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

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.

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

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.

Critical Collapsology:
Theory and the Ends of Worlds

DESCRIPTION: Collapsology has been one of the most strikingly underthought areas of the social sciences. Conceptually surrounded by the problem of the 'indeterminate totality,' as well as the hackneyed quality of invocations of 'the apocalypse,' the practice of studying social disintegration remained fragmentary and ad hoc. We still need new critical approaches to this canon and its implications, as participants in a society whose future is highly uncertain and whose historical condition of possibility was itself the destruction of other societies. What do we owe future societies when we consider the prospect of collapse? What do we owe past societies? In this Seminar, we will explore the field of collapsology and what it means for us. Crucially, these will not be taken as two separate questions but as a single field of concern. Can we embed 'what it means for us' into our accounts of how collapse actually occurs, integrating the normative and descriptive layers of theory?

The careful consideration of collapse is of special importance to anyone who wishes to work with projects that operate over spans of time that exceed a few decades. Anyone with a radical political project, for instance, must contend with the possibility of a rapid period of transformation that makes their project not only more operationally challenging but potentially conceptually incoherent. Yet noticing the possibility of our own obsolescence short of our outright extinction also opens a rich philosophical terrain. What does it mean to have values that are once historically contingent and claim their universality to be unrealised? What kind of medium is history itself and how does it resist us? This question is at once densely theoretical and eminently practical, demanding analyses of key questions in ethics and metaethics but also the challenge of designing new institutions that might carry forward revised goals, or at least encase them sufficiently so they can be transported to our descendants.

Session 1: An introduction to 'traditional collapsology'. In this introductory lecture, we will discuss some major theories for why societies fall apart, which form much of the basis for current ideas about collapse. These are focused on moral, environmental, demographic, and energetic reasons. We will introduce the philosophical problem of the 'indeterminate totality' as well as the way a discipline of 'collapsology' has functioned on the outside of more conventional social sciences.

Readings (excerpts): Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West; Alfred Toynbee, A Study of History; Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima; Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail; Patricia McAnany & Norman Yoffee, Questioning Collapse; Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe; John Michael Greer, The Onset of Catabolic Collapse; Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations.

Session 2: Recent developments in Existential Risk Studies. Much has recently been achieved in overcoming the weaknesses of traditional collapsology. In this second session we will look into some of the more nuanced approaches to questions of risk and the development of multi-causal explanations for collapse. Surveying research from CSER and other major institutions, we will take a skeptical look at the very notion of collapse and offer a broader taxonomy of periods of rapid social transformation and loss of agency.

Readings (excerpts): Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies; Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord; Florian Jehn, Mapping Out Collapse Research; Graeme S. Cumming and Garry D. Peterson, Unifying Research on Social–Ecological Resilience and Collapse; SJ Beard, Clarissa Rios Rojas, and Catherine Richards, The Era of Global Risk; Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse; Nafez Ahmed, Failing States, Collapsing Systems; Samo Burja, "Why Civilisations Collapse"; Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending; Guy Middleton, Understanding Collapse; Toby Ord, The Precipice; Sabin Roman, "Historical Dynamics of the Chinese Dynasties."

Session 3: Applied collapsology. The third session will look in detail at the changing tactics of social destruction, from the theory of the imposition of the Eurocene to early counterinsurgency tactics in the Americas. We look at the development of lineages of strategic destruction and the kinds of social structure they imply. What relationship does this darker canon of induced destruction—which arguably forms the majority of 20th century collapses—have with the more stately canon we were introduced to?

Readings (excerpts): Jairus Grove, Savage Ecology; Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future; Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe; A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide; Jeremy Black, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency.

Session 4: An introduction to Critical Collapsology. In the final session, we will discuss a framework that addresses many of the problems raised in the previous sessions. The critical aspect of collapsology emerges from a reading of institutional forms as at once producing affordances, constraining developments, and entailing normative tasks for agents to accomplish. Developing these aspects of the history of collapse will allow us to make common cause with feminist and Marxist theories of social reproduction, particularly those that relate to the question of the 'mute compulsion' of capitalism as an economic system.

Readings (excerpts): Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory; Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion; Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World; Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres v. III; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy; Bob Jessop, "Ordoliberalism and Neoliberalization".

IMAGE: R.H. Quaytman, Untitled 2024.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Variations on The Great Refusal II

DESCRIPTION: The first Variations on The Great Refusal Seminar situated this notion in the speculative aesthetics of Alfred North Whitehead and in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. This Seminar proposes the idea of great refusal as a lens through which to look at the nature of aesthetic achievement in contemporary artistic practices and the ethical commitment by intellectuals. In this second edition of the Great Refusal Seminar, an outstanding contemporary filmmaker, curator and sociologist will reflect on the idea of the great refusal in relation to ‘aesthetic achievement,’ not as an ‘other’ to reason, but rather as requiring the intellectual courage to grant reason the exercise of its full rights. They will chart their own trajectory in navigating the great refusal in the context of the highly fraught public discourse about Israel and Palestine.

Dante Alighieri first introduces the idea of ‘great refusal’ into the Western literary canon in his Divine Comedy (1321). Here, the ‘shade’ who commits the great refusal is emblematic of those who err eternally in the antechamber of hell in pursuit of the banner of conformity. Whitehead famously revives the notion of the great refusal as the mark of intellectual cowardice, namely, as the refusal to grant reason the exercise of its full rights. However, he also defines the great refusal in diametrically opposite terms as the hallmark of aesthetic achievement!

It is in this second sense as aesthetic achievement that the great refusal has entered the vocabulary of 20th emancipatory movements via Herbert Marcuse as a rallying cry for emancipation against oppression and injustice. Dante’s great refusal has thus ultimately become the legacy of the exiled poet’s intellectual and aesthetic courage, namely, his refusal to be cowed by self-doubt and his courage to place the rank and file of his powerful contemporaries in the Divine Comedy’s Hell.

In this Seminar, we will hear from those who have entered the fray of a highly polarized public discourse through a courageous act of refusal – a refusal of censorship and a refusal of injunctions against the exercise, by reason, of its full rights.

The Seminar allows us to tune into the intellectual sensitivity we inherit from thinkers such as Dante, Whitehead and Marcuse. We will take abreast of the problematic nature of inner conflicts that great refusals imply: undecidability and self-deliberation. To look at contemporary art through this prism allows us to regain the means of complexity.

Speakers: Award wining filmmaker and journalist, Cherine Yasbeck; Galit Eliat, curator and director of the Meduza Foundation; Ashjan Ajour, sociologist, author of the award winning book Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger strikes: Political Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body (Palgrave 2021); Cécile Malaspina, philosopher & programmer at The New Centre for Research and Practice, author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury 2018)

IMAGE: Israel Gaza war protests, 2023.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Autonomous Self-Creation:
Foucault Beyond Neoliberalism

DESCRIPTION: Neoliberalism is facing a deep crisis. Everyone seems to agree that it is the cause of a wide range of current issues, from growing economic inequalities and increasing indebtedness to the erosion of interpersonal relationships, climate change, and more. It is hard to tell if this turbulence is a catalyst for further advancing neoliberal reforms or if we should anticipate a significant transformation. Nonetheless, before offering a response, it is important to comprehend the nature of neoliberalism, as there is a lack of consensus regarding its definition.

In his lectures on “The Birth of Biopolitics” at Collège de France (1978–79), Foucault suggests that neoliberalism is a mode of governance based on market dominance, individual competition, and the generalization of the “enterprise form” to all of society. Rather than relying exclusively on discipline, neoliberal governance aims to produce self-disciplined subjects who identify their freedom with the imperative to accomplish themselves by enhancing productivity and economic growth. Accordingly, the individual is called upon to be an “entrepreneur of the self” and to manage their life as if operating within a logic of profits, earnings and efficiency, thus experiencing their own existence as human capital. Against this conception, Foucault invites us to struggle for autonomous self-creation through the “care of the self.”

This Seminar will discuss the current state of neoliberalism and its logic by way of Foucaultian analysis. How do we distinguish these virtuous practices Foucault addresses from the techniques of self-empowerment and self-realization that are continuously marketed by the present-day industry of self-merchandising? If we are experiencing a crisis of neoliberal governmentality, how can we ensure that we are also producing alternative forms of subjectivity instead of inadvertently contributing to a new strategy for the valorization of human capital?

Session 1: Introduction to Foucault: Power, subjectivity, and governance
Session 2: American Neoliberalism: Human Capital and the Enterprise of the Self
Session 3: Financialization vs Care of the Self
Session 4: Student Presentations

IMAGE: Gabriel Alcala, Foucault In California, 2023

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Timely Thoughts on War and Death

DESCRIPTION: In our past Seminar, "Lethe: Forgetfulness and Concealment,” we re-read Freud’s report on a summer trip through the Balkans. As Freud untangled his forgetting of the name Signorelli, painter of frescoes of the Last Judgment, the Great War, then over a decade away, cast a shadow après-coup over his associations. This Season, we will take the same approach in order to re-read—comb, map, interrogate—three other moments in Freud’s œuvre that are shadowed by catastrophe. The rise of Nazism, which these works anticipated in 1915, 1921 and 1930 respectively, casts its shadows on them; as it does on our times. As we read, we will attempt to trace these shadows of war and death together, collectively.

Session 1: General Introduction to the works we will be reading and the themes of the Seminar.
Session 2: Discussion of a group of short pieces written in 1915, amidst the Great War.
Session 3: Discussion of Freud’s 1921 reflections on war trauma, with which he introduces the death drive. This theory of authoritarianism and (perhaps less obviously) its diagrams of modes of identification have never lost their pertinence.
Session 4: Discussion of Freud’s Malaise in Culture (i.e. Civilization and its Discontents), a work written in 1930 and accused of pessimism and conservatism, yet still cruelly, inexorably relevant.

IMAGE: Käthe Kollwitz Two Dead, 1920.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Reading Simondon:
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects

DESCRIPTION: This Survey Seminar will offer a collaborative close reading of Gilbert Simondon’s book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. First published in 1958, this has become a seminal work in the philosophy of technology. In the text, Simondon challenges the conventional dichotomy between humans and machines, arguing for an emancipation of technical objects from the enslavement of mere utility in the cultural sphere and restoring the dignity of technical objects through an unprecedented philosophical account of their modes of existence and evolution. Cécile Malaspina’s own English translation, published by Univocal in 2017, with the collaboration of John Rogove, is the first official translation of this major work.

This Seminar will feature two guest lectures by contemporary philosophers who will discuss the importance of Simondon for their own work. In the other Sessions, Malaspina will delve with the students into key parts of “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.”

Session 1: We will introduce Simondon’s critique of cultural alienation from technical objects.
Sessions 2 and 3: We will focus on the genesis of technical objects and their evolution through the "process of concretization," analyzing the concepts of technicity and technical individualization.
Session 4: We will focus on our relations with technical objects, highlighting the educational and cultural innovations proposed by Simondon based on his distinction between minor and major modes of engagement with technology.
Session 5: We will dive deep into the essence of technicity, tracing its origins in magical thinking and its divergence from religious thought while foregrounding the role Simondon attributes to aesthetic, theoretical, and practical reasoning vis-à-vis philosophy.
Session 6 and 7: Guest lectures TBA.
Session 8: We will conclude with a synthesis and discussion of Simondon’s vision for the integration of technical objects into culture and their contemporary relevance to issues such as artificial intelligence, automation, and ethics.

IMAGE: Zdenek Porcal, Rituals Of Solitude, 2024

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Critical Collapsology Part 2:
Limitless Risk

DESCRIPTION: Last season, in the first part of this Seminar, we established a new frame for studying the rapid decomposition of social structure, called 'critical collapsology.' This theory more adequately conceptualizes the vulnerabilities faced by global capitalist societies and sketches an orientation toward collapse.

However, the theory remains relatively abstract. In this second part of the Seminar, we will look at the particular histories that have led us to our vulnerable present moment and develop a radical politics adequate to our incapacity for formulating utopias. How did the world become so vulnerable? How have people responded to vulnerability before? Why is the end of utopia a problem for the left? What institutions should we create now, and how?

Session 1: We will run a collective mapping project to enumerate our current risks. We will introduce the horizon scanning techniques, the Delphi method, and the basic principles and theory of prediction markets.
Session 2: Starting from the premise that collapse is already an object in contemporary politics, we will survey responses to its prospect. Each response imagines a particular mode of collapse and proposes ways to address it. These responses range from drastic to gentle, gestural to programmatic.
Session 3: We turn to the reformulation of a 'communist core' in politics and its status, given the risk of collapse. The communist task requires actualization in a world simultaneously made possible and frustrated by capitalism. Marx and Engels describe communism as ""the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."" What if those premises are no longer in existence?
Session 4: Exploring practical questions, we ask what political possibilities persist through any future collapse, materially and conceptually. What strategies for resilience, emergency responses, and transformations of thought into transportable protocols might be required during different stages of collapse? What should we build now?
"

IMAGE: Gabriel Alcala, Foucault In California, 2023

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Avant-Garde Today:
The Question of Autonomy

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar brings together two understandings of the problem of the avant-garde in art: the now classic approach offered by Peter Bürger in his seminal book “Theory of the Avant-Garde” (1974) and Harry Lehmann’s essay “Avant-Garde Today” (2008). The Seminar hypothesizes that these two understandings illustrate different models of progress in and against art’s autonomy that will be worked with through the four sessions. In doing so, it hopes to question the many connections that bring together art, the hypothesis of its autonomy, and its political affordances.

Bürger understands the avant-gardist impulse not as a new style within the institution of art but as an attempt to break with art altogether, scattering aesthetic effects upon life at large. He offers one of the clearest understandings of the avant-garde, based on art reaching out of its own definition—progressively absorbing that which is not art into that which is art. While the historical avant-garde is seen by Bürger as a final breaking point, given that art is individualized as an autonomous sphere, this same notion is taken by Lehmann to offer a model of aesthetic modernity predicated on the autonomization of the elements that compose art. Instead of reading the avant-garde as an impulse to the outside, Lehmann sees it as a new coupling between the work, the medium, and reflection itself.

Complementing these two models of the avant-garde, this Seminar will also tackle the theoretical basis the two authors are polemicizing against: Adorno's “Aesthetic Theory,” a model that Bürger takes to be intrinsically anti-avant-gardist and Lehmann tries to supersede with his understanding. Finally, in the last session we will see a more recent synthetic approach by Mattin on his book “Social Dissonance” (2023). Mattin offers a contemporary model for art reaching out of its limits—towards politics—but coinciding with a change in the materials of artmaking. Now, instead of aesthetic appearance, as Adorno would have it, the social world appears to constraint art.

Session 1: We will delve into the general themes of the Seminar, through a reading of selected sections of Bürger’s text and further secondary literature.
Session 2: We will read sections of Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory” alongside Bürger’s “Adorno’s Anti-Avantgardism” essay. A further comparison will be drawn between Adorno and Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
Session 3: Close reading of Harry Lehmann’s essay “Avant-garde Today,” where the model of the avant-gardist integration of the outside is discussed and tentatively replaced by the model of systemic gains in degrees of freedom.
Session 4: Discussing Mattin's very recent “Social Dissonance” (2023) as the latest incarnation of the reaching-out model, but with the twist that, for Mattin, the material of the work of art becomes the social action of its audience.

IMAGE: Oscar Niemeyer, Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum, 1996

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Logical Time and the Production of the Intelligible

DESCRIPTION: In Jean Cavaillès’s final, posthumous “prison manuscript,” written in 1942-1943 and published in 1947, we find two central theses: that “[s]cience moves outside of time—if by time we mean reference to the lived experience of a consciousness,” and that “the fact that everything can not be at once has nothing to do with history, but is the characteristic of the intelligible.” These two theses form the core of a theory of logical time, in which mathematics is defined by its form of historicity, i.e., by a particular relationship between earlier and later theories. Cavaillès’s term for this relation, imported from Cartesian treatises on method, was “mathematical concatenation.” This Seminar will be devoted to studying this notion through the 20th century French mathematical philosophy represented by Cavaillès as well as Léon Brunschvicg, Albert Lautman, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, and others. We will use the short text of On Logic and the Theory of Science (1947) as a guide for investigating this broader intellectual history.

In the first part of the Seminar, we will situate Cavaillès within a tradition of thought surrounding the production of the intelligible, with roots in a particular Platonic-Cartesian “rationalist” history of philosophy constructed by the previous generation in France. The framework of “logical time” implied by this tradition informs a paradoxical notion, led by questions such as: if time is “produced,” in what medium can this production occur, if not that of time itself? Cavaillès’s assertion that “the intelligible” should be defined by its internal non-simultaneity should be situated in the long durée of this philosophical problem. We will read his writings in terms of how to refuse the purportedly “all at once” character of knowledge, a problem that extends from Plato to contemporary computational complexity theory. Cavaillès resumed the stakes of this classical problem in light of transformations in the notions of evidence and proof from Descartes through 19th century mathematics, leading to a fundamental methodological assertion: self-evidence had been replaced by provability, and thus “intuition” should be seen as being produced by concatenation.

In the second part of the Seminar, we will consider how these transformations set the stage for a research program in the historiography of mathematics. We will take Cavaillès to have advanced a speculative interpretation in which conjunctural results from mathematical logic in the 1920s and 1930s concerning the so-called “limitations of formalism” (Gödel, Skolem, Church-Turing) were taken to be positive discoveries concerning the nature of the intelligible. What is at stake in this part is a metaphysics of mathematical production derived from a reading of the actual history of mathematics. The core methodological requirement in this tradition of treating each mathematical work as “a regional and specific product” (Desanti) relates to an underlying metaphysical distinction between production and what is produced (or, in Cavaillès’s language, between the effectuating and the effectuated). We will examine the various philosophical and mathematical sources for this doctrine.

The general aim of the Seminar will be both historical and programmatic. Cavaillès understood contemporary mathematical logic to have shown the ruin of any philosophy of transcendental constitution, and thus of post-Kantian approaches to the philosophy of science, including phenomenology. Against such philosophies of the transcendental subject, Cavaillès (paradoxically) proposed a theory of the act without a subject. We shall conclude the Seminar by considering the origins and future of this doctrine in the philosophy of mathematics, broadly conceived.

Session 1: Two Perspectives on The “Production” of Mathematical Theories and the Transtheoretical Character of Mathematical Objects.
Session 2: A “Cartesian” Opposition in the Theory of Proof.
Session 3: Logical Time as a Problem in the French Philosophical Field.
Session 4: The Necessary Generation of New Concepts, or 19th Century Mathematics Through a Cartesian Lens.
Session 5: Rationalist Nominalism as a Research Programme in the Historiography of Mathematics.
Session 6: The Method of Recursion and the Horizon of Effective Computability.
Session 7: The Act Without a Subject.
Session 8: Old and New Problems.

IMAGE: George Nees, Untitled, 1965

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Art Writing Against the Grain:
Towards a New Criticism

DESCRIPTION: Art criticism has become a hot topic recently, after a long period of repressed dormancy in the art world. Even the forces that formerly sought to smother criticality out of existence now give lip service to the need for criticism. However, this has not coincided with an improved understanding of criticism's means or ends, which sets the stage for an impotent “critical turn.” This Seminar will seek to remedy that blindness by studying the history of contemporary art's move away from criticism alongside examples of criticism's successes and failures.

Neither the Left's self-satisfied identity politics nor the Right's reactionary provocations present a way back to art as something more than political signification, and we must recover precisely the terms of art's irreducibility if a new criticism is to emerge. To do so, we must understand how those terms changed in the later parts of the twentieth century, how they degenerated into inarticulate relativism, how that relativity expresses itself (even in those who seek to resist it), and how it can be possible to apply new terms of valuation in a hostile climate.

Session 1. The rhetoric of contemporary art: Beginning approximately with the battles around Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood," come to terms with the expansions of art discourse from the '60s to the trap of 2010s contemporary art as diagnosed by Suhail Malik in "On The Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art."
Session 2. The indecision of contemporary art criticism: We will look at examples of art writing's inability to engage with contemporary art or set up concepts for adequate discussion while diagnosing the nature of its impasse.
Session 3. The possibility of a new art criticism: We will consider how criticism can reconcile grounded historicity with the awareness of its own relativity, updating judgment without falling into a stale conservatism.
Session 4: Presentation of final projects

IMAGE: Arshile Gorky, Untitled, 1944

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

What is Eco-Freud?

DESCRIPTION: This is, again, Freud’s moment. Just when “the father of psychoanalysis” has been all but written off, his agile, living thinking and method becomes more important than ever. To be more precise, this is the time of the weird (perhaps the weirdest) Freud, who finds the anachronistic structures of past ages preserved in our psychic life as though no time had elapsed; who locates the entire development of humankind, the history of life on earth, and a succession of geological epochs in a miniaturized and sped-up fashion within the story of a single human life; who, beyond the pleasure principle, discovers the death drive in the temptation of absolute regression to a state devoid of all tension in the inorganic prelude of organic existence; who revives the ancient thinking of eros, translated into a drive toward the aggregation of multiplicities, human or not; who locates the origins of time-perception in the rhythmic acts of reality testing by the antennae-like apparatus of consciousness, which is but a small retractable part of the unconscious.

The list of strange and evermore relevant aspects of Freud's work goes on almost indefinitely. The physiological, ecological, geological, and planetary aspects of Freud’s works, long overlooked or dismissed as sheer eccentricities, are finally coming to the forefront as astute features of psychoanalysis, uniquely fitting to contemporary thought. In this Seminar, we will analyze the invaluable contributions of “eco-Freud,” a barely recognized conceptual figure who holds essential insights on how to relate to, deal with, counteract, and transform the ever-worsening situation of planetary devastation, understanding the relevance of psychoanalysis in a world ablaze or in ruins.

Session 1: Eco-Psychoanalysis and Geo-Psychoanalysis, Part I
Session 2: Eco-Psychoanalysis and Geo-Psychoanalysis, Part II
Session 3: Anxiety and Hysteria: Between Organismic and Ecological Bodies
Session 4: Freud on Plants and Animals, Part I
Session 5: Freud on Plants and Animals, Part II
Session 6: Biodiversity and the Death Drive
Session 7: Joking, Kissing, Knowing
Session 8: Trauma and Beyond

IMAGE: Antonio Rodriguez, Untitled, 2022

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Creativity and Intoxication

DESCRIPTION: Beer served as a nourishing staple in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, while wine in Greece and Rome symbolized vitality and truth, encapsulated in the phrase In vino veritas (In wine, truth). In Christianity, wine continues to embody a sacred symbol of unity and renewal, as seen in the Communion ritual. Virginia Woolf eloquently described the wine as evoking a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

This Seminar will present texts from the realms of theology, philosophy, poetics, and literature to contextualize intoxication and its place within the practices of knowledge production and its expression in writing. By drawing on sources both at the edges of the modern European tradition and beyond it, from Bataille to Hafez and Lispector, we will explore the inner experience of the intoxicant as an underacknowledged method of creativity.

Session 1: Alcoholism and Theology: This Session will present the technique of inebriation as it concerns the relation to the divine, the epistemology of drunkenness, and its deployment in James' account of mysticism, Jones' theological-phenomenological investigation of alcoholism, and Bataille's methodology of Non-Knowledge in his project of Atheology.
Session 2: Libation and Literature: This Session will investigate the integration of intoxication into literature, with specific attention to the use of wine imagery in Islamic poetry and the writings of Clarice Lispector and Alejandra Pizarnik regarding the narrative structure of experience.
Session 3: Drunkenness and Delirium: In this Session, intoxication will be linked to the extremities of the mental, in terms of mania and rupture, drawing from Mohaghegh's study of mania as well as the rupture in the experience of madness as described in the psychedelia of Laing's anti-psychiatry.
Session 4: The final Session will review the submitted works by participants in an open discussion, as a conclusion to the Seminar. A short assigned film will also guide the discussion.

IMAGE: Saramanete and Deborah Robbiano, Untitled, 2024

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Critique of Pure Plasticity:
The Thermo-Informatic Transduction of Kant

DESCRIPTION: In Hans Vaihinger’s neo-Kantian masterpiece “The Philosophy of ‘As If,’” he argues that the “unjustified transference to the world” of the Kantian categories “leads to all those philosophically important ideas, such as world-substance, cosmic energy, cosmic causes.” For Vaihinger, these ideas are mere “logical illusions” that partake of Dinge an sich, noumenal things as such. However, in true Kantian style, Vaihinger also argues that these illusions remain necessary from a “subjective and conceptual standpoint.” Even beyond, I would argue that regulative Ideas such as these are necessary precisely because they offer unity to a class of categories that provide structure for any investigation into the conditions of existence of things.

Following Vaihinger, I posit that there are four Dinge an sich that guide us back from the Absolute to a class of transcendental categories that function as the conditions of possibility of existence: the Idea of the Conservation of Energy (cosmic energy); the Idea of Heat Death (cosmic entropy); the Idea of Pure Communication (cosmic information), the Idea of Absolute Certainty (cosmic information entropy). Each regulative Idea has its corresponding class of categories: energy, entropy, information, and information entropy (which I call “intropy”). Each class of category, likewise, follows the Kantian table of categories insofar as energy is quantitative in kind, information is relational, thermodynamic entropy is qualitative, and informatic entropy is modal.

It is not enough, however, to just state each class of categories and name their corresponding relation to the Kantian categories of pure understanding. As Kant argues in the “Deduction,” it must nonetheless be demonstrated that the four concepts of existence are the necessary and universal conditions for existence. Each transduction of a concept of the thermoinformatic table of categories requires the deduction of the concept as it appears in its scientific domain being carried over to its complementary category. How does it relate to the conditions of possibility of the (object) of experience, which are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the (objects) of existence?

If, as Catherine Malabou argues, plasticity denotes both the capacity to “take form (as in the plasticity of clay) and to give form (as in the plastic arts and plastic surgery),” then what is being sought here is precisely the conditions of pure plasticity qua possible existence, since existence always presents itself to the understanding as form and as its possible transformation. What are the conditions of the possibility of plasticity in general? This Seminar will outline a draft of the transduced thermoinformatic table of categories. We will read from Kant’s “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,” the “Transcendental Logic” and the “Transcendental Analytic” as well as from the history of thermodynamics and information theory, in order to provide a critique of pure plasticity.

Session 1. Energy as Quantity.
Session 2. Entropy as Quality.
Session 3. Information as Relation.
Session 4. Intropy as Modality.

IMAGE: Buckminster Fuller, The Biosphere Environment Museum, 1976-77

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Copresence Research Laboratory

DESCRIPTION: Where are you, right now? Where are you present?
Our bodies, our minds, our ideas, our data: where are they —where are we— present at any given moment? On whose territory —on land, on paper, on servers— are we living our lives and how does that serve us? This Seminar is designed to be as much about those who attend it as the content that is delivered. These gatherings are as much about the physical places from which we join the calls and the physical routes that carry our data between us as they are about the ways in which we co-create places online.

The Seminar is conceived as the establishment of a collaborative lab for collective investigation into presence and co-presence. Our focus will be on a more intentional and considerate relationship with our data, our places, our fellow humans and the other-than-human. While for most of our history, a human individual could be in one place at one time, our ability to extend and expand our presence has grown exponentially in recent centuries. By engaging with the histories and affordances of the social and technical systems that facilitate our meeting from diverse locations around the world, we will explore our relationships and agency —as designers, as worldmakers— within them.

Session 1: Presence & consciousness. We will begin where we are, both in physical and virtual space. We will investigate the relationships between our locations around the world, the locations of our data and the platforms and jurisdictions within which we are resident.
Session 2: Gathering, arrangement & copresence. With a greater consciousness of where we are all reside, we will look at how we gather. For most of human history, gathering and separation has been in physical space. What can we learn from centuries of evolution of gathering places in order to better inform the ways we design and gather in virtual places?
Session 3: Collective inquiry into future presence. Where might this take us next? What might be better than a videocall? What can we test right now? With a two week gap between sessions 2 & 3, there will have been the possibility for group or individual investigation into the topics above.
Session 4: Space for emergence. The intention for this session is that its content and format will have primarily emerged from the research and experimentation in previous sessions. We may be on a videocall; it may be an audio call as we walk outside; we may gather in a virtual world of our own devising.

IMAGE: Paul Klee, In Angels Care, 1931

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Loser Gods and Deities

DESCRIPTION: Every ancient pantheon refers to its own loser gods. Whether we look to Babylon, Egypt, Greece, China, the Aztecs, or myriad indigenous cosmologies, we will find the stories of those lesser deities who have been disgraced, banished, or punished. Some have absurd physiologies or disfigurements; others follow paranormal rituals or possess borderline useless powers that cause them to fall outside the top levels of the universal hierarchy. Some have been forgotten, lost in time; others are feared for they bring plague, famine, disease; still others play no role in the world's destiny or dwell in the shadows, the vapor, or the nothing itself. Prometheus, Medusa, Arachne, Set, Ahriman, Nezha, Sedna, Loki, Hades, Pandora, Kali, Tiamat, Xolotl, Aipaloovik, Erlik, Satan, and thousands more.

This Seminar will track these loser gods and resurrect their narratives as a new philosophical-mystical outlook. Through them, we will wonder about alternative existences where those once most neglected might rule.

Session 1: Dethroned Gods (Overthrow) and Gods of Failed Revolutions (Rebellion)
Session 2: Outcast Gods (Exile) and Minor Gods (Irrelevance)
Session 3: Gods of Lost Powers (Disenchantment) and Gods of Lost Status (Obsolescence)
Session 4: Trickster Gods (Play) and Accursed Gods (Pain)

IMAGE: Bazil, Haydari Battle, 1808

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

What Is Left to Learn?:
The Scope of Human Ignorance

DESCRIPTION: Worldviews are made as much as they are found, and perhaps more the former than the latter. Answers to the question of who we are, what we are, and where we might be headed have changed—often drastically—as our kind has learned more about this universe and our place in it. Put differently, knowledge is a thing that can only ever be earned by proving a predisposition to correct errors when they become apparent, and this is a process that inherently takes time.

From Blaise Pascal onward, people have noticed that this applies to wider human collectives as much as to the individual. It may sound Romantic in an age of disillusion and delusion, but our species learns as it ages, compiles shared memory, converses with itself, and accumulates insights about the world. A millennia ago, no one alive knew what stars are made of nor what powers them; now we do.

This Seminar will focus on the building of worldviews across time, framed around a provocative question: how much is left to learn? The answer to such a question cannot, of course, be quantitative or predictive. The history of ideas often tells us only how erroneous creatures like us tend to be. But if you find yourself in a pitch-black cave, the dimensions of which are invisible to you, you can shout, and the echo gives some slight sense of its scope. Similarly, it is only by attending to how incomplete prior worldviews have been that we gain any sense of the proportions of what we might yet be missing today.

Together, we will tend to such questions, whilst remaining vigilant to the fact that, though firm knowledge can indeed be won, we remain completely in the dark regarding the shakier questions of whether a worldview can ever be perfected or completed.

Session 1. From Arbitrary Worlds to Asserted Worlds: We will explore the question of legitimacy lying at the very base of the notion of adopting a ‘worldview’: is modern knowledge merely a secularised form of elder religious dogma? What even is it to have a world? Can there be hope for a better one?
Session 2. Are We The Only Worldmakers?: We will explore the perennial question of our place as worldmaking creatures within the wider tree of life. What can we learn from our only relatives, Earth’s other species? Do they also make their own worlds in the ways we do?
Session 3. Worlds Make Worldmakers, Worldmakers Make Worlds: A symptom and inevitable side effect of knowing about a world is knowing how to change that world. This way, all knowledge is knowhow, and all theory is potentially practical. What does this mean for an era wherein human systems are reshaping flows of energy and matter at a global scale? Is this planetary sapience or, instead, planetary stupidity?
Session 4. When Worldmaking Goes Awry: The status of knowing presupposes the possibility of error. If an utterance or internal state cannot even be wrong, how can it purport to have a world in view? But this means worldmakers can make mistakes, potentially vast ones, potentially ones that scar the collective historical record forever. This final session will grapple with this somber truth.

IMAGE: Color Enhanced Scanning Electro Micrograph of Drosophila Melanogaster, the Common Fruit Fly, 2021

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

The Depthwise & the Diagonal

DESCRIPTION: This four-session Seminar undertakes an analysis of ‘the structure of world history’—to adopt Kojin Karatani’s term for organizing phenomena and processes which span across historical, economic, religious, political and mass psychological horizons. The analysis will be conducted in the vein of a synthesis between horizontalists and verticalists, where the difference between the two is often understood in terms of the emphasis put on the contrast between networks and bottom-up processes on the one hand and hierarchical models equipped with a central command and control on the other.

By reconceptualizing organizational structures as operating in a space that combines aspects of hierarchical (vertical) and networked (horizontal) models, this Seminar will examine contemporary frameworks in political, economic, and social systems’ increasing failure to address the challenges posed by complex systems that do not fit neatly into either horizontalist or verticalist paradigms. The structures shaping history reflect interactions that cut across these traditionally understood categories. This is the model of depth—understood computationally as a blend of these dimensions across scales of an organization—which is precisely what we must strive to comprehend in order to address the shortcomings of how we describe the structure of world history. Given that our interventive practices aimed at the structure of world history are beholden to how we describe and explain it first, then a notion of “diagonal depth” is necessary for describing phenomena which, despite their appearances, are neither truly horizontal nor vertical.

To this end, this Seminar integrates insights from political science, economics, complexity theory, and computer science to propose a conceptual framework adequate for analyzing historical evolutions and organizations and systems manifesting them. A number of concepts and frameworks adequate to the task of describing such systems will be introduced, including Charles Bennett’s “Logical Depth,” Paul Vitanyi and Ming Li’s work on Kolmogorov complexity and its applications, Andrée Ehresmann’s memory evolutive systems, Aurora Apolito on the problem of scale in anarcho-communism, and Remo Badii. Antonio Politi’s work on hierarchical and scaling problems in complexity sciences will be adapted to highlight the labor involved in interpreting and transforming them.

Ultimately, this Seminar underscores the necessity of an appropriate description of a complex model of depth—one that acknowledges its hybrid nature—as a prerequisite for any meaningful engagement or transformation. Without this understanding, attempts to address or intervene in such systems—the structure of world history writ large—risk being superficial and ineffective, if not exemplifications of malicious practical vagaries of which the contemporary political spectrum is replete.

IMAGE: Rasoul Ashtary, Interview, 2022

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

The Triple-Helix Structure of World History

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar reexamines the philosophical underpinnings and the historical contexts that shape our understanding of “history” itself. By critically engaging with diverse schools of thought—from classical historiography to contemporary philosophies of temporality—we will re-conceptualize historical development to consider a new structural model of history as an entwining helix composed of three interdependent yet distinct strands: Nature, encompassing physical environments, climate patterns, geological transformations, and the broader ecological context within which human activity occurs, as well as the broad sweep of natural history, starting with the Big Bang and beyond, and influencing the conditions for both technologies and societies to develop; Technology, encompassing the tools and methods originating within nature but emerging as autonomous forces through which the inanimate world evolves by way of correctional processes of life contingently self-revising and innovating for survival, gradually shaping more complex forms beyond the interactions of both nature and society; Society, encompassing social and cultural norms, institutions, and identities, the history of which chronicles the organization of human communities, driven by the conditions of nature and reaching for technological advancements, and representing the sum of collective human experience—the cultural, political, and economic realms.

The main hypothesis of the Seminar is that these strands are co-responsive, forming the structures that define different historical epochs. Although open-ended and autonomous, they twist and turn around each other in an intricate interplay. At times, one strand may exert a dominant force, pulling the other two in its direction. For example: technological revolutions often reshape societal structures and redefine humanity's relationship with nature. Conversely, environmental shifts can compel societies to adapt, influencing technological developments. After understanding both the philosophy of history and its materialization into historical writing or historiography, this Seminar will look at the interplay of Nature, Technology and Society to analyze the theoretical and practical relevance of their intertwinement to our current predicament. We will examine whether History can be reconfigured as an open-ended process shaped by the dynamic interactions between these three factors.

Session 1: Introduction: Historiography and philosophy of history, from Herodotus and Abu Rayhan Biruni to von Ranke and Hegel. Determining the scale and scope of participants’ projects.
Session 2: The Cybernetic Concept of History: From the humanism of Walter Benjamin to the inhumanism of Land and Negarestani.
Session 3: A Triple-Helix Philosophy of History.
Session 4: Seminar Review and Participants Presentations.

.

IMAGE: R.H. Quaytman, Instaltion View, Glenstone Museum, 2022

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.