Necrophilanthropy:
Nonprofit Killers and the Carceral State

DESCRIPTION:Indebted to the benevolence of grantmakers and one-percenters, liberal 501(c)(3) organizations have consistently absorbed, defanged, and profited from radical movements for social transformation over the past forty years. From a workers' perspective, the web of public and private interests that constitute the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) might be experienced as constant negotiations between domination and subjugation, exploitation and genuine pleasure. "Necrophilanthropy," the neologism at the heart of this Seminar, invokes necropolitics and necrophilia to probe deeper into the seductive death drive of capital.

The first half of the Seminar surveys the NPIC's structural underpinnings through lecture and discussion, from the late-nineteenth-century "scientific charity" movement through the fall of the welfare state and rise of mass incarceration. We then narrow in on art and culture to historicize the 1990s rise of "social practice," examine how artists have been instrumentalized to beautify the carceral system, look at the contemporary wave of (arts) nonprofit labor struggle, and the US “nonprofit killer” bill—planning to revoke nonprofit status of organizations deemed to be “terrorist supporting” with no recourse, targeting even the most mild Palestine solidarity. These factors and more have brought the liberal 501(c)(3) to its current existential crossroads.

The second half of the Seminar will be responsive to the particular needs and interests of participants. Collaborative student presentations may use case studies, power mapping, and lived experiences to consider what it means to evade mechanisms of elite capture. The Seminar will culminate with individual final works in the form of an essay, presentation, direct action, or workshopping a speculative organization. Themes of death and seduction will remain front and center as we strive toward a range of artistic, administrative, and agitational strategies toward the question of how cultural production, within or against the NPIC, can be materially useful to revolutionary movement work today.

We will study materials by artists and thinkers like Robert Allen, Chloë Bass, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Larne Abse Gogarty, Jarrod Shanahan & Zhandarka Kurti, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Jeniffer Wolch. Readings and other assignments will be adjusted based on collective capacity. Artists and cultural workers—salariat or precariat, waged or unwaged—are particularly encouraged to register, though we are eager to study with folks from other sectors who are interested in the broader themes.

Week 1. Pre-reading: Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” chapter 3 (2019), Rodríguez’s “The political logic of the non-profit industrial complex” (2016) (also: introduction to Kurti/Shanahan’s “Skyscraper Jails,” Shanahan’s “Explosive Elements Beneath the Surface of the City of New York”). Review syllabus, requirements, deadlines. Lecture: intro to necropolitics & nonprofit industrial complex, NPIC early history.

Week 2. Pre-reading: Allen’s “Black Awakening in Capitalist America” excerpt (1969), Gilmore’s “In the shadow of the shadow state” (2016), introduction to Gogarty’s “Usable Pasts” (2022), Petrossiants / Arts Workers Inquiry zine excerpt (2025). NPIC history continued 1930s-today via art/culture. Film discussion.

Week 3. Student text presentations (anti-work horizons, ideal alternatives, power research, organizing methods).

Week 4. Necrophilanthropy reflections, flexible for leftover reading/lecture discussions, briefly share final works.

IMAGE: Live Aid Concert, 1984

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Aether, Field, Manifold:
Transcendental Aesthetic

DESCRIPTION: From Descartes to Feynmann via Faraday and Einstein, the notion of some abstracted spatiotemporal domain in which matter and its motions interact has posited as the fundamental ground of physical theory. As Kant demonstrated in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, such a formal geometric ground is one of the necessary a priori conditions for the possibility of experience. The pure forms of intuition—space and time—are what render the “manifold” of sensation receptive to order; they provide the understanding with the structured data it requires to synthesize appearances spatiotemporally. Without these forms, sensations would not be arrayed in any configuration of “simultaneity” or “succession”: experience would become rhapsodic, lacking all coherence and unity.
Kant’s aesthetic, however, is developed within a Newtonian framework. Space is the a priori form of outer intuition, homogeneous and essentially Euclidean; time is the pure form of inner intuition, continuous and one-dimensional. Yet even within this Newtonian framing, Kant, as per the Metaphysical Foundation of the Natural Sciences, still maintains the notion (still widespread in 18th-century natural philosophy) of the “aether,” a dynamic plenum of matter underlying all interactions. Though Kant carefully avoids positing a physical aether as a constituent of things-in-themselves, the concept nonetheless lingers as a heuristic constraint: forces require a domain of possible transmission, and the understanding requires an organized manifold to operate upon.

However, the emergence of the field in the works of Faraday and Maxwell, the relativistic reconceptualization of the spacetime manifold in Einstein, and the development of quantum field theory in the 20th century, collectively displaced the Newtonian framework that silently underwrites Kant’s aesthetic. What once appeared as fixed, absolute forms of intuition have become plastic and relativistic. The manifold of spacetime is no longer understood as an empty formal container (what Leibniz and Kant called absolute space and time) but a medium whose very geometry depends upon energetic and material configurations. Indeed, matter and energy bend the very fabric of spacetime, and the geometry of this interactive manifold dictate what it is possible to intuit (the speed of light sets an absolute limit to the informational intuitable horizon). Furthermore, in quantum field theory, even the notion of “particles” as objects in space and time gives way to excitations of underlying fields defined over highly abstract manifolds. That is to say, no longer can we separate those objects of experience from the field in which they said to be experienced. Matter is not place in a field, the field is matter.
This course takes this paradigmatic revolution as its central problematic. It will examine how the concepts of aether, field and manifold ultimately compels a rethinking of the very transcendental aesthetic framework within which physical experience is possible. The guiding question is: What would a transcendental aesthetic look like if it were transductively reconstructed in light of the historical and scientific development of the field and the manifold from out of the notion of the aether? Or put differently: Can we articulate an a priori framework adequate to a world in which the fundamental entities are not substances in space and time, but relational, energetic fields whose structure determines the geometry of their own manifold?
Over four weeks, we will trace this conceptual evolution:
• from the early modern aether as a medium of forces,
• to Faraday’s and Maxwell’s reconception of physical interaction as continuous field activity,
• to Einstein’s fusion of spacetime and field into a single dynamical structure,
• to the radical ontology of quantum fields in which particles are modes of excitation and the vacuum itself is structured,
• and finally to contemporary philosophical attempts to interpret fields and manifolds not merely as scientific constructs but as potential transcendental conditions of appearance—conditions for the intelligibility of experience in a post-Newtonian world.

Session 1 — From Substance to Medium: The Aetherial Cosmos
Theme:
The early modern transition from Aristotelian substance to mechanical plenum; aether as the universal medium of forces and waves.
Primary Texts:
• René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), Part II (“Of the Principles of Material Things”).
• Isaac Newton, Opticks (1704), “Queries” 18–31.
• Christiaan Huygens, Treatise on Light (1690), Preface and ch. 1.
Secondary Readings:
• Mary Hesse, Forces and Fields (1961), ch. 1–2.
• E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925), ch. 6 (“Newtonian Dynamics and the Aether”).

Session 2 — Electricity, Magnetism, and the Birth of Field Thinking
Theme:
Faraday’s empirical turn from action-at-a-distance to lines of force; the conceptual shift from medium to relational topology.
Primary Texts:
• Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity (1831–1855), §§ 3078–3110 (“On Lines of Force”).
Secondary Readings:
• Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), ch. 2 (“Field and Force”).
• Peter M. Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter (1982), ch. 4 (“Faraday and the Field Concept”).

Session 3 — Maxwell’s Equations and the Ontology of Energy
Theme:
Field as continuous energy distribution; mathematical formalization and unity of electricity, magnetism, and light.
Primary Texts:
• James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), Book II, ch. 1–4; Book IV, ch. 20–23.
Secondary Readings:
• Jed Z. Buchwald, From Maxwell to Microphysics (1985), Introduction and ch. 2.
• Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force” (1847).

Session 4 — Relativity and the Dissolution of the Aether
Theme:
From electromagnetic field to spacetime field; the collapse of absolute medium into geometric structure.
Primary Texts:
• Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905).
• Albert Einstein, “Ether and the Theory of Relativity” (1920).
• Hermann Minkowski, “Space and Time” (1908).
Secondary Readings:
• Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function (1910), Part II.
• Thomas Ryckman, The Reign of Relativity (2005), ch. 3.

IMAGE: Pierre Huyghe, De-Extinction, 2014

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African Philosophy in the 20th Century:
Historical Materialism or Ethnophilosophy?

DESCRIPTION: Today there are voices, such as that of Cedric Robinson and his followers, that speak of the existence of an "African metaphysics" which can provide an alternative to historical materialism as a theoretical orientation for emancipatory projects. However, this contention is not new; in fact, it goes all the way back to the birth of African philosophy as an academic subfield in the mid-twentieth century. It was also subjected to criticism from a historical materialist perspective by Paulin Hountondji. This Workshop revisits this debate and explores its current significance. Our readings will focus on two texts by the Beninois philosopher, Paulin J. Hountondji: African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983 [1976]), and The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa (2002 [1998]). Hountondji's work is interesting for a variety of reasons, but his most important contribution, at least for the purposes of this Workshop, has to do with his claim that a certain way of doing African philosophy (what he labels "ethnophilosophy") is liable to impede development on the African continent through mystification. We will critically assess his arguments in support of this claim and try to reconstruct and evaluate his positive proposal, which gives a rather deflationary account of the role of philosophy in development and in political movements more generally.

Session 1: The Origins of the Debate / We start with a text that has been the subject of controversy in African philosophy from 1945 onwards, namely Placide Tempels' Bantu Philosophy. Tempels' book was positively received by key African philosophers and politicians such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Alioune Diop. We examine how Tempels presents "Bantu Ontology" and what the implications are for debates about African alternatives to historical materialism.
Readings: Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy

Session 2: The Critique of Ethnophilosophy / This session introduces Paulin Hountondji's critique of ethnophilosophy through the first part of his book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Hountondji contends that Tempels' approach to African philosophy is liable to mislead both Africans and Europeans. Hountondji tries to show how ethnophilosophy can be critically assessed on philosophical terms and then explained in sociological terms.
Readings: Part I of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

Session 3: Nkrumah and the Shadow of Ethnophilosophy / Kwame Nkrumah championed a national development campaign in Ghana and produced a philosophical discourse to legitimate it. The key text in this philosophical discourse is his Consciencism. Hountondji contends that the African socialism that Nkrumah champions in this text is yet another iteration of ethnophilosophy.
Readings: Part II of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality; Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism

Session 4: The Place of Marxism in African Philosophy / In this session we study Hountondji's The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa to understand how his critique of ethnophilosophy was driven by a commitment to a Marxist political project. We investigate the nature of this project and its bearing on debates about development and emancipation on the African continent today.
Readings: Paulin Hountondji, The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa

IMAGE: Wosene Worke Kosrof, Woman of the Nile, 1998

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Philosophers’ Diagram

DESCRIPTION: What happens when philosophy is visualized rather than merely verbalized? What if its most elusive problems like time, subjectivity, emergence, and metaphysics require not just concepts but diagrams?

This Workshop investigates the conceptual and affective power of diagrams across the history of continental philosophy. From Plato's cosmological schemas and Husserl's time-consciousness graphs to Deleuze's rhizomes and Barad's agential cuts, we explore how philosophical diagrams operate as devices (dispositifs), both exposing and producing structures of thought. Drawing from ancient metaphysics, media theory, and speculative technics, we engage diagrammatics not merely as interpretation but as method. Each session is organized around a specific thematic or philosophical problem (time, perception, subjectivity, interface, the event) and activated through a curated archive of historical and contemporary diagrams. As much a visual as a conceptual inquiry, the Workshop "delaminates" the diagrammatic unconscious of philosophy, revealing how thought itself can be shaped and unfolded through spatial-logical forms. The Workshop culminates in a hands-on practicum where participants develop original diagrams in real time. These may range from philosophical systems to affective cartographies, cinematic temporalities, or synthetic cosmograms. The goal is to equip participants with tools to construct their own situated, speculative diagrammatics: intuitive yet precise, aesthetic yet structural, metaphysical yet grounded.

Session 1: Cosmological Origins / Plato's Timaeus and the diagram of the khora; Neoplatonist systems of emanation; Gnostic cosmograms and the mytho-diagrammatics of Bertrand Russell's Icarus.
Readings/References: Plato, Cornford, Plotinus, Proclus, Derrida, Kristeva.

Session 2: Time, Perception, and Memory / Diagrams of temporality in Husserl and Bergson; Whitehead's event-diagrams and their mutations in Stengers and Manning; constructing processual diagrams of attention and bracketing. Readings: Husserl, Bergson, Gell, Whitehead, Stengers.

Session 3: Dispositifs and Media Apparatuses / Foucault's diagrams of epistemes and the dispositif; C.S. Peirce and diagrammatic logic; Mitchell and Stjernfelt on diagrammatology as an epistemic mode. Readings: Foucault, Bird & Tusa, Peirce, W.J.T. Mitchell.

Session 4: Platonism, Event, and the One / Deleuze and Badiou on metaphysical seriality; diagramming the One and the multiple; the tension between immanence and transcendence in diagrammatic form.
Readings: Badiou, Deleuze, Hallward, Rolfe, Masciandaro.

IMAGE: Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland. It is titled, Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1803.

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The Right Wing

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar introduces students to the broad parameters of right-wing thought. This includes discussions of some of its seminal figures (Burke, de Maistre, Hayek, and Nietzsche) alongside more modern movements and figures like Yoram Hazony and the National Conservative movement and post-liberal "aristopopulists" like Patrick Deneen. The Seminar unpacks the throughline between different right-wing thinkers in their commitment to hierarchy and the principle that there are "recognizably superior" persons and groups in society. It also situates right-wing intellectuals alongside contemporary developments like the rise of MAGA.

Session One: What is the Right? / This class introduces students to the debate around the nature of right-wing thought, with different explanations given by conservative authors like Russell Kirk and leftists like Corey Robin. We will also touch on the right's nostalgia for "pre-modern social imaginaries" centered around hierarchical complementarity and symbolized in the great chain of being.
Readings: Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, Introduction and Chapter One

Session Two: Early Right-Wing Thinkers / This class introduces students to early right-wing thinking, focusing heavily on the twinned influence of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. Burke and de Maistre embody variations of right-wing thought. Both opposed the French Revolution, but Burke did so from a more moderate and less staunchly reactionary standpoint. His bourgeois inclinations made Burke open-minded about reform in a way an aristocratic royalist like de Maistre couldn't countenance.
Readings: Selections from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Joseph de Maistre, The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions

Session Three: The Rise of the Radical Right / This class looks at thinkers that belong on the "radical right." These are those who regard society as so decayed by the forces of liberalism, socialism, and democracy that there is nothing left to "conserve." Only radical change via a "conservative revolution" or "refounding" will work. This includes some of the right's more interesting, but also disturbing, thinkers. We'll discuss the alignment of these figures with fascism and other far-right movements.
Readings: Selections from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, and Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

Session Four: The Modern Illiberal Right / We conclude the Seminar with a discussion of the contemporary illiberal and in many ways "postmodern" right that is currently ascendant. This focuses particularly on the United States as the current locus of world reaction. We will look at various MAGA intellectuals and see how and whether they wield substantial influence as they hope.

IMAGE: Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA speaking at the memorial service for her slained husband Charlie Kirk, 2025, Getty Images.

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Distance and Social Peripheries:
Capital Accumulation on a Global Scale

DESCRIPTION: Mianstream Marxism has more or less understood the logic of commodity production as a fundamental component of industrial capitalism. However, according to some neo-Marxists, this perspective has focused primarily on the production circuit and overlooked the circulation process (commodity exchange) in the formation of surplus value. Since commodity exchange occurs between communities, once capitalism becomes a world-economy, these trading relations no longer take place between individual buyers and sellers, but rather between places—namely, states. Another fundamental trait of the capitalist circulation process is its inherent imbalance and inequality, which leads to the development of advanced national economies while others are subjected to exploitation and extractive activities. This phenomenon underpins political terms such as underdevelopment and Third-Worldism, which gained popularity in the 1990s.

Several theoretical frameworks have emerged to clarify the imbalance in trading terms. Two stand out in this context: world-systems theory, with its center-periphery axis (and semi-peripheries, as discussed in the works of Wallerstein and Arrighi), and Marxist dependency theory, which introduces the concept of unequal exchange—ideas best understood in light of the relationship between capital and state power. Some concepts are particularly useful for examining the connection between states and the capitalist system on a global scale: Karatani's idea of the capital-nation-state trinity, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the Urstaat, and Amin's explanation of the tributary state. This political analysis suggests that capitalism, far from being a homogeneous system, displays structural imbalances—especially from a spatial point of view. It is an asymmetric totality that began with the colonial process in the Americas, creating peripheral social formations (former colonies) in contrast to the centers of capitalism. This Seminar is intended for those interested in understanding how capitalism spreads across the globe through a logic of spatial engulfment, radically transforming the lives and cultures of communities and individuals, and establishing a material accumulation process grounded in exploitation and political disempowerment.

Session 1: Introduction / World-systems theory and the center-periphery axis
Readings: Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, Arrighi, Samir Amin

Session 2: Karatani and the Capital-Nation-State Trinity / Global capitalism as all-encompassing system, political and cultural phenomena enabling accumulation, modes of exchange
Readings: Karatani, Marx, Hegel, Benedict Anderson

Session 3: Unequal Exchange and the Axioms of Periphery / Capitalist engulfment of pre-capitalist areas, transformation of socio-economic structures and political order, tributary state, Urstaat, axioms of capitalism
Readings: Samir Amin, Deleuze and Guattari, Gunder Frank

Session 4: Peripheral Social Formations and Post-Colonial Critique / Colonial reshaping of labor systems and subsistence activities, racial and gender stratifications in the social order
Readings: Maria Mies, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen, Claudia von Werlhof, Quijano, Rosa Luxemburg, Fanon

IMAGE: Hedda Sterne, NY, NY no. X, 1948

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Tektologus Autodidactus:
World-Engineering from Desert Islands to Corrigible Utopias

DESCRIPTION: The Seminar studies a sequence of philosophical constructions of solitary intelligence and collective organization: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān, Ibn al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Each work marks a different configuration along the path from desert island consciousness to objective spirit: the self-taught islander, the rational theologian reinserted into community, the revolutionary visitor confronted with a completed communist planet, the dissident physicist inside an exhausted anarchist order, and finally the collectivist construction site whose utopian project digs itself into non-viability. The concern is not socialist literary criticism but the use of these constructions as conceptual instruments for questions about collective labor and the maintenance or breakdown of complex social forms.

Utopian arrangements here are treated as models of organization with a computational profile: they specify inputs, update rules, channels of transmission, and costs. The seminar will ask how much logical depth—buried work, irreversibility, dependence on long chains of prior decisions—is condensed in the institutions, norms, and feedback mechanisms that sustain these worlds, and how that depth is rendered legible or left opaque. A central concern is structural tenability: how these constructions propose to withstand scarcity, conflict, and metabolic constraints without collapsing into predation, stagnation, or self-cancellation. Here, The Foundation Pit is included as a limit case in which the organizational project becomes an open-ended algorithm of descent: work and resources are sunk without convergence on a tenable structure, as the utopian project collapses into its own excavation—an ever-deepening object where labor and history are stored as depth that no habitable form can occupy.

Across four sessions, the seminar alternates close reading with explicit philosophical thought experiments. Island scenarios, organizational redesigns, and counterfactual modifications of key institutions are used to stress-test the constructions and to extract from them a set of problems about orientation, coordination, and the reparability—or irreparability—of complex systems.

IMAGE: Vladimir Lenin plays chess with Alexander Bogdanov, 1908

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From Magic to Media:
A Hermetic Genealogy of Optical and Communication Technologies

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar examines the genealogy (in a Nietzschean sense) of technical and optical media—from pre-cinema technologies through film and beyond—through its occulted roots in Hermeticism, magic, and alchemy. With the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and artificially constructed images of illusion and deception, it is becoming increasingly imperative to trace the history of our technologically mediated realities to the little-known genealogies of shamanic performance, ritual, and Hermetic magic, and to question the cultural, philosophical, and political significance this knowledge holds for our time. The intersection of magic, technology, and art—especially occult technologies such as alchemy and talismans—reveals the predecessors of much of what we consider technical media and optical technologies: photography, film, the internet, social media, and AI.

To provide a sample of what we cover: we examine Giovanni Fontana's influential treatise Illustrated and Encrypted Book of War Instruments, written around 1420 CE, an illustrated book of military instruments, optical media, and automata. This treatise contains one of the first ever depictions of an early version of the magic lantern or lanterna magica in Europe. We trace how such optical devices and automata as military technologies appear in the literature of Islamicate or Arabic Hermetica by excavating its earliest sources in the little-studied Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, much of which was influenced by Harranian astral magic. We consider figures such as the enigmatic Balinus or pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana, a disciple of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, called in the sources "the lord of talismans" (sahib-i tilismat). In these texts, Aristotle or Balinus creates automata called "talismans" (tilismat) for the purpose of helping Alexander conjure illusions to deceive and frighten his enemies in battle—precisely the function of the optical device illustrated in Fontana's manuscript, considered an early version of the magic lantern. The early magic lantern device described in Fontana's book is a talisman (Arabic: tilism, Persian: telesm) with its genealogy in the literature of Hermetica transmitted via Arabic and Persian sources into Europe. In this way, the Seminar contributes to discourses on decoloniality by decolonizing the largely Eurocentric narratives of the history of media technologies.

We also consider how the very technological devices we use and hold in our hands today—smartphones, AGIs such as ChatGPT—may be understood as talismanic media rooted in Hermetic magic, possessing different operationalities from their current forms and uses under late capitalist and neoliberal regimes. What is at stake today and for the future is who controls and wields these powerful talismanic media. We think through these issues with theorists and philosophers including Ernst Bloch, Yuk Hui, Gilbert Simondon, Siegfried Zielinski, Vilém Flusser, Ernst Kapp, and Friedrich Kittler, Perso-Islamicate philosophers such as Suhrawardi and Ahsai, and the writings of early avant-garde movements such as The Great Game and Surrealism.

Session 1: Introduction / A Hermetic genealogy of technical media, decolonizing Eurocentric narratives of media history, talismanic media and Hermetic magic, late capitalism and neoliberal regimes, who controls talismanic media

Session 2: Archaeoapocalypse / A Hermetic archaeology of technical media, Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge and media archaeology, archaeoapocalypse as alternative methodology, the motif of discovery of hidden and arcane knowledge

Session 3: Media as Talismans / Theorizing talismanic magic, Fontana's Illustrated and Encrypted Book of War Instruments (1420 CE), the lanterna magica, Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, Harranian astral magic, Perso-Islamicate sources, optical media's magical heritage through to cinema

Session 4: Cinematic Cosmos / Islamicate philosophy and cinema theory, decolonizing Eurocentric media and film discourse, the concept of hūrqalyā, Suhrawardī and the Illuminationist school, Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī and the Shaykhi school, the world of images (ʿālam al-mithāl), correspondence between cosmic and cinematic ontology

IMAGE: Vera Dg, Calligraphy Abstract Expressionism, 2017

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Marx’s Capital in the 21st Century

DESCRIPTION: Capital, Vol. 1 is both a totally unique literary masterpiece and the most insightful book ever written about the economic order that continues to shape all of our lives. It's full of both technical economic points illustrated with mathematical precision and a dense web of references to Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Dante, Greek and Roman history, and more. Add the complications of reading it in translation, and it's easy to get lost very deep in the weeds.

In this Seminar, we zoom out to cover the core themes of the book, taking on two of the eight sections per session. Instead of getting lost in what can, at worst, become a sort of secular socialist equivalent of scriptural exegesis, we think hard, with care and analytical rigor, about Marx's core arguments in each of the eight sections. What was the most important case he was trying to make in each case, and how does it all fit together on a high level?

Session 1: Commodities and Money; The Transformation of Money into Capital / Marx on commodities, value, and money, transition to analysis of capitalist class structures, simple commodity circulation versus the circuit of capital, source of profit in labor-power

Session 2: The Production of Absolute Surplus Value; The Production of Relative Surplus Value / The beating heart of Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation, necessary labor and surplus labor, capitalism's historical uniqueness, mute compulsion and vertical market relations, horizontal competition between capitalists

Session 3: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value; Wages / Recap from a different perspective, disconnect between exploitation and legal forms of compensation, time-wages versus piece wages, capitalism as a global system

Session 4: The Process of the Accumulation of Capital; So-Called Primitive Accumulation / Simple reproduction versus runaway accumulation, wealth at one pole and social misery at the other, organized labor and the welfare state, the true horrors of capitalism's origins

IMAGE: Ludwig Engelhardt, Marx and Engels Monument, Berlin,1986

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To Draw Away Matter, Space and Time from Media and Meaning

DESCRIPTION: To Draw Away takes its name from the Latin root of abstraction: abs-trahō, to pull away from the material object, and from the Greek aphairesis, things that exist from removing. Drawing itself, originally figurative, names the act of dragging a stylus across a surface. This seminar follows that double etymology across the entire historical trajectory of abstraction in visual and broader cultural production, from paleolithic mark-making to the present, drawing on physiology, ophthalmology, neurology, psychiatry, theology, art history, philosophy, and politics.

The "surface" of Abstract Art is globally accessible precisely because it operates outside the structures of formal language, untethered from any single cultural context. Non-figurative, non-objective, non-representational: abstraction is defined by negation, yet what it negates opens onto an esoteric inner vision touching the transcendental and metaphysical. It encompasses revelation and apocalypse, entoptic phenomena produced directly by the central nervous system, and the involuntary imagery of psychedelic intoxication or sensory deprivation. It was also, after World War II, an American export, deployed in the promotion of individualism against Stalinist Socialist Realism. Without the Abstract, as the seminar argues, we cannot get closer to truth or its knowing.

This seminar is suitable for students of art and art history, emerging curators and artists, collectors, and all serious lovers of art. It is a first installment of the long-term Intercentric Curatorial Studies program beginning in September.

Session One: On Abstract, Abstraction and Abstract Art in General / This session establishes the conceptual and historical ground, tracing abstraction from its etymological origins through its development across cultures and media. Students are introduced to the core paradox: that to draw away from the object is also to draw closer to something essential.
Session Two: On the Spiritual, the Psychopathological, the Entoptic and the Neuroaesthetical / This session examines the inner sources of abstraction, including aniconic and iconoclastic traditions, the visionary and hallucinatory, and the neurological. Students explore how Abstract Art operates at the threshold of the rational and the involuntary.
Session Three: On Specificity of Understanding and Tacit Knowing / This session addresses what it means to know and understand abstraction beyond formal language. Students engage with intuition as heuristic insight and examine the range of stimuli and irritants that bring it forth.

Session Four: On the Personal, the Relational and the Political / The final session situates abstraction within lived experience and political history, from its role as an instrument of Cold War ideology to its capacity for somatic self-knowledge and catharsis.

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

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