach in logic, model theory and mathematical logic, relational, classical, paraconsistent, and paracomplete models, Badiou's reading of materialist epistemology, semantic link to abstract logics, interdisciplinary construal of model theory
Readings: Badiou, The Concept of Model, chapter 2 (p. 9) and chapters 4–10 (pp. 14–55)

Session 4: Set Theory co-contra Category Theory / The foundational dichotomy between set theory and category theory, NBG and ZFC formalizations, Zalamea's synthetic approach, Kantian reading of analytic versus synthetic, Vopěnka's Hypothesis, toward a full synthetic approach to foundational projects
Readings: Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, introduction (pp. 3–18), chapter 1 (pp. 21–48), chapter 3 (pp. 109–129)

IMAGE: A Thousand Plateaus, First English Translation, University of Minnesota Press, 1987

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Distance and Social Peripheries: Capital Accumulation on a Global Scale,"Mianstream Marxism has more or less understood the logic of commodity production as a fundamental component of industrial capitalism. However, according to some neo-Marxists, this perspective has focused primarily on the production circuit and overlooked the circulation process (commodity exchange) in the formation of surplus value. Since commodity exchange occurs between communities, once capitalism becomes a world-economy, these trading relations no longer take place between individual buyers and sellers, but rather between places—namely, states. Another fundamental trait of the capitalist circulation process is its inherent imbalance and inequality, which leads to the development of advanced national economies while others are subjected to exploitation and extractive activities. This phenomenon underpins political terms such as underdevelopment and Third-Worldism, which gained popularity in the 1990s.

Several theoretical frameworks have emerged to clarify the imbalance in trading terms. Two stand out in this context: world-systems theory, with its center-periphery axis (and semi-peripheries, as discussed in the works of Wallerstein and Arrighi), and Marxist dependency theory, which introduces the concept of unequal exchange—ideas best understood in light of the relationship between capital and state power. Some concepts are particularly useful for examining the connection between states and the capitalist system on a global scale: Karatani's idea of the capital-nation-state trinity, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the Urstaat, and Amin's explanation of the tributary state. This political analysis suggests that capitalism, far from being a homogeneous system, displays structural imbalances—especially from a spatial point of view. It is an asymmetric totality that began with the colonial process in the Americas, creating peripheral social formations (former colonies) in contrast to the centers of capitalism. This Seminar is intended for those interested in understanding how capitalism spreads across the globe through a logic of spatial engulfment, radically transforming the lives and cultures of communities and individuals, and establishing a material accumulation process grounded in exploitation and political disempowerment.

Session 1: Introduction / World-systems theory and the center-periphery axis
Readings: Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, Arrighi, Samir Amin

Session 2: Karatani and the Capital-Nation-State Trinity / Global capitalism as all-encompassing system, political and cultural phenomena enabling accumulation, modes of exchange
Readings: Karatani, Marx, Hegel, Benedict Anderson

Session 3: Unequal Exchange and the Axioms of Periphery / Capitalist engulfment of pre-capitalist areas, transformation of socio-economic structures and political order, tributary state, Urstaat, axioms of capitalism
Readings: Samir Amin, Deleuze and Guattari, Gunder Frank

Session 4: Peripheral Social Formations and Post-Colonial Critique / Colonial reshaping of labor systems and subsistence activities, racial and gender stratifications in the social order
Readings: Maria Mies, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen, Claudia von Werlhof, Quijano, Rosa Luxemburg, Fanon

IMAGE: Hedda Sterne, NY, NY no. X, 1948

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The Right Wing,"This Seminar introduces students to the broad parameters of right-wing thought. This includes discussions of some of its seminal figures (Burke, de Maistre, Hayek, and Nietzsche) alongside more modern movements and figures like Yoram Hazony and the National Conservative movement and post-liberal ""aristopopulists"" like Patrick Deneen. The Seminar unpacks the throughline between different right-wing thinkers in their commitment to hierarchy and the principle that there are ""recognizably superior"" persons and groups in society. It also situates right-wing intellectuals alongside contemporary developments like the rise of MAGA.

Session One: What is the Right? / This class introduces students to the debate around the nature of right-wing thought, with different explanations given by conservative authors like Russell Kirk and leftists like Corey Robin. We will also touch on the right's nostalgia for ""pre-modern social imaginaries"" centered around hierarchical complementarity and symbolized in the great chain of being.
Readings: Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, Introduction and Chapter One

Session Two: Early Right-Wing Thinkers / This class introduces students to early right-wing thinking, focusing heavily on the twinned influence of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. Burke and de Maistre embody variations of right-wing thought. Both opposed the French Revolution, but Burke did so from a more moderate and less staunchly reactionary standpoint. His bourgeois inclinations made Burke open-minded about reform in a way an aristocratic royalist like de Maistre couldn't countenance.
Readings: Selections from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Joseph de Maistre, The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions

Session Three: The Rise of the Radical Right / This class looks at thinkers that belong on the ""radical right."" These are those who regard society as so decayed by the forces of liberalism, socialism, and democracy that there is nothing left to ""conserve."" Only radical change via a ""conservative revolution"" or ""refounding"" will work. This includes some of the right's more interesting, but also disturbing, thinkers. We'll discuss the alignment of these figures with fascism and other far-right movements.
Readings: Selections from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, and Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

Session Four: The Modern Illiberal Right / We conclude the Seminar with a discussion of the contemporary illiberal and in many ways ""postmodern"" right that is currently ascendant. This focuses particularly on the United States as the current locus of world reaction. We will look at various MAGA intellectuals and see how and whether they wield substantial influence as they hope.

IMAGE: Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA speaking at the memorial service for her slained husband Charlie Kirk, 2025, Getty Images.

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Technological History of Fiction,"What if fiction was never opposed to science, but rather its secret double? Russian Formalism was the first declarative attempt at a ""scientific"" study of literature: an attempt to map the consecutive evolution of ""literary facts"" and even to unlock the secret engine of prose as if fiction could be diagrammed like a machine. But this initial inspiration by both evolutionism and thermodynamic physics alike produced an unexpected censorship: in defending the autonomy of its object, theory forbade any further ""external"" explanation and banned contact with parallel domains (science, media, technology). The laboratory became a cell. We want to dismantle the limitations of this era of ""military formalism,"" the era when literary studies, fighting for autonomy like other scientific disciplines, fortified themselves behind disciplinary walls. Instead, we will trace a radical genealogy of how different literary techniques were infiltrated by scientific experiments and media practices.

From the 19th century's first ""distant approximations"" between narrative and empirical science to the latest research at the crossroads of media, technology, and the humanities, we will explore how fiction borrows not just metaphors but instruments, how storytelling becomes a technology of knowing. The microscope and the novel were born of the same desire: to see closer, deeper, otherwise. To view the histories of literature and science as parallel or even entangled is to disrupt the old academic catechism: the familiar division in literary studies between 19th-century realism and 20th-century modernism, conveniently distributed between the autumn and spring semesters, between a passion for representation and a fascination with the surface, between literature as a window into the social world and a self-constructed instrument devoted to language.

We will instead look at fiction as a continuous experiment, where the immanent logic of writing combines with attention to parallel domains: science in the 19th century, technology in the 20th. In fact, realism itself, as an attitude towards (photo)mechanical objectivity, owed much to science and technology. Similarly, the initially strange predication of the novel as an experimental enterprise would subsequently lose its connection with the physiological laboratory and become more or less a mandatory program for modernist literature. Rewriting this history means that literature, whether realist or modernist, was never autonomous but always plugged into the scientific and technical infrastructures of its time, being at the same time not a reflection of acquired knowledge, but one of the tools for constructing possible worlds, testing epistemic limits, and exposing the aesthetic fictions that science itself cannot escape. If fiction has always been an experiment, the question always looms on our horizon: what, exactly, are we testing now?

Session 1: (Media) Archaeology of Communication and the Epistemology of Fiction / The archaeology of knowledge as prolonged and radicalized by media archaeology of communication and theories of discursive infrastructures. The joint history of literature and science. Goethe as poet and naturalist. Scientific rationality and the ""culture of the senses."" Balzac and the inheritance of natural history in fiction. Social facts and the aesthetics of positivism. Mistranslations and the foundation of Russian literary positivism.
Readings: Honoré de Balzac. Introductions to The Human Comedy // Project Gutenberg, Kittler, F. Discourse Networks 1800–1900. Trans. M. Metteer and C. Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Session 2: Experiment and Fiction. Parallelism of Contemporary Science and Art / A parallel analysis of the ""vision"" of contemporary science and art, on both pictorial and conceptual levels. Photography and psychophysiology as conditions of modernist art. The experimental measurement of sensations (light, color, sound) and the birth of Impressionism. Literary semiosis in comparison and contrast with scientific semiosis. ""Laboratories of ideas,"" ""thought experiments,"" and laboratory knowledge. The institutional and technical setting of the laboratory vs. ""the man at the writing desk."" Reference to physical facts, the genre of the hypothesis, and the use of signs in narrative fiction. The ""propaganda of scientific facts"" in Russian radical criticism of the 1860s. Transfer of the laboratory protocol into the ""experimental novel."" Modernist semiosis without reference.
Readings: Vitz, P., and A. Glimcher. Modern Art and Modern Science: The Parallel Analysis of Vision. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Baudelaire, Ch. ""The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography,"" in Modern Art and Modernism. Routledge, 1982.
Zola, É. ""The Experimental Novel"" (1893), in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. B. Sherman. New York: Haskell House, 1964. Moser, W. ""Experiment and Fiction,"" in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, pp. 61–80.

Session 3: Psychophysiological Aesthetics and the Origins of Formalism / Physiological experimentation and the ""destruction of aesthetics"" in Russian radical thought. Aesthetics as a ""branch of applied physiology"" (Nietzsche). ""Physiological aesthetics"": from metaphors to experimental settings. The materiality of language as an object of experimentation. Psychophysics and the psychophysiology of perception (auditory sensations). Experimental phonetics and laboratory equipment in avant-garde poetry. Formalism vs. impressionistic criticism and the ""parallel series."" Experimental psychology in cultural history. The positive science of literature in the history of ideas (early 20th century). Defamiliarization of Formalism.
Readings: Valéry, P. ""On the Literary Technics"" [1889], in The Art of Poetry. Trans. D. Foliot. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989, pp. 314–323. Tolstoy, L. What Is Art? Trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. Penguin Classics, 1996. Shklovsky, V. ""Art as Technique"" (aka ""Art as Device""), in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. J. Rivkin and M. Ryan. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2004, pp. 3–24.

Session 4: The Mechanization of Grammar and Psychoengineering in Fiction / The ""revolution of language"" as linguistic technology and the ""factory of literature."" Word invention and word building. The poetic avant-garde and the new media of the time. The material and technical basis for the ""mechanization of grammar."" Soviet programs of literary industrialization and collectivization. The industrial avant-garde and the history of psychotechnics.
Readings: Platonov, A. ""Factory of Literature."" Trans. A. Kalashyan, from Oktyabr 10 (1991): 195–202. Tretiakov, S. ""The New Leo Tolstoy,"" in October 118 (Fall 2006): 45–50. Stephens, P. The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

IMAGE: Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Religions on the Genitals

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Conspiracy Theory as Method: Speculation and the Infrastructure of Belief,"This Workshop invites participants to treat conspiracy theory not simply as pathology or misinformation, but as a mode of world-making: a method of connecting fragments, sensing hidden structures, and producing meaning amidst chaos. Drawing on anthropological, philosophical, and artistic perspectives, we will approach conspiracy theory as both a cultural phenomenon and an epistemic practice that attempts to render the invisible visible.
Across four sessions, participants will examine key theoretical and ethnographic approaches to conspiracy theory: from Cold War anthropology and psychoanalytic accounts of projection to contemporary digital subcultures and the aesthetics of evidence. Each week will pair a short reading or media artifact with a practical task: tracing a historical or contemporary conspiracy narrative, mapping its affective economies, or producing a short speculation (text, image, sound) that reflects how conspiracy theories form.

Rather than debunk or defend conspiracy theories, we will analyze how they organize perception and belonging, how they intersect with gender, race, and power, and how they mirror methods of anthropological critique itself. The final meeting will center on participants' creative or analytical projects (mini-essays, field notebooks, zines, or experimental presentations), each exploring how conspiracy theory serves as a diagnostic lens for the present.
This Workshop will appeal to artists, theorists, and researchers interested in ethnography, critical media, and speculative inquiry. It builds on emerging conversations that treat conspiracy not as irrational deviation, but as a mirror to reason, a sensory form that reveals as much about our infrastructures of belief as about the imaginary of hidden worlds.

Session 1: The Conspiratorial Turn, Reading the Hidden / Core readings: Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things (Chs. 1–2); Kathleen Stewart, ""Ordinary Affects"" (selections); Bruno Latour, ""Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?""
Focus: Conspiracy as ethnographic object and affective atmosphere. Field exercise: write ""fieldnotes of suspicion"" from daily life or digital encounters.

Session 2: Infrastructures of Belief / Core readings: Achille Mbembe, ""The Power of the False""; Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Ch. 7: ""Reflexive Impotence""); Jean and John Comaroff, ""Occult Economies.""
Focus: The political economy of belief and the circulation of hidden knowledge. Task: map one conspiratorial infrastructure (media, algorithmic, social).

Session 3: Intimacy, Gender, and the Body of Proof / Core readings: Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Paranoia); Eve Sedgwick, ""Paranoid and Reparative Reading""; Joseph Russo, ""Hiding in Plain Sight: QAnon and its Seekers.""
Focus: Conspiracy as moral drama and embodied knowledge. Task: produce a short audio or visual vignette on the gendered life of suspicion.

Session 4: Speculative Ethnography and Counter-Conspiracy / Core readings: David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; Sylvia Wynter, ""Unsettling the Coloniality of Being""; Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, ""Bad Endings.""
Focus: Turning conspiracy into method. Participants share final projects (essays, zines, installations, or speculative field notebooks), exploring conspiracy as critique, poetics, or world-building.

IMAGE: Blue Night Photo

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Philosophers' Diagram,"What happens when philosophy is visualized rather than merely verbalized? What if its most elusive problems like time, subjectivity, emergence, and metaphysics require not just concepts but diagrams?

This Workshop investigates the conceptual and affective power of diagrams across the history of continental philosophy. From Plato's cosmological schemas and Husserl's time-consciousness graphs to Deleuze's rhizomes and Barad's agential cuts, we explore how philosophical diagrams operate as devices (dispositifs), both exposing and producing structures of thought. Drawing from ancient metaphysics, media theory, and speculative technics, we engage diagrammatics not merely as interpretation but as method. Each session is organized around a specific thematic or philosophical problem (time, perception, subjectivity, interface, the event) and activated through a curated archive of historical and contemporary diagrams. As much a visual as a conceptual inquiry, the Workshop ""delaminates"" the diagrammatic unconscious of philosophy, revealing how thought itself can be shaped and unfolded through spatial-logical forms. The Workshop culminates in a hands-on practicum where participants develop original diagrams in real time. These may range from philosophical systems to affective cartographies, cinematic temporalities, or synthetic cosmograms. The goal is to equip participants with tools to construct their own situated, speculative diagrammatics: intuitive yet precise, aesthetic yet structural, metaphysical yet grounded.

Session 1: Cosmological Origins / Plato's Timaeus and the diagram of the khora; Neoplatonist systems of emanation; Gnostic cosmograms and the mytho-diagrammatics of Bertrand Russell's Icarus.
Readings/References: Plato, Cornford, Plotinus, Proclus, Derrida, Kristeva.

Session 2: Time, Perception, and Memory / Diagrams of temporality in Husserl and Bergson; Whitehead's event-diagrams and their mutations in Stengers and Manning; constructing processual diagrams of attention and bracketing. Readings: Husserl, Bergson, Gell, Whitehead, Stengers.

Session 3: Dispositifs and Media Apparatuses / Foucault's diagrams of epistemes and the dispositif; C.S. Peirce and diagrammatic logic; Mitchell and Stjernfelt on diagrammatology as an epistemic mode. Readings: Foucault, Bird & Tusa, Peirce, W.J.T. Mitchell.

Session 4: Platonism, Event, and the One / Deleuze and Badiou on metaphysical seriality; diagramming the One and the multiple; the tension between immanence and transcendence in diagrammatic form.
Readings: Badiou, Deleuze, Hallward, Rolfe, Masciandaro.

IMAGE: Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland. It is titled, Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1803.

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African Philosophy in the 20th Century: Historical Materialism or Ethnophilosophy?,"Today there are voices, such as that of Cedric Robinson and his followers, that speak of the existence of an ""African metaphysics"" which can provide an alternative to historical materialism as a theoretical orientation for emancipatory projects. However, this contention is not new; in fact, it goes all the way back to the birth of African philosophy as an academic subfield in the mid-twentieth century. It was also subjected to criticism from a historical materialist perspective by Paulin Hountondji. This Workshop revisits this debate and explores its current significance. Our readings will focus on two texts by the Beninois philosopher, Paulin J. Hountondji: African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983 [1976]), and The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa (2002 [1998]). Hountondji's work is interesting for a variety of reasons, but his most important contribution, at least for the purposes of this Workshop, has to do with his claim that a certain way of doing African philosophy (what he labels ""ethnophilosophy"") is liable to impede development on the African continent through mystification. We will critically assess his arguments in support of this claim and try to reconstruct and evaluate his positive proposal, which gives a rather deflationary account of the role of philosophy in development and in political movements more generally.

Session 1: The Origins of the Debate / We start with a text that has been the subject of controversy in African philosophy from 1945 onwards, namely Placide Tempels' Bantu Philosophy. Tempels' book was positively received by key African philosophers and politicians such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Alioune Diop. We examine how Tempels presents ""Bantu Ontology"" and what the implications are for debates about African alternatives to historical materialism.
Readings: Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy

Session 2: The Critique of Ethnophilosophy / This session introduces Paulin Hountondji's critique of ethnophilosophy through the first part of his book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Hountondji contends that Tempels' approach to African philosophy is liable to mislead both Africans and Europeans. Hountondji tries to show how ethnophilosophy can be critically assessed on philosophical terms and then explained in sociological terms.
Readings: Part I of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

Session 3: Nkrumah and the Shadow of Ethnophilosophy / Kwame Nkrumah championed a national development campaign in Ghana and produced a philosophical discourse to legitimate it. The key text in this philosophical discourse is his Consciencism. Hountondji contends that the African socialism that Nkrumah champions in this text is yet another iteration of ethnophilosophy.
Readings: Part II of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality; Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism

Session 4: The Place of Marxism in African Philosophy / In this session we study Hountondji's The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa to understand how his critique of ethnophilosophy was driven by a commitment to a Marxist political project. We investigate the nature of this project and its bearing on debates about development and emancipation on the African continent today.
Readings: Paulin Hountondji, The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa

IMAGE: Wosene Worke Kosrof, Woman of the Nile, 1998

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The Void Writes,"This Workshop examines how writing is engendered by the void, and writing as the site where the void unfolds even if unfolding is its only doing. Drawing on literature and philosophy, it asks what happens when form is not assumed to impose upon nothingness but to arise from, and through, it. The Seminar explores how the void necessitates form: why there is nothing that precedes creation, or rather, that nothing precedes creation and must itself be understood as something creative.

The Workshop begins with the concept of the crushed narrative, developed through a close reading of Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, where writing is engendered by the shadow of a lost companion, through the very inability to account for them. It is this void that becomes text in not becoming text.

We then turn to Ovid's Metamorphoses, where chaos becomes both the origin and driving force of transformation in the emergence of new forms. The impossibility of narrating chaos directly creates a contradiction that generates endless variations of form, stories that are actual material forms.

The third session turns to urban suicides and examines their potential, not as mere corpses, not as reduced to ""society,"" but as horizons through which a necessary destruction or abandonment, and a founding of a new polis, become possible. The suicides are openings to be translated into (human) language and space, while also remaining as voids within it.

The final session considers Kafka's ""The Burrow"" and Bernhard's Correction and discusses the impossibility of creation alongside the possibility of creation through correction. Correction is not only a destructive but a generative force, precisely in remaining destructive. Correction is the total elimination through which a text, body, or world becomes possible, an elimination that is registered as text, body, or world. This problematizes the notion of gender as a site that can only be corrected.

Participants are asked to produce a hybrid project (a theoretical reflection and a creative project) demonstrating that what cannot be said in either medium may only be addressed in a space between: a void that is not articulated but opened. The void in this sense is reshaped as a possibility for unexpected interaction.

Session 1: Crushed Narrative / Theme: Narrative and the ethical void as an embodied experience
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (selections), Emmanuel Levinas, ""There Is: Existence Without Existents""

Session 2: Quem dixere chaos / Theme: Chaos as the generative principle of metamorphosis
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Books 1–8; selections)

Session 3: Dwelling as Falling / Theme: The swirling of the polis; the dialectic between dead and alive
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn ""The Ister"" (selections), Jean-Luc Nancy, ""Blanchot's Resurrection""

Session 4: Korrektur / Theme: Impossible creation; generative correction; the denial to pass and transition
Thomas Bernhard, Correction (selections), Franz Kafka, ""The Burrow"" (selections), Jacques Derrida, ""Fors""

Final Project /The space between theory and practice; void as method, Participants produce a dual project (theoretical + creative), articulating the in-between space where meaning and embodiment emerge, attempting to articulate something within a topos of a new void, beyond (or even against) what is actually articulated.
Jean Genet, What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet

IMAGE: Graham Gillmore, Untitled (Glossary 2002), 2002

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"Aether, Field, Manifold: Transcendental Aesthetic","From Descartes to Feynmann via Faraday and Einstein, the notion of some abstracted spatiotemporal domain in which matter and its motions interact has posited as the fundamental ground of physical theory. As Kant demonstrated in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, such a formal geometric ground is one of the necessary a priori conditions for the possibility of experience. The pure forms of intuition—space and time—are what render the “manifold” of sensation receptive to order; they provide the understanding with the structured data it requires to synthesize appearances spatiotemporally. Without these forms, sensations would not be arrayed in any configuration of “simultaneity” or “succession”: experience would become rhapsodic, lacking all coherence and unity.
Kant’s aesthetic, however, is developed within a Newtonian framework. Space is the a priori form of outer intuition, homogeneous and essentially Euclidean; time is the pure form of inner intuition, continuous and one-dimensional. Yet even within this Newtonian framing, Kant, as per the Metaphysical Foundation of the Natural Sciences, still maintains the notion (still widespread in 18th-century natural philosophy) of the “aether,” a dynamic plenum of matter underlying all interactions. Though Kant carefully avoids positing a physical aether as a constituent of things-in-themselves, the concept nonetheless lingers as a heuristic constraint: forces require a domain of possible transmission, and the understanding requires an organized manifold to operate upon.

However, the emergence of the field in the works of Faraday and Maxwell, the relativistic reconceptualization of the spacetime manifold in Einstein, and the development of quantum field theory in the 20th century, collectively displaced the Newtonian framework that silently underwrites Kant’s aesthetic. What once appeared as fixed, absolute forms of intuition have become plastic and relativistic. The manifold of spacetime is no longer understood as an empty formal container (what Leibniz and Kant called absolute space and time) but a medium whose very geometry depends upon energetic and material configurations. Indeed, matter and energy bend the very fabric of spacetime, and the geometry of this interactive manifold dictate what it is possible to intuit (the speed of light sets an absolute limit to the informational intuitable horizon). Furthermore, in quantum field theory, even the notion of “particles” as objects in space and time gives way to excitations of underlying fields defined over highly abstract manifolds. That is to say, no longer can we separate those objects of experience from the field in which they said to be experienced. Matter is not place in a field, the field is matter.
This course takes this paradigmatic revolution as its central problematic. It will examine how the concepts of aether, field and manifold ultimately compels a rethinking of the very transcendental aesthetic framework within which physical experience is possible. The guiding question is: What would a transcendental aesthetic look like if it were transductively reconstructed in light of the historical and scientific development of the field and the manifold from out of the notion of the aether? Or put differently: Can we articulate an a priori framework adequate to a world in which the fundamental entities are not substances in space and time, but relational, energetic fields whose structure determines the geometry of their own manifold?
Over four weeks, we will trace this conceptual evolution:
• from the early modern aether as a medium of forces,
• to Faraday’s and Maxwell’s reconception of physical interaction as continuous field activity,
• to Einstein’s fusion of spacetime and field into a single dynamical structure,
• to the radical ontology of quantum fields in which particles are modes of excitation and the vacuum itself is structured,
• and finally to contemporary philosophical attempts to interpret fields and manifolds not merely as scientific constructs but as potential transcendental conditions of appearance—conditions for the intelligibility of experience in a post-Newtonian world.

Session 1 — From Substance to Medium: The Aetherial Cosmos
Theme:
The early modern transition from Aristotelian substance to mechanical plenum; aether as the universal medium of forces and waves.
Primary Texts:
• René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), Part II (“Of the Principles of Material Things”).
• Isaac Newton, Opticks (1704), “Queries” 18–31.
• Christiaan Huygens, Treatise on Light (1690), Preface and ch. 1.
Secondary Readings:
• Mary Hesse, Forces and Fields (1961), ch. 1–2.
• E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925), ch. 6 (“Newtonian Dynamics and the Aether”).

Session 2 — Electricity, Magnetism, and the Birth of Field Thinking
Theme:
Faraday’s empirical turn from action-at-a-distance to lines of force; the conceptual shift from medium to relational topology.
Primary Texts:
• Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity (1831–1855), §§ 3078–3110 (“On Lines of Force”).
Secondary Readings:
• Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), ch. 2 (“Field and Force”).
• Peter M. Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter (1982), ch. 4 (“Faraday and the Field Concept”).

Session 3 — Maxwell’s Equations and the Ontology of Energy
Theme:
Field as continuous energy distribution; mathematical formalization and unity of electricity, magnetism, and light.
Primary Texts:
• James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), Book II, ch. 1–4; Book IV, ch. 20–23.
Secondary Readings:
• Jed Z. Buchwald, From Maxwell to Microphysics (1985), Introduction and ch. 2.
• Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force” (1847).

Session 4 — Relativity and the Dissolution of the Aether
Theme:
From electromagnetic field to spacetime field; the collapse of absolute medium into geometric structure.
Primary Texts:
• Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905).
• Albert Einstein, “Ether and the Theory of Relativity” (1920).
• Hermann Minkowski, “Space and Time” (1908).
Secondary Readings:
• Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function (1910), Part II.
• Thomas Ryckman, The Reign of Relativity (2005), ch. 3.

IMAGE: Pierre Huyghe, De-Extinction, 2014

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"Limits of Decolonial Reason: Modernity, Universality, and Gnoseological Critique","This Seminar assesses the major conceptual contributions and limitations of the so-called ""modernity-coloniality"" movement in Latin America from a philosophical standpoint. It examines the major theses elaborated by this movement while diagnosing the internal fissures that open decolonial thought beyond the original tenets adopted by its foundational figures and their guiding methodological strictures. Above all, the Seminar explores the purported extension of the critique of Eurocentric reason advanced by historicist thinkers since the 1940s, and by the philosophy of liberation since the 1970s, to interrogate the methodological foundations of Western epistemology and ""occidentalism"" in its complicity with the coloniality of knowing and power that accompanies the institution of the ""modern world-system,"" as described by Immanuel Wallerstein.

First Session / In the first, introductory session, we depart from a retrospective localization of the ""decolonial turn"" through a genealogical reconstruction of Latin Americanist thought in the twentieth century. We then consider some of the foundational texts published in the 2000 collection Colonialidad del Saber (Coloniality of Knowledge), which functioned as a first definitive collective statement for the movement. In particular, we focus on foundational texts by Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, which also clarify the continuity with and departure from the liberationist program in its sociological and historical aspects. In this context, we find the concepts of the coloniality of power and knowing become explicitly elaborated and belabored as an extension of the critique of Eurocentrism.

Second Session / We focus on Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, and Ramón Grosfoguel's critique of Western epistemologies in the name of a gnoseological critique that would rehabilitate non-Western gnoses, and their critique of universalism in the name of a pluriversalist perspective. We interrogate the protracted reconstruction of Western philosophical modernity in its complicity with the coloniality of knowing, which conditions the challenge to universalism as a covert Eurocentrism, as well as the methodological coherence of the subordination of ontology to epistemology.

Third Session / We examine an alternative trajectory of decolonial thought that resists the wholesale denunciation of modernity as inextricably bound to coloniality defended by Mignolo and others. First, we focus on the genealogical critique adopted by Santiago Castro-Gómez, inspired by Foucault, who, in El tonto y los canallas, proposes a retrospective delineation of the depoliticizing effects of the abandonment of universality in the aforementioned vectors of decolonial thought. Second, we focus on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's trenchant critique of the complicity between the adoption of decolonial thought within the Anglo-Saxon academy as symptomatic of a nefarious complicity with neoliberal constituency in its distance from, if not hostility to, insurgent popular movements.

Fourth Session / We examine the recent attempts to formulate an alternative mode of decolonial thought that would not only rehabilitate the possibility of a modernity without coloniality, but also of a universalism without Eurocentrism. Focusing on the work of Gabriel Catren, we see a program for a reconstituted systematic philosophy that reactivates the universalist spirit of the early twentieth-century Latin Americanist project while traversing its residual humanist, anthropocentric, and Eurocentric elements. At the same time, we evaluate the extent to which such a program risks relapsing into a pre-critical metaphysical program that elides the development of Latin American consciousness since the historicist turn of the 1940s.

IMAGE: Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF), New Rural Agenda, 2022

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Hegel and the Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity,"Are we the authors of our own actions and decisions? Or are we always already determined, conditioned, and influenced by our social, historical, cultural, and economic environs such that our agency is merely a reflection of these processes? This Seminar tackles these questions head-on by engaging with G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel was a radical and incisive thinker whose ideas have shaped the face of political philosophy and critical theory. With questions of political agency and free will as urgent as ever, this Seminar examines Hegel's ideas of freedom and the weight they carry in the political, economic, and social contexts of the 21st century by engaging with my book Freedom, in Context: Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Examining the concept of freedom from a Hegelian Marxist perspective, I demonstrate that the essential relation between self-determination and causal necessity in Hegel's thought is a multifaceted process to be viewed through historical, temporal, logical, and ontological lenses. Using examples from the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental justice, economic inequality, and democratic uprisings in Iran, the value of Hegel's philosophy is emphasised in contexts beyond the colonial, Eurocentric tendencies of his worldview. Emphasizing the central role of temporality and history in the conception of free will gives this new reading of Hegel real practical import for the pressing political issues of our time.

Session 1: Introduction(s) and the Problem of Freedom in Modern European Thought / An introduction to the Seminar by a general presentation of the core philosophical context: concepts, themes, questions, and problems associated with self-determining freedom and the logic of necessary causation in European modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant). We see how Hegel's intervention into these debates not only develops the philosophical significance of freedom, but more importantly how his dialectical approach provides helpful conceptual tools to diagnose and critically think through contemporary social and political movements of self-determinacy.
Readings: Malabou, ""Contextualizing Freedom,"" in Freedom, in Context (2024), pgs. x–xvi; Radnik, ""Introduction,"" Freedom, in Context, pgs. 1–12.

Session 2: Freedom, Necessity, Self-Reflexive Historicity / This session examines the essential relation between the concepts of self-determining freedom and causal necessity in Hegel's early Jena writings (up to and including the Phenomenology of Spirit). We explore how temporal and logical movement is constitutive of this relationship in Hegel's thought.
Readings: Radnik, ""Chapter 1: Freedom, Necessity, Self-Reflexive Historicity,"" Freedom, in Context, pgs. 13–54.

Session 3: Christianity and the Temporality of Freedom /
Through an examination of Hegel's philosophy of religion, we see that his account of Christianity demonstrates how being-with-oneself-in-one's-other, in addition to expressing human freedom, is simultaneously a temporal formula to the extent that it reveals how human freedom sublates the external causal factors that serve as its necessary ground. Since the causal factors temporally precede and condition human freedom, they constitute a historical necessity.
Readings: Radnik, ""Chapter 3: Christianity and the Temporality of Freedom,"" Freedom, in Context, pgs. 127–157.

Session 4: Hegel's Political Theory and Freedom /
We finally turn to Hegel's political thought. By examining Hegel's concepts of ""free will,"" ""right,"" ""ethical life,"" ""the state,"" and ""world history,"" we explore that insofar as they are external and particular shapes of the universal and eternal absolute idea, these concepts express their historicity since they are shapes of the idea of freedom in its historical process of actualization.
Readings: Radnik, ""Chapter 4: Political-Social Freedom and Philosophy's Historicity,"" Freedom, in Context, pgs. 159–189.

IMAGE: Paul Delaroche, The victors of the Bastille in front of the City Hall, July 14, 1789, 1830-39

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Understanding Microclimates,"In this Seminar, we will be studying microclimates. Microclimates are regions of heightened atmospheric variability that generate divergent forms of life. In ecological terms, microclimates emerge from complex interactions among the physical conditions of a place, such as winds, water currents, temperature, humidity, and terrain. Yet, moving beyond a materialist paradigm, microclimates may also be composed of immaterial aspects like sensations, images, thoughts, and perhaps entities. This seminar asks, what becomes possible if we expand our understanding of microclimates to include the immaterial alongside the elemental? To approach this question, we will enter into several microclimates where thought, image, and sensation interfuse with and shape variations on the surrounding environment: The Antipodes of Unity, Eshraq, and Land of Birds. The Antipodes of Unity arises from a convalescing writer’s immersion in fields, forests, and visions of the night sky. Eshraq appears where computation and virtual worlds intersect with Persian philosophy and myth in a contemporary cityscape. And Land of Birds seeks to restore the land’s connection with indigenous memory and cosmology in a local park, through story and sound. By cultivating nascent microclimates through our own research and multimedia projects, we will explore potentials for inhabiting spaces where the elemental and immaterial converge – not in isolation, but amid the broader currents of a “world of many worlds.”

Session 1. The Antipodes of Unity
–Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics”
–Blaise Cendrars, “At the Antipodes of Unity”

Session 2. Eshraq
–Samir Mahmoud, “‘Alam al-Mithal or Mundus Imaginalis”
–Ali Eslami, Eshraq

Session 3. Land of Birds
–Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, “Pluriverse”
–Djaara storytellers with Olivia Guntarik, Land of Birds

Session 4. Microclimates
–The final session is reserved for in-depth discussion of seminar participants’ work.

Group Assignment: For the second or third week, find an example of a microclimate and share it with us.
Final Assignment: For the final week, present your exploration of microclimates using the medium of your choice.

IMAGE: Pierre Huyghe, Camata, 2024.

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Post-Accelerationism: Futurity between Time and Space,"There have been a number of recent attempts at taking stock of Speculative Realism on one side, and of Accelerationism on the other (including the fashioning of new labels: cute/acc, psychotic acc, effective acc, etc.). But from the ashes of that intellectual constellation that formed sometime between 2006, the release date of Meillassoux's After Finitude, and 2015's Xenofeminist Manifesto, including the re-release of Nick Land's texts from the 90s and the launch of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, it is Left Accelerationism that is mostly left out of any serious engagement. Coined in 2013 by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, the term was very rapidly dropped by its own proponents and never appears in their 2015 book Inventing the Future.

This Workshop tackles, if not some influences, some resonances of the specifically left accelerationist constellation from the time on more recent political and intellectual endeavors. With its demand for imagining a new future compatible with abstraction and scientific rationality, the ideas of the Manifesto resonated and took on different guises, some mostly convergent, some only partially so. Starting from a close reading of the MAP and of the Xenofeminist Manifesto, the Workshop shifts emphasis in the middle sessions from the temporal futurity announced in these attempts to a spatialized future harboured by the critics that come from the point of view of the Global periphery. Instead of these provoking a blank rejection of the tenets of L/Acc, the Workshop rekindles its wager on abstraction from a more globally spatialized point of view.

Session 1: Introduction to MAP / The first session is a close reading of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics and of the XF Manifesto, tracing its immediate intellectual influences in Marxist critique of political economy, CCRU-era accelerationist writing, Speculative Realist attempts to rekindle scientific rationality within continental philosophy, and gender politics in xenofeminism. The critique of localist politics is given precedence in the session.

Session 2: Neorationalism / One important mutation is called ""epistemic accelerationism,"" referred to in many writings of the 2013–15 years. Stemming from the connection between the political ideals of L/Acc and the epistemological program coming from the scientific realist wing of Speculative Realism, neorationalism is traced in its program of inferential unpacking of the consequences of Reason and of the Human (as inhumanism) in a few important texts of the time.

Session 3: The Real Abstraction Constellation / In 2008, with the publication of ""The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,"" Alberto Toscano paved the way for the revitalization of the Sohn-Rethelian thesis of real abstraction in the Anglo-American continental milieu. Reflexes of the dissemination of these theses can be seen already in the Speculative Aesthetics volume, out in 2014, where many of the speakers, including Srnicek, Williams, Brassier, and Fisher, among others, mention the real abstraction hypothesis as a way out of the problems put forward by the left-accelerationist espousal of abstraction (a mention that came way too early to be registered at the time).

Session 4: Futurity as Time and as Space / While not a signatory of the Manifesto, the works of Mark Fisher are given place of prominence in the fourth session as defining a new set of attempts to rekindle ""Post-Capitalist Desire"" and ""the Communist Hypothesis"" as Badiou and Žižek would have it. With this, the Workshop arrives at a juncture where the point of view of the periphery as depicted in the works of Roberto Schwarz and Paulo Arantes becomes relevant to think of any kind of post-capitalist futurity. The parallax is important: while Fisher wants a new orientation towards the future, these Brazilian authors suggest that the future of capitalist experimentation is to be found in the peripheries of the World System, issuing a challenge to any Global North-led understanding of the dynamics of contemporary capital (a charge that was all too soon led against L/Acc). Here the debate between left-accelerationism and communization theory as led by Ray Brassier can put us on track to a theory of transition in its relation to organizational issues.

IMAGE: #Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, 2013

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Autism and Civilization,"Taking the cue from Foucault, this Seminar will look at autism as a flash point within discourse about biology, politics, and culture. Since its description in the early 1900s as a form of childhood schizophrenia, autism has rapidly transformed and shifted from a developmental ""catastrophe,"" to the result of emotionless parents, to environmentally caused, to part of a larger neurodiversity movement. The Seminar will look at how autism has activated and reactivated mad activism, the neoliberalism of neurodiversity, and the questions of biopolitics and the function of norms in contemporary life.

Session 1: From the Ship of Fools to the Hospital Ship / Much panic around autism relies on pathologization and the weaponization of statistics against the condition. The first session will examine how autism was constructed as a kind of general loss of reason and autonomy from within classifications of schizophrenia and psychosis.
Readings: Chapters from Neurotribes; excerpt from The Hospital Ship; Preface to Foucault's Madness and Civilization

Session 2: T.O.M., Tommy, and Sally-Anne / Theory of Mind and Theory of the Self / A central aspect of the diagnosis and medical articulation of autism in the late 1980s and 1990s was the assertion that autistic individuals lacked any notion of sense of self and therefore were incapable of empathy. Here philosophy of mind and psychology mask for cultural norms, particularly prevalent in the way theory of mind (TOM) is treated as psychological fact. We will also explore alternative understandings of theory of mind, such as narrative theory and monotropism.
Readings: Essays from Simon Baron-Cohen and Devon Price; excerpts from Empire of Normality (Chapman)

Session 3: Neanderthals, Animals, and Aliens / Another aspect of the study of autism revolves around splitting autistic humans off from neurotypical humanity. This has been done through associations with Neanderthal DNA on the one hand and by claiming that neurodivergent people are more akin to animals or aliens from another planet. These themes have also at times fed into notions of ""Aspie supremacy"" or constructions of autistic identity as something superior to allistic or neurotypical individuals.
Readings: The Arachnean (Ferdinand Deligny); ""Enrichment of a Subset of Neanderthal Polymorphisms in Autistic Probands and Siblings"" (Pauly et al.)

Session 4: Vaccines and Memes, or Autism as Culture Machine / This final session will look at the most recent aspects of autistic identity in the cultural and political present. Increased advocacy by way of neurodivergence has been met with rejuvenated forms of eugenics as well as the discussion of autistic children at the expense of autistic adults. This infantilization of autism has been appropriated by groups as disparate as right-wing mothers of autistic children to reality TV producers. Lastly, we will address the specter of vaccines which refuses to die.
Readings: ""Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response"" (hbomberguy); ""Ileal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-Specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children"" (Andrew Wakefield)

IMAGE: Francisco Goya, Witches’ Flight, ca. 1798.

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The Revenge of Reason: On Inference and its Consequences,"What is the fate of Reason in the twenty-first century? Is its invocation nothing but a cipher for earthly powers that diffuse and retrench as the political terrain shifts, or is Reason the only force capable of eroding the unthinking intuitions upon which those powers thrive? Can it be mobilized into concrete systems of uncommon sense, collective weapons to dispatch all self-serving rationalizations and vacuously 'reasonable' banalities? Or will it be dissolved without remainder in the Bayesian dance of expected utility? This Workshop outlines a Neorationalist conception of Reason that resists postmodern critique and Bayesian dissolution alike. Deploying a collection of texts written over more than fifteen years, it presents an integrated philosophical perspective that delves into the epistemic, semantic, and logical mysteries of inference and extrapolates their metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical consequences. Lectures will explore theoretical tendencies such as Prometheanism, Inhumanism, and Computationalism, and address questions ranging from 'What is a game?' and 'What is the value of art?' to 'What is real?' and 'Why does anything matter?'
Almost all session readings are taken directly from The Revenge of Reason. The rest will be made available. Readings in bold are mandatory; the others are recommended.

Session 1: Introduction / Neorationalism in Outline, 'On Neorationalism', 'Prometheanism and Rationalism'
'Philosophy and Normativity'
Session 2: Computational Kantianism / 'On Transcendental Logic', 'On Computational Asymmetry'

Session 3: Inferentialism and Inhumanism / 'The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens', 'Artificial Bodies and the Promise of Abstraction'

Session 4: Hegelian Minimalism / 'Essay on Transcendental Realism', 'The Greatest Mistake'

Session 5: Biology and its Discontents / 'Beyond Survival', 'Incarnation'

Session 6: Personhood and its Problems / 'On Containing Multitudes', 'Not So Humble Pie'

Session 7: Art and Agency / 'Art and Value', 'What's in a Game?'

Session 8: Beauty and Freedom / 'Why Does Anything Matter?', 'The Weight of Forever'

IMAGE: Matt Bovingdon, Revenge of Reason, 2025

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Lyotard and Non-Human Language in the Age of LMMs,"Large Language Models present us with a new and shattering perspective on language that forces us to put into question our assumptions on the meaning of terms such as thinking and speaking, as they are traditionally linked to the idea of subjectivity. In this seminar we will shed some light on what language is for neural networks through the lenses of Lyotard's anticipatory reflections on the emergence of a non-anthropocentric conception of language.

We will first introduce the view on language that emerges from Le Différend: to master language amounts to correctly enchaining words one after one another according to rules that depend on use, something that a statistical machine could do. From this standpoint, language is not the means of expression of a subject, but the subject is an effect of modes of linking words. We will then see how Lyotard develops this view in the exhibition Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou 1985). Here, the philosopher was interested in computer technologies and the way in which they challenge the modern conception of language as well as the status of the subject. The beginning of the internet era, which the philosopher witnessed, invites us, in fact, to rethink the role of humans within an ontology in which everything (including humans) is a more or less complex interface in the global communication network. Finally, we will consider the conception of language that follows the process of vectorization and embedding that allows, today, the deployment of LLMs (large language models). We will see how current natural language processing technologies achieved the non-modern and non-anthropocentric way of conceiving language that Lyotard was invoking while subverting his expectations. We will discuss the promises and risks implied by the vectorization of language, in particular, we will question the social and political consequences of the uses and abuses of the automated system for linguistic production.

Session 1: Le Différend / Readings: Excerpts from The Differend; ""In reading your work..."" in Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates, edited by Kiff Bamford, Bloomsbury 2020.

Session 2: Les Immatériaux / Readings: Lyotard, ""After Six Months of Work..."" in 30 Years after Les Immatériaux, edited by Y. Hui and A. Broeckmann, Meson Press, 2015; ""Les Immatériaux: A Staging"" in Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates, edited by Kiff Bamford, Bloomsbury 2020; ""Les Immatériaux: A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard"" in Lyotard's Interviews on Les Immatériaux, edited by A. Broeckmann and S. Meijide Casas, Les Immatériaux Research, Working Paper No. 11, 2024.

Session 3: The Vectorization of Language / Readings: Juan Luis Gastaldi, ""Why Can Computers Understand Natural Language?"" Philosophy & Technology, 2021, 34(1), pp. 149–214; Gregory Chatonski, ""Vectorial Politics.""

Session 4: Students' Presentations /

IMAGE: Julieta Aranda, As the Ground Becomes Exposed, 2016

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Jerusalem Syndrome: Symbolic overload & the architecture of belief,"This Roundtable investigates Jerusalem Syndrome, a rare psychoreligious phenomenon in which an individual experiences intense religiously themed ideas or delusions triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem, as a framework for examining symbolic overload, spiritual cognition, and the embodied architectures of belief. Instead of interpreting the syndrome as pathology, it is approached as a heuristic for understanding how sacred and symbolically charged environments can overwhelm perceptual and cognitive boundaries, producing rupture, transcendence, or revelation. Drawing from neurotheology, affect theory, cultural psychiatry, and spatial phenomenology, participants will explore how neural, architectural, and affective systems converge to generate sacred experience. The Roundtable aligns with The New Centre’s commitment to collaborative, research-based, and transdisciplinary inquiry, linking cognitive science, philosophy, and spatial theory through experimental collective learning.

PROCESS: One week before Session One, participants receive a lecture draft, reading list, and case materials (Bar-El, Witztum and Kalian, Bachelard, Pallasmaa, Ahmed, Newberg, Persinger, McNamara, Burke). They also begin Symbol Diaries or Affective Fieldnotes, documenting encounters with symbolically or emotionally saturated spaces to prepare their interventions.

SESSION ONE: Symbolic Overload and the Architecture of Belief (3 hours). A 60-minute lecture examines the neurocognitive and spatial mechanics of symbolic excess through case studies of Jerusalem, Paris, and Florence, cities historically and affectively charged to the point of psychic saturation. Jerusalem Syndrome and its sister syndromes, Stendhal and Paris, are presented within a framework that connects architecture, affect, and cognition, revealing how sacred and aesthetic environments function as symbolic amplifiers that exceed the brain’s integrative capacity. Each participant then presents a 10-minute critical response connecting the lecture and readings to their research or creative practice. The session concludes with a group dialogue on how affect, architecture, and cognition converge to produce states of belief, rupture, and transformation.

SESSION TWO: Neurospiritual Futures: Collective Inquiry and Reflective Practices (2.5–3 hours). The session begins with introductory framing remarks and a guest presentation by Suhaila Abu Hadba Mounayer, a Jerusalem-born artist whose work on church architecture, wartime tonality, and spatial memory introduces an embodied perspective on sacred density, destruction, and resonance. Participants then deliver revised 10-minute reflections based on their Symbol Diaries and Affective Fieldnotes, connecting personal observations with theoretical framing to trace how encounters with symbolically charged environments reshape understandings of belief, perception, and space. The session ends with a full-group discussion and collaborative synthesis, transforming insights into short texts, conceptual diagrams, or symbolic mappings that articulate emergent frameworks of spatial affect, symbolic overload, and neural plasticity.

ASSIGNMENTS: 1. Group Manifesto: A collective statement articulating shared insights on symbolic overload, faith, and perception. 2. Conceptual Diagram or Schema: A visual mapping of relations between space, cognition, and belief within the Triple Helix framework of Nature, Technology, and Society. 3. Roundtable Video (5–7 min): Edited highlights for The New Centre’s public archive. 4. Individual Reflection: A one-page text explaining how the Roundtable reframed each participant’s approach to transdisciplinary or research-based practice.

OPTIONAL PRACTICES: Case analysis of Jerusalem, Stendhal, and Paris Syndromes; symbolic density mapping through psychogeographic or diagrammatic tools; affective fieldnotes integrating spatial phenomenology and affect theory; and a Symbols Diary that documents images, texts, or experiences exerting symbolic pressure or affective charge.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES: Shared theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying sacred and symbolic environments; a collective publication or zine integrating text, diagrams, and audiovisual documentation; and contributions to The New Centre’s pedagogical model that emphasizes mutual development and collaborative research outputs.

READING LIST: Bar-El, Y. et al. (2000). Jerusalem Syndrome. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 176(1), 86–90; Witztum, E. and Kalian, M. (2016). Jerusalem Syndrome and Paris Syndrome: Two Extraordinary Disorders. Oxford University Press; Newberg, A., d’Aquili, E. and Rause, V. (2001). Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. Ballantine Books; Persinger, M. A. (2001). The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 13(4), 515–524; McNamara, P. (2022). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience. Cambridge University Press; Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press; Pallasmaa, J. (2012). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley; Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge; Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful."
"Art & Theory Industrial Complex: Capital, institutions, language and the production of value","This Roundtable begins from a critical stance toward the tightening co-dependence between art and theory within the institutional and economic structures of contemporary cultural production. Rather than affirming this relationship as an inevitable or progressive development, it interrogates the mechanisms through which theory and art have become mutually instrumentalized within shared circuits of validation, value, and visibility. The Roundtable reframes their interaction as a material and political problem: how are artistic and theoretical practices shaped, limited, and co-authored by the forces of governance, policy, and institutional mediation that transform creative labor into exchangeable forms of knowledge and capital? By analyzing the shared material base of art and theory, the discussion exposes how disciplinary divisions reproduce themselves within capitalism’s cultural logic, even when presented as critique. From this perspective, political economy appears not as context but as an active author in the production of meaning and form. Across two sessions, participants will explore how the art–theory nexus can be rethought as a site of tension rather than collaboration, identifying strategies for resisting or reconfiguring the conditions that capture creative and philosophical production within the industrial complex of contemporary art.

SESSION ONE: The first session introduces the theoretical framework for the Roundtable through key texts by Marina Vishmidt, Peter Osborne, and Andrea Fraser, examining how their analyses of labor, value, and authorship reveal the interdependence of economic and aesthetic forms. The discussion then extends to Robert Brandom and Reza Negarestani, whose concept of a “space of possibilities” opens new grounds for understanding the relation between art and reason. We will also consider Josefine Wikström’s critique of art’s confinement to the experiential domain, placing it in dialogue with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a historical anchor for art’s entanglement with reason. In the background, readings by Alberto Toscano and Sianne Ngai on real abstraction help reframe how social relations determine the production and perception of art. After the instructor’s presentation, participants will deliver ten-minute interventions connecting the readings to their own artistic or theoretical projects, identifying and unpacking specific instances of the art–theory relation through conceptual or material analysis.

SESSION TWO: The second session builds on the insights from Session One. Participants will present short reflections on how the readings and discussions have informed their work. The conversation will focus on how theoretical and artistic practices can resist their capture by capitalist institutions and generate new modes of production, circulation, and collaboration that exceed the current art–theory industrial complex."
What Is Democratic Economic Planning?,"In partnership with the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning (INDEP)

DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable explores Democratic Economic Planning (DEP) as an alternative to the financialized market-based economy. With neoliberalism in crisis and authoritarian movements on the rise, there's renewed interest in how economies might be organized differently. Any proposal for economic planning has to answer several basic questions: How do you gather accurate information about what people need and what resources exist? What do you measure things in—money, labor time, physical units, some combination? Who makes decisions, and how centralized should that be? Do markets have any role, and if so, what kind? How do you motivate work and handle distribution? These questions are not new. They emerged in the Socialist Calculation Debate of the 1920s-30s. Answers have been attempted differently across historical experiments—from Soviet central planning to Chile's Cybersyn project to contemporary participatory budgeting initiatives. Today's proposals range from participatory economics to algorithmic coordination models that imagine repurposing Amazon's logistics infrastructure for democratic ends.

SESSION ONE: The opening session will lay out this intellectual landscape and the core problems any planning model confronts. We'll look at how these questions connect to contemporary concerns about technology, ecology, and democratic transition strategies.

SESSION TWO: The second session builds from student research to map current debates and identify where productive collective work might happen.

OUTCOMES: You'll understand the fundamental challenges facing economic planning proposals and how different models tackle them. We'll cover key historical debates and experiments alongside contemporary paradigms that leverage digital infrastructure. You'll gain frameworks for evaluating whether planning proposals are actually democratic and practically viable, plus exposure to real-world implementations and transition strategies. And you'll connect with others exploring alternatives to market coordination."
Accelerationism as a Philosophy of Energy,"This Roundtable maps the extent to which accelerationism can be understood as a philosophy of energy, fostering discussion around what a supposed “point of view of energy” implies for human beings and our collective desire for energy transition—and how these implications have been theorized elsewhere within accelerationist thought. In this sense, the Roundtable addresses not only the climate crisis but also questions of contemporary ontology, centering on the paradigmatic passage between Nick Land and Reza Negarestani. In Cyclonopedia, Negarestani annihilates any residual metaphorical distance by turning the novel’s protagonist into the energy source itself, detonating Land’s libidinal-materialist diagnostic machine and marking the point of no return for speculative realism. To treat accelerationism as a philosophy of energy is to approach the climate crisis from the impossible standpoint of energy itself—from exuberant sunlight to decayed oil—and to ask what aesthetic and theoretical consequences such a perspective entails. Both Land and Negarestani displace authorship into fictional or nonhuman figures—from Land’s machinic and libidinal personae to Negarestani’s fictitious Professor Parsani—raising questions about what such aesthetic strategies mean and what they do. As capitalism increasingly becomes a system for expending vast quantities of energy to achieve barely more than nothing—transforming heat, water, and resources into alphanumerical sequences—it becomes necessary to ask: what does energy think it is doing, and to what extent does such a question make sense at all?

ROUNDTABLE BREAKDOWN: 1. Critique of Speculative Realisms: Beginning with Quentin Meillassoux, we examine speculative realism’s core claims, distinguishing its critical mode from its critique of Kantian correlationism. /// 2. The Libidinal Materialism Diagnostic Machine: We reconstruct the accelerationist apparatus developed by Land to understand how “hyper-correlationism” operates as an energetic and metaphysical framework. /// 3. Climate Crisis and Correlationism: We turn to the state of the art in the scientific and economic debates surrounding the climate crisis, tracing how their conceptual architectures remain embedded in Kantian correlationism. /// 4. Ecological Philosophies and Capitalism: Finally, we engage “more explicitly ecological” ontologies, such as Amerindian perspectivism, to consider what they reveal about capitalism and the planetary crisis when positioned alongside accelerationism and correlationist critique.

SESSION ONE:The first session introduces participants to the overlapping terrains of contemporary ontology and the climate crisis by exploring the extent to which science itself faces a metaphysical crisis rooted in the effects of Kantian correlationism, as articulated by Meillassoux. Here, we traverse this terrain using what accelerationism calls the libidinal materialism diagnostic machine—a model as expansive as the territory it seeks to map. Through the works of Land and Negarestani, we reconstruct the contours of a philosophy of energy implicitly shared between them, one threaded through the energetic continuum linking Nietzsche and Freud. By the end of Session One, participants will be able to engage fully with the Roundtable’s theoretical stakes, situating accelerationism as an attempt to think energy and transition from the standpoint of energy itself.

SESSION TWO: The second and final session begins outside accelerationism, examining how contemporary economics, science, and philosophy conceptualize the interrelations between energy, capitalism, and the climate crisis. This session invites participants to connect these frameworks with the accelerationist critique of correlationism, asking how thought itself becomes bound to metaphor when it encounters energy—and what this has to do with the fictitious and performative strategies of Land and Negarestani. Ultimately, “Accelerationism as a Philosophy of Energy” becomes less a conclusion than a platform for shared inquiry. This session is designed as a space to identify theoretical and aesthetic overlaps among participants, nurturing collective research agendas and potential future collaborations rooted in libidinal perspectives and their possible transcendence.

READING LIST: Ray Brassier, “The Truth of Extinction,” in Nihil Unbound, Quentin Meillassoux, “Ancestrality,” in After Finitude, Nick Land, “The Curse of the Sun” and “The Passion of the Cyclone,” in Fanged Noumena, Reza Negarestani, “Tellurian Insurgencies: Xerodrome, Solar Tempests, and Earth–Sun Axes,” in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Mark Fisher, “Spinoza, K-Punk, Neuropunk”, Nick Land, “Barker Speaks,” in CCRU Writings / Fanged Noumena, Reza Negarestani, “Uncharted Regions: Catalytic Spaces,” in Cyclonopedia"
"How to Fix Brain Rot: A Soviet guide to AI, labor, dialectics, and reflexivity","This Roundtable addresses the widespread sense that current discussions about AI and cybernetics are creating cognitive breakdowns rather than genuine insights. Instead of producing new philosophical understanding, today's AI often promotes what we might call ""existential stupidity"" – a kind of ideological brain rot that traps both technological systems and human thinking in repetitive, meaningless loops that drain vitality from social systems. This course uses Soviet cybernetic theory to understand why current AI discourse often feels stuck and unproductive, and offers practical tools for more reflexive, collaborative approaches to thinking about technology, cognition, and society.The problem is that we're stuck in a closed loop: whenever we try to understand machine intelligence, we end up with incomplete visions of either technological apocalypse or singularity, preventing us from developing truly self-critical perspectives.To break out of this trap, the course draws on Soviet thinkers who developed an unconventional Marxist-cybernetic approach. They proposed what they called a ""reflexive exit"" – a way of acting that enables radical reconfigurations and helps us handle unprecedented situations. Central to this approach is the figure of the ""methodologist"" from the Moscow Methodological Circle (MMC), who uses dialectical tools to critically examine their own thinking processes in collaborative, multi-perspective ways.

SESSION ONE: In this session, we will work with the concept of brain rot as the emerging tendency in collective sense-making that brings what R. Scott Bakker calls “semantic apocalypse.” Using the second-order cybernetic framework, we will analyze brain rot as an exemplification of reflexive closure and trace its implications, revealing a non-reflexive, individualist understanding of cognition and action, caught by cognitive science’s gap between the individual and the collective. This gap, weaponized by the algorithms, reveals how brain rot confines cognitive systems – along with their norms and values of activity – to endless, trivializing self-referential iterations trapping the social system within pre-set patterns. We will see how this cultural situation can be assessed as a cognitive-practical rupture. This will set the stage for introducing the MMC’s emergence within Soviet philosophy, tracing its roots in systems theory, cybernetics, and especially Marx’s methods of organic wholes, cell-forms, and the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. After that, we will present MMC as a counter-culture to dogmatic Marxism, classical cognitivism, behaviorism, and reflexology – especially regarding their early debates on logic and thinking with Evald Ilyenkov. Totality and omniscience – the aims pursued by AI – can be disenchanted as based on hollow abstractions extracting thinking, action, society, and innovation from their functioning in organic wholes. These one-sided abstractions are yet to be concretized with a robust methodological toolbox.

SESSION TWO: In this session, we will see how the MMC reinterpreted dialectics and reflexivity – as an optimization of activity (Georgy Shchedrovitsky’s general activity theory), observation of cognitive systems’ resistance against trivialization (Vladimir Lefebvre’s reflexive control theory), and the generative mechanism of mutual mirroring and communication between cultural systems (David Zilberman’s modal methodology). These positions interpret labor and activity as collective and transformative, with an inherent, concrete (“contentful”) logic irreducible to atomized, abstract algorithmic operations. Brain rot will be a primary example of successful trivialization and the execution of reflexive control, detaining the system in the interposition of cognitive-practical rupture, and not merely a neurological disorder kindred to ADHD or attention span reduction which are often analogized with the impact of brain rot. We will unpack the instrumental view of reflexivity as an exit from the standpoint of the generic individual embraced by the classical political economy. Philosophical systems can be operated as technical instructions and mechanisms for a praxis devoid of prototypes, thereby overcoming intersystemic tensions and incompatibilities. This supplies the means to analyze, reengineer, and overcome destructive ruptures (such as brain rot), cultivating a new understanding of AI as a converted form (verwandelte Form) compressing the elements of human labor, its reciprocal linkages with social-systemic structures. Ultimately, this session aims to elucidate how ruptures – while potentially leading to both failure and creation – can be dialectically overcome through a gradual approximation of truth and goodness."
The Essence of Analytic Philosophy,"What is analytic philosophy, really? Does it have an essence or at least some stable feature that defines it? Is there such a thing as ‘analytic’ style, and how do we recognize it? The answers to these questions are ambiguous. Some blame analytic philosophy (hereafter, AP) for the lack of internal values—claiming that it is essentially asocial and apolitical— some praise it for the lack of precisely the same features. Another way to define analytic philosophy is, again, negative: it is ahistorical at its core. Even though all these characteristics are valid, it is clear that a positive characterization of AP on its own is missing. Does it have its own values, and, for that matter, history?

SESSION ONE: The purpose of this Roundtable is to synthesize a collective answer to these questions, i.e., to provide good explanations for what makes AP the very thing which it is, and hopefully, in this way, acquire its essence. To fulfill this task, we will take a look at the work of historians of philosophy as varied as Christoph Shuringa, Scott Soames, and Guillermo Rosado Haddock, whose representations are polarized both in terms of the implied constitutive values and critical approaches. This will occupy us during the first session. During this gathering, we will collectively create a diagram representing all three approaches and highlighting their virtues.

SESSION TWO: In about a week, we will gather for the second meeting to retackle the essence of AP and forge our own definition of it, not identical to any of the previously discussed representations. The outcome of two sessions will be a short programmatic text containing our definition(s) of AP, complemented by a diagram representing the variety of its historical narrativizations.

Yet some of us might object that embarking on such an inquiry is retrograde and senseless, since neorationalism has eliminated the analytic-continental distinction long ago. They may remind us of many instances of neorationalist interplay with the concepts of Wilfrid Sellars, the method of Rudolf Carnap, and even critical metaphilosophically of Ludwig Wittgenstein—all of which was done alongside the traditional engagement with German Idealist thought. However, to those objecting, still, we might say: merging analytic with continental is one task. Understanding the essence of ‘analytic’ is another."
Scalar Darwinism: Is There No Alternative?,"This Roundtable offers a critical inquiry into the directionality, ontology, and developmental logic of contemporary Artificial Intelligence through an experimental framework—Scalar Darwinism. The Roundtable argues that, with its proprietary regimes, uniformist and essentialist presuppositions, data-centric ontology, and the elevation of quantity as the metric of progress, modern AI aligns neatly with the logic of development characteristic of what Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism. Capitalist Realism and Scalar Darwinism reciprocally reinforce one another, amplifying the impression that—just as there appears to be no meaningful alternative to capitalism—there are no real alternatives to AI R&D beyond Big Tech’s current path: ever-inflating, data-devouring transformers without substantive qualitative shifts in architecture. The Roundtable questions this status quo by (1) critically exposing our present condition and (2) surveying alternative “lines of flight” that could meaningfully exit the Scalar Darwinism trap.

ROUNDTABLE FORMAT: Instead of a lecture and Q&A, the Roundtable unfolds in two sessions separated by at least two weeks. A pre-circulated draft and readings anchor Session 1, where participants deliver 10-minute interventions that position the material in relation to their own research (not summaries). In Session 2, participants return with revised positions for a construction-focused discussion that culminates in collective statements/manifestos and visual schemas/genealogies, with short edited video pieces and individual one-page reflections as tangible outputs.

SESSION ONE: How Scale Captured Intelligence (Description and Structure) Instructor presentation (≈60 min). Entrenchment as the current phase of Capitalist Realism; how contemporary AI functions as a tool of entrenchment rather than rupture—producing a slightly dystopian projection of yesterday’s disappointments into the near future. We analyze what “scalar fitness” selects for (uniform tasks, data-hungry architectures, centralized and proprietary control, positive only outcomes of Scaling Laws) and against (hybrid/ neurosymbolic methods, program induction, sample-efficient learning, edge autonomy, privacy-preserving federations, open-weight civic infrastructures, critical implications of Scaling Laws). /// Participant interventions (10 min each). Critical responses (not summaries) mapping the lecture/readings to each participant’s ongoing research or conceptual project, identifying where their work collides with or diverges from Scalar Darwinism. Theme clustering (wrap-up, 15–20 min). We cluster emergent motifs and methodological affinities—sketching an initial Triple-Helix map (Nature–Technology–Society) to seed group formation.

BETWEEN SESSIONS: Participants self-organize into small groups around shared vectors (e.g., neurosymbolic routes, program synthesis, retrieval-modular systems, small/ edge models, open-weight governance, federated privacy, local compute). Each group drafts a 1-page position and a first pass at a diagram/timeline/ genealogy.

SESSION TWO: Vector Alternatives to the Order of Computation (Description and Structure) Interventions Revisited. Participants present how their positions shifted after Session 1: reading-informed pivots, methodological swaps, mini-prototypes, or evaluation criteria that privilege capability diversity over mere scale. Instructorled roundtable synthesis. The vector alternatives would be introduced across three layers: 1. Architectures & Methods — neurosymbolic paradigm, program induction/synthesis, retrieval-modular systems, continual/interactive learning, small & edge models. /// 2. Deployment & Governance — local compute, federated privacy, accountable open-weight regimes, reproducible/transparent evaluation cultures. /// 3. Political Economy — forms of thought and practice that resist subsumption and co-optation; “order of computation” alternatives that don’t default to scale ambitions and ethics of ”the survival of the X-est.”

FINALIZED OUTPUT: Group deliverables, a collective statement/manifesto or a visual schema (Triple-Helix map, topology of alternatives, or short genealogy), suitable for further exhibition/publication; a brief suitable for a 5–7 minute edited Roundtable video. Individual deliverable — a one-page reflection on how the Roundtable reconfigured one’s stance on method and transdisciplinarity."
Artist Writing / Artistic Production: The Perspective of Perspective (A World Mediated by a Faulty Image of the World),"DESCRIPTION
This seminar will focus on the relationship between artistic practice, art theory and artistic writing; probing ways to cross cultivate writing and art making as two sides of an artistic practice. While artists have become increasingly reliant on theory and philosophy in order to find avenues to produce works of art; there is little theory being produced directly in the art field. In effect, the reliance on outside sources for the theoretical foundations of art practice, becomes a form of recycling, robbing art of its role in contributing as a source of original theory to discourses outside of itself. This seminar attempts to highlight and perhaps shift that relationship towards a more productive role for art in the production of theory. The participants will examine artistic writings produced within the last 3 decades, focusing on the works of theory by Anton Vidokle, Hito Steyerl, Martha Rosler, and Liam Gillick (additional authors TBA). Through readings, conversations and writing projects, participants will be encouraged to approach artistic writing as embedded into their practice and not as a schizophrenic double running parallel to a separate art object.

""There is an implicit relationship of reciprocity between mainstream networks of cultural circulation and the new ones being proposed. What happens when new forms are absorbed? How can you resist a system that has factored in resistance as part of its circuit of expansion? What we are given as a model for resistance, also works as an assumption: It assigns references, perpetuates readings and presupposes the conditions both for resistance and for what is being resisted. It denies the unexpected, and this predictability makes the cycles of cultural production rather similar to the cliffhanger show, ‘The Perils of Pauline’ (a 1917 silent serial shown in weekly installments featuring a perpetual damsel in distress. At the end of each installment she was placed in a situation that looked sure to result in her imminent death. The start of the next episode showed how she was rescued or otherwise escaped the danger, only to face fresh peril again.) Thinking of art/cultural production as a “damsel in distress,” why do we, in fact, want to rescue her? How do we escape the genre and revitalize things? Is it possible to propose a circulation model that will remain vital and current?""
--Julieta Aranda (2006)

REQUIREMENTS
A syllabus will be assigned at the beginning of the seminar, and students are required to do all the assigned readings. The main objective of the course is to develop writing as an integral part of art making, so students are required to complete a 3000 word text that relates to their work. The guidelines for the final texts will be determined at the beginning of the seminar, and the texts in progress will be rigorously discussed throughout the duration of the course, both collectively and in one-to-one sessions. Course participants will also be required to write 2 reviews of art exhibitions that they have seen during the seminar. These should be delivered in advance to the meetings and will be discussed collectively."
"Internet as a Platform, Programming as a Medium","DESCRIPTION
This Seminar will explore the constructive and expressive aspects of programming, and approaches the internet as a platform for building new systems and/or mediating between the real and the cybernetic. As the web matures, programming has become the most versatile means for the production of lucrative economies. Artists, on the other hand, have been expropriating programming as an expressive tool for artistic production and creative inquiry since the 1960’s, with pioneering exhibitions such as “Une esthétique programmée'” and “Cybernetic Serendipity”. In our networked world and post-software era, internet browsers have established themselves as the de-facto operating systems of the web; they run entire applications by acting as windows to remote clusters of massive computing power AKA “the cloud”. In this context, JavaScript, the native programming language of browsers, becomes an increasingly versatile instrument for creating and running small and large programs that can instantly be accessed over the internet across different platforms. understood in the context of art, JavaScript language has the potential to be used as a medium to create, experiment with, and instantly share and deliver works of art over the internet.

REQUIREMENTS
This seminar will be structured around 3 JavaScript programming projects, due by the end of the seminar. After introducing basic programming concepts in theory and practice, the participants will begin working on these projects evolving around concepts of a) simulation, b) algorithmic image manipulation and c) machinic vision. The framework for starting the projects will be provided to students as a point of departure in the first session by Nilchiani. Each seminar session will allocate time to instructor-guided hands-on programming. With an understanding of high level concepts, the class will focus on writing experimental software and examining the capabilities of programming languages."
Marx & Technology,"""Marx alone sought to combine the politics of revolt with the 'poetry of the future' and applied himself to demonstrate that socialism was more modern than capitalism and more productive. To recover that futurism and that excitement is surely the fundamental task of any left 'discursive struggle' today.” -Fredric Jameson

DESCRIPTION
This seminar will examine Marxist reflections on technology and their role in both consolidating capitalist power and potentiating post-capitalist futures. From Marx’s initial ambiguous writings on technology – sliding between immense respect and outright horror – the Marxist tradition has grappled with these tensions in a variety of ways. This seminar will be reading classic and not-so-classic Marxist texts in an effort to uncover what technology may be able to offer for a future political economy.

To what extent can technology be repurposed? What are the social consequences of automation? And what might technological development look like after capitalism? Topics covered will include automation, the fetters of capitalism, the critiques of productivism, labor process theory, cybernetic planning, and socially useful production. The Seminar will examine a range of thinkers, including Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Panzieri, Cleaver, Noble, Federici, Mandel, Wainwright, Dyer-Witheford, Ramtin, and Morris-Suzuki.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each split between an hour and an hour and a half lecture and around an hour of group discussion. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Cut of the Real: Non-Philosophy & the Question of Subjectivity,"DESCRIPTION
Following François Laruelle’s nonstandard philosophy and the work of Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Luce Irigaray, and Rosi Braidotti, this seminar reclaims the relevance of categories traditionally rendered “unthinkable” by postmodern feminist philosophies, such as “the real,” “the one,” “the limit,” and “finality,” thus critically repositioning poststructuralist feminist philosophy and gender/queer studies. Poststructuralist (feminist) theory sees the subject as a purely linguistic category, as always already multiple, as always already nonfixed and fluctuating, as limitless discursivity, and as constitutively detached from the instance of the real. This conceptualization is based on the exclusion of and dichotomous opposition to notions of the real, the one (unity and continuity), and the stable. The non-philosophical reading of postructuralist philosophy encountered in this seminar engenders new forms of universalisms for global debate and action, expressed in a language liberated from philosophy's auto-referentiality and sufficiency. The non-philosophical reading of the contemporary poststructualist philosophies of subjectivity aims to liberate theory from ideological paralysis, recasting the real as an immediately experienced human condition determined by gender, race, and social and economic circumstance. The seminar draws upon Kolozova’s The Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2013), and will be of interest to students enrolled in Social & Political Thought, Curatorial Practice and Critical Philosophy Certificate Programs.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four 2.5 hour sessions, each split between a 10 minute introduction to the session, a 20 minute lecture, 30 minutes of student-facilitated group discussion, a brief break and 1.25 hours of instructor-facilitated Oxford/Williams-style tutorial presentations on the readings and topics of the day. All students will write four mini-essays of 600-1000 words each addressing a current event or recent cultural object in light of the readings, due at the end of each week. These will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussions and tutorials. The top pieces will be given extensive feedback for revision into a full paper and promoted by the professor for publication in leading academic and/or para-academic venues."
Posthuman Life I: Humanism Unbound,"DESCRIPTION
Since its emergence in the 1990s, the term “posthuman” has been used to mark a historical juncture at which the present and future status of the human are radically destabilized. Thus, two distinct posthumanisms can be discerned over this period. Futurists regularly concatenate “post” and “human”` when speculating about the long-run impact new technologies have on the future shape of life and mind. By contrast, for philosophers in the “Continental” tradition, the posthuman is a cultural moment marked by the philosophical and material untenability of the foundational status of the human. Posthumanism, in this critical sense, is defined through the deconstruction and overcoming of the dualism of human subjectivity versus the non-human objectivity of “things”.

In this seminar, students will engage Roden’s Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, which integrates the speculative and critical approaches to thought within a philosophical account of the passage from a human to a posthuman state. The seminar will consider the themes of the first five chapters of the book: What is the relationship between posthumanism and other critiques of humanism? Does critical posthumanism undermine the futurist understanding of the posthuman? Can transcendental philosophy impose anthropological constraints on the space of possible posthumans? Is it possible to develop a rigorous and naturalistic theory of the posthuman that is compatible with the dated nonexistence of real posthumans?

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four 2.5 hour sessions, each split between a 10 minute introduction to the session, a 20 minute lecture, 30 minutes of student-facilitated group discussion, a brief break and 1.25 hours of instructor-facilitated Oxford/Williams-style tutorial presentations on the readings and topics of the day. All students will write four mini-essays of 600-1000 words each addressing a current event or recent cultural object in light of the readings, due at the end of each week. These will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussions and tutorials. The top pieces will be given extensive feedback for revision into a full paper and promoted by the professor for publication in leading academic and/or para-academic venues."
Curatorial Practice II: Curating the Future,"DESCRIPTION
The 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, witnessed the emergence of a new class of cultural producers named curators who worked with with artists, museum officials and private collectors to organize art exhibitions. Through an ongoing process of self-specialization, curators began to play a decisive role in the production of art and shaping the function of the individual artist. Over the course of the last two decades, in turn, many universities have begun to offer curatorial studies programs, focusing on the development of the curator’s role in constructing associations between art, artists and audiences, as well as elaborating the significance of exhibitions as the key space for approaches to contemporary art and society.

This second module of the Curatorial Practice seminar will look at how telecomputation, or the synthesis between telecommunication and computation, has both transformed and made inseparable the production and distribution of art, culture and knowledge, and introduced conceptual changes for the curatorial field. Participants will consider the categories of post-internet and data-driven art from a critical perspective and will examine the strategies of absorption, rejection and recuperation of the telecomputational paradigm on the part of established contemporary art institutions. The seminar will explore and develop real and cybernetic strategies to assist in the salvaging and utilization of the existing global art world infrastructure to frame and exhibit new art forms for the 21st century beyond that which has historically been referred to as “contemporary art”.

REQUIREMENTS
Participants will form groups to address different aspects of the seminar topic or other themes that emerge in the readings-related discussions during the first two sessions. Between the first two and the second two sessions, the instructor and groups will meet on Google Classroom platform to discuss theoretical issues towards the planned exhibition, conference & catalogue for Prague's Tranzit Gallery by the instructor in March 2016. Participants will then return to finalize their contributions in January and set the resulting project into motion."
Art and its Reason(s): Retooling the Horizons of Practice,"“If art already embodies the potential of a non-standard existence, would this not mean that we would be stuck in a semantic game of interpretational formalism: reinterpreting the artwork in novel terms but without altering the principles of its production? On the other hand, what possibility remains for any investment in the category ‘Art’, and what is produced under its name?” - Amanda Beech

“Far from having merely been the Other of Reason, art played a decisive role in the Modern, rationalist and universalist distribution of possibilities, and this is why it can also participate in their transformation [...] Glass Bead contends that it is only from the complex weavings that supported the constitution of these Modern borders that it is possible to navigate a thoroughly transmodern passage.” - Glass Bead

“The condition and horizon of an art [other than contemporary art] is not that it be felt, appreciated in vague ways, or made-sense-of as contemporary art is, affirming in each case the viewer in her or his sensitivities and capacity for judgment... It is [rather] an art of rational knowledge. ‘Knowledge’ here means that if there is an experience to be had, it can not only be formulated with a coherent logic and reasoned (even if its results are historically irrational) but also that it is subject to the predictive and generative exercise of reason qua new organizations of matter, thought, and experience.” - Suhail Malik

DESCRIPTION
This seminar will introduce a diagnosis of contemporary art (CA) that challenges several dominant and ideal narratives endemic to the field, addressing the chasm between what many want CA to do, what many say CA does, and how CA actually operates. This overview grasps CA systemically, including the entire spectrum of production, dissemination, economy, discourses and reception, rather than focusing solely on individual practices. What do we want, or expect from art today in the face of global complexity? How can art be defined outside of a localized and subject-centred paradigm? How can CA move from planes of critical description towards horizons of how it ought to be; and why is this path worth forging for a distinctly 21st century mode of transit? How does art understand itself politically in relation to the scientific and social real, stereoscopically? Can one avow a definition of art within the folds of a leftist project more generally as an endeavor of ethical inhumanism? What sets of particular affordances can this new definition of art map out that other fields cannot? This seminar proposes a first step in a long-term, massively collaborative project for art’s redefinition and reorientation through readings, guest respondents and the experimental format of the digital studio seminar.

REQUIREMENTS AND DETAILS
The aim of the seminar is to work through the double entendre of the course title, both speculating on the reasoning for a continued existence of the category we name as ‘art’, as well as how this ‘art’ can participate within the distribution of reason itself.

The seminar will be composed of five 2.5 hour sessions. For the first four sessions, the first hour and ½ of class will be structured as a reading group introduced by seminar leaders, followed by an invited guest. The final hour is dedicated to group discussion where two to three students per week will be required to prepare questions/commentary referencing the readings and the work of invited guests (a sign up will be posted in advance of the class). This last hour of class will be devoted to the elaboration and discussion of these questions.

There is a strong practice component to this course on which a large portion of the final assessment will be based. Students will be required to produce a ‘screen-friendly’ work; it will be up to practitioners to determine how they negotiate the constraints of the medium - be it textual, moving-image, photography, drawing, diagrammatic, model of distribution etc. The final 2.5 hour session will be left open for a group seminar to review students work. This will be available to fully enrolled students, there is the possibility that auditing students may also show work time/space permitting.

Session Preparation: Students are expected to do the required readings assigned for each week and to actively participate in the discussion part of each class. Each week 2-3 students will prepare questions based on the weeks readings and lead the initiate an hour of discussion. A sign-up page prior to the first session will be posted. Topics/sessions will be available on a first come first serve basis with an upper limit put on each week. Students are also expected to produce and art work or project that can be digitally disseminated for review on the final day of class. They are also expected to write a minimum 300-500 words on the class room discussion board."
The Anarchy of Objects II: Onto-Cartography,"DESCRIPTION
Since the revolutionary work of Immanuel Kant, Continental philosophy has been dominated by the idealist or correlationist paradigms wherein it is argued that mind structures and constitutes reality. In 20th century Continental philosophy, this correlationist turn has been manifested in the thesis that it is language, signs, discourses, or narratives that structure reality. This thesis has also harbored the emancipatory promise of liberating people from oppressive conditions through a critique and deconstruction of various discourses and symbolic systems that structure social relations.

Through the disclosure that forms of subjectivity and identity are not intrinsic properties of persons but are social constructions, these identities and power-relations are revealed to be contingent, and it becomes possible to build new forms of subjectivity, identity, and social relations. Such is the political import of the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and those influenced by Lacan. The emancipatory achievements of the semiotic turn are not to be underestimated nor minimized; however, they have obscured another form of power, non-discursive power, that arises from materiality as such. Power issues not simply from signification and how we signify, but also how the world of objects about us is organized.

Through a reading of Bryant’s Onto-Cartograhy: An Ontology of Machines and Media, this seminar explores both the being of material objects and how they contribute to the organization of social relations through technologies, infrastructure, living beings, and features of geography. Over the course of the Spring seminar, students will be introduced to the ontology of machines, relations between machines, and how they influence the form that societies take. The seminar will explore machinic ontology, adopting a functionalist perspective that argues all beings, regardless of whether or not they are fabricated by humans, are machines, and will investigate nonhuman, animal, mineral, technological, institutional, and semiotic machines. Special emphasis will be placed on how worlds are structured and the ways in which power functions within these different worlds. Students will learn techniques for mapping worlds so as to better devise strategies of resistance and escape from oppressive formations.

REQUIREMENTS
Each seminar session will consist of lectures over the material assigned that week, as well as class discussion. Students are expected to participate in class with contributions of their own in the form of questions and observations. They are required to attend all four sessions of the online seminar. Over the course of the week there will also be message board discussions in regards to the material. Students taking the course for credit will write a 3000-3500 word essay, applying the concepts drawn from the assigned readings in the analysis of how a region of the social world is structured."
Aesthetics of the Generic & Non-Event,"“[T]he generic is capable of supporting a multiplicity of heterogeneous acts or predicates, among other things the thoughts of science and philosophy: the generic is endowed with extension but without totality or singularity, thus under-determined, non-absolute” --François Laruelle from The Generic Orientation of Non-Standard Aesthetics.

“The difference between the apparatus and the universe is, accordingly, that the apparatus is subject to human control. But it cannot stay this way forever: in the longer term, the autonomy of the apparatus must be liberated from human beings.” --Vilém Flusser from Into The Universe of Technical Images

DESCRIPTION
Through an exploration of our contemporary relationship to the technical image, this seminar will develop an aesthetic theory of the generic in relation to the non-human form. Laruelle’s Non-Standard Aesthetics posits an under-determined collapsing of art and philosophy in order to elide categorical distinctions between the realms of vision and thought. Flusser frames the contemporary image within ostensibly non-human and technical means; they both propose a “new universal” criteria for judgments of taste and reason, but, crucially, without any reference to an idealized Absolute. In relation, the idea of the evental, or the crucial fulcrum of actualized being conceptualized most notably in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, will be considered within the more radical context of Laruelle’s onto-vectoral immanence and Flusser’s technical framework.

What are the important implications of a generic aesthetics? How has a continuous and accelerated accommodation of image making/producing to technological means of production engendered an under-determined criterion of representational reason? Why does it seem that the present moment calls for a more active and pragmatic approach to aesthetics? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this seminar by guest artists and curators regarding the form and content of the generic.

REQUIREMENTS
Each seminar will consist of focused readings that will help to structure the group discussion, which will be presented both in a physical, institutional location in New York City and online, via Google+ Hangouts. Participants are expected to contribute to these sessions spontaneously and with four short response papers (500-750 words max), due on a weekly basis. In addition to the written component, participants will engage in a daily photographic process from which they will curate a select grouping of images demonstrative of an aesthetics of the generic, which will be developed both individually and within the group dynamic of the seminar."
Hyperstition & The New Weird II: Fictional Worlds & Possible Futures,"DESCRIPTION
This spring seminar, “Fictional Worlds & Possible Futures”, builds on the previous one (“Entities and Worlds/Genres and Climates”). By focusing on the philosophical and literary concepts of the world and world creation, it will examine the fictional and the possible, philosophically, but more specifically in contexts that are hyperstitional (making things real, coincidence intensification) and weird (genre splitting and recombination). In attending to possibility and futurity, we hope to examine how the creation of worlds theoretically and fictionally lend themselves to the interconnection of ethics, politics, and time.

The New Weird is a notoriously difficult literary genre to define, as it involves splicing together of fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres - but as Ann and Jeff Vandermeer suggest, The New Weird undermines those genres’ fixed cliches and overtly romanticized world views. Indeed, the genre remains difficult to define further. As Michael Cisco has put it:

“Nothing could be more unenlightening or useless than a New Weird manifesto. What strikes the observer is precisely the spontaneity with which so many different writers, pursuing such obviously disparate literary styles, should vaguely intersect in this way. Instead of a set of general aims, we have a great proliferation of correspondences on a more intimate level, like a sprawling coincidence of idiosyncratic choices.”

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each split between an hour and an hour and a half lecture and around an hour of group discussion. Students are required to do the assigned readings for each week, along with participating in presentations and discussion. In addition, each student is expected to lead at least one discussion on assigned readings during the course of the seminar. Students will also manage their own blogs, in which they will compose a 400 word post regarding some aspects of the weeks topic in advance. This will be shared via Google Classroom for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructors in advance. Students do have the option of presenting their own project as a replacement for the final essay."
Bitcoin and Philosophy,"DESCRIPTION
This principal purpose of this seminar is to constitute Bitcoin – in all of its main senses, as a protocol, a currency, and a contemporary industrial revolution – as a definite philosophical object. Through this process, philosophical conceptuality and method undergoes significant reciprocal modification. In particular, the understanding of philosophical appropriation as a hash of its object introduces cryptographic principles into its most basic procedures.

The first module of the seminar is devoted to an analytical abstraction of the Bitcoin system, accommodated to the language and problems of philosophy. A close reading of Satoshi Nakamoto’s catalytic 2008 paper provides an anchor for discussion. By methodically reconstructing the Bitcoin solution to the double-spending problem, in terms that fully-capture – but displace – its articulation within computer science, the Bitcoin system is brought into communication with more highly-generalized philosophical concerns.

The second module turns to the inherited fundamental concepts that have been re-installed by the Bitcoin machine. These include: money, contract, property, work, society, power, knowledge, truth, signs, history, agency, identity, time, and being. By grouping these concepts into four coherent clusters – duplicity, singularity, and the sign; the open secret (the public and the private); computer power (politics, anti-politics, and the Bitcoin commercium); and artificial singularity (truth, time, and being) – some tractable compression is achieved.

REQUIREMENTS AND DETAILS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended blog essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

Preliminary Reading:
Nakamoto, Satoshi, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (2008)
Diffie, W.; Hellman, M, “New Directions in Cryptography” (1976),
Szabo, Nick, “Shelling Out -- The Origins of Money” (2002)
& “Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets” (1996)

Background Material:
Hobbes, Leviathan
Locke, Two Treatises of Government
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Heidegger, Being and Time
Turing, ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’
Deleuze & Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (two volumes)

**We can accept bitcoin for this seminar as well. Email us at info@thenewcentre.org for more information**"
Reintroduction to Metaphysics II: Method & Practice,"DESCRIPTION
The end of metaphysics was a dominant theme in early 20th century philosophy. Even though the Western philosophical tradition sundered in two, one of the few things its analytic and continental halves seemed to agree upon was that the age of metaphysics was over, either because physics had finally usurped it or because philosophy had finally rooted out the pathological desires which drove us to speak of the fundamental structure of reality. The resurgence of metaphysics in the second half of the century in both traditions certainly came as a surprise, even if it has taken until the turn of the 21st century to become ingrained in both camps. However, despite its increasing popularity, there remains much confusion about precisely what metaphysics is: how does it sit within philosophy as a whole? How does it relate to the sciences (especially physics)? How do we go about doing it? The purpose of this seminar and its subsequent followup in Spring is to reintroduce metaphysics by considering these sorts of methodological questions, and to do so by explaining the history of its rise, fall, and rise again.

The Spring Semester, “Method & Practice,” will open by consolidating the methodological issues discussed in the first part, and attempt to present an account of what metaphysics is. This will provide answers to the most pressing questions regarding the philosophical role of metaphysics (e.g., its relation to science) and a methodology for orienting ourselves towards specific metaphysical questions (e.g., the problem of universals). We will then address a number of these specific questions, examining classical and contemporary debates on a number of topics from within this new methodological framework.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be split between an hour and an hour and a half lecture and around an hour of group discussion. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. This will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance."
Global Politics of the Anthropocene,"DESCRIPTION
This seminar is structured upon the premise that we are already in the grip of the Anthropocene, a turbulent era of human caused, planetary changes in which we are confronted with the transformation of the very conditions of possibility for both organic and social life. Our goal for this seminar will be to intensify our perceptions of what the Anthropocene will mean for the 21st century on a number of levels, including the ecological, the cultural and the political. In order to broach these questions, we will undertake a conceptual survey of global and local strategies of engagement with the Anthropocene, as conditioned by technocultural and geopolitical globalization. Along the way, we will consider altermondialisation and transmodernity discourses that have developed alongside the Anthropocene, just as we will examine the antiglobalization and antimodern discourses that have reacted against it. Drawing upon thinkers engaged with the rapid multiplication of global “centers” and internal/external “peripheries” that are confronted by climate change unevenly, this seminar will function as a collective investigation into the transnational and transitional nature of the Anthropocene, including modes of ecological, technocultural and geopolitical exchange in our emergent encounters with the consequences of the new epoch.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four 2.5 hour sessions, each of which will be split between a 10 minute introduction to the session, a 20 minute guest lecture, 30 minutes of student-facilitated group discussion, a brief break and 1.25 hours of instructor-facilitated Oxford/Williams-style tutorial presentations on the readings. All students will write four mini-essays of 600-1000 words each addressing a current event or recent cultural object in light of the readings, due at the end of each week. These will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussions and tutorials. Students in the certificate program will receive extensive feedback and assistance in expanding the paper into a publishable document."
Capital as Computation & Cognition: From Babbage’s Factory to Google’s Algorithmic Governance,"DESCRIPTION
Since the times of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, if not for even longer, capital has functioned as a form of computation constituted by and as a complex mathematical system. After WWII the numeric essence of capital has been coupled with the informational dimension of cybernetics and computing machines, while also subsuming emergent forms of augmented intelligence. Capitalism, as a form of accounting and as an exterior mnemonic technique, is in itself a form of transhuman intelligence. Cognitive capitalism, specifically, on the basis of its infonumeric procedures, from layman’s accounting to sophisticated algotrading, as well as from immaterial labour to scientific research, is an institution of computation.

The aim of the seminar is twofold: on the one hand, it will provide a critical introduction to the notions of cognitive capitalism, immaterial labour and general intellect as developed by Autonomist Marxism, as well as those of abstraction and the automation of intellectual labour & artificial intelligence, as discussed in the accelerationist debates. On the other hand, the seminar will test these theories and hypotheses on the ground of contemporary case studies contextualized by the global networks of the Internet and social media, logistics and the internet of things, intelligence apparatuses, climate science infrastructures and the algorithmic stock exchange. Finally, each session of the seminar will be dedicated to a specific historical technological assemblage: 1) the role of information within the industrial factory; 2) the role of machinic knowledge in post-WWII cybernetic factories; 3) the role of ranking algorithms and procedures in the network society; 4) the role of algorithmic governmentality in the metadata society.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four 2.5 hour sessions. Students will write four mini-essays of 500-1000 words for each session in relation to the research focus, due at the end of each week. The mini-essays will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussions, tutorials and final presentation or potential publication of research projects. The top pieces will be given extensive feedback for revision into a full paper and promoted by the professor for publication in leading academic and/or para-academic venues. This is the first module of a two-part seminar."
Philosophy and Mathematics I: Consequences of Diagonalization,"DESCRIPTION
Metamathematics (alternately metalogic) may best be regarded as naming an experiment in self-reference: what happens when we realize not only that mathematics is encoded, but that the encoding has, in turn, mathematical properties, raising the problem of the mathematics of the code of mathematics? Is there knowable truth in this abyssal reflection, or do we have to be content here with the usual duplicity of the understanding and its imaginary supplement? Cantor's discovery of diagonalization, arguably the major event of logical history since Plato, shows that there is some knowledge that can be articulated in this place, while at the same time the truth of diagonalization protects itself in a completely novel way from reduction to the knowledge we acquire of it. For while diagonalization is the metamathematical ""technique'' par excellence, it is also something more and less than a technique, something which functions and dysfunctions at the very edge of formalization. If we cannot avoid assimilating diagonalization to tekhne at a first pass, neither should we avoid the rebound of what diagonalization says and shows upon the concept of tekhne, and likewise on the possibilities and limits of mathematics, logic, rationality, technology, system, science, etc. This reversal and speaking out of turn—calling into question the terms in which you characterize it—is perhaps one of the signature behaviors of diagonalization and of what happens at this extreme point of formalization to complicate and redouble the link of form to existence which philosophy always has to rethink.


Diagonalization introduces a novel form of temporality, neither historicist nor transcendental, into mathematics. Thus, Cantor's discovery initializes a series of diagonal theorems, each at once negative and irreducibly creative (renewing immediately this disparaged potential of dialectical thought), and each characterized both by the form"
"Building the Commune: Insurgent Government, Communal State","DESCRIPTION
When Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez died in March 2013, he left behind an unfulfilled dream that was never his alone: that of the “communal state.” Amid the complicated maneuvering of the post-Chávez era, this aspiration—which would see the expansion and unification of nascent communal councils, alongside a proliferation of other directly democratic political and productive organs—has pressed forward. This seminar situates this communal state at the intersection of two tensions. It first “decolonizes” the idea of the Venezuelan commune, excavating the broad contours of its history as a subterraneous process oriented toward self-government, not in an effort to romanticize indigenous and maroon communism, but to underline the tense relationship between the Venezuelan commune and nineteenth-century liberation struggles. Second, through the theories of former guerrilla comandante Kléber Ramírez Rojas, it shows how a particular history of the commune enters into tension with the state itself and how the contemporary construction of the commune from above is but one side of a seeming paradox gestating under the sign of the communal state, the tense unity of government from above and insurgency from below. The seminar begins from the history of revolutionary movements laid out in Ciccariello-Maher’s We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke University Press, 2013), while further drawing upon his latest work, Building the Commune (forthcoming, Jacobin/Verso Books, 2015), and will seek to provide insights that will be applicable in a variety of contexts and struggles around the world.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar will be composed of four 2.5 hour sessions, each of which will be split between a 10 minute introduction to the session, a 20 minute lecture, 30 minutes of student-facilitated group discussion, a brief break and 1.25 hours of instructor-facilitated Oxford/Williams-style tutorial presentations on the readings and topics of the day. All students will write four mini-essays of 600-1000 words each addressing a current event or recent cultural object in light of the readings, due at the end of each week. These will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussions and tutorials. The top pieces will be given extensive feedback for revision into a full paper and promoted by the professor for publication in leading academic and/or para-academic venues."
New Rationalism: The Shape of Systems to Come | Reason & Time,"DESCRIPTION
First Module - The Shape of Systems to Come: Following the Copernican revolution, thought witnessed an unprecedented array of epistemological devices and methods of abstraction which jolted the totalized universe of myth and removed the epistemic blockage created by pre-critical philosophies constructed from the viewpoint of spontaneity and sufficiency. The unraveling of the spontaneous philosophy of the earth (Kepler and Newton), the spontaneous philosophy of the organism (Darwin) and the spontaneous philosophy of history (Hegel and Marx) each opened up a hitherto unimagined or inaccessible domain that pointed to new affordances for thought and action. The enlightenment's anticipation of modernity coincided with the maximization and proliferation of methodic abstraction as a process whereby thought became able to make a difference in the world by making irreversible differences in itself.

The objective of this seminar is to sketch the possibility of philosophical systems ""synchronized with modern sciences"" (Gabriel Catren), to examine what is required to construct such systems, what they can do and what would be the shape of future philosophical systems equipped with evolved abstract protocols, sophisticated epistemological tools and the armamentarium of modern sciences.

The system of myth -- particularly in the sense of an ideological fixation -- as Jules Vuillemin suggests, attempts to circumvent the world of appearances through engendering abstract systems which grow without any limit by the aggregation and tinkering of immutable codes in a monotonic fashion. In doing so, the system of myth feigns openness and mobility and attempts to overcome finitude. In this manner, the system is supported by the reinforcing effect of seemingly benign assumptions. However, rather than collapsing under the weight of its precarious elements, it is progressively bolstered by their aggregation. This is how the system of myth avoids the risk of revision and ensures that the addition of new premises increases theorems and preserves truth-values. As contrasted with the structure of the myth, non-monotonicity and non-entailment (that is, not entailing old truth-values) are on the other hand the primary attributes of the modern system of knowledge. These features have the capacity to reorient thought beyond any anticipated image derived from the viewpoint of spontaneity and compel thought to take an exploratory initiative with regard to understanding and action.

The first two sessions of this seminar will focus on the epistemological toolbox of the modern system of knowledge as adopted by sciences after the enlightenment. The emphasis would be put on the architecture of concepts as non-discrete components, rules as functionally plastic entities, methods of experimentation and exploration, articulation of intelligibility through the organization of space and heuristic techniques to single out explanation and description. We shall discuss the operational definition of the concept, axiomatics, modes of analysis and synthesis, abductive inference and methods of destabilization of thought's own rules in order to detect, understand and act on dynamic tendencies of the external world. In the remaining two sessions we will investigate how these tools can be incorporated within philosophical systems and what would be the enabling implications of such epistemological synchronization.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar is comprised of four two and a half hour sessions. We will allocate forty five minutes to an hour each session to group discussion. Some preliminary readings will be provided in advance. Participants are required to write 500 word papers based on the topics discussed each session, these can be questions or further development of topics covered. For the final evaluation, participants are required to write 2500 word essay on one of the main general topics of the seminar which will be listed during the first session. Joint essays are especially encouraged (the length requirement for collaborated papers is 3500 words).

DESCRIPTION
Second Module - Reason & Time:
What can we do with time? This seminar attempts to highlight the question of time with regard to the perennial questions of philosophy, what to think and what to do. The aim is to understand the ultimate import of rationality in terms of its capacity to explore time through reason's self-cultivating project and collective realization of intelligence. If time as such ensures the ceaseless coming-to-be and passing-away of all things, if the power of becoming coincides with the annihilation of all values and ends, then the prospective recognition of the future appears as unconvincing of a task as the retrospective recognition of the past. Why to commit to either a promethean investment in the future or a recollective reappropriation of the past? If time severs the link between virtue and happiness, then why not retreat to the safe house of the ordinary or seek asylum from God as the sole guarantor of a reward?

The seminar will examine why rationality's rule-governed attitude is indispensable in a thoroughgoing cognitive inquiry into the configuration of temporality and how it essentially leads to the development of new blueprints of action and understanding informed by different conceptions of temporality than what is already intuitively available in terms of past, present and future. While on the other hand, the enrichment, integration and institution of theoretical and practical dimensions of reason according to their specific demands allow creatures endowed with history to redefine their relationship with time from mere affirmation to a vector of transformation and historical cultivation. The collective exploration of possibilities brought about by new configurations of temporality and recognitive attitudes toward history set up the groundwork for a project of collective self-cultivation. The realization of such a project is in effect tantamount to a social desanctification of time that renders its purposeless becoming intelligible and exploits this intelligibility as a transformative opportunity. By wresting time from all vestiges of the divine and turning the intelligibility of time into a conduit for collective action and reorientation, the project of self-cultivation signals the advent of social intelligence. For what is intelligence other than augmentation of recognitive attitudes toward history and the positive feedback loop between self-conception and self-transformation, to understand what it means to have a history and what it can do with time. This is what Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan through a Confucian appropriation of Kant and Hegel calls the possibility of social sagehood which can be understood as the materialization of a self-realizing intelligence and the fulfillment of the principle of summum bonum. It is the self-realizing intelligence that reestablishes the link between social virtue and happiness independent of any theological or teleogical frame of reference. But this is a concept of happiness that lies in the recognition of something that cultivates itself through our pursuit for the better and only recognizes us as its history, neither a conservable constitution nor an impeding conception of the past. What it has been does not ordain what it will be.

Throughout four sessions, we will approach the subject matter by highlighting the relevant theses of Kant (reason and orientation), Hegel (geist and self-consciousness), Marx (history and social consciousness) and Zongsan (the highest good and the possibility of social sagehood) required to understand the significance of reason and social intelligence with regard to time. We will examine topics such as time and the notion of risk, recognition and cognition, intelligence as the organizer of time, temporal ordering, the understanding of time not as a parameter but as an operator, the role of discursive reasoning in navigating time and the collective conception of self-cultivation as the overcoming of what Hegel calls unhappy consciousness as associated with self-cultivation in its individualist and arbitrary, albeit ascetic forms and driven by a frail concept of freedom.

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar is comprised of four two and a half hour sessions. We will allocate forty five minutes to an hour each session to group discussion. Some preliminary readings will be provided in advance. Participants are required to write 500 word papers based on the topics discussed each session, these can be questions or further development of topics covered. For the final evaluation, participants are required to write 2500 word essay on one of the main general topics of the seminar which will be listed during the first session. Joint essays are especially encouraged (the length requirement for collaborated papers is 3500 words)."
The Legacy of Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood,"This Seminar examines Michael Fried’s seminal 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” and the debates in art criticism that have surrounded it from the time of its publication to the present. Beginning with a close reading of the essay itself, we will then explore notable responses to Fried, including those by artists like Robert Smithson and Jeff Wall, as well as critics affiliated with the journal October. Special attention will be given to Fried’s later text, “Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in which he reflects on “Art and Objecthood” thirty years later, recontextualizes its polemics as less absolute than they may initially seem, and recounts the range of reactions it provoked. The Seminar culminates in a discussion of the essay’s ongoing relevance to contemporary art and criticism.
A key figure in our exploration will be Stephen Melville, whom Fried acknowledges as the “sole exception” among his critics for engaging with the actual terms of his argument. We will read Melville’s 1981 essay “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory…” alongside Jeff Wall’s 2006 essay “Depiction, Object, Event,” which situates Fried’s argument within a broader trajectory of aesthetic thought extending into the 21st century. These texts allow us to extrapolate the stakes of Fried’s essay beyond its original 1967 context, moving past the Minimalism vs. color-field binary that framed the debate at the time.
Due to the complexity of the material, readings will be kept concise. The Seminar’s co-taught format reflects the need for collaborative unpacking of dense theoretical and art-historical texts, with the goal of giving Students the tools to engage Fried’s legacy rigorously and critically.
Session 1, “Art and Objecthood” and Contemporary Reactions: We begin with a close reading of Fried’s original essay and discuss the immediate reactions it provoked in the art world, including responses from artists and critics of the era.
Readings: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”; Robert Smithson, letter to the editor of Artforum (October 1967)
Session 2, The Afterlife of “Art and Objecthood”: 1970s–1990s: This Session explores how Fried’s arguments were taken up, challenged, or reinterpreted in subsequent decades, with special focus on Stephen Melville’s influential critique and further responses from October journal.
Readings: Selections from Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism”; additional October journal critiques (TBD)
Session 3, The Reevaluation of “Art and Objecthood”: 1990s–2010s: We examine a new wave of reflection on Fried’s text, focusing on Jeff Wall’s essay and Fried’s own retrospective introduction, both of which reassess the essay’s stakes and legacy for a contemporary audience.
Readings: Jeff Wall, “Depiction, Object, Event”; selections from Fried, “Introduction to My Art Criticism”
Session 4, “Art and Objecthood” Now: The Seminar concludes with a discussion of the ongoing significance of “Art and Objecthood” and its critical reception today, using Melville’s recent word-by-word engagement as a touchstone for current debates.
Readings: Stephen Melville, “‘Art and Objecthood’ Word by Word”"
The Organisation of Nature: Trends in Theoretical Biology and Cognitive Science,"Evolutionary biology is undergoing a profound theoretical shift, one in which dialectical principles—closely tied to organicism—are regaining centrality. These ideas are being reintegrated into a transformed scientific landscape, where new methodological tools make their study more viable than before. This move away from genocentric biology coincides with, informs, and is informed by parallel developments in cognitive science, particularly the enactive approach to mind and cognition. Moreover, it carries significant implications for philosophy of science, enabling a more reflexive, systematic, and critical framework—one in which the principles derived from scientific content can be applied to the study of scientific practice itself.
This Seminar seeks to reconstruct these emerging trends and explicitly link them to dialectics (in form and content), which is being taken up—implicitly or explicitly—by key researchers across these fields. To accomplish this, we will proceed in a circular fashion: from the history and theory of biology, to questions in systems theory and philosophy of mind, and back again. In doing so, we will articulate a renewed naturalism and philosophy of nature capable of bridging philosophy and science—ultimately confronting what Frank, Thompson, and Gleisner (2024) term the scientific blind spot.
Session 1, Modern Synthesis or Extended Synthesis?: The debate over the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is somewhat confused, given the inchoate nature of the framework it seeks to replace. Is the Modern Synthesis a coherent paradigm, a mutable research agenda, or a philosophy of nature? We examine Betty Smocovitis’ historical critique (1992, 2023) to ask whether these shifts demand a new philosophy of nature, or merely reflect biology’s inherent tensions. We pay special attention to Lewontin’s claim that the organism is both subject and object of evolution, a dialectical tension central to the Seminar’s framework.
Readings: Smocovitis, “Unifying Biology”; “Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian”; Walsh & Sultan, “The Agential Perspective”; Lewontin, “The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution”.
Session 2, Dialectical Biology and the Organisational Approach: Organicism, revived in the organisational view, challenges more limited frameworks (e.g., cybernetics) and aligns with dialectical traditions from Hegel to Levins and Lewontin. We explore how this approach reframes autonomy, closure, and causality in living systems—and why moving beyond operational closure (autopoiesis) to organisational closure matters for a dialectical philosophy of nature that takes us beyond dynamical systems theory.
Readings: Haldane, “A Dialectical Account of Evolution”; Gambarotto & Illetterati, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Biology?”; Jaeger, “The Fourth Perspective”; Kauffman, “Eros and Logos”; Mossio, “Organization as a Scientific Blind Spot”.
Session 3, Life-Mind Continuity: Dialectics and Enactivism: How does dialectical biology inform theories of cognition? We examine enactivism’s recent turn toward dialectics, asking whether a reformulated notion of natural normativity, rooted in biology, can escape neo-Aristotelian teleology. We outline what this means for a materialist theory of mind—and how it strengthens the ontological footing of philosophy of mind.
Readings: Di Paolo, “Evald Ilyenkov and the Enactive Approach”; “F/acts”; Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal”; Illetterati, “Science as Experience of Freedom”; Gambarotto & Mossio, “Hegel and Enactivism”.
Session 4, Facing the Blind Spot: Towards a New Kind of Science: How can dialectical principles critically inform our understanding of scientific practice? We study how recent insights from biology and cognitive science may take us in the direction of a political philosophy of mind and science; moreover, we chart how this reflexive and interdisciplinary approach may address the so-called scientific blind spot: experience.
Readings: Slaby, “Political Philosophy of Mind”; Gambarotto & Van Es, “An Enactive Account of Labour”; Pradeu, “Philosophy in Science”; Frank, Thompson, and Gleisner, The Blind Spot; de Oliveira, van Es, and Hipólito, “Scientific Practice as Ecological-Enactive Co-construction”."
Accelerationism and Revolution in Russia,"Vladimir Lenin once said: “I’m certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough, that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.” Realities indeed circumscribe the very domains of our struggles, whether social or ontological. In other words, our thought and action are always rooted in their structures, and this disposition of the subject to radicate in reality is exactly what defines it as radical. In the history of modern knowledge, the subject’s disposition to be rooted in reality usually appears in its epistemic forms, notably different versions of determinism. In political history, this disposition usually becomes the matter of resistance and contestation. In this vein, Lenin’s saying could be read in the following way: “Reality acts upon us faster than we can act upon it, thus our task is to accelerate human agency—to enhance our capacity to enroot things and transform reality together with ourselves. Being radical, therefore, is to constantly radicalize oneself.”

But what does it mean, exactly, to be radical and to radicalize oneself? What kind of subjects does this task presume at specific historical conjunctures? This Seminar explores these questions by taking a historical journey across pre-Soviet and Soviet political experiences, focusing on various manifestations of political radicalism. Moving away from the dominant view of radicalism as merely an extreme left or right ideology, this Seminar suggests attending to our political selves and focuses on radical subjectivities. In particular, we will trace how forms of Soviet Accelerationism—the drive to intensify and harness the forces of social and technological transformation—shaped the emergence of new radical subjects and strategies throughout Russian and Soviet history. We will study four distinct radical subjects, each representing specific movements, intellectual projects, or political practices, from late 19th-century anarchist populism to post-revolutionary artistic experiments.

The Seminar sits at the intersection of intellectual history, political philosophy, and cultural history, drawing approaches from each discipline. Each Session offers a contextual introduction and a reading of the political text(s), from pamphlets and manifestos to philosophical treatises, allowing us to study both historical and conceptual aspects of radical subjectivities in their formation.
The Seminar’s argumentative framework proposes that radicalism, when viewed through the lens of subjectivity formation, implies a fusion of everyday life and political existence—to the point where they become inseparable. In this view, the individual herself becomes a site of political struggle. Radical subjects are neither ideal types nor conceptual characters; they are lived subjects who can guide us through the political imaginaries and historical landscape of Russian and Soviet radicalism.

Session 1, An Ascetic or a Terrorist? The People’s Will and Populist Voluntarism: The Seminar explores the practices and ideas of the People’s Will, a political organization in late 19th-century Russia. Operating secretly, this group embraced direct action tactics, eventually radicalizing its methods to the point of political terror. This session examines how such radicalization occurred, focusing on the formation of revolutionary subjectivity that blended political conviction with religious forms of self-awareness.

Session 2, An Intellectual or a Militant? Professional Revolutionaries and Russian Social Democracy:This Session further develops a conversation on revolutionary organizations, now moving to the Russian Social Democrats. It introduces and deciphers the central figure of the movement—the professional revolutionary. The Session examines the dual mission of the professional revolutionary, who must simultaneously propagate ideas and agitate people, acting as a writer or theorist and as a militant at the same time.

Session 3, A Worker or an Artist? Proletkult and Cultural Politics of the Post-Revolutionary Avant-garde: This Session turns to the history of ideas often grouped under the problematic umbrella term “Russian cosmism.” With this cosmist context in mind, we focus on Evald Ilyenkov’s treaty titled Cosmology of the Spirit. Excavating political project from the depths of he philosophical argument, the session explores a striking version of radical subjectivity: the materialist who is prepared to embrace collective self-sacrifice for the salvation of matter.

Session 4, A Hero or a Sacrifice? Radical Cosmologies and the Science of Immortality: The Seminar concludes with Russian cosmism, focusing on Evald Ilyenkov’s once-censored treatise, Cosmology of the Spirit. We consider the emergence of a radical subjectivity prepared for collective self-sacrifice in pursuit of material transformation.

Among the authors we will engage with are Mikhail Bakunin, Sergey Nechayev, Alexander Bogdanov, Vladimir Lenin, Boris Arvatov, Evald Ilyenkov, and others. In addition to their political and philosophical writings, we will explore manifestos, poetry and even film."
Coming Anarchy: Philosophy of Decentralization and Cryptography,"The rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies over the last few years has largely unfolded without a properly philosophical and historical critique, giving shape to new forms of political and economic organization, from libertarian network states to emerging models of digital governance and surveillance. Existing analysis from the Left has often taken the form of wholesale rejection, while the Right has supported these technologies in pursuit of various models of decentralization and private control.

It is clear that a new orientation to technology is needed for human emancipation, one that can build upon the legacy of left accelerationism as well as other philosophical approaches to technology. A kernel of this orientation can be found in the words of Hal Finney, who received the first Bitcoin transaction from the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, when he stated that “The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.” It is in this spirit that we will revisit key texts of the relatively unknown crypto-anarchist canon to understand the liberatory and reactionary possibilities in the latent philosophy of cryptocurrency.

We should recognize that cryptocurrency, and a broad Hayek-inspired crypto-libertarianism, are currently manifesting themselves in the formation of network states like Prospera, free from government regulation, as well as new debates about technology and political power. Despite these developments, we will begin by trying to understand cryptocurrency as an outgrowth of anarchist critiques of the state, the fusion of cryptography and anarchism by the crypto-anarchists, and the move by cypherpunks to translate legal questions into technical ones in order to defend people from corporate and state overreach, and to establish new forms of individual sovereignty. It is this historical tradition that has led to the formation of Wikileaks, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, and the broader ecosystem of network states.

Session 1, Anarchist Pre-Technological Concepts of Decentralization and Currency: We locate the origins of many concepts of decentralization in the anarchist thought of Proudhon, including notions that later influenced cryptocurrency such as federalism, credit, and decentralization. We also examine the history of secrecy and privacy up to the advent of digital computing, as well as the birth of the Austrian school of economics and the socialist calculation debate.

Readings: Selections from Proudhon, Stirner, Marx, Lange, and Hayek; “The Philosophy of Secrecy”

Session 2, From Cryptography and Crypto-anarchism: This Session reviews the basic technical concepts of cryptography and their deployment into politics at the birth of the crypto-anarchist movement in the 1990s. We discuss the rise of cypherpunk philosophy, its roots in techno-feminist hacking, censorship-resistant digital cash, anonymous credentials, and mixnets for anonymous communication.

Readings: Short papers from Diffie and Chaum, manifestos from May, Hughes, and Milhon, excerpts from The Sovereign Individual by Rees-Mogg and Davidson; “The Philosophy of Cryptography”

Session 3, Cryptocurrencies: Techno-financial Liberation or Control?: We analyze how Bitcoin catalyzed development around decentralization via blockchain technology. While Bitcoin aimed to replace debased capitalist currency with an inflation-proof alternative, blockchain innovation has also led to smart contracts and distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs) as possible replacements for traditional structures in crisis.

Readings: “The Straussian Moment” by Peter Thiel, “The Bitcoin Whitepaper” by Satoshi Nakamoto, excerpts from Tiqqun’s Cybernetic Hypothesis, Nick Szabo, Primavera De Filippi, Amir Taaki, and David Golumbia.

Session 4, Network States and the Anarchist Alternative: We examine how supporters of cryptocurrency are shaping new forms of governance, including network states, and assess both the potential challenges and the revolutionary possibilities for new forms of anarchist practice in this technological context.

Readings: Excerpts from Network State by Balaji Srinivasan, “Farewell to Westphalia” by Hope and Ludlow, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc Andreesen, “My Techno-Optimism” by Vitalik Buterin, and selections from Stiegler and Malabou."
"AD HOC, The Second Contemporary","The Seminar examines contemporary art's evolving landscape through a comprehensive investigation of its histories and discourses. Aimed at students of curatorial studies, artists, and cultural practitioners, it presents contemporary art not merely as a creative domain but as the fastest-moving discipline capable of influencing all others. Drawing from Ondreička’s essay “AD HOC: The Second Contemporary,” the Seminar proposes a fresh understanding of art history through divergence, chaos, identity, and curatorial strategies. It challenges dominant narratives of art movements (isms), critiques the exploitation of socio-political subjects in activist practices, and suggests new frameworks for curatorial agency in a post-ideological world.

Rather than linear art history, students will engage with conceptual maps, critical case studies, and provocative theses on how art mirrors or subverts broader socio-political dynamics. The Seminar ultimately questions the boundaries of art and its institutions, offering alternative models of political and aesthetic engagement.

Session 1, The Isms and Beyond: Explores how collective art movements emerged and how individual acts undermined them from within, focusing on the fragmentation and fractalization of modern and contemporary art histories.

Session 2, Progress and Pathology: Analyzes neurosis, freedom, and inherent social tensions as drivers of historical progress, especially during the 19th century’s shift from collective to individual identity.

Session 3, Post-1989 Realities: Examines void, chaos, and adhocism in the wake of ideological collapse, with attention to how identity politics and cultural organization adapt in post-ismic conditions.

Session 4, Activism and Curatorial Ethics: Considers activism as a form of applied art, critiques its commodification of social suffering, and explores curating as a practice of care that navigates between political extremes while maintaining ethical complexity."
UNDERSTANDING EXOCAPITALISM,"Exocapitalism is the idea that capitalism does not belong to humans. The titular book (Becoming Press, 2025) and this accompanying Seminar spring from a dissatisfaction with the sameness of Marxian critical social theory. This theoretical lineage appears to be poisoned by a Marvel Cinematic Universe approach to storytelling when it comes to economics: capitalism is almost always a powerful, demonic, one-dimensional Big Bad against which the accumulated forces of dignified human laborers engage in heroic, planetary-scale battle. The Seminar Instructors (authors Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo) push this tired metaphor to its breaking point. What if capitalism is so univocal as to be actually transcendental? What if it cohabits within its share of the Empyrean with things like computation or mathematics? What if capitalism can happen on anything, anywhere, without us?

At the core of exocapitalism is the logical kernel of arbitrage, the burbling contingencies of price and value as buried exploits in simple temporal deferral. Poliks and Trillo collapse tens of thousands of years of human economic activity into this kernel, even labor, which in exocapitalism is strictly and simply the injection of manufactured volatility into a held asset. But labor itself, let alone the simple flows of commodity exchange, is insufficiently volatile for exocapitalism’s hyperfertile scalarity. It is too bound to fixed costs and predictable dependencies to sustain the attention of exocapitalist flows. Instead, exocapitalism treats the entire terrestrial condition as a hyperdimensional random number generator upon which to wage and hedge controlled bets. Yet even this is insufficient. More dimensions, more abstractions, and greater differentials appear with greater and greater velocity. The human is left to consider what happens when this entire process and its operational mechanics leave us behind entirely.

Session 1, Retcon: If arbitrage is the processual unit of exocapitalism, we can build a lineage of authentic capitalisms far into the past (and far beyond Marx’s blind spots outside of Europe). We start with currency speculation in 5th-century BCE Persia, Jiaozi paper money schemes in 11th-century southwest China, the famous cowrie-shell economy in the Maldives and in Africa’s Gold Coast from the 10th through the 19th centuries, the radical hyperstition of the Black-Scholes financial model, the play-to-earn DeFi gaming economics currently wreaking havoc in the Philippines, and the jet fuel futures market that underpins almost all contemporary airline industry pricing. Each of these case studies will focus on relationships between price, value, underlying asset, and volatility (via time, labor, or alternative frictions). Accompanying readings from Elena Esposito and Suhail Malik ground these case studies in theory.

Session 2, Software Economy: This Session introduces students to a side of the software economy almost entirely undocumented by contemporary critical theory or philosophy. Instead of identifying software strictly with celebritarian politics, Silicon Valley ideology, surveillance capitalism, or the reductive and incorrect “Big Tech,” we read commercial Software as a Service (SaaS) through the concept of the fold. This approach helps explain how the software economy proceeds through the production of new dimensions of relations. We discuss the mechanics of orchestration and containerization in enterprise software architecture, the infrastructure platform as a service (for example, AWS and Azure Cloud), the problematics of agentic AI (such as through Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol), and the rise of the Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Session 3, Lift & Drag: In this Session, we focus on the transformation from service economies into banking economies, in which virtually every major corporation gradually pivots to financial services as their core revenue driver. This transformation is a manifestation of what we call lift: the shift from material to abstract, from dependency to partnership, and from production and consumption to fully automatic capital generation. Lifted capital reproduces itself not through goods or services but through platform effects, derivatives, loyalty programs, and algorithmic arbitrage, which effectively detaches value from the material constraints of labor or logistics. In the wake of this lift, drag becomes the residue, the slow, frictional layer of infrastructure still required to feed, house, and move people. As lifted systems ascend into abstraction, consumers (people) are left with an increasingly shaky infrastructure with which to secure their basic needs. The function of white-collar or professional managerial labor convolves as well, becoming largely performative. Its purpose is increasingly centered on manufacturing conditions for its own necessity, in an attempt to avoid collapse into abjection or precarity. While this begins with a focus on the contemporary American experience, we quickly move to discuss the unique permutations of this problem with case studies in Europe (especially the UK, Spain, and Poland), Nigeria, Brazil, and Southeast Asia.

Session 4, The Last Mile: What happens after exocapitalism has become too fast or too small to engage with, or its value-generative capacities too random and arbitrary to recognize as such? The question ignored by humans until the last moment is sheerly and strictly one of social reproduction, a question that will continue to become more and more urgent at scale. In this section, we grapple with Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” most vociferously through its critique by Sylvia Federici. We contend, contra Marx, that all human social reproduction is and has always been mobilized through primitive accumulation. We conclude with an analysis of terrestrial logistics, working through the theory of Frantz Fanon, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney. This last session puts exocapitalism in context, offering a brutally critical re-reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire through geotrauma (for example, via Reza Negarestani) and Deleuze and Guattari’s “megamachine,” placing both exocapitalism and the (useless, arbitrary, nonexistent) nation-state in their respective pantheonic positions. In this session, we focus on the transformation from service economies into banking economies, in which virtually every major corporation gradually pivots to financial services as their core revenue driver. This transformation is a manifestation of what we call lift: the shift from material to abstract, from dependency to partnership, and from production and consumption to fully automatic capital generation. Lifted capital reproduces itself not through goods or services but through platform effects, derivatives, loyalty programs, and algorithmic arbitrage, which effectively detaches value from the material constraints of labor or logistics."
Animals Against Earth and the question of Planetarity,"Contemporary thinking about the more-than-human world approaches its topic from an ecological perspective. But as theorists like Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nigel Clark and Lukáš Likavčan have begun looking at Earth from an astrophysical viewpoint, we are reminded that nature is more than an economy of life. Living beings are constrained by intractable physical forces at every level of existence. Likewise, life-bearing planets cannot be reduced to complex systems; they are first of all masses acting on themselves through gravity. If gravity is said to be the constitutive medium of planetarity, for life to get going, it must propel itself against its planet. We might say then that the history of life is a history of ‘anti-planetary’ action, a dialectical process through which life discovers its planet and Earth determines its life.
This Seminar will investigate anti-planetary action across different temporal scales and levels of organization: from the slow ascent of tetrapods onto land to gymnasts’ philosophical hatred for the Earth. Through our examples, we will extend the history of geological knowledge and assess our own participation in life’s negation of Earth. In the end, we proceed to examine what a true elimination of everything terrestrial from ourselves might mean – a task far more difficult than a mere escape from the pull of Earth’s gravity.
Session 1: Constitutive Planetarity - The first session will introduce the key concepts of constitutive planetarity and anti-planetary action while distinguishing between different kinds of knowledge about mechanics that can be used to interrogate planetarity. The session will also discuss the stakes of the seminar and situate our approach in relation to contemporary writing about planets, Promethean philosophy and more-than-human relations.Literature: Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics (selection); Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, What Can a Planet Do?
Session 2: Case Study, Vertebrate Terrestrialization and the Fish-Tetrapod Transition - The second session will focus on the morphological demands of transitioning between different media, paying particular attention to the transition of our own ancestors from a marine to terrestrial habitat. We will consider how the requisite adaptations may count as a prototypical form of embodied geological knowledge.Literature: Jennifer A. Clack, The Fish–Tetrapod Transition: New Fossils and Interpretations; Egon Heiss et al., Aquatic-Terrestrial Transitions of Feeding Systems in Vertebrates: A Mechanical Perspective.
Session 3: Living Planetary Lives -  The third session will shift the focus to ourselves and the philosophical consequences of explicitly recognizing our place in life’s anti-planetary history. We will do this by looking at different practices that allow us to measure anti-planetary actions.Literature: D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (selection); Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish (selection); Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique, Code of Points (selection).
Session 4: Lockpicking Transcendental Geology - In the fourth and final session, we will consider what escaping our planetary past might mean. If the Earth’s essence is embedded in the fabric of our bodies, breaking out might not be as simple as reaching escape velocity.Literature: Benedict Singleton, Absolute Jailbreak; William C. Wimsatt, Developmental Constraints, Generative Entrenchment, and the Innate-Acquired Distinction."
Will to Power and the Nature of Intelligence,"This Seminar provides an in-depth look at Nietzsche's infamous but often misunderstood doctrine of ""the will to power"" by reconstructing how it is presented, developed, and refined across his published works and unpublished notebooks, as well as in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. Rather than approaching the will to power as a mere historical curiosity or philosophical slogan, we will investigate the internal evolution and complex nuances of the doctrine, paying special attention to how Nietzsche’s own understanding changed over time and how subsequent generations of scholars have interpreted, critiqued, and reinvented his ideas. This approach will allow us to unravel the richness and contradictions embedded in Nietzsche’s thinking, considering the will to power both as an individual psychological force and as a broad metaphysical principle. We learn how the doctrine can still be of use today, not just for interpreting Nietzsche, but for drawing out overlooked critical insights and posing important questions in ongoing philosophical debates. Whether the issue is agency, free will, ethical responsibility, or the future of intelligence, both human and artificial, we will ask what the will to power offers that contemporary frameworks might miss. By reconstructing its trajectory and situating it alongside current debates in philosophy of mind, ethics, and the theory of intelligent agency, the Seminar encourages participants to revisit and reimagine the stakes of Nietzsche’s thought for our own time.

Session 1, Why Will to Power Today?: We begin by showing how Nietzsche’s often-dismissed doctrine of the will to power remains relevant for contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we contrast Nietzsche’s ideas with Nick Bostrom’s influential theory of intelligent agency, exploring both similarities and important differences that emerge around questions of agency, instrumental power, and fundamental drives.
Readings: Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will” and “Is the Default Outcome Doom?”, in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 105–126.
Session 2, The Will to Power in the Published Works: This Session traces the appearance and development of the will to power across Nietzsche’s published writings—from its earliest anticipations to its explicit articulation after Thus Spoke Zarathustra. We explore how Nietzsche presents the will to power as a drive more fundamental than self-preservation, shaping human and possibly all life’s striving for mastery and distinction.
Readings:
Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–12.
Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorisms 23, 113, 189, 575, 429, 542, in Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 21–22, 80–82, 133–134, 281–282, 223–224, 263–266.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On a Thousand and One Goals” and “Self-Overcoming,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 42–44, 88–90.

Session 3, Interpreting the Will to Power: We examine major scholarly interpretations of the will to power as both a psychological and metaphysical doctrine, before advancing a metaphysical and constitutivist reading: the will to power as a universal, quasi-normative drive at the core of all goal-directed action.
Readings:
Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, “Introduction,” in The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–10.
Tsarina Doyle, “Introduction,” in Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of the Will to Power: The Possibility of Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1–16.
Paul Katsafanas, “Introduction” and “Action’s Second Constitutive Aim: Power,” in Agency and the Foundation of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 1–5, 147–182.

Session 4, The Will to Power in the Unpublished Notebooks: By comparing Bostrom’s basic drives with Nietzsche’s speculations in his unpublished 1880s notebooks, we explore the possibility that the will to power is a fundamental, universal drive underlying all action. This Session draws out the difference between Bostrom’s “instrumental convergence” and a Nietzschean model in which power—expressed as intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness—may be an ultimate end. We also discuss Nietzsche’s challenge to the idea of self-preservation as the most basic drive.
Readings: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, ed. R. Kevin Hill, trans. R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti (London: Penguin Books, 2017), sections 666–715, pp. 374–406."
Psychotic Accelerationism,"Accelerationist philosophy still lacks a proper grounding and systematization of its key concepts such as the Outside, intensification, and acceleration itself. The project of Psychotic Acceleration contends that this grounding can be achieved by synthesizing Lacanian psychoanalysis with Nick Land’s accelerationist thought. Its central claim is that the register of psychosis is the register of acceleration. In other words, the psychotic register—one of the three possible positions a subject can occupy in relation to the Other—provides the structure within which key accelerationist concepts can be explicated and the ""accelerationist sensibility"" fully understood.
In this synthesis of Nick Land’s accelerationism and Lacanian theory, the Seminar first spells out the distinctive logic of psychotic experience, the structural marker that sets it apart from neurotic and perverse formations. It then draws out the specific implications this difference carries for the accelerationist project. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, a psychotic structure results when the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier that normally anchors the subject’s link to the Symbolic Other, is foreclosed rather than repressed. This foreclosure blocks the subject’s entry into the symbolic order of language, law, and shared meaning, and allows the excluded signifier to return in the Real as hallucination or delusion.
Accelerationist philosophy, in this context, starts from this exclusion. The Other has been foreclosed and now occupies the enigmatic position of the Outside. The Seminar explores the conceptual, epistemological, and ontological consequences that stem from this displacement, focusing on psychotic phenomenology and epistemology. Because of foreclosure, the relation to the Other no longer falls under the dialectical logic that would stabilize it. Instead, it undergoes constant intensification. For this reason, the experience and understanding of the Other in psychosis are fundamentally different, giving rise to a distinctive conceptual logic, which is the logic of acceleration.
Session 1, Foreclosure and the Outside: We introduce psychosis as the privileged register for acceleration. By outlining Lacan’s concept of foreclosure, we contrast psychosis to neurosis and highlight the difference in subjectivity that each relationship to the Other entails. We examine the peculiar nature of the foreclosed Other and its enigmatic status as the Outside, and the specific way the psychotic maintains a relationship with this enigmatic Other. For the psychotic, the truth of the relationship is located entirely outside, as all knowledge is seen to come from there.
Session 2, Intensities and Psychotic Epistemology: This Session tackles psychotic epistemology by addressing the systematization of intensities at the level of psychotic subjectivity. Drawing on Deleuze’s metaphysical reading of differential calculus, we show why the psychotic can traverse the entire dx/dy curve, unbound by any single structuring principle. Because the psychotic never internalizes the Name-of-the-Father, they remain within intensive relations, and the connections they produce unfold along this plane.
Session 3, Cold Empathy and the Logic of the Psychotic Phantasm: We distinguish between emotion and empathy as two modes of relating to the Other. Empathy becomes a psychotic substitute for a failed relationship with the Other. The Other is not felt, as it is for the neurotic, but is sensed through increasingly vivid visualizations. Empathy thus operates as a dream-like solution. The psychotic projects themselves into the Other and simulates it in order to understand it. The psychotic phantasm is therefore more direct and less mediated, since the relation is not veiled by the signifier but experienced immediately, outside any mediating bond.
Session 4, Sinthome as a Subject: We take Jean-Claude Maleval’s maxim—""the sinthome is the subject""—as our point of departure for grasping the psychotic subject. Once the paternal metaphor collapses, what remains is a self-compiling sinthomatic knot that aggregates jouissance at the level of the Real itself. In the Seminar, we show how delusion functions as a suppléance, or substitute for the Symbolic, systematizing the Real without pacifying it and transforming the Joycean sinthome into a machinic compiler of intensities. Discussion will trace how this sinthomatic logic scales from singular subjects to cybernetic markets, offering a final toolkit for thinking acceleration beyond any guarantee of the Big Other."
The Labor Theory of Life: Capitalism in the Web of Life Revisited,"Upon its publication in 2015, Capitalism in the Web of Life reconceptualized capitalism as a world-ecology of power, profit and life, sparking widespread conversations and critiques on the academic left. In this four-session Seminar, we revisit the book to elaborate three key conceptual innovations that have built upon its historical and theoretical architecture over the past decade, foregrounding the labor theory of life. First, Marx and Engels’ historical materialism departs from a critique of “abstract man” and “abstract nature,” centering instead on the labor process as the pivotal relation that simultaneously unfolds between humans—and with the rest of nature. Such a labor-metabolic approach—“labor created man” (Engels)—lays the groundwork for conceptualization of the class struggle in the web of life, an irreducibly socio-metabolic contradiction. Second, the critique of Man/Nature dualism is fundamentally a critique of ideology, underscoring its central role in imperialism through Civilizing Projects from Columbus to the Washington Consensus. This ideological framework has enabled the capricious and epoch-making (extra-economic) appropriation and (economic) exploitation that underwrites endless accumulation. Third, the origins of the climate crisis are rooted in the worldwide class formation that began after 1492, during Marx’s era of so-called primitive accumulation. This historical account traces how early capitalist enclosures and expropriations initiated planetary-scale ecological disruptions, forging fresh connections with contemporary class struggles amid escalating climate crises, and opening avenues for revolutionary strategies.

Session 1, Toward a Labor Theory of Life: An introduction to historical materialism through Marx and Engels, focusing on labor’s transformative role in human-nature relations and the foundations of a labor theory of life.
Readings: Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (in Dialectics of Nature); Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme; Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (Part I); Marx, Capital vol. 1 (selections: “The Working Day” and “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”); Wittfogel, “Geopolitics, Geographical Materialism and Marxism”; Moore, “Nature and Other Dangerous Words”; Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (excerpts).

Session 2, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital: This Session examines capitalism as a world-ecology, focusing on imperialism and mechanisms of capital accumulation that reshape global ecologies.
Readings: Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Chapters 4–6); Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (Chapters 26–29).

Session 3, Ruling Abstractions: We explore the ideological foundations of capitalism’s “civilizing” projects, their environmental impacts, and the concept of bourgeois naturalism through the lens of superexploitation.
Readings: Moore, “Power, Profit & Prometheanism, Part I: Method, Ideology and the Violence of the Civilizing Project”; Moore, “Power, Profit & Prometheanism, Part II: Superexploitation in the Web of Life”; Moore, “Our Capitalogenic World: Climate Crises, Class Politics & the Civilizing Project”; Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (excerpts); Patel & Moore, “Cheap Nature” in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.

Session 4, Climate Crises and Socialist Politics: We connect the climate crisis to socialist strategies, exploring the Anthropocene–Capitalocene debates, revolutionary transitions, and ecologies of revolutionary hope.
Readings: Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature"
"Political Economy of Construction: Design, Bureaucracy, Labour, and Money","Like many named places in California, it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway... [A] hallucinatory vision of a city imposed onto the blank suburban plat, filed in some county recorder's office; a planned community, a 'circuit's-eye view' of a transistor radio, whose streets, housing tracts, freeway interchanges, and so on, were named for electronic parts, now deeded over to the heirs."" —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
This Seminar proposes a wandering exploration around a web of interconnected strata. The recently deceased George Baird (August 25, 1939 – October 17, 2023) coined the term “Political Economy of Construction” as a tool to help us understand the decisions architects make when designing, as well as to distinguish established mainstream construction practices from luxury and premium construction materials and labor, setting aside experimental practices for now.
The Seminar presents the practice of Political Economy of Construction through a structured journey of interviews, conversations, and readings of theoretical texts on architecture, economics, labor, and planning. Beginning with political economy as a possible artistic practice, then moving to a study of urban building types and regulations such as zoning, we progress to examining the condition and organization of labor in construction, and finally conclude with a discussion of the complex relationship between finance and construction.

Session 1, Introductions and Political Economy as an Artistic Practice: Introduction to the Seminar; an artist talk from the Instructor, Daniel Young; the struggle with heuristics versus experience; and the evolution of the 'prototype' as a method, referencing Guy Debord’s Theory of the Dérive and its modification by Roberto Bolaño.
Readings:
- Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” (1958)
- George Baird, review of the Gehry Residence (Santa Monica)
- Roberto Bolaño, Labyrinth (2012)
- The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, Sterling Holywhitemountain reads Roberto Bolaño
- Donald MacKenzie, An Engine Not a Camera (2006)

Session 2, The Bureaucracy: Building Code, Zoning, and Typology: A look at typology and the impact of bureaucracy on urban development, including the influence of zoning and building codes.
Readings:
- Christ & Gantenbein, Typology I & II (2012 & 2015)
- George Baird, “Vacant Lots in Toronto” (1978)
- Steven Holl, “The Alphabetical City” (1987)
- Research interview texts from architects and City of Vancouver planners
- YIMBY zoning reform texts (TBD)

Session 3, Labor: A focus on labor in construction, its organization, precariousness, and its social and economic context.
Readings:
- Andrew Yamakawa Elrod, “Built Trades” (2021)
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt” (2011)
- Maria Sheherazade Giudici, “Hoc Opus, Hic Labour” (YouTube, 2021)
- Katie Lloyd Thomas, “New Sites of Labor” (YouTube, 2021)
- Felix Behling and Mark Harvey, “The Evolution of False Self-Employment in the British Construction Industry” (2015)
- Vancouver carpenter research interview text

Session 4, Money: Financial Flows, Betongeld, Zero Interest Rate Phenomena, Form Follows Finance, and ‘the Wealth Window’: Discussion of the intersection between construction and finance, the impact of speculation, bubbles, and macro-economic forces.
Readings:
- Fredric Jameson, “Brick and the Balloon”
- Mike Davis, City of Quartz (selection)
- Brett Christophers, “Centering Housing in Political Economy”
- Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place”
- Brunnermeier & Schnabel, “Bubbles and Central Banks: Historical Perspectives”
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, historical examples of urban development, speculation, and rent-seeking
- Macro-economics research interview text"
The Cinematic Frontline,"In Girls of the Sun, a film written and directed by Eva Husson, rooted in the real-life resistance of Kurdish women fighters against ISIS, narrative becomes a weapon, and the filmmaking process itself a war of logistics, ethics, and representation. This Seminar investigates what it means to build a politically charged film within the transnational machinery of cinema, where personal vision must pass through the gauntlets of finance, geopolitics, reception, and representation.
Structured as a four-part exploration, this Seminar traces the full arc of making Girls of the Sun: from initial research and writing, to the labyrinth of financing and international co-production, to the ethical negotiation of trauma and representation, and finally, to the public reception of the work—including the paradoxical backlash it received amid the MeToo movement. Through theoretical texts, annotated script and scene analyses, production documents, and conversations with key collaborators, we will investigate the tension between artistic freedom and political responsibility when making a film in a war zone of both bodies and narratives.
This is a Seminar for those interested in the creative process as a form of praxis, where storytelling becomes an act of resistance, and where directing is less about control than about the ethical navigation of forces far greater than oneself.

Session Breakdown
Session 1, Vision & Violence - Writing Against Erasure: We begin with the origins of Girls of the Sun and the choice to center Kurdish women fighters, the aesthetic and political stakes of telling a real-time war story, and the screenwriting process as a form of testimony. We interrogate how cinema confronts—or avoids—the political, and what it means to fictionalize the real.
Readings/Media: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (chapter on violence),  Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims; excerpts from Girls of the Sun annotated script; Visual references: The Battle of Algiers, Beau Travail. Documentary work: Surrounded by ISIS, director Xavier Muntz.

Special Guest: War reporter  Xavier Muntz, who worked extensively on Kurdistan.

Session 2, Reception, Misreading, and Feminist Discomfort - We contrast the first session, the intention, by addressing the film’s reception, especially the dissonance between its feminist intent and its critical backlash at Cannes. This session interrogates the paradoxes of feminist storytelling, Western savior narratives, and how cultural capital is unevenly distributed when women speak of war. What happens when a story meant to provoke solidarity gets dismissed as melodrama? Who gets to tell certain stories, and why?

Readings/Media: Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Cannes reviews and press reactions to Girls of the Sun;

Visual references: The Battle of Algiers, One Battle After Another

Session 3, Producing the Impossible: Capital, Borders, and Trust - This session maps the geopolitical and financial labyrinth of getting the film made: international co-productions, soft money, political gatekeeping, and the precarity of shooting in sensitive regions. We examine how the story was shaped by what could and couldn’t be funded, and how co-producers, state agencies, and cultural agendas intersected with the director’s intent. Overview of budget and co-production agreements; excerpts from Cannes press materials and co-production pitch decks.

Special Guest: Girls of the Sun producer, Didar Domehri

Session 4, Representation and the Edge of Trauma - How do we depict suffering without aestheticizing it? When does a close-up become exploitation? This session examines how trauma was navigated on set—between actors, the real women whose stories inspired the film, and the responsibility of representation. We also explore the stylistic choices that created emotional and narrative intensity, and the tension between vérité and poetics.

Readings/Media: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others; Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography;  Representations of Sexual Violence in War Cinema, Kelly Saint-Laurent

Annotated visual script sequences from Girls of the Sun; scene studies from Son of Saul, Waltz with Bashir, Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Documentary work: Gulistan, Land of Roses

Special Guest: Zaynê Akyol, director Gulistan, Land of Roses"
The Pathos of Modernity,"In the wake of Kant’s epochal intervention in the history of philosophy and amid the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution, a generation of German philosophers and poets took up the task of rethinking knowledge of the absolute, the problem of freedom, the methodology of dialectical reasoning, the concept of the tragic, and, above all, the significance of modernity. The work of Friedrich Hölderlin is central to this pivotal moment in German literature and philosophy in the late 18th and early 19th century. This seminar will focus on Hölderlin’s late Elegies and Hymns, approaching these in light of Hölderlin’s poetological writings and his reception by important twentieth century thinkers (Heidegger, Adorno, Nancy, Hamacher, Henrich). We will play close attention to the formal, conceptual, rhetorical, and tonal particulars of the poems, and we will situate these amid “the pathos of modernity”: the complex feeling of the movement of history as its wrenching transformations traverse modern literature and philosophy.
Each session will focus on one or two poems, but students will benefit from reading widely in Hölderlin’s Selected Poems and Fragments and Essays and Letters. The secondary poems and additional materials listed week-by-week designate particularly relevant selections from Hölderlin and from other sources that may inform our discussions.
Week 1 - Nov. 7 Primary Texts: Bread and Wine; As on a holiday…Secondary Poems: In Lovely Blue…; The ArchipelagoAdditional Sources: Nancy, “The Poet’s Calculation”; Hölderlin, “Hölderlin, Essays” “The declining fatherland…” (Coming to Be in Passing Away, p. 271); “When the poet is once in command of the spirit…” (The Procedure of Poetic Spirit, p. 277)
Week 2 - Nov. 14 Primary Text: The RhineSecondary Poems: The Ister; Germania; The Traveller; Stuttgart; Homecoming; RousseauAdditional Sources: Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine”
Week 3 - Nov. 21 Primary Text: PatmosSecondary Poems: At the Source of the Danube; The Journey; The Only One (Second Version)Additional Sources: Revelation (King James Version); Hamacher, “Parousia, Stone Walls”
Week 4 - Nov. 28 Primary Text: AndenkenSecondary Poems: Mnemosyne; Celebration of Peace; Whatever is NearestAdditional Sources: Heidegger, “Remembrance”; Adorno, “Parataxis”; Henrich, “The Course of Remembrance”
Required TextsFriedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, ed. Jeremy Adler, trans. Michael Hamburger, New York: Penguin, 1998.Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth, New York: Penguin, 2009.
Additional Sources Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.Hamacher, Werner, “Parousia, Stone Walls: Mediacy and Temporality, Late Hölderlin” in Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Anthony Curtis Adler, ed. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.Heidegger, Martin, Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine”, trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.Heidegger, Martin, “Remembrance” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keither Hoeller, Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000.Henrich, Dieter, “The Course of Remembrance” in The Course of Remembrance and other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.Nancy, Jean-Luc, “The Poet’s Calculation” in Expectation: Philosophy, Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, New York: Fordham, 2018."
Marxism with Chinese Characteristics,"Amongst the menagerie of Marxisms past and present, few have been as successful or more misunderstood than Chinese Marxism. Critics have dismissed it as revisionist, anachronistic, exceptionalist, and primitive, and debated its true color. Is it red? Too red? Not red enough? Complicating matters, many who’ve embraced Chinese Marxism or some element therein, e.g., Mao Zedong thought, have too often valorized concepts like class struggle and cultural revolution as universal and transhistorical practices, and even attempted to emulate them in excessive and self-defeating ways. Meanwhile, in China today, Chinese Marxism frequently finds itself reduced in the vernacular of propaganda to a variable but vacuous formalism and an uncontestable state ideology, making it vulnerable to accusations that it exemplifies a reactionary tyranny of the present or perhaps something much worse: empty words.
In a short Seminar like this, it would be a fool’s errand at best to address, one way or another, the multitude of mis-directions or criticisms, whether they’re well-earned or not. Rather, we will elucidate the often overlooked but deep and distinctive foundation in Chinese Marxism that distinguishes it from others. We will focus on the profound influence that traditional thinking continues to have on the development of Chinese Marxism, and likewise the intergenerational continuities from the Mao, Deng, Jiang, Hu, and Xi periods, contrary to frequent depictions of ideological ruptures between them or even wholesale betrayals. We will demonstrate how Chinese Marxism continues to inform China’s strategic worldview and tactical adjustments, including serving as a cornerstone of some of Beijing’s most well-known but least understood policies, including the “socialist market economy,” “one country, two systems,” and “national rejuvenation,” among others, as well as what we’ll describe as China’s “new internationalism,” including new paths for development for emerging economies with programs like the Belt-Road Initiative. Thus, we will explain the significance of Chinese Marxism for the world overall, but especially the Global South, particularly in an era of intersecting singularities associated with the collapse of an American-led global system and the return of a multipolar world, China’s reemergence as a major power and its rise as an advanced technological society amid the onrush of paradigm-shifting technologies, along with the growing pressures to improve governance while fostering green innovation and development to mitigate climate change and black swan events like the recent global pandemic.
Session 1, On Contradiction and Practice: We’ll start by introducing Xi’s concept, “the two combinations,” and what the Chinese call the “Sinicization of Marxism.” We’ll advance via a comparative epistemology, revealing the ideologemes of Western (or) and Chinese (和/and) language and logics. We’ll focus on the “two classics” of Chinese Marxism, Mao’s essays, “On Practice” (1937) and “On Contradiction” (1937), and how his conceptualization of the “unity of opposites” differs from Lenin. We’ll show how these understandings of contradiction have endured to the present, providing the interior logic of many key Chinese policies.
Readings: Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, Chapter 3; Confucius, Liji/Book of Rites, Book VII, The Li Yun; Laozi, Daodejing, 1; David Hall and Roger Ames, Anticipating China; Mao Zedong, “On Practice,” “On Contradiction;” Josef Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism; Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People;” Mao, “Contradictions under Socialism”
Session 2, On Class Struggle and Social Harmony: We begin by discussing the role of class struggle described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then examine how this concept was instrumentalized tactically by the CPC in different stages of its modern development, including liberation, political consolidation, sovereignty and national rejuvenation, strategic autonomy, the role of technology development, and the struggle against various forms of imperialism and related concerns, like climate change, the struggle between developed and developing countries, the Global North and the Global South, etc.
Readings/Key concepts: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1; Mao, Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung, Chapter 2; Mao, “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” Mao, “Talk on Questions of Philosophy;” “Speech By Chairman of the Delegation of the People’s Republic of China, Deng Xiaoping, At the Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly;” Deng Xiaoping, “Address To Officers At the Rank of General and Above In Command of the Troops Enforcing Martial Law In Beijing;” Jiang Zemin on “the three represents;” Hu Jintao on the “harmonious socialist society” and the “scientific development” concepts; Xi Jinping, on “spirit of struggle and daring to struggle/敢于斗争?” and “building a global community of a shared future” (GCSF); Josef Gregory Mahoney, “China’s Rise as an Advanced Technological Society and the Rise of Digital Orientalism.”
Session 3, On Governance: “Governance” has been the keyword of Xi’s “new era” and Xi Jinping Thought, i.e., Xi’s political philosophy as it relates to large-scale issues including national rejuvenation, rural revitalization, party rectification, anti-corruption campaigns, political and governmental reforms, digital governance, international relations, technology, green innovation and development, ecological civilization, peaceful co-existence, the military, and so on. We will discuss the development of governance during Xi’s time in office and how it relates to previous generations, and how Chinese Marxism has been developed in both theory and practice along the way. Also covered, from “serve the people” to “putting people first,” “whole process people’s democracy,” “1-2-3-4-5.”
Readings/Key concepts: Xi, The Governance of China (4 volumes); Chinese Marxism on the xiaokang shehui and establishing a middle income society.
Session 4, On China’s ‘New Internationalism’: China has signaled its rise as a major power in a multipolar world, one in which Chinese Marxism asserts the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the GCSF, and multilateralism, and actualizes these through the Belt-Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, along with its support for BRICS, the SCO, the UN, WHO, WTO, and so on. We will examine these developments along with concepts discussed earlier in the Seminar, including building an ecological civilization, the “three worlds theory,” and others. We will look at international security from a Chinese Marxist perspective, including the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and the increasing sensitivity of the polar regions."
Enlightenment Reloaded,"This module–in line with the past New Centre Seminar Cartesian Conflagrations– examines Descartes and in addition Spinoza–the heretic Jewish prince of philosophy–as the revolutionary progenitors of a radical Enlightenment. In doing so, this Seminar challenges fatigued interpretations with which the project of Enlightenment in its Cartesian lineage is often associated with: mind-body dualism and rigid rationalism among others. We will explore how Descartes's mature philosophy initiated a stark philosophical movement that posed the greatest challenge to Aristotelian scholasticism, where philosophy had become subordinated to a branch of sciences with inbuilt blindspots with regard to where they have come from and where they are headed. The Seminar traces Descartes's schema for rational computational mechanics back to the systematization of perennial philosophical ideas, from Plato's dialectica to Euclid's geometric codification of it, and subsequently, al-Khwarizmi's algorithmic take on the latter where ‘Thus Spake the Algorithm’ (by which the first Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi's begins) is more akin to a profound distillation of philosophy’s revolutionary ideas than an AI-informed ratification of a legacy of the Enlightenment that has been usurped and now is being taken for granted.
To this end, central to our investigation are the methods and ethics put forward by Descartes and Spinoza as armamentariums of an authentic Enlightenment–by all means, an emancipatory and revolutionary labor in its inception–that has been hijacked by a surviving scholastic counter-revolutionary force that was never fully quashed. This counter-revolutionary force as we shall investigate has moved through the likes of Thomas Hobbes to Immanuel Kant at which point the project of the Enlightenment simply finds itself settled and rested upon mere conciliatory epistemological or knowledge acquisition problems riddled with ad hoc and arbitrary political and religious addendums whose major purpose is to whitewash over the false-hearted spirit of this appropriated Enlightenment we have inherited.
Session 1, The Hijacking of Enlightenment and Historical Disasters: This Session examines how the original revolutionary Enlightenment vision was hijacked by counter-revolutionary forces, leading to concrete historical disasters through scientific and political crises. We analyze the critical juncture where science's emancipatory role began to fracture and how counter-emancipatory tendencies masqueraded as legitimate Enlightenment offshoots. Students explore the social, economic, technological, and political consequences of this hijacking process.
Session 2, Contemporary Scientific Crisis and False Paths: Students investigate how uncritical adoption of natural sciences as paradigms creates significant internal and external crises within scientific frameworks themselves. We examine the dangerous bifurcation between narrow scientistic reduction and anti-modern reactions, both betraying authentic Enlightenment principles. The Session analyzes how essentialist biases resurface under Enlightenment guises, creating hysterically bipolar historical unfolding.
Session 3, The Technical Parasite and Ideological Overdetermination: This Session explores how contemporary Enlightenment has mutated into a technical parasite through empty technological mastery and liberal economic manipulation. We analyze how this strain mimics authentic Enlightenment vision while remaining anti-revolutionary, especially in AI discourse within capitalist frameworks. Students examine how absent critique of images leads to ideological overdetermination and imaginative indeterminacy.
Session 4, Pathways for Enlightenment Recovery: The final Session investigates concrete pathways for recovering authentic Enlightenment as an emancipatory project accountable to its philosophical history. We explore why neutral scientific conceptions are no longer tenable and how excluding revolutionary voices leads to militarized imperialism with pseudo-resistance. Students develop strategies for standing up to images of power while correcting modernity's trajectory toward genuine emancipatory ambitions.

IMAGE: Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE."
Video games: Between Contagion and Reality,"Over the past decade, video games have undergone a dramatic politicization. Once viewed as an asocial pastime, gaming communities have, since events like #GamerGate and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, been increasingly cast as incubators of far-right and reactionary politics. However, mainstream critiques have rarely explored how these developments relate to the broader evolution of the gaming industry, or why the industry itself was so unprepared for this wave of populist energy. This Seminar traces how video games moved from being solitary pursuits to deeply social and networked practices, and how debates between narratology (the study of games as narrative) and ludology (the study of games as play) have shaped both academic and popular perceptions of the medium. Ultimately, we examine how video games became entangled with the forces of platform capitalism, social antagonism, and contemporary political struggles, reflecting what Roger Caillois once called “the contagion of reality.” Participants will engage foundational texts, critical debates, and case studies to understand video games as sites where art, technology, and politics collide.

Session 1, A New Art Form: We introduce game studies through the works of Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, examining how the concept of play generates culture and how video games came to be understood as an art form. Readings for this Session include Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, excerpts from Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois, and key texts from the Roger Ebert and the Games-as-Art Debate.

Session 2, The Rise of Narratology: This Session explores Janet Murray’s notion of video games as “multiform” digital texts, contextualized within the technological shift from arcades and ARPANET to home consoles and the growth of AI. For this Session, please read Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray.

Session 3, The Ludological Turn: We focus on the emergence of ludology as the dominant approach within game studies, particularly through the influence of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, and discuss how online games fostered user-created content. Recommended readings are Cybertext by Espen Aarseth, “Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences Between (Video)games and Narrative” by Gonzalo Frasca, and “The Gaming Situation” by Markku Eskelinen.

Session 4, Crises, Real and Imagined: The final Session examines #GamerGate, the industry’s crisis of profitability, and how backlash to changes in gaming was expressed as a wider campaign against progressive voices. We close by discussing how video games reveal social antagonisms characteristic of platform capitalism. The central reading is Play Anything by Ian Bogost."
Future Libraries,"This Seminar theorizes and designs the library of the future—an infinite archive encompassing books that have never been written, might be written, or can never be written. Drawing inspiration from mythological, imaginary, and long-lost libraries, participants will explore both the spatial and conceptual architectures that could define the libraries at the edges of knowledge and imagination. The Seminar will encourage creative experimentation, inviting participants to imagine new blueprints and catalogues for hypothetical libraries found at the end of time and the boundaries of the universe. Through critical readings and original design exercises, the Seminar becomes a laboratory for inventing, narrating, and documenting the possible futures of the library as both a real and imagined institution.
Session 1, The Book of Echoes: We explore legendary lost libraries—such as the House of Wisdom, the Library of Alexandria, and mythic or literary spaces like Borges’s “Library of Babel,” the Hermetic Hall of Records, and Murakami’s “The Strange Library”—to consider how memory, erasure, and speculation have shaped the idea of the archive.
Readings: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”, Selections from Hermetic texts on the Hall of Records, Haruki Murakami, “The Strange Library”
Session 2, The Book of Fatal Images: This Session investigates the architecture, atmosphere, and spatial logic of imaginary libraries, considering designs that are labyrinthine, subterranean, or cosmological.
Readings: Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (selections), Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (selections), Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea (selections)
Session 3, The Book of the Stranger: We study histories and legends of anonymous, banned, and rumored books, using these as the basis for constructing speculative catalogues and organizing systems for the future library.
Readings: Mike Carey & Peter Gross, The Unwritten (comic selections), Lev Grossman, The Magicians (selections), Cornelia Funke, Inkheart (selections)
Session 4, The Book of the Giant: This final Session examines the psychological, existential, and transformative effects that imagined libraries and their texts can have on readers, authors, and societies.
Readings: Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char (selections), Isaac Asimov, Foundation (“The Great Library” chapters), H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (selections)
For their creative or critical library projects, participants may wish to draw inspiration from works such as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s The Unwritten, Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, Scott Hawkins’s The Library at Mount Char, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (particularly the Restricted Section), Django Wexler’s The Forbidden Library, Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Walter Moers’s The City of Dreaming Books, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel, among others."
White World Lost Lands: The Mythical History of the West,"This Seminar investigates the historical and ongoing role of myth, pseudo-history, and the imagination of lost lands in constructing and reinforcing right-wing and white supremacist ideologies in the West. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Western European societies, confronted by new discoveries in archaeology and the deep history of non-Western civilizations, responded to their own anxieties about origins, degeneration, and racial hierarchy by inventing and popularizing narratives about “lost” civilizations such as Atlantis, Lemuria, Hyperborea, and Thule. These myths were not mere fantasies or harmless stories. Instead, they became powerful tools for rationalizing colonial domination and constructing a narrative of European cultural primacy. The logic of social Darwinism, initially couched as a biological theory, migrated into anthropology and history, serving the needs of empire and white supremacism by presenting Europe as both the pinnacle and the point of origin for civilization. Even when archaeological evidence from Victorian-era colonial expeditions revealed the antiquity and sophistication of non-Western societies, these findings were quickly assimilated or distorted by myths that posited Europe as the inheritor, if not the source, of all ancient greatness. The Seminar takes up Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of how the European colonial project universalized its own concept of “Man” and explores how this form of narrative power persists into the present, both in contemporary far-right and alt-right movements and within popular culture, particularly science fiction and digital conspiracy milieus. Throughout the Sessions, we will examine the historical genesis, transformations, and contemporary implications of these myths, aiming to understand why they remain so resilient and what this persistence reveals about the ideological operations of whiteness and tradition in the West.
Session 1, Lost Lands and the Colonial Encounter with Deep Time: We begin by exploring the conditions that led European colonialists in the nineteenth century to create and circulate myths of lost lands. Encounters with the deep past, the prospect of extinction, and the discovery of spectacular ancient civilizations such as the Maya, Aztec, and Egyptian societies, all combined to fuel new anxieties and ambitions in the context of nationalist and imperial projects. These anxieties gave rise to a widespread fascination with stories of vanished continents, which allowed Europe to imagine itself as both the inheritor and the origin of civilization.
Readings: Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 (3), 2003, Excerpts from Lost Continents by L. Sprague de Camp, Heald and H. P. Lovecraft, “Out of the Aeons”

Session 2, From Atlantis to Mars, Ancient Astronauts and Aryan Fantasies: In this Session, we examine the persistent fascination with ancient astronauts and advanced lost civilizations. These narratives, popularized in both pseudo-archaeology and science fiction, have often been closely tied to racialized ideas about the supposed incapacity of non-Western societies to achieve technological greatness. We will look at how such myths support fantasies of a pure Aryan origin and explore their enduring appeal in the culture of the far-right.
Readings: Garrett P. Serviss, Edison’s Conquest of Mars, L. Sprague de Camp, “Hunting for the Cognate”, Georges Bataille, “The Absence of Myth”
Session 3, Decayed Eden, Mu, Lemuria, and the Pseudo-Anthropological Imagination: This Session addresses the invention and spread of pseudo-anthropological myths, especially those related to the lost continents of Mu and Lemuria. These stories, often presented as scientific or historical, were used to undermine the achievements of non-Christian and non-European societies and to provide alternative explanations for cultural diffusion. We will also discuss the contemporary afterlife of these myths in science fiction and popular film.
Readings: CCRU, “Lemurian Time War”, Excerpts from James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Men, Film: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (dir. Ryan Coogler)
Session 4, Tartaria and the New Old Traditionalism, From Lost Lands to Digital Conspiracy: The final Session focuses on the current resurgence of lost land narratives in the context of new traditionalist thought and internet-driven conspiracy culture. By looking closely at post-Soviet Russia and the influence of thinkers such as Alexander Dugin, we will analyze how myths of ancient civilizations are mobilized today to create new forms of identity, legitimacy, and political motivation within far-right and online communities.
Readings: Miri Davidson, “Sea and Earth” Film: Alexander Dugin, YouTube lecture."
THE TRIAL OF NICK LAND,"We have yet to be Nick Land’s contemporaries, too late and too early at the same time. Unlike any other living philosopher, the courtroom of Land’s trial has been ongoing since the publication of Fanged Noumena. From his generalized criticism of the 90s to a rightward turn in the new millennium, Land’s philosophical experiments stand as a heresy against every form of humanism and anthropocentrism. After the blows delivered by Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud against the beliefs that the human is at the center of the universe, life, and ourselves, Land adds yet another: we are no longer even the authors of the very work that once seemed all too human: Culture. In the theoretical machinery of libidinal materialism, philosophy, economics, computation, and geopolitics are generated by a primary process of signals from cybernetic desires. What we call Culture is a camouflaged attack coming from the Outside through the counter-chronological portal of technocapitalism, which amplifies as more of this future signals pour out from it. Thus, over the past few decades, as we have learned more about Land’s philosophy, the world around us has become manifestly more Landian, unbestowed as to whether this process signals a deep recognition or a superficial conflation.

In this Seminar, we invite researchers to navigate Land’s conceptual current in search of verdicts or reformulations of what those signals entail. The urgency of this call is not only theoretical but also practical realism, since Land himself has become a cultural singularity, reaching new territories while remaining placeless, and generating modest endorsements but passionate disagreements throughout the political spectrum. These effects refract depending on the angle of approach. For the left, land remains an aberration that subverts the youth and gives a misguided meaning to radicalism. For the liberal and conservative center, he is a suspect figure: diverging both from the liberal positivity of the diagnosis that technocapitalism aligns with humanity, and from the anachronistic negativity of the conservative conviction that Accelerationism is a futile revolt against modernity by the luddite forces of tradition. While the reasons for putting Nick Land on trial are diverse, the evidence points in one direction: whether we like it or not, he continues to be an unavoidable figure for those trying to understand our current predicament.

Session 1, Land against and with the World: This Session identifies and systematizes the key elements that make up the genesis and structure of Land’s research program, along with its transformations. We begin with an overview that defines the case: Is Land’s world our world? Does the evidence allow for couplings and connections with other frameworks, or does it point to fraud?

Session 2, Anti-philosophy and Anti-humanism: We examine Land’s challenge to traditional philosophical and humanist frameworks, exploring how his critique redefines or abolishes familiar boundaries of thought.

Session 3, Xenocapitalism: This Session analyzes the intersection of Landian philosophy and capitalism, investigating the emergence of a radical form of capitalism that operates beyond humanist or traditional economic limits.

Session 4, Inside Outsideness: We address Land’s engagement with the concept of the Outside, the status of the Other, and how “outsideness” transforms philosophical, political, and existential horizons.

Session 5, Spironomics and Hyperoccultation: This Session explores Land’s speculative and often occult-inflected ideas about economics, energy, and the movement of capital, focusing on his concepts of spirals, secrecy, and hidden dynamics.

Session 6, Gods and Demons of Speculative Computing: We look at Land’s writings on computation, intelligence, and artificial agency, and how these inform his vision of a post-human, techno-capitalist future.

Session 7, Nick Land as Cultural Singularity: We reflect on Land’s broader cultural impact and singular status, evaluating the intensity of both endorsement and opposition across different intellectual and political milieus.

Session 8, Feedback Loop: The Seminar concludes by inverting the roles of jury and accused, inviting participants to deliberate on the “trial” and offer a Landian judgment on the proceedings."
A Triple-Helix Philosophy of History,"OR BUY CREDITS FOR THIS SEMINAR & OTHERS AT SPECIAL RATE

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar reexamines the philosophical underpinnings and the historical contexts that shape our understanding of “history” itself. By critically engaging with diverse schools of thought—from classical historiography to contemporary philosophies of temporality—we will re-conceptualize historical development to consider a new structural model of history as an entwining helix composed of three interdependent yet distinct strands: Nature, encompassing physical environments, climate patterns, geological transformations, and the broader ecological context within which human activity occurs, as well as the broad sweep of natural history, starting with the Big Bang and beyond, and influencing the conditions for both technologies and societies to develop; Technology, encompassing the tools and methods originating within nature but emerging as autonomous forces through which the inanimate world evolves by way of correctional processes of life contingently self-revising and innovating for survival, gradually shaping more complex forms beyond the interactions of both nature and society; Society, encompassing social and cultural norms, institutions, and identities, the history of which chronicles the organization of human communities, driven by the conditions of nature and reaching for technological advancements, and representing the sum of collective human experience—the cultural, political, and economic realms.

The main hypothesis of the Seminar is that these strands are co-responsive, forming the structures that define different historical epochs. Although open-ended and autonomous, they twist and turn around each other in an intricate interplay. At times, one strand may exert a dominant force, pulling the other two in its direction. For example: technological revolutions often reshape societal structures and redefine humanity's relationship with nature. Conversely, environmental shifts can compel societies to adapt, influencing technological developments. After understanding both the philosophy of history and its materialization into historical writing or historiography, this Seminar will look at the interplay of Nature, Technology and Society to analyze the theoretical and practical relevance of their intertwinement to our current predicament. We will examine whether History can be reconfigured as an open-ended process shaped by the dynamic interactions between these three factors.

Session 1: Introduction: Historiography and philosophy of history, from Herodotus and Abu Rayhan Biruni to von Ranke and Hegel. Determining the scale and scope of participants’ projects.
Session 2: The Cybernetic Concept of History: From the humanism of Walter Benjamin to the inhumanism of Land and Negarestani.
Session 3: A Triple-Helix Philosophy of History.
Session 4: Seminar Review and Participants Presentations.

."
The Depthwise and the Diagonal,"This four-session Seminar undertakes an analysis of ‘the structure of world history’—to adopt Kojin Karatani’s term for organizing phenomena and processes which span across historical, economic, religious, political and mass psychological horizons. The analysis will be conducted in the vein of a synthesis between horizontalists and verticalists, where the difference between the two is often understood in terms of the emphasis put on the contrast between networks and bottom-up processes on the one hand and hierarchical models equipped with a central command and control on the other.

By reconceptualizing organizational structures as operating in a space that combines aspects of hierarchical (vertical) and networked (horizontal) models, this Seminar will examine contemporary frameworks in political, economic, and social systems’ increasing failure to address the challenges posed by complex systems that do not fit neatly into either horizontalist or verticalist paradigms. The structures shaping history reflect interactions that cut across these traditionally understood categories. This is the model of depth—understood computationally as a blend of these dimensions across scales of an organization—which is precisely what we must strive to comprehend in order to address the shortcomings of how we describe the structure of world history. Given that our interventive practices aimed at the structure of world history are beholden to how we describe and explain it first, then a notion of “diagonal depth” is necessary for describing phenomena which, despite their appearances, are neither truly horizontal nor vertical.

To this end, this Seminar integrates insights from political science, economics, complexity theory, and computer science to propose a conceptual framework adequate for analyzing historical evolutions and organizations and systems manifesting them. A number of concepts and frameworks adequate to the task of describing such systems will be introduced, including Charles Bennett’s “Logical Depth,” Paul Vitanyi and Ming Li’s work on Kolmogorov complexity and its applications, Andrée Ehresmann’s memory evolutive systems, Aurora Apolito on the problem of scale in anarcho-communism, and Remo Badii. Antonio Politi’s work on hierarchical and scaling problems in complexity sciences will be adapted to highlight the labor involved in interpreting and transforming them.

Ultimately, this Seminar underscores the necessity of an appropriate description of a complex model of depth—one that acknowledges its hybrid nature—as a prerequisite for any meaningful engagement or transformation. Without this understanding, attempts to address or intervene in such systems—the structure of world history writ large—risk being superficial and ineffective, if not exemplifications of malicious practical vagaries of which the contemporary political spectrum is replete."
Computer Games and Hellscaping of the Unreal Engine,"CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE WORKSHOP'S OPEN SESSION

DESCRIPTION: Gaming is ever more important not only as a cultural form and industry but also in the artworld and contemporary philosophy. This Workshop thematizes the main aspects of this growing medium while avoiding its mere assimilation (into art or discourse) by focusing not on its current forms or narratives but on its very design. The Workshop will introduce Unreal Engine, its basic features and components, in a broader context of media culture and philosophy. We will get from the basics of gaming theory (Galloway) to more political edges of the virtual space to identity-play (Patterson), while featuring guests like Ondřej Trhoň and Alex Quicho.

The Workshop will experiment with what the virtual space of gameplay means for us, moving from the dialectics of hellscape and pastoral garden (Session 1) through dystopian realism of shooter templates (Session 2) and the “final” dialectics of play and identity (Sessions 3 and 4). In the background of this direction is a post-Marxist account of the game as the medium of the empire. Students will work themselves with Unreal Engine to create (1) a working MOD of Lyra Shooter game with base-cap functionality and their own map plus adjustments, (2) a basic walking simulator in a prepared environment with event triggers and subtitled text. The Workshop is designed to get the most from Unreal Engine without any prior experience, focusing on the ability to use its already existing assets.

Session 0 (Open Session): Discussion of gaming experience and participant's interests; Introduction to the course and explanation of approach; Literature review; Poaching with Unreal Engine (free assets, self-reliance, post-production, remixing).
Session 1: Dialectics of Hellscapes and Pastoral Garden in gamespace: Game as art-medium; Orientation in UI, creating a project, FAB and assets, blueprints, and differences between Unreal Engine and Unity; Creating a custom map for Lyra Shooter Game.
Session 2: Discussion on the reading, concepts of acceleration and dystopian realism; Ontology, worldbuiding, and worldending in videogames; Workflow reflection (asset management, materials); Adjusting the player character, map, level design, 3D assets (meshes, materials); Build of the game and multiplayer play.
Session 3: The concept of the avatar; Queer games, gender, and erotics; Discussing erotics; Creating a new project in Unreal Engine, basics of blueprint design, event triggers, basic narrative and setting composition.
Guest: Ondřej Trhoň (No Fun).
Session 4: Online and gamified subjectivities; Identity-as-play and conspiracy theorizing; Walking simulator and trauma-realism; Finishing the prototype of the game, making a build, and testing the gameplay.
Guest: Alex Quicho (Girlstack)."
Prototyping Para-Institutional,"PURCHASE CREDITS HERE & ENROLL DESCRIPTION: Over the last few decades, para-institutions emerged in the cultural field in response to major events such as the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, indicating a demand for knowledge production that engaged with critical socio-political junctures. These responses were often informal, fugitive, and fleeting. While structurelessness was a feature, sustaining these efforts over time proved challenging. If sustainability was achieved, it was through partnerships with established institutions, private patronage, or through public funding. This workshop will begin by defining para-institutions: what is the institutionality that it operates beside, beyond, or against? We will look at the historical forces that once bound cultural institutions to an international order—a system that's now unraveling through multipolarity and an ascendant right-wing. The faltering of once durable cultural institutions has been met by a multitude assembling and dispersing across online platforms. This short history will be reviewed and notable examples highlighted.

This Workshop offers an opportunity to prototype alternatives, to either conserve parts of existing models, or offer new ones. We’ll examine why Postwar liberalism regarded culture as a public good deserving of subsidy, and how the arts codified this status with academic accreditation and professionalization. Through discussions with guests behind notable para-institutional projects, we’ll examine case studies and outline their practical and ideological foundations. The workshop culminates with presentations by participants of para-institutional prototypes that reflect their philosophical and political concerns—complete with visual identities, mission statements, and funding strategies.

Session 1: Introduction to the Workshop themes, including a short history of public and private arts funding, university art departments, and independent study programs. This session will also outline expectations for the final project—developing a fictional para-institution—and include a group session to begin drafting key elements such as names, visual identities, and mission statements.

Session 2: A discussion on the global art system, with a focus on how it is shaped and sustained primarily by art markets and museums. Guests include Jürgen Bock, Director of the Maumaus Independent Study Programme (Lisbon), and Renzo Martens with members of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC).

Session 3: A discussion exploring artistic research, philosophy, the humanities, illiberalism, activism, and the internet. The session will also focus on developing the internal structure of the para-institutional projects, including funding strategies, public relations approaches, and organizational flowcharts. Guest: Mohammad Salemy, Main Organizer of The New Centre for Research & Practice.

Session 4: Presentation of para-institutional prototypes followed by group feedback and discussion."
Copresence Research Laboratory,"PURCHASE CREDITS HERE & ENROLL
DESCRIPTION: Where are you, right now? Where are you present?
Our bodies, our minds, our ideas, our data: where are they —where are we— present at any given moment? On whose territory —on land, on paper, on servers— are we living our lives and how does that serve us? This Seminar is designed to be as much about those who attend it as the content that is delivered. These gatherings are as much about the physical places from which we join the calls and the physical routes that carry our data between us as they are about the ways in which we co-create places online.

The Seminar is conceived as the establishment of a collaborative lab for collective investigation into presence and co-presence. Our focus will be on a more intentional and considerate relationship with our data, our places, our fellow humans and the other-than-human. While for most of our history, a human individual could be in one place at one time, our ability to extend and expand our presence has grown exponentially in recent centuries. By engaging with the histories and affordances of the social and technical systems that facilitate our meeting from diverse locations around the world, we will explore our relationships and agency —as designers, as worldmakers— within them.

Session 1: Presence & consciousness. We will begin where we are, both in physical and virtual space. We will investigate the relationships between our locations around the world, the locations of our data and the platforms and jurisdictions within which we are resident.
Session 2: Gathering, arrangement & copresence. With a greater consciousness of where we are all reside, we will look at how we gather. For most of human history, gathering and separation has been in physical space. What can we learn from centuries of evolution of gathering places in order to better inform the ways we design and gather in virtual places?
Session 3: Collective inquiry into future presence. Where might this take us next? What might be better than a videocall? What can we test right now? With a two week gap between sessions 2 & 3, there will have been the possibility for group or individual investigation into the topics above.
Session 4: Space for emergence. The intention for this session is that its content and format will have primarily emerged from the research and experimentation in previous sessions. We may be on a videocall; it may be an audio call as we walk outside; we may gather in a virtual world of our own devising."
Critique of Pure Plasticity: The Thermo-Informatic Transduction of Kant,"In Hans Vaihinger’s neo-Kantian masterpiece “The Philosophy of ‘As If,’” he argues that the “unjustified transference to the world” of the Kantian categories “leads to all those philosophically important ideas, such as world-substance, cosmic energy, cosmic causes.” For Vaihinger, these ideas are mere “logical illusions” that partake of Dinge an sich, noumenal things as such. However, in true Kantian style, Vaihinger also argues that these illusions remain necessary from a “subjective and conceptual standpoint.” Even beyond, I would argue that regulative Ideas such as these are necessary precisely because they offer unity to a class of categories that provide structure for any investigation into the conditions of existence of things.

Following Vaihinger, I posit that there are four Dinge an sich that guide us back from the Absolute to a class of transcendental categories that function as the conditions of possibility of existence: the Idea of the Conservation of Energy (cosmic energy); the Idea of Heat Death (cosmic entropy); the Idea of Pure Communication (cosmic information), the Idea of Absolute Certainty (cosmic information entropy). Each regulative Idea has its corresponding class of categories: energy, entropy, information, and information entropy (which I call “intropy”). Each class of category, likewise, follows the Kantian table of categories insofar as energy is quantitative in kind, information is relational, thermodynamic entropy is qualitative, and informatic entropy is modal.

It is not enough, however, to just state each class of categories and name their corresponding relation to the Kantian categories of pure understanding. As Kant argues in the “Deduction,” it must nonetheless be demonstrated that the four concepts of existence are the necessary and universal conditions for existence. Each transduction of a concept of the thermoinformatic table of categories requires the deduction of the concept as it appears in its scientific domain being carried over to its complementary category. How does it relate to the conditions of possibility of the (object) of experience, which are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the (objects) of existence?

If, as Catherine Malabou argues, plasticity denotes both the capacity to “take form (as in the plasticity of clay) and to give form (as in the plastic arts and plastic surgery),” then what is being sought here is precisely the conditions of pure plasticity qua possible existence, since existence always presents itself to the understanding as form and as its possible transformation. What are the conditions of the possibility of plasticity in general? This Seminar will outline a draft of the transduced thermoinformatic table of categories. We will read from Kant’s “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,” the “Transcendental Logic” and the “Transcendental Analytic” as well as from the history of thermodynamics and information theory, in order to provide a critique of pure plasticity.

Session 1. Energy as Quantity.
Session 2. Entropy as Quality.
Session 3. Information as Relation.
Session 4. Intropy as Modality."
Creativity and Intoxication,"Beer served as a nourishing staple in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, while wine in Greece and Rome symbolized vitality and truth, encapsulated in the phrase In vino veritas (In wine, truth). In Christianity, wine continues to embody a sacred symbol of unity and renewal, as seen in the Communion ritual. Virginia Woolf eloquently described the wine as evoking a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

This Seminar will present texts from the realms of theology, philosophy, poetics, and literature to contextualize intoxication and its place within the practices of knowledge production and its expression in writing. By drawing on sources both at the edges of the modern European tradition and beyond it, from Bataille to Hafez and Lispector, we will explore the inner experience of the intoxicant as an underacknowledged method of creativity.

Session 1: Alcoholism and Theology: This Session will present the technique of inebriation as it concerns the relation to the divine, the epistemology of drunkenness, and its deployment in James' account of mysticism, Jones' theological-phenomenological investigation of alcoholism, and Bataille's methodology of Non-Knowledge in his project of Atheology.
Session 2: Libation and Literature: This Session will investigate the integration of intoxication into literature, with specific attention to the use of wine imagery in Islamic poetry and the writings of Clarice Lispector and Alejandra Pizarnik regarding the narrative structure of experience.
Session 3: Drunkenness and Delirium: In this Session, intoxication will be linked to the extremities of the mental, in terms of mania and rupture, drawing from Mohaghegh's study of mania as well as the rupture in the experience of madness as described in the psychedelia of Laing's anti-psychiatry.
Session 4: The final Session will review the submitted works by participants in an open discussion, as a conclusion to the Seminar. A short assigned film will also guide the discussion."
Art Writing Against the Grain: Towards a New Criticism,"Art criticism has become a hot topic recently, after a long period of repressed dormancy in the art world. Even the forces that formerly sought to smother criticality out of existence now give lip service to the need for criticism. However, this has not coincided with an improved understanding of criticism's means or ends, which sets the stage for an impotent “critical turn.” This Seminar will seek to remedy that blindness by studying the history of contemporary art's move away from criticism alongside examples of criticism's successes and failures.

Neither the Left's self-satisfied identity politics nor the Right's reactionary provocations present a way back to art as something more than political signification, and we must recover precisely the terms of art's irreducibility if a new criticism is to emerge. To do so, we must understand how those terms changed in the later parts of the twentieth century, how they degenerated into inarticulate relativism, how that relativity expresses itself (even in those who seek to resist it), and how it can be possible to apply new terms of valuation in a hostile climate.

Session 1. The rhetoric of contemporary art: Beginning approximately with the battles around Michael Fried's ""Art and Objecthood,"" come to terms with the expansions of art discourse from the '60s to the trap of 2010s contemporary art as diagnosed by Suhail Malik in ""On The Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art.""
Session 2. The indecision of contemporary art criticism: We will look at examples of art writing's inability to engage with contemporary art or set up concepts for adequate discussion while diagnosing the nature of its impasse.
Session 3. The possibility of a new art criticism: We will consider how criticism can reconcile grounded historicity with the awareness of its own relativity, updating judgment without falling into a stale conservatism.
Session 4: Presentation of final projects"
Logical Time and the Production of the Intelligible,"In Jean Cavaillès’s On Logic and the Theory of Science (1942–1943; published posthumously in 1947, hereafter LTS), two central theses emerge:

 \tScience operates outside of time as understood through the lived experience of consciousness (LTS 22).
 \tNon-simultaneity is not historical but an intrinsic feature of the intelligible (LTS 35–36).

These ideas form the foundation of a theory of “logical time,” where mathematics is characterized by its unique historicity—its relationship between earlier and later theories—termed by Cavaillès, based on Descartes’ treatises, as mathematical concatenation. This Seminar explores how this theory, focusing on mathematical history and its philosophical stakes, illuminates the broader tradition of 20th-century French “mathematical philosophy.” Rarely studied in English, this tradition—represented by figures like Léon Brunschvicg, Albert Lautman, and others—emphasizes the history of mathematical production and its shared conceptual terrain with philosophy. Using LTS as a guide and drawing from other sources, the Seminar will construct this broader intellectual history in two parts.

Part I examines Cavaillès’s place within a tradition grappling with the production of the intelligible, rooted in Brunschvicg, Cartesian rationalism, and the paradox of producing time within time itself. Cavaillès reframes this classical problem by asserting that “the intelligible” is defined by internal non-simultaneity and a rejection of total simultaneity in knowledge. His methodological insight—that self-evidence has been replaced by provability—reinterprets intuition as a product of concatenation, or by what Richard Dedekind called a ‘chain of operations,’ aligning with 19th-century mathematical transformations.

Part II Will Consider how these transformations set the stage for a peculiar research programme in the historiography of mathematics. We will take Cavaillès to have (implicitly) advanced a speculative interpretation in which conjunctural results from the mathematical logic of the 1920s and the 1930s concerning the so-called ‘limitations of formalisms’ (Gödel, Skolem, Church-Turing) were taken to be positive discoveries concerning the nature of the intelligible, i.e. its intrinsic ‘movement’ and resistance in principle to combinatorial enumeration. What is at stake here is nothing less than a metaphysics of mathematical production, derived—it is claimed—from an epistemological research programme for reading the actual history of mathematics. In other words, the core methodological desiderata in this tradition of treating each mathematical work as ‘a regional and specific product’ (Desanti 1983), for all that it is often presented as a strictly methodological or epistemological norm, in fact has roots in an underlying metaphysical distinction between production and what is produced (or, in Cavaillès’s language, between the effectuating and the effectuated). As Cavaillès understood it, this meant that contemporary mathematical logic had shown the ruin of any philosophy of transcendental constitution, and thus of post-Kantian approaches to the philosophy of science, including phenomenology. 

Against such philosophies of the transcendental subject, Cavaillès (paradoxically) proposed a theory of the act without a subject. We shall close by considering the origins and future of this doctrine in the philosophy of mathematics, broadly conceived.

SEMINAR OUTLINE

Session 1. Introduction to the ‘Production’ of Mathematical Theories and the Transtheoretical Character of Mathematical Objects, Two Perspectives

Session 2. A ‘Cartesian’ Opposition in the Theory of Proof
Session 3. Logical Time as a Problem in the French Philosophical Field
Session 4. The Necessary Generation of New Concepts, or 19th Century Mathematics Through a Cartesian Lens
Session 5. Rationalist Nominalism as a Research Programme in the Historiography of Mathematics
Session 6. The Method of Recursion and the Horizon of Effective Computability
Session 7. The Act Without a Subject
Session 8. Old and New Problems"
Loser Gods and Deities,"Every ancient pantheon refers to its own loser gods. Whether we look to Babylon, Egypt, Greece, China, the Aztecs, or myriad indigenous cosmologies, we will find the stories of those lesser deities who have been disgraced, banished, or punished. Some have absurd physiologies or disfigurements; others follow paranormal rituals or possess borderline useless powers that cause them to fall outside the top levels of the universal hierarchy. Some have been forgotten, lost in time; others are feared for they bring plague, famine, disease; still others play no role in the world's destiny or dwell in the shadows, the vapor, or the nothing itself. Prometheus, Medusa, Arachne, Set, Ahriman, Nezha, Sedna, Loki, Hades, Pandora, Kali, Tiamat, Xolotl, Aipaloovik, Erlik, Satan, and thousands more.

This Seminar will track these loser gods and resurrect their narratives as a new philosophical-mystical outlook. Through them, we will wonder about alternative existences where those once most neglected might rule.

Session 1: Dethroned Gods (Overthrow) and Gods of Failed Revolutions (Rebellion)
Session 2: Outcast Gods (Exile) and Minor Gods (Irrelevance)
Session 3: Gods of Lost Powers (Disenchantment) and Gods of Lost Status (Obsolescence)
Session 4: Trickster Gods (Play) and Accursed Gods (Pain)"
Avant-Garde Today: The Question of Autonomy,"This Seminar brings together two understandings of the problem of the avant-garde in art: the now classic approach offered by Peter Bürger in his seminal book “Theory of the Avant-Garde” (1974) and Harry Lehmann’s essay “Avant-Garde Today” (2008). The Seminar hypothesizes that these two understandings illustrate different models of progress in and against art’s autonomy that will be worked with through the four sessions. In doing so, it hopes to question the many connections that bring together art, the hypothesis of its autonomy, and its political affordances.

Bürger understands the avant-gardist impulse not as a new style within the institution of art but as an attempt to break with art altogether, scattering aesthetic effects upon life at large. He offers one of the clearest understandings of the avant-garde, based on art reaching out of its own definition—progressively absorbing that which is not art into that which is art. While the historical avant-garde is seen by Bürger as a final breaking point, given that art is individualized as an autonomous sphere, this same notion is taken by Lehmann to offer a model of aesthetic modernity predicated on the autonomization of the elements that compose art. Instead of reading the avant-garde as an impulse to the outside, Lehmann sees it as a new coupling between the work, the medium, and reflection itself.

Complementing these two models of the avant-garde, this Seminar will also tackle the theoretical basis the two authors are polemicizing against: Adorno's “Aesthetic Theory,” a model that Bürger takes to be intrinsically anti-avant-gardist and Lehmann tries to supersede with his understanding. Finally, in the last session we will see a more recent synthetic approach by Mattin on his book “Social Dissonance” (2023). Mattin offers a contemporary model for art reaching out of its limits—towards politics—but coinciding with a change in the materials of artmaking. Now, instead of aesthetic appearance, as Adorno would have it, the social world appears to constraint art.

Session 1: We will delve into the general themes of the Seminar, through a reading of selected sections of Bürger’s text and further secondary literature.
Session 2: We will read sections of Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory” alongside Bürger’s “Adorno’s Anti-Avantgardism” essay. A further comparison will be drawn between Adorno and Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
Session 3: Close reading of Harry Lehmann’s essay “Avant-garde Today,” where the model of the avant-gardist integration of the outside is discussed and tentatively replaced by the model of systemic gains in degrees of freedom.
Session 4: Discussing Mattin's very recent “Social Dissonance” (2023) as the latest incarnation of the reaching-out model, but with the twist that, for Mattin, the material of the work of art becomes the social action of its audience."
Critical Collapsology Part 2: Limitless Risk,"Last season, in the first part of this Seminar, we established a new frame for studying the rapid decomposition of social structure, called 'critical collapsology.' This theory more adequately conceptualizes the vulnerabilities faced by global capitalist societies and sketches an orientation toward collapse.

However, the theory remains relatively abstract. In this second part of the Seminar, we will look at the particular histories that have led us to our vulnerable present moment and develop a radical politics adequate to our incapacity for formulating utopias. How did the world become so vulnerable? How have people responded to vulnerability before? Why is the end of utopia a problem for the left? What institutions should we create now, and how?

Session 1: We will run a collective mapping project to enumerate our current risks. We will introduce the horizon scanning techniques, the Delphi method, and the basic principles and theory of prediction markets.
Session 2: Starting from the premise that collapse is already an object in contemporary politics, we will survey responses to its prospect. Each response imagines a particular mode of collapse and proposes ways to address it. These responses range from drastic to gentle, gestural to programmatic.
Session 3: We turn to the reformulation of a 'communist core' in politics and its status, given the risk of collapse. The communist task requires actualization in a world simultaneously made possible and frustrated by capitalism. Marx and Engels describe communism as ""the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."" What if those premises are no longer in existence?
Session 4: Exploring practical questions, we ask what political possibilities persist through any future collapse, materially and conceptually. What strategies for resilience, emergency responses, and transformations of thought into transportable protocols might be required during different stages of collapse? What should we build now?"
Reading Simondon: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,"This Survey Seminar will offer a collaborative close reading of Gilbert Simondon’s book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. First published in 1958, this has become a seminal work in the philosophy of technology. In the text, Simondon challenges the conventional dichotomy between humans and machines, arguing for an emancipation of technical objects from the enslavement of mere utility in the cultural sphere and restoring the dignity of technical objects through an unprecedented philosophical account of their modes of existence and evolution. Cécile Malaspina’s own English translation, published by Univocal in 2017, with the collaboration of John Rogove, is the first official translation of this major work.

This Seminar will feature two guest lectures by contemporary philosophers who will discuss the importance of Simondon for their own work. In the other Sessions, Malaspina will delve with the students into key parts of “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.”

Session 1: We will introduce Simondon’s critique of cultural alienation from technical objects.
Sessions 2 and 3: We will focus on the genesis of technical objects and their evolution through the ""process of concretization,"" analyzing the concepts of technicity and technical individualization. Guest lecture: Erin Manning
Session 4: We will focus on our relations with technical objects, highlighting the educational and cultural innovations proposed by Simondon based on his distinction between minor and major modes of engagement with technology.
Session 5: We will dive deep into the essence of technicity, tracing its origins in magical thinking and its divergence from religious thought while foregrounding the role Simondon attributes to aesthetic, theoretical, and practical reasoning vis-à-vis philosophy.
Session 6 and 7: Guest lectures: Nandita Biswas
Session 8: We will conclude with a synthesis and discussion of Simondon’s vision for the integration of technical objects into culture and their contemporary relevance to issues such as artificial intelligence, automation, and ethics."
Autonomous Self-Creation: Foucault Beyond Neoliberalism,"Neoliberalism is facing a deep crisis. Everyone seems to agree that it is the cause of a wide range of current issues, from growing economic inequalities and increasing indebtedness to the erosion of interpersonal relationships, climate change, and more. It is hard to tell if this turbulence is a catalyst for further advancing neoliberal reforms or if we should anticipate a significant transformation. Nonetheless, before offering a response, it is important to comprehend the nature of neoliberalism, as there is a lack of consensus regarding its definition.

In his lectures on “The Birth of Biopolitics” at Collège de France (1978–79), Foucault suggests that neoliberalism is a mode of governance based on market dominance, individual competition, and the generalization of the “enterprise form” to all of society. Rather than relying exclusively on discipline, neoliberal governance aims to produce self-disciplined subjects who identify their freedom with the imperative to accomplish themselves by enhancing productivity and economic growth. Accordingly, the individual is called upon to be an “entrepreneur of the self” and to manage their life as if operating within a logic of profits, earnings and efficiency, thus experiencing their own existence as human capital. Against this conception, Foucault invites us to struggle for autonomous self-creation through the “care of the self.”

This Seminar will discuss the current state of neoliberalism and its logic by way of Foucaultian analysis. How do we distinguish these virtuous practices Foucault addresses from the techniques of self-empowerment and self-realization that are continuously marketed by the present-day industry of self-merchandising? If we are experiencing a crisis of neoliberal governmentality, how can we ensure that we are also producing alternative forms of subjectivity instead of inadvertently contributing to a new strategy for the valorization of human capital?

Session 1: Introduction to Foucault: Power, subjectivity, and governance
Session 2: American Neoliberalism: Human Capital and the Enterprise of the Self
Session 3: Financialization vs Care of the Self
Session 4: Student Presentations"
The Geographers that Ate Themselves,"This Seminar will examine the idea of losing oneself to space. Taking a cue from Roger Caillois' speculations about a deep-rooted temptation of all beings to recede into a generic background, we will examine the allure that the environment poses for thought. The corollary of Caillois' speculation is that space is a problem to manage, not only for humans but for animal life as such. The universal will of slipping back into the external world, of being assimilated into space, supposes a primordial separation from the environment that makes space intentionally manageable. Recent works in the philosophy of biology have found the vocabulary to talk about such management of space through a concept of autonomy that synthesizes spatial logics by way of physiological barriers, internalizations of vital functions and capacities for self-directed locomotion.

Putting Caillois' embryonic theory to work, we will consider how the problem of space extends into the history of science and highlights the innate vulnerabilities of the Enlightenment project. With the help of neglected episodes from the history of geographical thought – a discipline whose duty is to cognitively manage space – we can recast the dialectic of Enlightenment alongside other biological failures to keep the external world at bay.

Session 1
The first session will introduce the topic and define our central terms, like ""autonomy"" and ""space."" We will also discuss the contradictions between humanistic and naturalistic strands of the Enlightenment and what assuming the prerogatives of each strand could entail for thinking about space.

Readings: Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia; Bernd Rosslenbroich, On the Origin of Autonomy; Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere.

Session 2
The second session will follow geographical knowledge from its institutional foundations in the 18th century to its naturalistic conclusion at the end of the 1990s, under philosophies like 'non-representational theory,' 'relational space,' and 'materialist return.' We will see how the reactivation of space goes hand in hand with a deactivation of subjectivity, echoing the tensions between humanism and naturalism manifest in 20th-century sciences.

Readings: Immanuel Kant, Physical Geography; Sarah Whatmore, Materialist Returns; Paul Simpson, Spacing the Subject.

Session 3
The third session will recast the problem of space as a misadventure of transcendental subjectivity. We will follow Jay Rosenberg's suggestion that it is a subtle manifestation of the 'naturalistic fallacy', a reduction from normative to descriptive talk. Rosenberg's equation provides a pathway to naturalizing geography's deactivation of subjectivity.

Readings: Jay Rosenberg, The Thinking Self; Robert Pippin, Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind.

Session 4
Returning to our biological starting point, the final session will be a tentative search for a structural parallel to the naturalistic fallacy in animal behavior. We will examine how the judgments of geographical knowledge are structural recapitulations of ingestion, posed as a self-abjuration in the image of a mouth that eats itself up.

Readings: Charles Perrault, Little Red Riding Hood; Géza Róheim, ""Fairy Tale and Dream""; René Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis."
Catechism for Revolutionary Philosophy,"In this Eight-Session Seminar, we shall entertain a profound puzzle, not only regarding the nature of time but also concerning radical constitutional transformation and revolutionary subjectivity—that is, the crisis of social and political leadership in the contemporary West. This represents an infinite dilemma, a forking blade, a criterion raised against the vagaries of the Self/Subjectivity and the oppressions of those who have succumbed to these vagaries throughout history. This culminates in the rise of the contemporary Western political landscape, echoing a bygone colonialism, a Europe that, even before fulfilling its dream to annex the globe, was already conquered by forces of the other.

The central puzzle we will address is this: Which came first, the decentralized society or the crisis of transformative leadership? This Seminar does not indulge in approaches originating from either the canonical left or the right. The primary focus is to construct and hone a framework, a blueprint for a leader, a revolutionary subject, an open-source self that can unite and mobilize without succumbing to the pathologies of selfhood and the forms of collectivity built upon. These pathologies include not only messianic or effective altruist pretensions but also those born of individual and social traumas. Hysterias post-leadership crises won’t help us much.

The aim of this Seminar is to casually formulate a set of criteria for a leader, a true philosophical human being, who can be an open-source, democratically constructible, and fully reflective self—a self that may consist of no one but nevertheless stands up to the end of its life and its time. In other words, this is leadership as the mobilization of time-infinite practical reasons: leadership as the way of galvanizing self-determination and the progression of all humankind, leadership that has never been so rare to emerge and never so in dire need.

Such philosophical human beings, these potential leaders, signify what it is to adopt a set of practical reasonings and indeed a concrete self-consciousness that does not bottom out in the here and now—i.e., a movement that does not die down before the next generations join it. Hence, the catechism here is only a set of bracketing questions regarding the nature of who is a true leader and who is hysterically over- or neo-reactionary concerning the possibilities of leadership, the possibility of leadership notwithstanding. In other words, the open nature of leadership is that which challenges both the well-worn orthodoxies advanced in the name of oppression and exaggerations about a messianic AI-god yet to come.

Accordingly, in each Session, we will work in the spirit of critique, research, and lab work on particular leaders or revolutionary philosophical human beings, mainly originating from Iranian history. These names are mere prototypes—with shortcomings of their own—to be synthesized and reconstructed with care and criticism by all participants according to their specific contexts of social and historical consciousness, background, and struggle: Ali Mohammad Shirazi (Baab), Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn, Mirza Kuchak Khan, Yeprem Khan and his daughter, Astghik, Bijan Jazani, Ali Shariati, Akbar Goodarzi, and Meena Keshwar Kamal."
Critical Collapsology: Theory and the Ends of Worlds,"Collapsology has been one of the most strikingly underthought areas of the social sciences. Conceptually surrounded by the problem of the 'indeterminate totality,' as well as the hackneyed quality of invocations of 'the apocalypse,' the practice of studying social disintegration remained fragmentary and ad hoc. We still need new critical approaches to this canon and its implications, as participants in a society whose future is highly uncertain and whose historical condition of possibility was itself the destruction of other societies. What do we owe future societies when we consider the prospect of collapse? What do we owe past societies? In this Seminar, we will explore the field of collapsology and what it means for us. Crucially, these will not be taken as two separate questions but as a single field of concern. Can we embed 'what it means for us' into our accounts of how collapse actually occurs, integrating the normative and descriptive layers of theory?

The careful consideration of collapse is of special importance to anyone who wishes to work with projects that operate over spans of time that exceed a few decades. Anyone with a radical political project, for instance, must contend with the possibility of a rapid period of transformation that makes their project not only more operationally challenging but potentially conceptually incoherent. Yet noticing the possibility of our own obsolescence short of our outright extinction also opens a rich philosophical terrain. What does it mean to have values that are once historically contingent and claim their universality to be unrealised? What kind of medium is history itself and how does it resist us? This question is at once densely theoretical and eminently practical, demanding analyses of key questions in ethics and metaethics but also the challenge of designing new institutions that might carry forward revised goals, or at least encase them sufficiently so they can be transported to our descendants.

Session 1: An introduction to 'traditional collapsology'. In this introductory lecture, we will discuss some major theories for why societies fall apart, which form much of the basis for current ideas about collapse. These are focused on moral, environmental, demographic, and energetic reasons. We will introduce the philosophical problem of the 'indeterminate totality' as well as the way a discipline of 'collapsology' has functioned on the outside of more conventional social sciences.

Readings (excerpts): Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West; Alfred Toynbee, A Study of History; Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima; Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail; Patricia McAnany & Norman Yoffee, Questioning Collapse; Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe; John Michael Greer, The Onset of Catabolic Collapse; Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations.

Session 2: Recent developments in Existential Risk Studies. Much has recently been achieved in overcoming the weaknesses of traditional collapsology. In this second session we will look into some of the more nuanced approaches to questions of risk and the development of multi-causal explanations for collapse. Surveying research from CSER and other major institutions, we will take a skeptical look at the very notion of collapse and offer a broader taxonomy of periods of rapid social transformation and loss of agency.

Readings (excerpts): Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies; Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord; Florian Jehn, Mapping Out Collapse Research; Graeme S. Cumming and Garry D. Peterson, Unifying Research on Social–Ecological Resilience and Collapse; SJ Beard, Clarissa Rios Rojas, and Catherine Richards, The Era of Global Risk; Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse; Nafez Ahmed, Failing States, Collapsing Systems; Samo Burja, ""Why Civilisations Collapse""; Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending; Guy Middleton, Understanding Collapse; Toby Ord, The Precipice; Sabin Roman, ""Historical Dynamics of the Chinese Dynasties.""

Session 3: Applied collapsology. The third session will look in detail at the changing tactics of social destruction, from the theory of the imposition of the Eurocene to early counterinsurgency tactics in the Americas. We look at the development of lineages of strategic destruction and the kinds of social structure they imply. What relationship does this darker canon of induced destruction—which arguably forms the majority of 20th century collapses—have with the more stately canon we were introduced to?

Readings (excerpts): Jairus Grove, Savage Ecology; Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future; Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe; A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide; Jeremy Black, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency.

Session 4: An introduction to Critical Collapsology. In the final session, we will discuss a framework that addresses many of the problems raised in the previous sessions. The critical aspect of collapsology emerges from a reading of institutional forms as at once producing affordances, constraining developments, and entailing normative tasks for agents to accomplish. Developing these aspects of the history of collapse will allow us to make common cause with feminist and Marxist theories of social reproduction, particularly those that relate to the question of the 'mute compulsion' of capitalism as an economic system.

Readings (excerpts): Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory; Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion; Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World; Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres v. III; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy; Bob Jessop, ""Ordoliberalism and Neoliberalization""."
Pop and Contemporary Music Criticism Workshop,"CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE WORKSHOP'S OPEN SESSION

DESCRIPTION: An apocrypha, misattributed at different times to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and others, states that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This maxim is a provocation against music critics, who would try to express musical sentiments in language as if they could casually translate them through their words. Although the quote hides a romantic notion of the ineffability of musical aesthetics, it is fair in its contestation of the current paradigm of music writing, which either implies easy transparency in the conversion of sonic impressions or relies on a cold, technical, supposedly rational interpretation of music by way of notational parameters. It also acknowledges the first lesson of art criticism: that writing is a form of literature, an art form like any other, to which the critic needs to submit different artworks. Thus, music criticism would be, first of all, a literary practice. The main fault of the maxim is not that music is easy to translate but instead that the difficulty in translating itself can be potentially productive.

This Workshop will provide practical training on how to write effectively and synthetically about music. In particular, we will address pop music, which lacks a common imaginative vocabulary of abstractions, and we will use forms of communication that are amicable to current-day social media, which, contrary to traditional publishing, are ever relevant. Exercises will include short reviews, one-liners, criticism of criticism, video commentaries, and a longer essay (from the online pitch to the final editing process). The main takeaway from this Workshop should be a deeper engagement with listening and clarification of one’s taste and its translation into text. Why do you like or dislike a song that has been just released? How do you transmit the images and feelings it evokes in you to a wider audience, without alienating either the musically trained or the total dilettante? Lastly, how can music writing allow us to better understand the openings between art forms, between media, and between people?

Session 0 (Open Session): Introduction to Music Writing – We will introduce the bulk of the seminar and its schedule and assignments, and talk about comparative aesthetics and the phenomenology of the musical work, or how to effectively translate between artforms. We will also discuss your favorite pieces of response to music in all media.
Session 1: One-Liners – We will read and edit the outputs to your first assignment (one-liners) and discuss the conditions of critique and judgment for a piece of music, as well as learn to synthesize complex ideas into punchy, forthright, often humorous or dramatic phrases.
Session 2: Short Review – We will read and edit the outputs to your second assignment (blurb or short review) and compare them with examples of great music writers to understand how music reviews are usually structured and how creative writing techniques can play into it.
Session 3: Long Review – We will discuss the output of your second assignment (conceptualization, pitching, and long-form development) and discuss the modulation of music criticism in terms of size, tone, and style. We will also discuss the main gateways for publication and how to become a music writer in a practical sense, attentive to how freelancing markets work.
Session 4: Video Commentary – We will watch and discuss the outputs to your fourth assignment (video commentary) and discuss the role of music criticism in the current landscape of low-attention-span, influencer-dominated social media, or what a music critic even is in a deeper, long durée perspective."""
"Cognitive Mapping: Althusser, Sellars & Giannotti","In Grundrisse, Marx comments on his method for the critique of political economy:

“The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes, in turn, are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g., wage labor, capital, etc,"" culminating in the seminal formula ""The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”

According to Althusser, fashioning concepts that are adequate to their objects is the domain of proper science, which is understood as the business of theoretical practice, amounting to 1- the elaboration of a set of generalities 2- through the mobilization of the resources of generalities and 3- out of the previously accepted set of ideological generalities. The processual character of the constitution of Althusserian science is similar to how Wilfrid Sellars engages with the development of science, while the successive images of man in the world are constituted out of our linguistic resources.

In this Seminar, we will compare the two pictures of science as proposed by Althusser and Sellars, with an eye on the problem of grasping the whole, which is the subject of Marx's introductory quote. In this sense, both Althusser and Sellars are seen engaging in the problem that Fredric Jameson famously called cognitive mapping. However, if the Jamesonian cognitive mapping, in the case of science, consists of the relationship of the subject of knowledge to the whole of which it is a part, in the Althusserian picture of ideology, it involves the ""imaginary relationship of individuals to their conditions of existence."" This double dependency puts pressure on how subjects are determined by language- not only as a means of description but also as a normatively-laden medium capable of constituting agents as such. However, in this process, language competes with Capital in its constraining of subjectivity. Between norms and causes, we shall find a way out of the conundrum created by the ramification of these paths.

Finally, we shall revisit the framework offered by Brazilian philosopher José Arthur Giannotti in his historical debate with Althusser concerning operational schemes and the constitution of abstract diagrams of action by Capital. Giannotti is an especially interesting example for he engages with the Althusserian school early on, in 1967, with his Contra Althusser, offering a very robust account of real abstraction in his 1980's Labor and Reflection, finally becoming a Wittgensteinian scholar by 1995's Presentation of the world. While some commentators find Giannotti's change from Marx to Wittgenstein as a sign of capitulation, for us it might offer an interesting path for relating the critique and description of Capital and the critique and description of language, as they have been presented in the program of the so-called ""Post-Sellarsian Marxism"".

Here, the wager is that these mediations will furnish us with a more thorough understanding of how social synthesis operates in its multi-layered complexity.

Session 1: Cognitive Mapping & the Althusserian cut
Starting with Fredric Jameson's conceptualization of cognitive mapping, we offer the justifications of the Althusserian reading of Marx as divided into two phases deriving from the division between ideology and science which is part and parcel of Althusser's thinking.

Session 2: Sellars between fact & description
In this session we will address this question, can the constitution of the scientific image in the Sellarsian framework be related to the constitution of science for Althusser?

Session 3: Althusser on ideology
In this Session, we will look at Althusser’s notion of Ideology as a possible mediator between the Sellarsian manifest and scientific images, undercutting their distinction. Here, the Sellarsian notion of linguistic normativity will be looked at as a possible mediator between the Althusserian science and ideology, blurring their distinctions.

Session 4: Giannotti's alternative
In the last Session, we will look at Giannotti's account of real abstraction contra Althusser's division between science and ideology, examining Giannotti’s succeeding account of non-verbal language games as a more encompassing category and the problems that Wittgenstein brings to the understanding of Capital."
Film and Forensic Workshop: Towards a Documentary Practice,"In the age of social media, where content is distributed algorithmically with attention to political or psychological biases, we are immersed in the landscape of post-truth. In this paradigm, the testimonies of witnesses and victims can be easily dismissed as false or subjective, challenging the credibility of journalistic, judicial, or investigative work. Distrust in witnesses who hold differing political views poses a significant threat to the construction of democratic institutions. Critically engaging with the contemporary world requires a transformation in our toolboxes for activism and documentation. As a response to the complexities of the post-truth mediasphere, we need rigorous proximity to victims and familiarity with scientific knowledge, understanding the powerful role that visualization can play in community building and public advocacy during these times.

This Workshop moves away from the traditional ethics of testimony and employs various documentary techniques to directly approach violations against humans or nature. The goal of the Workshop is to develop an understanding of evidentiary techniques such as image analysis, geolocation, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), and data mining, exploring ways to utilize these tools in investigative filmic facts. We will engage with non-optical moving image-making technologies like AI videos, voice-overs, and found footage, with the final goal of collaborating in groups to produce a vertical film lasting 3-15 minutes. The Workshop will consist of four Sessions, with the final class held three weeks after the third Session, so that the groups of participants have time to prepare and complete their films.

Session 1: Introduction to Forensic Investigations
Session 2: Non-Optical Moving Image-Making Technologies
Session 3: Research and Development
Session 4: Film Production and Presentation"
Fear,"What are the thousand typologies of fear? Is fear a primordial problem of consciousness; does it rest in the realms of perception, sensation, psyche, imagination; or does it emanate from the outer atmosphere as a kind of spatial mood? In this Seminar, we will explore both those supposed universal categories of phobia (fear of heights, needles, insects, confined spaces) and their corresponding nightmares (dreams of falling, drowning, being chased), while also studying the possibility of new fright-modes that expand the boundaries of dread, horror, terror, paranoia, etc.

Our primary resource and method throughout this Seminar are conspiracy theories. Students will generate their own original archive by seeking out the strangest conspiracy theories in circulation today (secret societies, online demons, alien invasion, doomsday scenarios), decoding their implications, and thereby allowing us to ask a final question about the transforming horizon of fear and technology in an age of virtuality, holograms, and metaverses.

Session 1: Things Are Not What They Seem (fear of objects, phenomena, plagues)

Session 2: They Are Coming For Us (fear of the hidden, the powerful, the intruder)

Session 3: The End Nears (fear of dystopia, catastrophe, apocalypse)

Session 4: The Machine Will Devour All (fear of the artificial, the digital, the simulated)"
200 Years of Life Part II,"This Seminar tracks the history, politics, and philosophy of biology over the last 200 years, since it cohered as a scientific discipline in the early 1800s. It breaks out of two critical dead-ends in interpreting biology: the political and historical limitations of analytic treatments of biology, and the disregard for biological history and scientific detail in continental philosophical discourses around the life sciences.

By focusing on the latter half of the twentieth century, part II of this Seminar will emphasize how technical expertise and experimental praxis are marshaled both for and against a value-neutral articulation of biology. This false neutrality, especially pervasive following the end of the Cold War, has allowed the political center to shift to the right, resuscitating historically naive discussions of eugenics, race, IQ, and human experimentation. As we will see, this strain of thought is opposed, at times at the cost of over-simplification, to both post-genomic understandings of evolutionary history and a too-eager valorization of organismic agency or teleology.

Session 1: Soviet Symbiotics and Organicisms (1940-1960): Group selection, non-genetic biology, micro and macro cooperation, biopolitics and cybernetics.

Session 2: Molecular Revolutions and Sociobiology (1960-1980): Gould and Lewontin versus Dawkins and Wilson, environment and development, multi-level selection, the persistence of eugenics.

Session 3: Genomics and Gene-centrisms (1980-2000): GWAS studies, heredity and heritability, behavioral genetics, not-so-junky-junk DNA.

Session 4: Post-Genomics and Epigenetics (2000-): Developmental Programming, intergenerational trauma, genetic marks, health risk, and epigenetic medicine."
Art Writing in Context,"The term “art writing” emerged in recent years to encompass the many ways that art is mediated by text, overlapping with but not limited to art criticism and academic art history. The purpose of this Workshop is to provide a general orientation on art writing while encouraging students to think about verbal and textual expression, in relation to their own and others’ work. Regardless of one’s role in the cultural fields, writing about art can often seem daunting: how to sum up a lifelong practice in a few words? How to describe complex visual or conceptual notions in plain terms? How does art writing shift in different contexts, languages and geographies?

This Seminar is envisioned as an orientation covering all aspects of art writing in its many contexts: from reporting and criticism (in magazines, journals and newspapers) to professional communication (in websites, press releases, brochures, grant applications and proposals), up through artists’ writing and writing as an artistic practice in general. Students will read and discuss touchstones of art writing while developing their own critical writing through weekly exercises. Particular emphasis will be given to general writing principles and the situated forms art writing takes in professional practice. The Seminar will also ask open questions about language, including the role of English in the art world and the use of language in relation to the work of art."
Variations on the Great Refusal II,"The first Variations on the Great Refusal Seminar situated this notion in the speculative aesthetics of Alfred North Whitehead and in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. This Seminar proposes the idea of great refusal as a lens through which to look at the nature of aesthetic achievement in contemporary artistic practices and the ethical commitment by intellectuals. In this second edition of the Great Refusal Seminar, an outstanding contemporary filmmaker, curator and sociologist will reflect on the idea of the great refusal in relation to ‘aesthetic achievement,’ not as an ‘other’ to reason, but rather as requiring the intellectual courage to grant reason the exercise of its full rights. They will chart their own trajectory in navigating the great refusal in the context of the highly fraught public discourse about Israel and Palestine.

Dante Alighieri first introduces the idea of ‘great refusal’ into the Western literary canon in his Divine Comedy (1321). Here, the ‘shade’ who commits the great refusal is emblematic of those who err eternally in the antechamber of hell in pursuit of the banner of conformity. Whitehead famously revives the notion of the great refusal as the mark of intellectual cowardice, namely, as the refusal to grant reason the exercise of its full rights. However, he also defines the great refusal in diametrically opposite terms as the hallmark of aesthetic achievement!

It is in this second sense as aesthetic achievement that the great refusal has entered the vocabulary of 20th emancipatory movements via Herbert Marcuse as a rallying cry for emancipation against oppression and injustice. Dante’s great refusal has thus ultimately become the legacy of the exiled poet’s intellectual and aesthetic courage, namely, his refusal to be cowed by self-doubt and his courage to place the rank and file of his powerful contemporaries in the Divine Comedy’s Hell.

In this Seminar, we will hear from those who have entered the fray of a highly polarized public discourse through a courageous act of refusal – a refusal of censorship and a refusal of injunctions against the exercise, by reason, of its full rights.

The Seminar allows us to tune into the intellectual sensitivity we inherit from thinkers such as Dante, Whitehead and Marcuse. We will take abreast of the problematic nature of inner conflicts that great refusals imply: undecidability and self-deliberation. To look at contemporary art through this prism allows us to regain the means of complexity.

Speakers: Award winning filmmaker and journalist, Chérine Yazbeck; Galit Eliat, curator and director of the Meduza Foundation; Ashjan Ajour, sociologist, author of the award winning book Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger strikes: Political Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body (Palgrave 2021); Cécile Malaspina, philosopher & programmer at The New Centre for Research and Practice, author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury 2018)"
Reflexive Architecture II : Seven Continua for the post-digital,"Reflexive Architecture is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgian, the augmented, and the mixed in the context of constructed worlds. Above all, such architectures express the complex entanglement of what Deleuze & Guattari termed “the chaoids or the daughters of chaos: Philosophy, Science, and Art.” It is this transdisciplinary reflexivity that the Reflexive Architecture Workshop explores. The Workshop is structured at a slow-pace with breaks between Sessions to recognize the time participants need to remobilize the concepts discussed for their worldmaking practices.

Participants will be asked to respond to numerous smaller provocations, making works toward a substantial polemical project over the duration of the Workshop. Philosophical and technical workshops facilitate the application of media/software concepts in post-digital worldmaking practices. The Workshop is geared towards those interested in establishing a postgraduate studio practice situated between drawing, modeling, prompting, scripting, coding and both rapid and diegetic prototyping.

The Workshop is split into two strands which run in parallel: 

The first, oriented towards architecture’s visionary mode, is set against the backdrop of cybercultural tendencies in reflexive architecture proposed by Neil Spiller in his 2002 issue of Architecture & Design magazine at the millennial turn. This strand includes the exegesis of Spiller’s visionary work Communicating Vessels as well as the works of the AVATAR research group. 

Our second strand detours and swerves through the strata of such worldmaking proposed in Derek Hales’ assimilation of the Deleuzian technical object as objectile, offering a philosophical-technical orientation centered on a guided hands-on encounter with software and hardware. We address the rather vexed question of toolsets and technical rigs practically. 

While assignments can be completed with mixed-media, simple image-editing tools and a scanner, advanced toolsets and workflows, both closed-and open-source software will be discussed in some considerable detail.

Through our first strand, participants will learn of reflexive architecture as originally pioneered by Spiller in a 7-point manifesto of continua: Space, Technology, Narrative Semiotics and Performance, Cyborgian Geography, Scopic Regimes, Sensitivity, and Time. This visionary orientation features guests with experimental practices relating to the developed themes. The second strand reconstructs this reflexive architectural and cyberspatial proposition after web3 and the cyberphysical, with which the reflexive architectural vision might be actualized anew in a visionary mode of worldmaking and practical engagement in making speculative hard/soft/wet-wares for fictive materialities.

The Workshop offers both an engagement in the construction of media systems and a philosophical engagement in the future of drawing and technical objects. The visionary worldmaking mode will be underpinned by the philosophical development of the Deleuzian concept of objectility, relating it to the process-orientation of Whitehead and Simondon. We will do this by reanimating notions of an analog audio visuality from the practice of Simondon’s construction of a television and Kittler’s building of a synthesizer and loose these amidst the assemblage of digital infrastructures as we reconfigure instances of the seven continua of a post-digital reflexive architecture.

Session 1, 30th and 31st October:
Context: Introducing seven continua for reflexive architecture: Space, Technology, Narrative, Semiotics, and Performance, Cyborgian Geography, Scopic Regimes, Sensitivity, Time.

We will revisit these continua throughout the workshop, conducting philosophical research using mythopoesis (original myth-making through higher imagination) and technogenetics (the intertwined relationship between the origins of humans and technology).

Description: Reflexive Architecture as a technoecological niche

In this Session, we will explore the rapid expansion of web3, XR and AI as a technical assemblage. We will provide a practical introduction to constructing n-dimensional worlds and give an overview of SOTA (state-of-the-art) XR workflows. Participants will begin working with Blender for 3D object-tool production and integrate this within Unity, understanding Unity's structure and logic for scenographic design in XR events and Blender’s procedural logics.

Pre-requisites:
Install Unity and Blender and Sverchok. We will also offer support for participants seeking to integrate AI into their workflow Claude, Blender-MCP, VSCode, Roo Cline

Tools:
Unity & Blender

Outcome: we examine how surfaces operate in split-site architectures. Rather than treating surfaces as boundaries, we engage them as dynamic, procedural, and sensorial interfaces—capable of encoding feedback, agency, and narrative.Participants will construct procedural surface morphologies in Blender using Sverchok and experiment with surface deformations linked to sensor input. These surfaces will be deployed in Unity environments as if part of reflexive spatial systems. Through this, participants will develop an understanding of surface operations as responsive 'soft machines' across multiple continua. The session emphasizes the composition of surfaces not just as geometry, but as responsive diagrams, portals, and mediators.

Session 2, 13th November:
Context: Many areas of architectural experimentation remain underexplored, particularly the surreal processes through which augmented and mixed realities actualize. Spiller’s Communicating Vessels exemplifies the design of relationships across continua. It involves a reflexive relationship with contexts (geographical, psychological, and imagistic), creating worlds that complicate mythopoetic, mythotechnical, and technogenetic narratives. A 15th Century incunabula the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and an evolutionary tower are introduced.

Description: This session explores how reflexive architecture can be extended through distributed systems as well as systems of optics. 

Tools/Platforms: Blender, Unity, Ethereum, MQTT

Outcome: Participants will engage with the notion of ontologies as decentralised constructs—exploring how spatial logic, governance, and agency can be encoded into Web3-native and speculative web 4 infrastructures.

Session 3, 4th December:
Context: This Session presents works exploring reflexive architectural concepts, focusing on the split-site and pataphysical chunking engines. These were deployed in response to perceived problems in architecture and cyberspace around the turn of the millennium. The Session externalizes individual project ideas that Participants can develop further.

Description: Tracing allegorical shadows
Participants will trace found objects using particle systems and generate procedural terrains as allegorical landscapes. They will create scenes within a collective project, map a camera source to an in-world object as a live surface, and explore shadows, optics, movement, and the space between object and surface when split across continua.


Tools: Blender, Unity, Touch Designer, RTML

Outcome: Participants explore the integration of physical-world inputs into virtual reflexive systems, using sensors and real-time data streaming. The goal is to create responsive architectures where physical gestures, movements, or environmental changes influence the form, behaviour, or state of digital models. This builds upon the reflexive surface logics of previous modules, extending them into full feedback loops that incorporate sensor data through OSC and MQTT protocols.



Session 4, 18th December:
Context: In much of late 20th- and early 21st-century digital architecture, technical objects as ""objectiles"" have often preoccupied form and content over a reflexive pataphysical imagination. In this Session, we prepare for a winter break by discussing creative methodologies for confronting XR continua and remobilizing the objectile across split-sites in speculative hardware, parallel botany and pataphysical computing.

Description: Working with volumes and soft bodies
Participants will work with volumetric approaches and procedural techniques in Blender to generate clouds, fogs, and swarming, soft and fruiting bodies. These assets will be integrated into Unity landscapes.

Tools: Blender, Unity, RTML Touch Designer, Max MSP

Outcome: This concluding technical session synthesises technoecological reflexivity, GenAI form-generation, Web3 governance, and biochemical responsiveness and the speculative terrain of the extraordinary, this session invites participants to construct speculative architectures that think, grow, or metabolise—responsive to environmental, symbolic, or networked stimuli.



Final Four Sessions

Starting in January 2025, the final four Session are project-based, led by Participants' research. Rather than concluding with a summary, we will maintain openness to chaos and worldmaking, revisiting Reflexive Architecture's Seven Continua and the mythopoetic and technogenic processes of worldmaking.

Session 5, 15th January:

Context: This Session centers on encounters with AI and visionary architectural works, constructed in tension with polemical discourse on architectural creativity and imagination. Participants will present their chunking engine prototypes while exploring archives of visionary architecture.

Description: Chunking engines and splatting the split-site

Participants will prepare scanned objects using point-cloud data and manipulate them in Blender using various XR development strategies.

Outcome: Participants will manipulate point-cloud data, understand common problems with Lidar scans, and work with Gaussian splats to extract data from scanned objects.

Session 6, 29th January:

Context: Participants will explore the ambiguous sense of time in their project work and complicate discussions on Reflexive Architecture's Seven Continua.

Description: Reflexive events across split-sites

Participants will compose multiple scenes in Unity, working with in-world scenes, levels, and reflexive events across continua.

Outcome: Participants will prototype interactions between split-sites across virtual and actual continua.

Session 7, 12th February:

Context: Participants will encounter chaos in this Session, slipping between continua.

Description: Scenes, gates, and mappings across continua

Participants will design complex split-sites in Unity, focusing on object interoperability and real-time generative media systems.

Outcome: Participants will design complex reflexive virtual-actual split-sites

Session 8, 26th February:

The final Session focuses on redesigning reflexive continua, inviting Participants to consider the mythopoetic and technogenic processes in their work considering this a work for other works. The workshop will explore participants worldmaking and the individuation of speculative prototype worlds."
Simondon: Imagination and Invention,"This Survey Seminar will offer students of the New Centre a collaborative close reading of the recently published English translation by Joe Hughes and Christophe Wall-Romana of Gilbert Simondon's seminal work, Imagination and Invention.

Imagination and Invention is a lecture series delivered by Simondon at the Sorbonne's Institute of Psychology in 1965-66. It offers a profound reorganization of the basic concepts of the relation between imaginative processes and inventive practices prevalent in psychology and philosophy. It is a special privilege to welcome two guest speakers for this Seminar, Andrea Zoppis and Andrea Bardin. Zoppis' session will provide invaluable philosophical context by situating Simondon's work on the imagination vis-à-vis two key contemporaries, Mikel Dufrenne and François Lyotard. Bardin, on the other hand, will enrich the Seminar with a critical comparison of Simondon's book and the almost homonymous 1962–1963 lecture at the Sorbonne, Imagination, by Juliette Favez-Boutonier.

This Seminar will delve into Simondon's concept of the image-object, emphasizing its multifaceted role in synthesizing contemporary realities and social norms. In Imagination and Invention, Simondon posits that the image serves as a pivotal mediator between subjective experiences and objective truths, enabling a dynamic interaction between the concrete and the abstract. We will discuss the dual nature of images as both mental constructs and tangible artifacts, their significance in memory and foresight, and their influence on decision-making and cultural expression. By analyzing Simondon's approach to the proliferation and mediation of images, participants will gain a novel perspective on how the imagination drives invention and shapes human experience. This Seminar provides a comprehensive overview of Simondon's theories, and a refined understanding of what Simondon took to be the vital role of both imagination and invention in various domains of life.

This close reading of Gilbert Simondon's Imagination and Invention will enable Students of the New Centre to familiarize themselves with the core arguments and to clarify key concepts. By situating this work within its historical and philosophical context, this close reading will also position Simondon's ideas with respect to other philosophical theories and enable us to reflect together on their ethical and practical implications. Students will actively engage in discussions, presentations and their final written, visual or sound assignment, honing their critical thinking and communication skills. They will be encouraged to extrapolate from Simondon's insights into the mediating role of images between subjective and objective realms, in order to think about contemporary issues relevant to the arts, but also to recent developments in the theory of evolution of cognitive processes and intelligence. Simondon’s concept of the plurifunctionality of images notably will offer an original angle on current inquiries into neural activity and cognitive development, but also artificial intelligence and the widely accepted analogy between AI and human image processing and imaginative capabilities.

By integrating Simondon's philosophical insights with contemporary techno-aesthetic and techno-scientific theories, this Seminar fosters original thinking with respect to the intricate relationships between imagination, cognition, and technological innovation.

Key Topics:
1. The Role of the Image as Mediator
2. Plurifunctionality of the Image-Object
3. Integration of Contemporary Realities and Social Norms
4. Phenomenological Analysis of Images
5. Memory, Anticipation, and Decision-Making
6. Cultural and Expressive Significance of Images
7. Contemporary relevance vis-à-vis contemporary art practice and theory, as well as developments in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence

Learning Objectives:
• Understand Simondon's theoretical framework on imagination and invention.
• Explore the interplay between subjective and objective realms through images.
• Analyze the multifaceted nature of image-objects in contemporary society.
• Discuss the implications of Simondon's theories on memory, anticipation, and culture."
Antonin Artaud and Journey to Mexico,"On January 10, 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him not only to the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico City but to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara.

The Journey would only last ten months, culminating in some six to eight weeks spent among the Rarámuri of Tarahumara. Still, the motivations, challenges, and limits that characterized the trip have only become more relevant to our lives on this warming planet.

Artaud didn’t just leave Europe. He fled it: “I came to Mexico to escape European civilization … I hoped to find a vital form of culture.” The vitality that he sought was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in the soil of a place, and the rituals of religion reinforced a connection in human lives between the earth and the sun. However, Artaud’s quest for a vital form of culture would not be a simple one.

His appeal to indigenous culture would first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic, religious, political, and philosophical transformations. And this intellectual work would not be without a psychological cost.

Tracing the complex itineraries of Artaud’s Journey to Mexico, this Seminar will take us far to the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion. We will confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of alternatives in a search for a vital and ecologically viable forms of culture.

Session One: What Artaud Went to Mexico in Order to Do
Artaud was then and is now primarily known for his contributions to the arts – to literature, theater, and the visual arts – but the deepest strata of his life and work were characterized by a will to change the world as both a revolutionary and a mystic. The Seminar begins by considering Artaud’s will to change the world in the context of the political and social movements of the 1930s: fascism, communism, and Christianity.

Session Two: (Surrealist) Religion and Revolution
Artaud went to Mexico in order to escape European civilization. The second week of the Seminar considers Artaud’s critique of European civilization as well as his critique of European forms of art, religion, and ritual behavior.

Session Three: Mexico and Its Doubles
Artaud’s “Mexico” was at once imaginary, symbolic, and, in the end, all too real. His reading and research informed and motivated his journey but the disciplines and discourses shaping contemporary culture – art, anthropology, religion, revolution –limited it as well. This week in the Seminar considers motivations for and challenges to any attempt at decolonization.

Session Four: The Peyote Dance
Artaud’s journey to Mexico culminated in another journey, this one into the Sierra Tarahumara, where he may have participated in indigenous rituals. This was a physical journey but also a visionary one, a journey into altered states of consciousness, to the very edge of madness. Artaud continued to write about his experiences among the Tarahumara until the end of this life."
"On the Destruction of Life: in the Epoch of the Fourth Industrial Revolution information, anti-production and the ecological crises","On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution is the subtitle of Günther Anders’ second volume of The Outdatedness of Human Beings. This Seminar proposes a reflection on the increased destructive power of the digital revolution despite its apparently augmented productive efficacy. Neglected by the official history of philosophy, Günther Anders has been recently igniting interest. His stern considerations of the global existential threat brought about by the introduction of nuclear weapons are suitable for thinking of the human condition at the time of climate change. The moral paradox Anders uncovered is still preventing us from questioning the western narrative of techno-scientific progress: uwhile promising to globally ameliorate the quality of life thanks to the diffusion of more efficient means of production, what is also improved is the power of global annihilation. Compelled to adapt to advanced technological tools and productive practices to satisfy increasing artificial needs, we are forced to collaborate in the optimization of the means that not only increase the risk of annihilation but also provoke damages and inequalities on a daily basis. The difficulty is that we are almost blind to this blackmailing while at the same time we are prevented from assuming the responsibility for the destructive consequences of the irreproachable practices that allow us to express our values as consumers as creative means to renovate and intensify consumption. To deepen the insight on Anders’ thoughts on the harmful implications of contemporary capitalism, the Seminar considers Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of anti-production. Moreover, to clarify the link to ecological issues, we will read papers by bio-economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen about his notion of entropy.

READINGS:

Günther Anders, The Outdatedness of Human Beings (Vol. 2): On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution, Translated by Josep Monter Pérez, 1980 (excerpts).
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, Pergamon Press, 1976 (Chapter 1 “Entropy and Economic Myths”; Chapter 3 “The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem”).
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipus, University of Minnesota Press, 1983 (excerpts).
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press 1987 (excerpts)."
Modes of Transit in the Necropastoral,"This Seminar is a collaborative investigation of decaying, decomposing and/or dying nature, uncovering the subterranean precincts and possibilities of the Necropastoral. The Necropastoral designates a way of thinking about both ecology and aesthetics that eats away at categories like cause and effect, past and future, human and inhuman, living and dead. Instead, the Necropastoral propagates an eco-aesthetic zone which is decadent, inverted, unfit and too-much, posthumous and profligate, anachronistic and undermining. It expectorates an uneven array of ill-founded and spectacular effects.

As we collectively transit through the Necropastoral, we will read poetry in translation and consider the katabatic terrains and the ecologies they entailed. We will experience the distending and relieving shifts in pressure created by transit through genres and languages. We will encounter plural, extremophile, and hybrid lifeforms and subjectivities and palpate novel topographies with our increasingly acute sensory appendages. We will assimilate botanical/avian/angelic ecologies of
language, and consider translation's impossibility as a novel model of (posthumous) survival.

Session 1: Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Ito, tr. by Jeffrey Angles.

Part katabasis, part naturalist journal, this landmark in contemporary Japanese poetry follows a group of migrant children who might be moving through California desert, playing on a riverbank in Japan, be wild grass on that riverbank or might even in fact be dead. The work flexes between Japanese English, botanical terms, proper names, children's rhymes, puns, and a lengthy sample of Neil Young resounding through the landscape. Wild Grass will be our introduction to the Necropastoral, as we consider the way this text in its plurality propagates an infernal ecology and establishes translation and migrancy as signal activities in the Necropastoral.

Session 2: With Deer by Aase Berg and Angelgreen Sacrament by Eva Kristina Olsen, both translated by Johannes Göransson.

Contemporary Swedish surrealism will allow us to further study the way textual ecologies can propagate hybrid species and host conflict and events, whether between humans, animals and environment (With Dear) or between human, angel, insect, and language (Angelgreen). Translation will serve as a nexus for considering language as a human artifact and as the site of recombination, pain, and metamorphosis.

Session 3: Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi, and excerpts from Emergency by Edgar Garcia.

With Phantom Pain Wings, by contemporary Korean master poet Kim Hyesoon, we will consider the overlapping issues of bird language, shamanism, and cosmic transit, as well as the ways these themes and possibilities are occluded or extended by translation into English by Kim's close collaborator, the artist-poet Don Mee Choi. We will send these lines of lightless flight outwards into the critical regions designated in Emergency by scholar-poet Edgar Garcia, which contrasts the godly, the avian, and the human in the context of the Popul Vuh and critical Mayan darkness;

Session 4: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire tr. Clayton Eshleman.

We will conclude our transit with an anachronistic arrival at Martinican Surrealist Aimé Césaire's 1939 Notebook, considering how its dream botanies, climatology, geology, and ecologies of repetition and motif entail an eruption of futurity through the split beak of omenology and contradiction. We will also estimate what we have learned about the limitations and possibilities of translation as a means of subterranean transit and the relationship of translation to impossible utterance."
200 Years of Life I,"This two-part Seminar will track the history, politics, and philosophy of biology over the course of the last 200 years since biology cohered as a scientific discipline. We will attempt to break out of two critical dead-ends in interpreting biology – political and historical limitations of analytic treatments of biology and disregard for biological history and scientific detail in continental philosophical discourses around the life sciences.

Session 1: The Aristotle/Kant Sandwich (pre-1800 thoughts on life)
Topics: The organic as special, the beginning of the species problem, teleology, and agency,
the limits of analytic-style philosophy of biology

Session 2: What Darwin Did and Didn’t Do (1859-1880)
Topics: the newness of natural selection, theory-laden empiricism, the Darwin industry, Galton
and the birth of eugenics

Session 3: Darwinisms and Lamarckianisms (1860-1920)
Topics: The so-called Eclipse of Darwinism, the Bone Wars, Weissman and Neo- and Psycho-
Lamarckianism, Bergson as a philosopher of biology, the vitalist boogeyman

Session 4: The Modern Synthesis (1920-1940)
Topics: The Huxley Brothers, the victory of biometrics, the diminishing of development,
forgetting cell biology"""
Worldmaking between Prometheanism & Perspectivism,"The goal of this Seminar is to treat the question of planetary design at the often-polemical intersection of two contemporary streams of thought: On one side perspectivism, cosmopolitics, and/or the ""ontological turn"" and, on the other, prometheanism, neorationalism and/or left-accelerationism. This is structured on the basis of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's (EVC) text 'On models and examples: Bricoleurs and engineers of the Anthropocene', where he articulates a critique of geoengineering through the Levi-Straussian distinction between bricoleurs (who work with examples) and engineers (who work with models).

Drawing from tensions within EVC's own text, we would like avoid a simple opposition to engineering (as the use of models-for), and explore the possibility of thinking of bricoleurs/examples and engineers/models as vectors within a spectrum. We will bring in the concept of the diagram as one which might serve to mediate between models and examples: Both of those would then appear not as extreme cases of more or less coded diagrams. Our goal will be, on the one hand, to distance ourselves from a mere rejection of engineering and technology in the navigation of climate catastrophe while, on the other, dissolving the stark opposition between promethean planetary engineering and supposedly localist perspectivist cosmopolitics.

This should allow us to learn something from the perspectivist/terran critique of geoengineering and the promethean elaboration of planetary-scale worldmaking. We will explore mixed concepts, such as Viveiros de Castro's concept of geobricolage, or perhaps even a perspectivist take on (geo)engineering, via the notion of a bricolage- engineering spectrum, which is to say, an example-model spectrum mediated by the notion of the diagram.

Session 1: ENGINEERS AND BRICOLEURS
In this first session, we will determine our Seminar's research problem by reading Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's ""On Models and Examples: Engineers and Bricoleurs in the Anthropocene."" We will ask what exactly is at stake between the prima facie conflicting positions of terran/perspectivist bricoleurs and inhuman/promethean
engineers. Viveiros de Castro emphasizes he does not want to posit engineering and model-making as essentially evil. Yet, at times, he seems to rely on a distinction between ""model-of"" and ""model-for"" to save the former at the latter's expense. As an alternative, we will focus on his suggestion that models and examples are ultimately not discontinuous and pure opposites but rather vectors within a continuous bricolage-engineering spectrum.

Session 2: THE PROMETHEAN CASE FOR (GEO)ENGINEERING
Moving forward, we will look into how contemporary geoengineering is thought of and takes place, with concrete and speculative examples from geoengineering writings. We will discuss how the human/nature relation appears in prometheanism through Reza Negarestani's call for norm revisionism, the practice of inference, and the interplay between thought (belief) and action (agency). This will be tested against other divides (social, epistemological, geopolitical), creating a sliding scale of what can be considered as human-engineered interventions. Through that, we will seek to delineate the relation between locality and globality regarding ecological issues and how each feeds back onto the other. This should start to create a multifaceted diagram of vectors of engineering and bricolage.

Session 3: THE MODEL-EXAMPLE SPECTRUM I: PERSPECTIVISM
In our third section, we will move back to the perspectivist side to ask how the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of diagram may allow us to mediate between models and examples, picturing them respectively as more and less coded diagrams. We will read Viveiros de Castro's work on metaphysical perspectivism as a paradigm of bricoleur thought, with special attention to his concept of the body as determining the differentiation of perspectives. The proximity between this concept of the body and the diagram will be key in obtaining a perspectivist take on the bricolage/engineering spectrum, introducing models within a perspectivist framework and, thus, cannibalizing the enemy engineer as a potential geobricoleur.

Session 4: THE MODEL-EXAMPLE SPECTRUM II: DIAGRAMMING THE COMMONS
Focusing on Patricia Reed's diagrammatic propositions for navigating different scales, our last session will focus on thinking through how models and examples can be traced in different areas of the same spectrum through the plastic topology of the diagram. Through this approach, we will look into how models can be speculative tools for designing possibilities that are not yet existent. We will look into the conceptual differentiation between ""firmative speculation,"" which doesn't account for the realities of a speculative territory, and ""affirmative speculation,"" which allows for bifurcation and actualizations of the model by a feedback mechanism with the territory. This recursivity will allow us to bridge the example/model gap and highlight what geobricolage can absorb from engineering."
Secrecy: Return of the mystery cults,"How does one design the perfect secret? How does one become an architect of ciphers, and can it resurrect the atmospheres of the mystery cults? In this seminar, we will explore those code-worlds of secrecy and techniques of encryption through which disguised, covert, subterranean, and cloaked zones are generated. Imperative: Conspiracy.

Note: Students will bring their own original selections of secret societies, undergrounds,
outsider movements, or unseen circles each week in a laboratory-mode experimental discussion.

Each week will follow a specific prompt to be shared in advance.

Session 1. Hierophantēs (revealer)
Session 2. Dadouchos (torchbearer)
Session 3. Mystagogos (accomplice)
Session 4. Mystēs (initiate)"
Long-Form Writing Laboratory,"What makes a good idea for a writing project? How do you move from a curiosity/impulse to an idea/argument? What would you tell an editor to persuade them to publish it? How do you follow through? This hands-on Writing Lab is a first collaboration between Liza Featherstone, a journalism professor and a columnist for Jacobin and The New Republic, and the philosopher Cécile Malaspina, programmer at the New Centre and at the College International de Philosophie. It aims at supporting a writing project over eight sessions, through targeted workshops, prompt writing exercises, and a series of short outside-of-class assignments, culminating in a draft that will have been progressively reviewed by fellow students and by the workshop leaders. The Lab is designed to address challenges of the writing process from start to finish, from the developing of robust ideas to the formulation of a pitch or proposal, from draft to fully edited submission. A combination of instruction and discussions, in-session groups activities, as well as assignments, this Workshop will help you to situate yourself as a writer, to argue with lucidity, and to identify and speak to your audience. You will practice initiating and sustaining a writing practice, finding structure and flow, as well parrying self-doubt by defining the scope of your argument and grounding it in evidence. Students will receive feedback on their final draft from peers as well as Instructors. The Workshop is supported by breaks of several weeks, to allow participants to write. Students from any discipline and working in any genre – whether academic, criticism, curatorial, fiction, theory, polemic, journalism, memoir – are welcome. Final projects are not limited to text and may take visual and/or auditory form.

SESSION ONE: WHAT MAKES AN IDEA FOR A WRITING PROJECT GOOD?
After a general outline of the course structure and final project outcomes, students and workshop leaders will introduce themselves and their writing objectives for the workshop. How do you move from a curiosity / impulse to an idea / argument? What would you tell an editor to persuade them to publish it? In the first session, instructors will provide guidelines for the upcoming pitching exercise, which will be due in the subsequent session. We will discuss how to move your project from topic to idea and how to explain it to funders, editors and of course yourselves. We will also discuss the final work, which will be due in the sixth session, allowing for review from peers and workshop leaders, and culminating in a revised draft, which will be due in week seven. We encourage students to limit their final work to 2500 words / 10-20 minute films or sound work in order to make the best of feedback. Larger projects are welcome but will be assessed based on samples from the text / visual / sound material.

SESSION TWO: PITCH PERFECT
Assignment for Session Two: write up your idea in required form: as a pitch to an editor / book proposal / curatorial project / grant proposal etc. Students will split into groups to read out the assignment submitted for this week. They will discuss the strengths of the pitch to editor / book proposal / curatorial project / grant proposal, giving and receiving feedback in a spirit of risk-taking and enabling comments. Instructors will visit with the small groups, guiding and offering feedback.

SESSION THREE: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? WRITING AND SELF-DOUBT
Assignment due for session three: edit your pitch, incorporating feedback from Week Two and write a first draft of the introduction to your project. This session will focus on entitlement / imposter syndrome, revisiting writers and their self-doubt from Dante to Merleau Ponty and Mark Fisher. We will discuss what stops you from writing, and what gets you writing, thinking about habits & routines as survival strategies. The focus will be on establishing expertise: where does authority come from and how do you ground your claims enough to marshall confidence in your own writing? The group will workshop the un-muddling of ideas, focusing on the drafting of introductions as an exercise in setting up argument and story, as limiting scope.

SESSION FOUR: ARGUMENTS & EVIDENCE Assignment due for Session Four: turn pitch onto roadmap / plan for final piece, centered around the key evidence that grounds your argument / project. Session Four will be dedicated to the types of structures that can hold arguments. In a group discussion, students will generate different kinds of arguments and evidence, while also considering what sorts of mistakes can disqualify an argument. Splitting into groups, students will present the strongest version of their project’s argument to each other, discussing difficulties and strategies for refining and substantiating key arguments.

SESSION FIVE: WRITING AS COMMUNICATION:
Assignment due for Session Five: break main project into parts and write an abstract for each part and bullet point outline for the sections. In this session we will workshop different styles of writing and find the language specific to a chosen audience. Breaking into groups, students will reformulate their project in different genres and styles, experimenting with the epistolary style, the diary style, presenting their project as a news item, or as an abstract for a scholarly essay etc. The exercises will help students render explicit the assumptions we make, or differences we fail to take into consideration, about our potential readers. The emphasis will be on foregrounding the purpose and objective of a given piece of writing. Does it aim to persuade, rectify misconceptions, propose new arguments, explore unchartered territory …? Does it aim at a blurring of genres and an experimentation with language, or at the bite of concision and clarity?

SESSION SIX: PRESENTATIONS OF FINAL PROJECTS
Assignement due for session six: submit and present first draft of final project. Feedback session: students split into small groups to present a first draft of their final projects to each other and receive feedback. This will be followed by a group discussion elaborating strategies for critically re-reading and revising one’s own project.

WEEK SIX: DELIVERY OF FINAL DRAFT
Assignment due for Session Six: students form pairs to read each other’s first draft. In the first part of this session students will form pairs to give each other feedback on their first drafts.The emphasis will be on identifying and providing positive reinforcement for effective writing strategies, as well as highlighting the visible effects of workable methods. Each student signs up for an in-session individual feedback slot with one of the instructors. This will be followed by a group discussion, where students read out particularly effective sections of each other’s work.

SESSION SEVEN: WRITING = REWRITING:
Consignment for Session Seven: submission of revised draft . How do you edit yourself? The final Session will revisit the transition from writing as the generation of raw material, to writing as the emergence of structure, dynamics, and refinement of argument. The Session will be dedicated to self-editing exercises and strategies.

SESSION EIGHT: DEBRIEF
Assignment for Session Eight: Resubmission of final essay, having incorporated comments and editorial strategies from Session Seven. The final session of the Workshop will consist in recapping and debriefing. Students will be encouraged to formulate a personalized writing strategy and criteria by which to assess and chart the dynamic development of their strengths and the progressive overcoming of difficulties."
Short-form Criticism Workshop: The conditions for judgment,"This Workshop engages participants in the discipline of criticism as a contemporary practice. The qualitative judgment of art has always been a fraught process. Following the decline of art historical canon, various critical and/or theoretical discourses, and the debilitating rise of social media, the prospect of criticism seems nearly impossible. But this sense of impossibility is a mere cultural norm, and the prevalence of ineffectual art writing that diverges from criticism only proves criticism’s necessity.

This Workshop will examine the history of the field of criticism and its enduring usefulness while grappling with the act of writing criticism in the present. We will consider the qualities that characterize a new form of criticism that is informative, articulate, entertaining, and, more importantly, brief yet powerful. The Workshop will center on the importance of short-form writing in a contemporary online context that has become the new locus of discourse, using the example of the instructor’s own writing on the Manhattan Art Review. In this process, the act of judgment will emerge as an integral and communicable operation in the ontology of art, and participants will learn through practice the means by which authentic judgment occurs.

-Overview of the four sessions of the seminar:

Session 1:
-Introducing short form criticism: The contemporary method of aesthetic communication, where the critic conveys their judgment to readers who might be suffering from attention deficit under current media regimes. The session lays the basic rules of short-form aesthetic education, where the reader quickly learns to understand and discriminate between artworks by the critic’s example in the minimum number of words required.

Session 2:
-The contemporary critic: How is it possible to ground subjective judgments without recourse to objectivity? What is the relationship between social phenomena, including art, their criticism, and the temporal context in which they appear? What can we learn from the history of criticism, and how does our present context differ?
-Discussion of the form and content of the final project.

Session 3:
-Perspective, taste, and accelerated articulation: A discussion of criticism considered in short-form writing, what criticism says about art, culture, politics, critics, and social context in the age of technological acceleration. What changes in criticism when it prioritizes the articulation of subjective judgments over presenting ostensibly factual information?
-Review of short-form critical pieces.

Session 4:
-Presentation and review of final pieces."
"Self-writing, Autotheory and Autoethnography: Paulin Hountoundji and the Critique of Realism","In this Seminar, Students will be introduced to the challenges of developing an autotheory and autoethnography as problematized by philosopher Paulin Hountondji. Given that we live in an age that has popularized the novel as a contemporary form of self-writing and that much of contemporary literature deals in memoir and diaristic writing, this class will offer some radical challenges to such a practice as it relates to disciplines like ethnography, psychology, and phenomenology and to problems and issues of writing, thinking, and speaking. If some of our most captivating personalities of today are defined through acts of public speaking and through autobiography, what, then, can be critically considered as the problems and issues of self-writing, autotheory and autoethnography?

One of the most influential modern African philosophers of the last three decades, Paulin Hountondji, has created a body of work that continues to speak to our contemporary times. Having emerged into the discipline of philosophy at a key juncture of African countries formulating their identity after gaining independence, Hountondji’s work can be said to speak to what philosopher Dismas A. Masolo has termed the “Search for identity.” In fact, one of his books is titled The Search for Meaning. Having influenced key thinkers like Achille Mbembe and Dismas A. Masolo, Hountondji’s work casts a long shadow over contemporary post-colonial thought.

If post-colonial literature continues to thrive in a particular mode of self-writing, Hountondji’s work questions in what ways such a practice contributes to the rigorous task of thinking about a world amid anti-colonial battles and the rigorous task of thinking belonging in such a world of tensions and anxieties. In other words, what models of self-writing can be viewed as detrimental to the progress in achieving and fulfilling this “search for meaning” and “search for identity.”

The Students will read key works by Paulin Hountondji, including his classic text, ""African Philosophy: Myth or Reality?"" alongside major texts by authors like James Clifford, Paul Rabinow, Dismas A. Masolo, Gayatri Spivak, Achille Mbembe, Bessie Head, and Mariama Ba."
From Inference to Intervention: on the operative logics of machine learning,"In recent decades, machine learning methods have become deeply entangled with processes of worldmaking through their crucial role in making inferences about the world. When deployed in contexts such as criminal justice, social welfare, or public health, predictive systems take an even more active role in shaping the world by directly feeding data-driven insights into decision-making processes. In such high-stakes contexts, patterns generalized from observed data are rendered actionable, often embedding and exacerbating historical patterns of inequality and social harm.

The project of remaking the world in a way that does not encode the past into the future in a perpetual feedback loop of discrimination requires an in-depth examination of the operative logics underlying some of the key machine-learning methods operationalized in high-stakes contexts.

While practices of classification, inductive inference, and correlation-based predictive modeling all typically serve as useful instruments for scientific research, their use in socio-political contexts requires additional scrutiny. This Seminar will explore some of the key concepts and example components of machine learning systems (including benchmark datasets such as ImageNet, the ETAS model for seismicity forecasting used by a predictive policing company, and the theoretical underpinnings of machine learning theory such as the no free lunch theorem) by situating them in their implementation contexts and examining their epistemic functions.

Each Session will approach machine learning logic logic via a different conceptual lens, drawing on theoretical frameworks for thinking about systems of classification (Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star), the material theory of induction (John D. Norton), theories of explanatory and idealized models in science (Alisa Bokulich and William C. Wimsatt), and interventionist theories of causation (Judea Pearl and James Woodward), to examine the necessary conditions for meaningful interventions in the world.

Session 1: Benchmark datasets and the logic of classification
Session 2: The ""no free lunch"" theorem and the problem of induction
Session 3: Prediction, explanation, and model fitting
Session 4: Correlation, causation, and intervening in the world"
Feminism in the canon of philosophy: A research lab,"In this Seminar, we will talk about feminist philosophy and its development into a parallel entity, into a “Philosophy’s ‘Other’” as Judith Butler calls it, concerning the traditionally understood philosophy, not included in the canon of philosophy as obligatory readings, while many feminist philosophers teach in other departments than philosophy itself.

Starting with the Ancient Greek cities as the birthplace of Western philosophy, we will see how the structural setup of the Greek society set the tone of what we read as the philosophical canon nowadays — the cradle of Democracy in its lack of representation. Feminist philosophers engage with the traditional canon of philosophy and a wide range of contemporary philosophical writings.

Still to this day, this is marked by a lack of mutual recognition that results in exclusion and foreignness towards feminist philosophy and women philosophers in general.

Women philosophers who are asking questions outside of the framework of traditionally thought philosophy when confronted with statements like “I cannot understand this or I do not see the argument here, all very interesting . . . but certainly ‘not’ philosophy.”, get pushed to the margins, with the only options to either constantly fight for their position or leave the field of philosophy for good, and therefore erased as equally valuable voices and insights.

As a consequence of these neglects, Judith Butler asks, “Is there any hope left for philosophy unless it actively engages precisely such an impurity?”

In the Seminar we will explore these impacts on the field of philosophy, and we will ask why it is important to read feminist philosophy as a collective effort in the canon of philosophy, rather than reading the endeavor of individual women philosophers as standing for an inclusion of women in general.

To what extent must a Critical Philosophy nowadays include feminist philosophy, to get sensitized to the topics, while widening its horizon, creating potentially new openings in order to gain a more representative epistemology.

Picking up on practices in feminist circles through community and collaboration, the aim of this Session is to invite discussion to think together through the challenges and perspectives of such an inclusive canon.

This Seminar functions as an opening introduction to a wide range of inquiries.

All Sessions will be accompanied by readings.

Session 1: How did we get here in the first place?

This Session will start to define what is feminist philosophy. What gets debated? What is the focus of its research? What does a contemporary feminist philosophy stand for? Why and How do we become feminist philosophers? Why is feminist philosophy not just for women?

Session 2: How did we get here in the first place? Part 2, the heritage.

Looking back at women philosophers throughout the history of philosophy, the question of archives, what and why is something included and what and why gets excluded.

Are we excluded from what? We will look closer at what traditionally understood philosophy entails by reading through its history with the specific example of the Ancient Greek cities as the birthplace of Western Philosophy.

Session 3: Why is feminist philosophy kept out of the rooms of a more institutionalized philosophy? Why did feminist philosophy develop into its own entity, particularly over the course of the 20th century?

Session 4: Why is it important to include feminist philosophy? This question will be read along with the specific example of Hedwig Dohm’s critique of Nietzsche.
What are the struggles and what could be the gains of including feminist philosophy in the canonical reading of philosophy."
Cartesian Conflagrations,"Often introduced in the vein of a boogeyman at the center of modern philosophical cautionary tales, Descartes remains one of the most influential and yet persistently controversial of all rationalists. His controversy stems mainly from two facts: one, that his legacy initiated a chain reaction at the dawn of the Enlightenment, likened by Rosalie L. Colie in Light and Enlightenment (1957) to a series of great blazes which reached to Hobbes and Spinoza, ravished the landscape of scholastic and theological thought with much intellectual fury, and set in motion the very process of modernizing philosophy. Second, because Descartes was a notorious critic of himself, shifting his philosophical position very thoroughly and very often from metaphysical rationalism to an unrestrained rationalism, only to arrive at a naturalist stance where the concerns of rationalism had to reckon with the problems of methodological naturalism.

The aim of this Seminar is to show that the conflagrating nature of Descartes’s philosophy—a mixture of high heat and enlightenment—in its transitional and revisory ethos is still very much intact. The great fires initiated by Rattus Descartus will live on. The strawmanning of René Descartes as the founder of the so-called la nouvelle philosophie, at best a substance dualist and at worst a philosopher bent on laying waste to all philosophical achievements of the old world, are not merely unjustified but also strategic falsities to stave off what Descartes had already anticipated to the determinant of philosophical forms of idleness: A second enlightenment born out of a meticulous renegotiation of boundaries between rationalism and empiricism.

This Seminar will engage with such problems in the philosophy of Descartes and its legacy by underscoring the insights of his so-called Leiden period, during which Descartes is, by all definitions, an intellectual persona non grata. We will subsequently investigate the achievements of his later works in light of some of the most pressing philosophical problems today, including but not limited to those brought up by the ongoing revisions demanded by developments in AI research and calls for a rationalist empiricism (see, for example, Nathan Brown’s Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique)."
The Flight of Ariel: Universalism in Latin American Thought,"In his groundbreaking study ""Ariel y Arisbe: evolución y evaluación del concepto de América Latina en el Siglo XX (2000),"" Colombian philosopher Fernando Zalamea proposes a broad genealogy of what he named the 20th Century Latin American ""universalist"" tradition. Guided by the utopian aspiration to nurture productive mediations between distinct modes of expression and seek new modes of integration between different cultural forms, this trajectory of thought emphasized the place of Latin America as a space of cultural synthesis, within which the particularities of its local traditions and unique histories were to become integrated into a global horizon of intellectual production and emancipation across the sciences, arts, and politics.

In this Seminar, we will examine how a universalist tradition conceived of the complementarity between the local and global in the attempt to think of the identity and destiny of Latin American nations and of the continent as a whole. In the first week, we shall introduce how the nascent republics of Latin America sought to extend the labor of independence to think of a cultural and not only economic-political autonomy from the colonial past, progressively problematizing the mimetic impulse.

In this context, we will examine how the dream of Latin America as a universal and cosmopolitan space of cultural synthesis was shaped in the horizon of a new humanist global culture that defied the spirit of positivism and affirmed the experience of mestizaje, looking at seminal texts by José Enrique Rodó, José Martí, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña.

In the second Session, we will explore how a vector of historical materialist thought during the first decades of the twentieth century sought to defy the lingering romanticism and idealism in the early humanist Americanist utopian projects, providing a dialectical interpretation of Latin American history. In this context, the place and destiny of indigenous populations and cultures in nationalist and continentalist visions becomes first rigorously defined, and with it the necessity to overcome the historic tension between the Western and native heritages of Latin America, in sight of the prospect of building alternative modern futures. We shall focus on selections from the works of Manuel González Prada, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Leopoldo Zea.

In the third Session, we will focus on how the ""philosophy of liberation"" since the 1970s and proponents of the so-called ""decolonial turn"" from the 1990s onward radicalized the prospective vindication of indigenous populations and the displacement of Eurocentrism against the mimetic impulse, the better to think of the ""peripheral"" place of Latin American nations in relation to hegemonic geopolitical ""centers"" through a synthesis of various theoretical registers beyond the resources of traditional Marxist analysis: Singer and Prebisch's dependency theory, Wallerstein's world-systems analysis, Foucaultian genealogy of power, and Levinasian ethics, being central among the central registers that mobilize a retrospective critical evaluation of the concept and ideals of modernity. We shall trace this trajectory by examining texts by Enrique Dussel, Ángel Rama, Walter Mignolo, and Santiago Castro-Gómez.

In the fourth and final Session, we will provide an approximation to two exemplary contemporary philosophical projects that provoke a traversal of the tension between regionalism and universalism in forms of writing that also defy the historical-institutional division between so-called analytic and continental approaches: Gabriel Catren's synthesis of Kantian transcendentalism and Spinozist immanentism in his recently published masterwork Pleromatica: Elsinore's Trance, and Fernando Zalamea's application of Peircean pragmatics to yield a formal ontology that synthesizes and systematizes the great Latin American universalist tradition in Ariel y Arisbe: evolución y evaluación del concepto de América Latina en el Siglo XX."
Being There and Not There,"Amid what Roberto Bolaño calls the melancholy folklore of exile, he evokes the phantom experience preceding an apocalypse that may never arrive: “I had practically no friends, and all I did was write and go for long walks, starting at seven in the evening, just after getting up, with a feeling like jet lag – an odd sensation of fragility, of being there and not there, somehow distant from my surroundings.”

Here, the perpetual state of being there and not there corresponds with a sense of profound alienation from the world. But there is a wider range of alternative formulations for this suspension between presence and absence, flickering across the boundaries separating the here and now from some kind of elsewhere. This Seminar explores concepts, experiences, and techniques of being there and not there through the lens of the immaterial, elemental, synaesthetic, and multiple.

We will do so through various written and multimedia works that blur between the philosophical, poetic, and hallucinatory. We will analyze their qualities and potentials to develop our practices for cultivating phantom states of being there and not there, somewhere between and beyond the categories of material and immaterial, embodied and disembodied, reality and illusion.

Session 1. Immaterial
– Roberto Calasso, “Distant Beings”
– Vilém Flusser, Immaterialism

Session 2. Elemental
– László Krasznahorkai, “Kamo Hunter”
– Remedios Varo, “A Recipe”

Session 3. Synaesthetic
– Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics”
– Ernst Jünger, “Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon”

Session 4. Multiple
– The final Session is reserved for in-depth discussion of Seminar participants’ work.

Group Assignment: For the second or third week, find an example or technique of being there and not there and share it with us.

Final Assignment: For the last week, students present their exploration of being there and not there using the medium of their choice."
Information: Individuation according to Simondon,"What is it that distinguishes information from a random event? It is, according to Simondon, its catalyzing effect on a process of individuation. Information, thus conceived, is synonymous with the sense of individuation [le sens de l’individuation], affine with the potentialities specific to it, and conducive to amplifying its intrinsic orientation.

The first part of this Survey Seminar will consist of situating the key elements of Simondon’s conception of information regarding what is, on the face of it, an anachronistic revival of the scholastic problem of individuation. This will allow us to carefully distinguish the concept of individuation from that of mere ontogenesis, with which it overlaps without being synonymous. Only once we situate Simondon’s conception of information in the paradigmatic reorientation of speculative realism can we begin to truly grasp the insufficiency that he diagnoses in the concept of information according to cybernetics and information theory.

The second part of this Seminar will deal with the often-deplored reduction of information to quantitative parameters at the expense of signification. Simondon’s critique of a reductive conception of information indeed deserves elucidation but also relativization, not only because of a certain blurriness in his account of ‘negentropy’ and ‘information entropy’ but also because the issue of signification does not account exhaustively for Simondon’s more substantive divergence on metaphysical grounds.

The third part of this Seminar will discuss Simondon’s divergence from cybernetics and information theory with particular attention to his emphasis on the role of disadaptation in developmental psychology. This will enable contemporary readers of Simondon to resist what Isabelle Stengers has so adroitly singled out as a danger of pietism and to amplify instead the extent to which his conception of information can still be understood as the ‘immanent vector of complexity and experimentation’ that Stengers rightly demands."
GPT for Arts & Humanities,"Designed for humanities students with little to no programming background, ""GPT for Arts & Humanities"" is an 8-session Workshop that focuses on the text-based research in humanities leveraging LLM technology (Large Language Models, most notably ChatGPT and GPT-4, colloquially accepted as the most widely useful contemporary form of “Artificial Intelligence"").

The Workshop offers an accessible introduction to key LLM-related technologies and products, such as ChatGPT, GPT API, and vector embeddings, which support a broad range of useful applications. By emphasizing practical, hands-on use-cases, the Workshop demystifies complex concepts, enabling participants to amplify their research capabilities. Topics covered include the fundamentals of LLM, constructions of topic-specific chatbots, techniques for analyzing expansive PDF archives, and innovative approaches to conceptual research and translation.

To ensure that the Workshop is aligned with the unique research needs of our participants, we'll ask each of them to complete a brief questionnaire about their background and interests. This will assist us in customizing the Workshop material for maximum relevance and impact.

Participants will be required to develop a LLM-based project that showcases their research object. This project will serve as the basis for their course assessment, providing a practical application of the skills and knowledge gained throughout the seminar. Students will be actively supported while developing the project. The LLM-related parts of the assignment, as well as the observational essay on the others’ interaction with this project, will be the object of the final evaluation.

In this Workshop, participants will learn:

– A variety of ways to leverage LLMs for research and presentation of that research
– How to use prompt-engineering to get better quality results with more control
– How to present their research topic in a way that is available for LLM to analyse
– How to create a GPT chat-bot, or another kind of interactive tools, to present one’s research for others in an engaging and interactive way
– Basic programming skills, and the way to use ChatGPT to write code for both personal use, and the use of others
– Basic concepts and techniques for LLM usage: from tokens, embeddings and quantization to prompt-chains, RAG and fine-tuning
– Critical and technical concepts helpful for understanding and working around the limitations of LLM-based research approaches"
On the Scissiparity of Geist: Reason & its Outside,"In his 2020 article “Geist and Ge-Stell: Beyond the Cyber-Nihilist Convergence of Intelligence,” Hilan Bensusan conjectures the possibility of what he calls a scissiparity of Geist. Coming from the framework sketched in his “Cosmopolitical Parties in the Post-Human Age” (2020/1). Bensusan fleshes out in “Geist and Ge-Stell” the tenets of what he calls a nihilist position, understood in a Heideggerian fashion as the result of Ge-stell, positionality, the understanding of the world as a standing reserve for a command to be seized- the “unworlding of the Earth”. (Bensusan, p. 95)

Thought of in that sense, modern science amounts to a form of nihilism for Bensusan, one that encounters its zenith in Reza Negarestani’s conception of Geist- or Reason- as its own artifact, entailing the simultaneous artificialization of itself and the world, as Reason strives for the expansion of intelligibility. Against what Bensusan reads as a convergent form of Reason, taken to be implicit in Negarestani’s conception, the argument from the Scissiparity of Geist make plausible a divergent form of Reason, whereby different forms of Geister separate and become unintelligible for each other. As Bensusan says, “Geist-B cannot have any content from the point of view of Geist-A because there is no pairing of commands that could be sanctioned by the community of Geist-A. In other words, from the point of view of Geist-A, those commanded by Geist-B are obeying to no command whatsoever even if there is a regularity that can be detected.” The guarantor of this possibility for Bensusan is what he deems the phenomenological character of Reason that characterizes the inhumanist understanding of rule-following: for him, according to the inhumanist, there is no reality of rule-following beyond our ability to grasp it. Therefore, the defense of an externalism of rules comes hand in hand with the idea of scissiparity.

While this is a particular solution to the problem, one may recognize within this piece of debate a way to encapsulate and parse out a number of contemporary theoretical positions. While Bensusan himself is trying to defend a form of perspectivism from his argument, it is possible to recognize in it Roden’s disconnection thesis that conjectures that an entity, while being a descendant of what Roden calls a Wide Human, may cease to belong to Wide Human as a result of technical alteration; as it is possible to recognize in it the form of the Outside in accelerationism- split between unconditional and left accelerations, with competing conceptions of reason/intelligence that might be read off Bensusan’s argument.

This Seminar presents the argument, propose a short history of this kind of argument in the guise of the “radical translation/interpretation schemes” that have been proposed in analytic philosophy (Dummett, Quine, Davidson, etc), and stage a confrontation between the different concepts of reason that are embedded in the aforementioned positions.

Session 1: Geist und Geister
We present some elements of the understanding of Geist by Negarestani, and of its critique by Bensusan.

Session 2: On Radical Translation
We revisit some radical translation/interpretation schemes with an eye into understanding Bensusan’s argument within a specific history of analytic philosophy.

Session 3: Perspectivism and Speculation.
We bring back the discussion to the present time, with an approach to Bensusan’s Indexicalist position as an example of perspectivism and to David Roden’s “Disconnection thesis” regarding the form of the posthuman to come. Both positions mobilize forms of opacity to reason in different ways, relating to the radical interpretation schemes visited in Session 2.

Session 4: On Reason and Perspective.
We bring back the concept of Reason or Geist, by attempting to defend an account of logicity compatible with the perspectival takings-as that inform Negarestani’s critics."
Earthworks and Waterpower,"This Seminar investigates the history of state power in relation to the organization and financing of earthworks for irrigation and flood control. Since Wittfogel, earthworks and the administration of hydraulic infrastructure have been enlisted to elaborate the Marxian category of Oriental Despotism, by means of which the supposed stagnation of non-Western state societies could be explained. The Seminar will begin by examining this literature before moving on to more contemporary scholarship on the deep history of hydraulic engineering and its relationship to money, the state, and the social processes of risk management. Water is both a necessary condition for life and a powerful and unpredictable threat. How have different societies responded to the need to manage their exposure to water, and what constraints have this need posed for their organizations, governance structures, and built environments?"
Sapient Cinema,"From anthropogenic climate change to the recent global pandemic, the necessity to think through the pitfalls and possibilities of human action on the world stage has never been more pressing. This Seminar will explore how contemporary popular cinema has already been engaged in the task of world-making that rethinks the potentials of human agency. Doing so requires reassessing the ability to think universally and properly defining the role of reason in theoretical and political analysis; as the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks states, “global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands” such that emancipatory politics “hinges on a profound reworking of the universal.” Since the rise of computer science and the engineering of machine life, this has become the question of intelligence, as seen in films such as; those dealing with cognitive drug enhancement, including Lucy (Besson, 2014) and Limitless (Burger, 2011); the recent spate of cinematic explorations of Artificial Intelligence, from Transcendence (Pfister, 2014) and The Wandering Earth (Gwo, 2019), to Ex Machina (Garland, 2014) and 2.0 (Shankar, 2018); as well as the tradition of cinema concerned with the hacking of consciousness, from Paprika (Kon, 2006) and Possessor (Cronenberg, 2020) to Neptune Frost (Williams & Uzeyman, 2021). Catherine Malabou opines that “the return of ‘intelligence’” is “one of the most important theoretical issues of the early twenty-first century,” and contemporary popular cinema, especially science fiction, is reflecting these concerns. Popular films provide contradictory and often surprising objects of study for an analysis of contemporary perspectives on rationality, revealing the insidious common-sense assumptions that the concept of reason has historically accrued – its gendered, ableist, and racist portrayals – whilst also providing spaces where constellations of ideas around autonomy, agency, politics and community are being perpetually renegotiated. These films offer valuable insights into the contemporary task of rethinking rationality and designing the future, figuring ways out of an often-misplaced pessimism surrounding theoretical appraisals of human action.

Session 1: Transcendence (Pfister, 2014). AI Drives and the Body
Session 2: Lucy (Besson, 2014). Post/Trans/In-humanism
Session 3: The Wandering Earth (Gwo, 2019). Collective Intelligence and the Politics of Space
Session 4: Neptune Frost (Williams & Uzeyman, 2021). Anti-colonial Hacking"