Synthesis

CIPh Indeterminacy and Play 05

Video Recording:

Friends and Fellow Travelers,

Attached is an interesting article by Cecile Malaspina,"Pure information: on infinity and human nature in the technical object," Culture, Theory and Critique, 2019

SERIES DESCRIPTION

In An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies Steve Coutinho writes: “Interconnections build and shift as one develops familiarity with the verses, but the meaning never crystallises into a final form.” This seminar responds to the need to enlarge the concerns, vocabulary, and even the modes of articulation of philosophy, so as to address the transformative dynamics of the contemporary world. Because it imbricates local and planetary complexities, this work calls for greater openness towards philosophical legacies muted by the dominance of the Western tradition of philosophy, including alternative attitudes towards indeterminacy, as well as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We invite participants to bring plural, distinct personal and cultural genealogies of thought to bear on the theme of indeterminacy and play, as much to create a polyphonic family of generate interpretations of the theme as to showcase the richly disparate modes and concerns that animate these genealogies.

Cécile Malaspina

+

SERIES DESCRIPTION

In An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies Steve Coutinho writes: “Interconnections build and shift as one develops familiarity with the verses, but the meaning never crystallises into a final form.” This seminar responds to the need to enlarge the concerns, vocabulary, and even the modes of articulation of philosophy, so as to address the transformative dynamics of the contemporary world. Because it imbricates local and planetary complexities, this work calls for greater openness towards philosophical legacies muted by the dominance of the Western tradition of philosophy, including alternative attitudes towards indeterminacy, as well as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We invite participants to bring plural, distinct personal and cultural genealogies of thought to bear on the theme of indeterminacy and play, as much to create a polyphonic family of generate interpretations of the theme as to showcase the richly disparate modes and concerns that animate these genealogies.

Recorded Thursday 11 April 2024

ABSTRACT

Western anthropologists studying the indigenous cultures of Black Africans on the continent have, all too often, been intent upon searching for “old ways” that have persisted in spite of the “modern” history of the continent, hoping to gain insights into “pre-modern” and “primitive” peoples. The reality is, however, that the cultural practices of indigenous Black Africans on the continent observed by these anthropologists have all been formed, to some degree, in response to one of the greatest sequences of geographic, demographic, and historiographic catastrophes, from the Slave Trade, to the Colonial Scramble for Africa, to the Organized Abandonment and Underdevelopment of the Postcolonies.

Similarly, Western anthropologists examining aspects of continental Black African cultures that seemingly persist in diasporic Black African cultures have, all too often, imagined that they are observing “old ways” that have persisted in spite of the genocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal machinations of racial capitalism. In reality, however, they are observing the dynamic play of homologous and analogous developments and recombinatory Trans-Atlantic crossings, back and forth, between the cultural ecologies of the continent and the diaspora -- all being responses (and not simply reactions) to the apocalyptic events of the past six centuries on both sides of the Middle Passage.

Taking the above into consideration, this lecture will attempt to re-articulate the schism between the continent and the diaspora as an evolving object of philosophical study by re-appropriating and re-evaluating the psychoanalytic anthropologies and ethnographies that informed Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis, re-reading them alongside the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, George Jackson, Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, R.A. Judy, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. In so doing, this lecture will make the case for an Anti-Oedipal Blackness and an Afro-Schizoanalytics that runs counter to applications of Western psychoanalytics and schizoanalytics to anthropologies of continental and diasporic Black Africans.

BIO

Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a performance artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. He is the author of six books of experimental poetry and prose.

Muindi’s philosophical perspective, his “deconstructive empiricism”, is deeply affected by Bantu philosophies and by Western deconstruction and schizoanalysis, and it is subtly informed by figures, functions, and structures from comparative biology and measure theory.

Muindi’s performances, his “philosophical gestures”, deploy dramatic devices to create sensuous experiences that deepen understandings of the metaphysical catastrophe of coloniality and that broaden the prospects of the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences. Having adopted the motto “more grit, less kit”, Muindi’s performance practice privileges high latency, low fidelity, and seamful designs and the use of TEK (Transformative Ecological Knowledges).

Muindi is co-founder of the Fyrthyr Institute for Unsettling Technologies, coordinator of the “Prototyping Social Forms” and “Alter-Eco” research streams at the Synthesis Center, an organizer at the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, co-producer and audio engineer for the Forested Niches podcast, and a member of the “After School”, “Technologies of Critical Conscientization”, and “Unwriting Nature” research communities at the Center for Art Design + Social Research.

VENICE, ITALY

Alice Oswald, celebrated poet and gardener

Sha Xin Wei, Director of Synthesis and Professor School of Arts, Media + Engineering at Arizona State University

Muriel Mambrini-Doudet, 1st Research Director, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, Doctoral program lead at the Learning Planet Institute

Brian MacCraith, Physicist, Senior Advisor to the President, Arizona State University (ASU); Chair, External Oversight Body of the Irish Defence Forces; Chair, Gaelic Players Association (GPA); Former President, Dublin City University (2010–2020)

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, artists, educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice for the transformation of civic spaces and collective imaginaries