Pattern Recollection:
Modalities of Contemporary Thought Processes

Instructor: Davor Löffler Date & Time: Sundays, June 9, 16, 23, 30, July 7, 14, 21, 28 11 AM - 1:30 PM ET

DESCRIPTION This seminar will focus on contemporary philosophy and theory as an exercise of thinking about the future in the past tense. Moderated by Davor Löffler & Patrick Schabus, this seminar will feature seven philosophers, thinkers and theorists who have made a major contribution to their field in the last five years. They will be focusing on the epistemological dimension of their practice, showing how their work addresses the social, political and cultural realities of contemporary life on a computationally interconnected planet earth.

 

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

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

June 23: Patricia Reed /// Horizonless Orientation 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the field of cryptoeconomics entails systems employing cryptography, computer networks and game theory then the design and governance of these systems would entails a field of political cryptoeconomics. But how should we conceive of the political in relation to decentralized socio-technical systems? In what ways can we take into account the way that agency, intentionality and responsibility is distributed, diffused and automated? In this seminar, Brekke draws together thinking in the fields of economic, political and computational  in order to delineate an approach to the emerging field of political cryptoeconomics.

 

Image: Andrea Zittel Planar Pavilions at A-Z West, 2017

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