CartTektologus Autodidactus:
World-Engineering from Desert Islands to Corrigible Utopias Instructor: Reza NegarestaniProgram: Critical Philosophy, Information Architecture & Intelligence DesignCredit(s): 1Date: August 14, 21, 28 September 4thTime: 10:00-12:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: The Seminar studies a sequence of philosophical constructions of solitary intelligence and collective organization: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān, Ibn al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Each work marks a different configuration along the path from desert island consciousness to objective spirit: the self-taught islander, the rational theologian reinserted into community, the revolutionary visitor confronted with a completed communist planet, the dissident physicist inside an exhausted anarchist order, and finally the collectivist construction site whose utopian project digs itself into non-viability. The concern is not socialist literary criticism but the use of these constructions as conceptual instruments for questions about collective labor and the maintenance or breakdown of complex social forms.
Utopian arrangements here are treated as models of organization with a computational profile: they specify inputs, update rules, channels of transmission, and costs. The seminar will ask how much logical depth—buried work, irreversibility, dependence on long chains of prior decisions—is condensed in the institutions, norms, and feedback mechanisms that sustain these worlds, and how that depth is rendered legible or left opaque. A central concern is structural tenability: how these constructions propose to withstand scarcity, conflict, and metabolic constraints without collapsing into predation, stagnation, or self-cancellation. Here, The Foundation Pit is included as a limit case in which the organizational project becomes an open-ended algorithm of descent: work and resources are sunk without convergence on a tenable structure, as the utopian project collapses into its own excavation—an ever-deepening object where labor and history are stored as depth that no habitable form can occupy.
Across four sessions, the seminar alternates close reading with explicit philosophical thought experiments. Island scenarios, organizational redesigns, and counterfactual modifications of key institutions are used to stress-test the constructions and to extract from them a set of problems about orientation, coordination, and the reparability—or irreparability—of complex systems.
IMAGE: Vladimir Lenin plays chess with Alexander Bogdanov, 1908
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