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Earthworks and Waterpower

Instructor: Colin Drumm
Program: History, Design & Worldmaking
Credit(s): 1
Date: May 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th
Time: 10:00-12:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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?




IMAGE: Michael Heizer, City, 2022.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



On the Destruction of Life:
in the Epoch of the Fourth Industrial Revolution information, anti-production and the ecological crises

Instructor: Anna Longo
Program: Critical Philosophy, Art & Curatorial Practice
Credit(s): 1
Date: March 24, April 7th, April 14th, April 28th.
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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).




IMAGE: Kai Caemmerer, Unborn Cities Series, 2015.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



On the Scissiparity of Geist:
Reason & its Outsides

Instructor: J.-P Caron
Program: Critical Philosophy, Art & Curatorial Practice
Credit(s): 1
Date: June 28, July 5, 12, 19
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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 aims to 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 intends to present 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.





IMAGE: Stefanie Allen, Imagined Environments, 2020.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



GPT for Arts & Humanities

Instructor: Valentin Golev
Program: Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical Philosophy, History, Design & Worldmaking, Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 2
Date: June 5th, June 19th, July 3rd, July 17th, July 31st, August 14th, August 28th, September 11th.
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 435 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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

 

IMAGE: Ed Ruscha, Various Works, 1974–1981.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 435 USD



Information:
Individuation according to Simondon

Instructor: Cécile Malaspina
Program: Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical Philosophy, History, Design & Worldmaking
Credit(s): 2
Date: May 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th, June 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 435 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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.




IMAGE: Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves Of Grass, 2013.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 435 USD



Being There and Not There

Instructor: Will Scarlett
Program: Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 1
Date: May 11th, 18th, 25th, June 1st.
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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.




IMAGE: Julio Le Parc, Primeras Modulaciones, 7, 2018.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



The Flight of Ariel:
Universalisms in Latin American Thought

Instructor: Daniel Sacilotto
Program: Critical Philosophy, Transdisciplinary Studies.
Credit(s): 1
Date: May 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

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.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



Cartesian Conflagrations

Instructor: Reza Negarestani
Program: Critical Philosophy, Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 2
Date: May 10th, 17, 24th, 31st, June 7, 14, 21, 28
Time: 10:00-12:30 ET
Enroll – 435 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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).




IMAGE: Christina Quarles, They'll Cut Us Down Again, 2020.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 435 USD



Feminism in the canon of philosophy:
A research lab

Instructor: Kerstin Fuchs
Program: Critical Philosophy, Art & Curatorial Practice
Credit(s): 1
Date: June 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

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.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



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

Instructor: Magdalena Krysztoforska
Program: History, Design & Worldmaking, Critical Philosophy
Credit(s): 1
Date: June 29th, July 6th, July 13, July 20.
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

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.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



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

Instructor: Sam Forsythe
Program: History, Design & Worldmaking, Critical Philosophy
Credit(s): 1
Date: June 29, July 6th, July 13th and July 20th
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

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

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



Self-writing, Autotheory and Autoethnography:
Paulin Hountoundji and the Critique of Realism

Instructor: Serubiri Moses
Program: Art & Curatorial Practice, Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 1
Date: June 30, July 7th, 14th, 21st
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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.




IMAGE: Vilalta, Lideta Mercato, 2017.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



Short-form Criticism Workshop:
The conditions for judgment

Instructor: Sean Tatol
Program: Art & Curatorial Practice, Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 1
Date: July 7th, 14th, 21, 28
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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.



IMAGE: Lygia Pape, Amazonino Vermelho,1989-2003.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



Long-Form Writing Laboratory

Instructor: Liza Featherstone & Cécile Malaspina
Program: Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical Philosophy, History, Design & Worldmaking, Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 2
Date: July 18th, August 1st, August 22nd, September 5th, September 26th, October 17th, November 7th, December 5th.
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 435 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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 class 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 1: 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.

WEEK 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.




IMAGE: Murray Library, Messiah University.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 435 USD



Secrecy and Return of the mystery cults

Instructor: Jason Mohaghegh
Program: Transdisciplinary Studies, Art & Curatorial Practice
Credit(s): 1
Date: July 27th, August 3, 10th 17th
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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)



IMAGE: James Turrell, Roden Crater, 2024.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



Worldmaking:
Between Prometheanism & Perspectivism

Instructor: José Antonio Magalhães - Luiza Crosman
Program: History, Design & Worldmaking, Critical Philosophy
Credit(s): 1
Date: July 27th, August 3rd, 10th, 17th
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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.



IMAGE: Lygia Clark, Fantastic Architecture, 1963-2013.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



200 Years of Life I

Instructor: Ben Woodard
Program: History, Design & Worldmaking, Critical Philosophy
Credit(s): 1
Date: August 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: 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"



IMAGE: Anatomy of Human Torso, Unisex.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD



Modes of Transit in the Necropastoral

Instructor: Joyelle McSweeney
Program: Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 1
Date: August 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: This four-session Seminar will entail a collaborative investigation of 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, expectorating an uneven array of ill-founded and spectacular effects.

As we collectively transit through the Necropastoral, we will read lyric works in translation and consider the katabatic terrains and ecologies thus entailed; experience the distending and relieving shifts in pressure created by transit through genres and languages; encounter plural, extremophile, and hybrid lifeforms and subjectivities; palpate novel topographies with our increasingly acute sensory appendages; 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 the California desert or might be playing on a riverbank in Japan or might be wild grass on that riverbank or might 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.

These works of 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.

 

IMAGE: Nigel Pavitt, Butterflies Eating Elephant Dung, 2016.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
Enroll – 225 USD