The Flight of Ariel:
Universalism in Latin American Thought

DESCRIPTION: 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.



IMAGE: Diego Rivera, Mexico Today And Tomorrow, 1935.

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Catechism for Revolutionary Philosophy

DESCRIPTION: 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. 

IMAGE: Jen Aitken, Siah Armajani, 2020.

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Art Writing in Context

DESCRIPTION: 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.


IMAGE: Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1971.

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Feminism in the canon of philosophy:
A research lab

DESCRIPTION: 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.



IMAGE: Lygia Pape, Divisor, 1968.

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200 Years of Life Part II

DESCRIPTION: 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.

IMAGE: Bridget Riley, Royal Liverpool University Hospital, 1983.

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Alien and Illogical Powers:
Incubation and Other Oneiric Forces

DESCRIPTION: At the limits of rationality, beyond the realm of the phantasmatic—whether accessed through imagination, intuition, hypnagogic states, or other transformative forces, we are able to reach and comprehend realms of knowledge that exceed logical processes and conscious understanding.

Through states like dreaming or practices such as incubation, the rational and irrational intertwine, uniting all the senses. In these moments, we reach forms of thought more powerful than mere calculative and logical thinking. This is what Nietzsche called the "alien, illogical powers — the powers of creative imagination." He described such thought as "not ruled by measure but leaping from possibility to possibility, using each one as a temporary resting place. Occasionally, it will grasp such a resting place even as it flies." Peter Kingsley refers to the oneiric practice of incubation as a "third type of consciousness quite different from either waking or sleeping." But what are these alien and illogical powers? How can we access them for creative or other purposes, as thought flies unfettered by logic, seizing insights and knowledge?

Through our readings, we will explore creative premonitions, imagination, intuition, the messages of the subconscious and unconscious, and the conditions of incubation, and more. We will experiment with directly engaging these forces ourselves.

SESSION 1. IMAGINATION & INCUBATION: ILLICIT FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in The Tragic Age of the Greeks
— Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom

SESSION 2. THE IMPERSONAL, THE ALIEN, THE ELEMENTAL.
— Carl Jung, On Active Imagination (excerpt)
— Évelyne Grossman, The Creativity of the Crisis

SESSION 3 — OTHERNESS & THE INHUMAN
— Timothy Clark, Theory of Inspiration (excerpt)
— HD, Notes on Thought & Vision

SESSION 4 — EXPERIMENT & INQUIRY: VENTURING ELSEWHERE
Student project presentations. These projects can be creative or autopsies of Seminar themes within whatever media each student wishes to utilize

IMAGE: Hilma Of Klint, The Ten Largest No7 Adulthood Group IV, Detail, 1907.

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Fear

DESCRIPTION: 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)

IMAGE: Annette Messager, My Vows 1988-91.

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The Geographers that ate Themselves

DESCRIPTION: 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.

 

IMAGE: Frans Pietersz de Grebber, The Banquet of the St Adrian Militia Company in 1610.

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Cognitive Mapping:
Althusser, Sellars & Giannotti

DESCRIPTION: 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.

IMAGE: Julie Mehrethu, Loop B Lozano Bolsonaro Eve 2019-2020.

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Abducting the Future:
Strategic Thought & the Logic of Military and Political Inquiry

DESCRIPTION: 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.



IMAGE: White House Situation Room for the Capture of Osama Bin Laden, 2011

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From Inference to Intervention:
on the operative logics of machine learning

DESCRIPTION: 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

 

IMAGE: Mohammad Salemy, Teach Me Something I Don't Already Know, 2023.

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Timely Thoughts on War & Death

DESCRIPTION: In our past Seminar, "Lethe: Forgetfulness and Concealment," we re-read Freud's report on a summer trip through the Balkans. As Freud untangled his forgetting of the name Signorelli, painter of frescoes of the Last Judgment, the Great War, then over a decade away, cast a shadow après-coup over his associations. This Season, we will take the same approach in order to re-read—comb, map, interrogate—three other moments in Freud's œuvre that are shadowed by catastrophe. The rise of Nazism, which these works anticipated in 1915, 1921 and 1930 respectively, casts its shadows on them; as it does on our times. As we read, we will attempt to trace these shadows of war and death together, collectively.

Session 1: General Introduction to the works we will be reading and the themes of the Seminar.

Session 2: Discussion of a group of short pieces written in 1915, amidst the Great War.

Readings: Freud, Timely Thoughts on War and Death; Freud, The Perishable; Freud, Mourning and Melancholia.

Session 3: Discussion of Freud's 1921 reflections on war trauma, with which he introduces the death drive. This theory of authoritarianism and (perhaps less obviously) its diagrams of modes of identification have never lost their pertinence.

Readings: Freud, Crowd Psychology and Ego-Analysis.

Session 4: Discussion of Freud's Malaise in Culture (i.e. Civilization and its Discontents), a work written in 1930 and accused of pessimism and conservatism, yet still cruelly, inexorably relevant.

Readings: Freud, Malaise in Culture.

IMAGE: Käthe Kollwitz Two Dead, 1920.

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Critical Collapsology:
Theory and the Ends of Worlds

DESCRIPTION: 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".

IMAGE: R.H. Quaytman, Untitled 2024.

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Variations on The Great Refusal II

DESCRIPTION: 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. Speakers will chart their 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 great refusal 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. 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. Outstanding contemporary artists, filmmakers, and curators will reflect on the idea of ‘aesthetic achievement,’ not as an ‘other’ to reason, but rather as requiring the intellectual courage to grant reason the exercise of its full rights.

The Seminar allows us to tune into the intellectual sensitivity we inherit from these thinkers such as Dante, Whitehead and Marcuse. We will take abreast of the problematic nature of inner conflicts that Great refusals imply: undecidability, self-deliberation vs deliberation with others. To look at contemporary art through this prism allows us to regain the means of complexity. The strategies, practices, and concepts we will encounter, such as the “mental state of noise” (The concept of noise, John Rathey & Steve Sands in Angelaki, Vol. 28, Nr. 3., 2023, ) and “social dissonance” borrowed from Mattin (Social Dissonance, Urbanomic, 2022) will contribute to the development of a much-needed self-defense kit against the compulsive ‘flight into meaning’ that, in the words of the psychologist Leon Festinger, corresponds to a “defensive searching for a ‘name’ or cognitive label” whose purpose is to alleviate the “cognitive dissonance” provoked by jarring beliefs and actions.

Guests will be announced later.

IMAGE: Israel Gaza war protests, 2023.

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