One Thousand & One Nights and A Handful of Plateaus

Instructor: Adam Berg Date & Time: Sundays, June 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, July 7, 14, 21, August 4, 11, 18, 25, September 8, 15, 22, 29, October 6, 13, 20, 27 2:00-4:30 PM ET

This seminar is not offered as part of any Certificate Program. If you have any concerns or questions about this please contact student services at studentservices@thenewcentre.org
DESCRIPTION A series of topological analyses of philosophical issues in relation to science, politics and art and their permutations in terms of emergent fields, this twenty-session Seminar promises to rekindle the project initiated by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus in a new vein: A world consisting of multiple scales and multitude of elements and processes—scientific, philosophical, occult, technological and military—and from which a new craft—a vehicle of cosmological thought—can be forged.

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

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

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

Targeted audience: those who are interested in the philosophy of Deleuze and Gauttari, but also those who dream of abolishing the so-called distinction between the Analytic and the Continental.

Image: #Rhizo15, Aras Bozkurt

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