Road to Neofeudalism:
Technology, the Left, and the Politics of Defeat

This roundtable offers a critical intervention into the rising discourse of “neofeudalism.” We argue that neofeudalism is less a coherent theory of a new social order and more an enchanted, neo-conservative project—a political imaginary where, to paraphrase Gillian Rose, “mourning has become the law.” This framework establishes the defeat of the collective subject, turns its back on epistemology, and suffers from a basic digital market determinism. From the symbolic ground of Greece—the romanticized cradle of Western rationality—we challenge the pressure to ‘call it a day’ on collective struggle. Using the Greek leftist concept of “aristerometro” (the "measure of the left"), we will dissect the politics of radical posturing and explore how this neofeudalist horizon forecloses alternative futures. The roundtable questions this status quo by (1) critically diagnosing the “neofeudal capture” of leftist thought and (2) surveying conceptual "lines of flight" that could meaningfully exit this politics of defeat.

Session one: WTF is Neofeudalism? / This Session is organised around the required reading this article on Neofeudalism. The article is very dense in an interdiscplinary fashion, so we will start with a short lecture on dominant approaches to tehcno/virtual/neo/name it feudalism, focusing on epistemology, romanticism, neoclassicism, and the collective subject. Greece is involved not only cause Korinna Patelis is Greek but also modern Greek is a unique natural language difficult to proccess (NLP). So we take a look at why technology and its mediations are treated as a societal ill—a black box whose workings remain unexamined. Metaphysical considerations are absent, whether approached in isolation or tied to temporality and events. This lack of engagement with technology’s philosophical and empirical dimensions reflects a wider crisis in epistemology due to pivotal shifts (e.g., AI, and so on). From then, each of the participatns need to have identified one dimention of the argument they are ambivilent about and try to counter it. So you present, and then file your counter argument in any form.

Key Questions: Is "neofeudalism" a useful metaphor or just melancholy defeat? Do media/tech giants enforce serfdom in a different way then before? Are the epistemologies and binarisms embedded in neofeudalist discourse, notably West/East, Rationality/Irrationality, Natural/Digital the problem?

Reading: Patelis, K. (2025). "Have I Got News For You: The Road to Neo-Feudalism". Media Theory Journal, 9(1). [URL: HYPERLINK

Session Two: “Aristerometro” and “Calling it a Day” / Our second Session is about the future and how radical politics could be designed. We will have already talk about how many collectives you wan to form in answer.....We are using a “gauge” for thinking about the future! The Greek leftist concept of “aristerometro” (from “measure” and “left”). We shall explore why we are all being told “it’s over”—and, even worse, how we measure each other’s radicalness as a politics of defeat. Enclosure: The pressure to ‘call it a day’ in the neofeudalism debate and no only —the idea that history is somehow calling on us—is deeply problematic. Dialectics are excluded from this debate, replaced by an urgency and manufactured temporality promoted by neofeudalist authors.

Key Questions: How does aristerometro (the "measure of the left") expose the politics of radical posturing? Why does neofeudalism demand we "call it a day" on collective struggles?

Reading: Patelis, K. (2023). "Aristerometro: Measuring the Unmeasurable in Greek Leftist Praxis" [unpublished manuscript]. (To be provided)

The Essence of Analytic Philosophy

DESCRIPTION: What is analytic philosophy, really? Does it have an essence or at least some stable feature that defines it? Is there such a thing as ‘analytic’ style, and how do we recognize it? The answers to these questions are ambiguous. Some blame analytic philosophy (hereafter, AP) for the lack of internal values—claiming that it is essentially asocial and apolitical— some praise it for the lack of precisely the same features. Another way to define analytic philosophy is, again, negative: it is ahistorical at its core. Even though all these characteristics are valid, it is clear that a positive characterization of AP on its own is missing. Does it have its own values, and, for that matter, history?

SESSION ONE: The purpose of this Roundtable is to synthesize a collective answer to these questions, i.e., to provide good explanations for what makes AP the very thing which it is, and hopefully, in this way, acquire its essence. To fulfill this task, we will take a look at the work of historians of philosophy as varied as Christoph Shuringa, Scott Soames, and Guillermo Rosado Haddock, whose representations are polarized both in terms of the implied constitutive values and critical approaches. This will occupy us during the first session. During this gathering, we will collectively create a diagram representing all three approaches and highlighting their virtues.

SESSION TWO: In about a week, we will gather for the second meeting to retackle the essence of AP and forge our own definition of it, not identical to any of the previously discussed representations. The outcome of two sessions will be a short programmatic text containing our definition(s) of AP, complemented by a diagram representing the variety of its historical narrativizations.

Yet some of us might object that embarking on such an inquiry is retrograde and senseless, since neorationalism has eliminated the analytic-continental distinction long ago. They may remind us of many instances of neorationalist interplay with the concepts of Wilfrid Sellars, the method of Rudolf Carnap, and even critical metaphilosophically of Ludwig Wittgenstein—all of which was done alongside the traditional engagement with German Idealist thought. However, to those objecting, still, we might say: merging analytic with continental is one task. Understanding the essence of ‘analytic’ is another.

IMAGE: Robert Seidel, Bifurcation Chamber, 2020.

Instructors' Bio: Lika Kareva is a philosopher who specializes in analytic interpretations of Ancient Greek philosophy. She studied at the New Centre’s program of Critical Philosophy, and has a Master’s degree from The University of Oklahoma. In 2025, she defended a thesis on Negativity in Plato, according to which The Sophist puts forward a negativity-inclusive conception of language, presenting non-being in two primary senses: as statements employing negations and as false statements.

How to Fix Brain Rot:
A Soviet guide to AI, labor, dialectics, and reflexivity

DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable addresses the widespread sense that current discussions about AI and cybernetics are creating cognitive breakdowns rather than genuine insights. Instead of producing new philosophical understanding, today's AI often promotes what we might call "existential stupidity" – a kind of ideological brain rot that traps both technological systems and human thinking in repetitive, meaningless loops that drain vitality from social systems. This course uses Soviet cybernetic theory to understand why current AI discourse often feels stuck and unproductive, and offers practical tools for more reflexive, collaborative approaches to thinking about technology, cognition, and society.The problem is that we're stuck in a closed loop: whenever we try to understand machine intelligence, we end up with incomplete visions of either technological apocalypse or singularity, preventing us from developing truly self-critical perspectives.To break out of this trap, the course draws on Soviet thinkers who developed an unconventional Marxist-cybernetic approach. They proposed what they called a "reflexive exit" – a way of acting that enables radical reconfigurations and helps us handle unprecedented situations. Central to this approach is the figure of the "methodologist" from the Moscow Methodological Circle (MMC), who uses dialectical tools to critically examine their own thinking processes in collaborative, multi-perspective ways.

SESSION ONE: In this session, we will work with the concept of brain rot as the emerging tendency in collective sense-making that brings what R. Scott Bakker calls “semantic apocalypse.” Using the second-order cybernetic framework, we will analyze brain rot as an exemplification of reflexive closure and trace its implications, revealing a non-reflexive, individualist understanding of cognition and action, caught by cognitive science’s gap between the individual and the collective. This gap, weaponized by the algorithms, reveals how brain rot confines cognitive systems – along with their norms and values of activity – to endless, trivializing self-referential iterations trapping the social system within pre-set patterns. We will see how this cultural situation can be assessed as a cognitive-practical rupture. This will set the stage for introducing the MMC’s emergence within Soviet philosophy, tracing its roots in systems theory, cybernetics, and especially Marx’s methods of organic wholes, cell-forms, and the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. After that, we will present MMC as a counter-culture to dogmatic Marxism, classical cognitivism, behaviorism, and reflexology – especially regarding their early debates on logic and thinking with Evald Ilyenkov. Totality and omniscience – the aims pursued by AI – can be disenchanted as based on hollow abstractions extracting thinking, action, society, and innovation from their functioning in organic wholes. These one-sided abstractions are yet to be concretized with a robust methodological toolbox.

SESSION TWO: In this session, we will see how the MMC reinterpreted dialectics and reflexivity – as an optimization of activity (Georgy Shchedrovitsky’s general activity theory), observation of cognitive systems’ resistance against trivialization (Vladimir Lefebvre’s reflexive control theory), and the generative mechanism of mutual mirroring and communication between cultural systems (David Zilberman’s modal methodology). These positions interpret labor and activity as collective and transformative, with an inherent, concrete (“contentful”) logic irreducible to atomized, abstract algorithmic operations. Brain rot will be a primary example of successful trivialization and the execution of reflexive control, detaining the system in the interposition of cognitive-practical rupture, and not merely a neurological disorder kindred to ADHD or attention span reduction which are often analogized with the impact of brain rot. We will unpack the instrumental view of reflexivity as an exit from the standpoint of the generic individual embraced by the classical political economy. Philosophical systems can be operated as technical instructions and mechanisms for a praxis devoid of prototypes, thereby overcoming intersystemic tensions and incompatibilities. This supplies the means to analyze, reengineer, and overcome destructive ruptures (such as brain rot), cultivating a new understanding of AI as a converted form (verwandelte Form) compressing the elements of human labor, its reciprocal linkages with social-systemic structures. Ultimately, this session aims to elucidate how ruptures – while potentially leading to both failure and creation – can be dialectically overcome through a gradual approximation of truth and goodness.

IMAGE: Digital illustration meme, Neural Network, 2019

Maxim (maksym) Miroshnichenko holds a PhD in philosophy (2019). Since 2024, he is a research fellow at the Bauhaus University. He also teaches at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. His interests revolve around cybernetics/systems theory, enactive cognition, and Soviet philosophy of science. Currently, he works on a project dedicated to the intersections of Marxism and cybernetics in the Soviet logico-methodological thought as a contribution to the discussions on cognitivism, AI, and posthumanism. Right now, he prepares a book about brain rot and semantic apocalypse.

Art & Theory Industrial Complex:
Capital, institutions, language and the production of value

DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable begins from a critical stance toward the tightening co-dependence between art and theory within the institutional and economic structures of contemporary cultural production. Rather than affirming this relationship as an inevitable or progressive development, it interrogates the mechanisms through which theory and art have become mutually instrumentalized within shared circuits of validation, value, and visibility. The Roundtable reframes their interaction as a material and political problem: how are artistic and theoretical practices shaped, limited, and co-authored by the forces of governance, policy, and institutional mediation that transform creative labor into exchangeable forms of knowledge and capital? By analyzing the shared material base of art and theory, the discussion exposes how disciplinary divisions reproduce themselves within capitalism’s cultural logic, even when presented as critique. From this perspective, political economy appears not as context but as an active author in the production of meaning and form. Across two sessions, participants will explore how the art–theory nexus can be rethought as a site of tension rather than collaboration, identifying strategies for resisting or reconfiguring the conditions that capture creative and philosophical production within the industrial complex of contemporary art.

SESSION ONE: The first session introduces the theoretical framework for the Roundtable through key texts by Marina Vishmidt, Peter Osborne, and Andrea Fraser, examining how their analyses of labor, value, and authorship reveal the interdependence of economic and aesthetic forms. The discussion then extends to Robert Brandom and Reza Negarestani, whose concept of a “space of possibilities” opens new grounds for understanding the relation between art and reason. We will also consider Josefine Wikström’s critique of art’s confinement to the experiential domain, placing it in dialogue with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a historical anchor for art’s entanglement with reason. In the background, readings by Alberto Toscano and Sianne Ngai on real abstraction help reframe how social relations determine the production and perception of art. After the instructor’s presentation, participants will deliver ten-minute interventions connecting the readings to their own artistic or theoretical projects, identifying and unpacking specific instances of the art–theory relation through conceptual or material analysis.

SESSION TWO: The second session builds on the insights from Session One. Participants will present short reflections on how the readings and discussions have informed their work. The conversation will focus on how theoretical and artistic practices can resist their capture by capitalist institutions and generate new modes of production, circulation, and collaboration that exceed the current art–theory industrial complex.

IMAGE: Jean-François Marmion, Gilles Deleuze at home in Paris, 1988.

Jack Segbars is an artist and writer whose work investigates the institutional and discursive conditions that frame art’s emergence. His practice examines how production, language, curation, and governance intersect in shaping artistic meaning and value. Within his visual and textual work, Segbars mobilizes the interconnections between critic, curator, writer, and artist as a mode of inquiry. He has published widely in Metropolis M, PARSE, and Open! and is the author of All Around the Periphery (Onomatopee, 2009) and Inertia (Onomatopee, 2012). His recent research includes Benjamin in Palestine (Ramallah, 2015) and The Saas Fee Summer School for Art (Switzerland), both examined within his PhD project, followed by an exhibition at Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam, 2016). A publication based on this research will appear in 2026. Segbars is a co-founder and board member of Platform Beeldende Kunst (Platform Visual Arts) and has lectured at several postgraduate programs in the Netherlands, including the Design Academy Eindhoven and the Master Artistic Research in The Hague. His current work investigates the development of independent art institutions, their relation to politics and governance, and the processes of institutionalization that shape the art field today.

What Is Democratic Economic Planning?

In partnership with the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning (INDEP)

DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable explores Democratic Economic Planning (DEP) as an alternative to the financialized market-based economy. With neoliberalism in crisis and authoritarian movements on the rise, there's renewed interest in how economies might be organized differently. Any proposal for economic planning has to answer several basic questions: How do you gather accurate information about what people need and what resources exist? What do you measure things in—money, labor time, physical units, some combination? Who makes decisions, and how centralized should that be? Do markets have any role, and if so, what kind? How do you motivate work and handle distribution? These questions are not new. They emerged in the Socialist Calculation Debate of the 1920s-30s. Answers have been attempted differently across historical experiments—from Soviet central planning to Chile's Cybersyn project to contemporary participatory budgeting initiatives. Today's proposals range from participatory economics to algorithmic coordination models that imagine repurposing Amazon's logistics infrastructure for democratic ends.

SESSION ONE: The opening session will lay out this intellectual landscape and the core problems any planning model confronts. We'll look at how these questions connect to contemporary concerns about technology, ecology, and democratic transition strategies.

SESSION TWO: The second session builds from student research to map current debates and identify where productive collective work might happen.

OUTCOMES: You'll understand the fundamental challenges facing economic planning proposals and how different models tackle them. We'll cover key historical debates and experiments alongside contemporary paradigms that leverage digital infrastructure. You'll gain frameworks for evaluating whether planning proposals are actually democratic and practically viable, plus exposure to real-world implementations and transition strategies. And you'll connect with others exploring alternatives to market coordination.

IMAGE: Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, 1933.

Raphael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. His work highlights the social, political and economic implications of technological acceleration and human-to-machine interaction. Raphael currently heads Design at One Project, an organization building infrastructure for a new economy where resources serve people and planet, not profit. He also serves as an Executive Board Member at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology and a mentor at NEW INC, a museum-led cultural incubator from the NEW Museum. Previously, he led design for learners at Khan Academy, tackled ethical platforms of AI at IBM Research, taught media theory at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and designed over a hundred iOS apps with Apple. His artwork has been shown at museums, conferences, festivals and galleries internationally including the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Moscow Museum of Applied Art, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Gamble House Museum, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Science Gallery, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and Athens Video Art Festival. Notable commissions include Dublab, Noema Magazine, Goethe Institut, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Intel Labs, and IBM Research. His design work has been featured in publications including TED, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, FastCompany, Wired and others.

Eric Meier is an organizer, researcher, and artist working on democratic economic planning, critical theory, and digital culture. He unites researchers, activists, and practitioners globally to advance the research and practice of democratic approaches to economic organization. He studies sociology and philosophy at the University of Bielefeld and is a certificate alumnus of the critical philosophy program at The New Centre. He co-founded INDEP – the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning, where he works as a strategic network facilitator. He also serves as a student assistant at the University of Kiel, where he supports Jan Groos, host of the Future Histories podcast, in the DFG project Governing Algorithms – A Sociology of the Algorithmic Art of Governing (led by Prof. Robert Seyfert). As an artist, his practice explores the topics of contemporary internet culture, (distorted) desire, and utopian imagination through digital image and video collage. His artistic practice has been presented in the 2023 exhibition Art, Design, Aesthetics of Democratic Economic Planning in Bonn—a show he conceptualized, curated and organized- the Science-Fiction Film Festival 2024 in Berlin and the 2025 exhibition Das Private ist Politisch in Bonn. His work has also appeared in publications by Rizomatica, Reincantamento, the Institute of Network Cultures and Rabble Review. He has spoken at a range of international events, including the 2024 Science-Fiction Film Festival Berlin, the 2024 London Ecosocialism Conference, the 2024 and 2025 Future Factory festivals in Rome and the 2025 INDEP conference in Montreal. He regularly hosts workshops, moderates panels, and appears as a guest on podcasts discussing democratic futures and transformative imaginaries.

The Emergent Poetics of Winding Oars

DESCRIPTION: This workshop takes the metaphor of winding oars (instruments of creation over which the writer has limited control in the rapids of thought, preference, and expression) as its guiding figure. It weaves allusions to what biologist Michael Levin calls the morphospace: a field of possibilities in which embodiments can exceed the material.
We argue that morphic refactoring -- the improvised, on-the-fly repurposing of biological material under pressure -- has been practiced by many poetic schools of the 20th and 21st centuries in ways that transcend trauma-informed, confessional, or memorialistic modes. These practices take mental and bodily shrapnel, ruins and fragments of experience, and depart from the writer's self: from what is proper to the individual, caught in severity, deformed by geopolitical violence, historic cruelty, or the technological metabolisation of the subject.
Somatic practices, and writing workshops grounded in Western trauma scholarship, often reinforce the coherent self as the site of healing -- ready to be digested into neoliberal, colonial subjectivity. Instead, this seminar contemplates creative forces that reorganize subjectivity at its root: dissolving calcified selves, channeling supra-personal forces.
We have chosen poets who invoke third spaces and their signals -- not yet known -- with assertoric energy and analytical gentleness: anti-confessional, militant, re-constitutive, breaking literary expectancy with a murmur beyond repair or emancipation (itself a liberal aspiration).
Against Promethean calls to unmake oneself in the pull of the Outside, and equally against fatalistic self-immolation that rejects any restoration, this seminar explores writing that lets the self cohere around a convergence of morphic intents: an authorial "I" that becomes a chorus, temporary, manyfold, coordinated.
Session One: Stolen Time, Rotten Conditions -- Misprisions and Anti-Confessional Writing
We read Anna Mendelssohn and Tom Raworth in symmetrical dialogue, tracing how poets move through their grounding in experience and biography toward a force that transcends both. From there we map poetic modes that mishear, mistreat, or refuse the "I" as site of truth or recovery -- practicing fragment, interference, and dissonant form against the compulsive coherence of the liberal subject.
Prompts: Collect one week's worth of words from your surrounding reality -- readings, searches, meals, conversations. Compose lists and indexes, draw, write around them. Then, starting from Mendelssohn's edict that "Poetry does not deserve evil keepers," imagine a keeper worthy of poetry: what species is it, to what order of existence does it belong? Write around it in 4 x 10-minute sessions (details tba).
Session Two: Neural Wounds and the Second "I" -- From Reactivity to Emergence
This session traces the faultline between poetic reactivity and suprasubjective force, writing not from the wound but through it. We explore how neural, bodily, and social zones can be reorganized as sites of collective sensing rather than personal crisis, moving toward the conditions of emergence: how the second "I" becomes possible not through transcendence but through the reorganization of what passed through the writing subject.
Prompts: Isolate a plot-cell or a Volta (Petrarch). Draw your plot material as circuitry. Ask not "what happened to me?" but "what passed through me?" What does this event disrupt, channel, organise, refuse? The session closes with no readings -- live writing prompts, work presentation, exchanges, observations, reviews, and suggestions.

IMAGE: Johannes Evangelista Purkinje, Contributions to the Knowledge of Vision in Subjective Regard (Breslau, second edition)

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Understanding Memetics

DESCRIPTION: This roundtable proposes a Critical Philosophy of Polymodal Discourse, taking memetics not as a subsidiary internet studies phenomenon but as an epistemological framework for analyzing contemporary cultural production. The capacity of memes to destabilize boundaries between aesthetic practice, philosophical intervention, and collective psychic individuation is what makes them worthy of academic research. Memesis offers critical analysis of memes without translating them into the sterilized language of institutions, and without fully descending into internet jargon. Falling constantly into the abyss between scientific and artistic communication, memes embody mixed media as artifacts of folk vernacular culture. Their participatory affordance is achieved through polymodal discursive nature; the interdisciplinarity of memetic communication renders it nearly invisible to monomodal discourses, demanding new synthetic discursive instruments.
Memesis occupies the space between institutions and the dispersed fragmentation of memes across the internet, and raises the question of a possible future institutionalization of memes within philosophy, art, and critical thinking. Long relegated to low genre by critics, memes are treated here as serious epistemic objects.
Moving beyond Dawkins' original biological metaphor, the course develops a Laruellean non-memetics while simultaneously employing Simondonian process ontology to map memes' metastable becoming. We examine how meme logic performs Laruelle's principle of philo-fiction: just as non-philosophy clones philosophical concepts to expose their limits, memes clone cultural forms (academic discourse, political rhetoric, religious iconography) to render them operationally useless while paradoxically amplifying their circulation. The Laruelle-Simondon dialectic offers participants both a critical weapon against reductive interpretations and a constructive framework for studying meme ontogeny.
Session 1: Memes as Philosophical Practice
This session constructs a speculative genealogy of memes as vehicles for philosophical intervention, beginning with Kierkegaard's ironist as a subject in perpetual negation, whose contemporary avatar is the dank meme enacting what Hegel feared as infinite absolute negativity. We map the memetic potential of Chan koans, where mimetic illusion demonstrates the illusory nature of reality, and examine liberation through absurdity from Dadaist anti-art to Surrealist Twitter bots, contrasting Deleuze's vision of humor as resistance with Baudrillard's silent majorities.
Building on this genealogy, we introduce Laruelle's non-philosophy to radically reconfigure the meme's epistemic status. Where traditional philosophy seeks to interpret memes through established frameworks, non-philosophy forces us to confront memes as already-theorized objects that resist philosophical colonization. The meme's viral persistence and resistance to hermeneutic saturation mirror Laruelle's determination-in-the-last-instance: memes operate through a radical immanence that precedes and exceeds philosophical capture. We develop a structural typology of irony's gradations -- the stable signifiers of ironic memes, the deadpan abyss of post-irony, and meta-irony's self-canceling signifiers. We also analyze the meme's infiltration of subjectivity through Bourdieu's habitus, reframed for 4chan's lurker class, whose internalized meme-grammars function as digital doxa.
Session 2: Memetic Individuation and Polymodal Translation
This session theorizes the meme's ontology through a tripartite schema: the Platonic eidos (Wojak as sadness-in-itself), genre-families and clusters (templates and their modifications), and singular deployments as instances. We explore the universal nature of memes where Loss.jpg crosses cultural thresholds, and examine polymodality through video memes (GIFs as Bergsonian durée compressed into loops), audio memes (samples as acoustic punctuation), and behavioral memes (TikTok challenges as Foucauldian technologies of the self).
Simondon's theory of individuation replaces static classifications with a processual account of meme-becoming. His concept of the preindividual (that realm of potentials preceding form) describes the metastable state of a meme-template before actualization. The Wojak template exists in a preindividual state of pure affective potential, what we call meme-matter, until individuated through specific deployments as incel icon, leftist critique, or existential cipher. We develop a Simondonian reading of meme propagation as transduction, the process by which a structure reorganizes itself by propagating through a field of potentials. This explains why successful memes exhibit metastable virulence: their capacity to maintain identity while continuously differing. Platform algorithms are analyzed as meme-physical environments that modulate individuation.
Reading List

Søren Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)
Jean Baudrillard, "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media," from In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983)
François Laruelle, "Philo-Fiction," from Philosophie non-standard (2010), trans. Jeremy R. Smith
François Laruelle, "On the Determination in the Last Instance," from Le principe de minorité (1981), trans. Jeremy R. Smith
Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," from Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (1988)
Gilles Deleuze, "Humor, Irony and The Law" (1967)
Pierre Bourdieu, "Structures and The Habitus," from Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977)
Henri Bergson, "The Multiplicity of Conscious States; The Idea of Duration," from Time and Free Will (2001)
Gilbert Simondon, "Collective Individuation and the Foundations of the Transindividual," from Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2005)
Seong-Young Her, "Metamemetics," from Critical Meme Reader III (2024)
Seong-Young Her, Postnaturalism (2020)
Phil Wilkinson, "Disassembly and Reassembly: Theorizing a Meme-Rhizome," from Critical Meme Reader III (2024)
Nate Sloan, "Beyond Based and Cringe" (2021)

IMAGE: Marine HRS-1 Helicopter flies away with its own geodasic hangar. Quantico, Virginia, August 3, 1954.

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Jerusalem Syndrome:
Symbolic overload & the architecture of belief

DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable investigates Jerusalem Syndrome, a rare psychoreligious phenomenon in which an individual experiences intense religiously themed ideas or delusions triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem, as a framework for examining symbolic overload, spiritual cognition, and the embodied architectures of belief. Instead of interpreting the syndrome as pathology, it is approached as a heuristic for understanding how sacred and symbolically charged environments can overwhelm perceptual and cognitive boundaries, producing rupture, transcendence, or revelation. Drawing from neurotheology, affect theory, cultural psychiatry, and spatial phenomenology, participants will explore how neural, architectural, and affective systems converge to generate sacred experience. The Roundtable aligns with The New Centre’s commitment to collaborative, research-based, and transdisciplinary inquiry, linking cognitive science, philosophy, and spatial theory through experimental collective learning.

PROCESS: One week before Session One, participants receive a lecture draft, reading list, and case materials (Bar-El, Witztum and Kalian, Bachelard, Pallasmaa, Ahmed, Newberg, Persinger, McNamara, Burke). They also begin Symbol Diaries or Affective Fieldnotes, documenting encounters with symbolically or emotionally saturated spaces to prepare their interventions.

SESSION ONE: Symbolic Overload and the Architecture of Belief (3 hours). A 60-minute lecture examines the neurocognitive and spatial mechanics of symbolic excess through case studies of Jerusalem, Paris, and Florence, cities historically and affectively charged to the point of psychic saturation. Jerusalem Syndrome and its sister syndromes, Stendhal and Paris, are presented within a framework that connects architecture, affect, and cognition, revealing how sacred and aesthetic environments function as symbolic amplifiers that exceed the brain’s integrative capacity. Each participant then presents a 10-minute critical response connecting the lecture and readings to their research or creative practice. The session concludes with a group dialogue on how affect, architecture, and cognition converge to produce states of belief, rupture, and transformation.

SESSION TWO: Neurospiritual Futures: Collective Inquiry and Reflective Practices (2.5–3 hours). The session begins with introductory framing remarks and a guest presentation by Suhaila Abu Hadba Mounayer, a Jerusalem-born artist whose work on church architecture, wartime tonality, and spatial memory introduces an embodied perspective on sacred density, destruction, and resonance. Participants then deliver revised 10-minute reflections based on their Symbol Diaries and Affective Fieldnotes, connecting personal observations with theoretical framing to trace how encounters with symbolically charged environments reshape understandings of belief, perception, and space. The session ends with a full-group discussion and collaborative synthesis, transforming insights into short texts, conceptual diagrams, or symbolic mappings that articulate emergent frameworks of spatial affect, symbolic overload, and neural plasticity.

ASSIGNMENTS: 1. Group Manifesto: A collective statement articulating shared insights on symbolic overload, faith, and perception. 2. Conceptual Diagram or Schema: A visual mapping of relations between space, cognition, and belief within the Triple Helix framework of Nature, Technology, and Society. 3. Roundtable Video (5–7 min): Edited highlights for The New Centre’s public archive. 4. Individual Reflection: A one-page text explaining how the Roundtable reframed each participant’s approach to transdisciplinary or research-based practice.

OPTIONAL PRACTICES: Case analysis of Jerusalem, Stendhal, and Paris Syndromes; symbolic density mapping through psychogeographic or diagrammatic tools; affective fieldnotes integrating spatial phenomenology and affect theory; and a Symbols Diary that documents images, texts, or experiences exerting symbolic pressure or affective charge.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES: Shared theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying sacred and symbolic environments; a collective publication or zine integrating text, diagrams, and audiovisual documentation; and contributions to The New Centre’s pedagogical model that emphasizes mutual development and collaborative research outputs.

READING LIST: Bar-El, Y. et al. (2000). Jerusalem Syndrome. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 176(1), 86–90; Witztum, E. and Kalian, M. (2016). Jerusalem Syndrome and Paris Syndrome: Two Extraordinary Disorders. Oxford University Press; Newberg, A., d’Aquili, E. and Rause, V. (2001). Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. Ballantine Books; Persinger, M. A. (2001). The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 13(4), 515–524; McNamara, P. (2022). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience. Cambridge University Press; Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press; Pallasmaa, J. (2012). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley; Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge; Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

IMAGE: Carol Rosegg, The Jerusalem Syndrome, Off-Broadway production, 2023

Alicia Kamien Kazhdan is an artist, curator, and researcher whose work investigates the intersections of symbolic systems, spiritual cognition, and human behavior. Her current research focuses on site-specific psychological phenomena, particularly Jerusalem Syndrome, approached through the frameworks of neurotheology, affect theory, and cultural psychiatry. Her forthcoming article on the topic will appear in the Cambridge Journal of Human Behavior. Kazhdan studied Cognitive Neuroscience and Art History at New York University, with additional training at IRCAM in Paris and the Musrara School of Art and Society in Jerusalem. She has taught and developed curriculum for MEET (Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow), an MIT-affiliated initiative fostering cross-cultural collaboration through technology and design. She curated the two-part exhibition Angels of Sabotage (Parterre Projects, 2024; Lifshitz Foundation, 2025), which explored rupture as revelation and sabotage as spiritual and aesthetic method. Her research has been supported by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she was a Research Fellow in June 2025, and by the Outset Contemporary Art Fund. She has presented her work at Clown Show Books in New York, the Architectural Association in London, and other experimental and academic venues.