The Center for Discursive Inquiry, School of Critical Studies, CalArts presents:
At the conjuncture: art and the imagination
An online conference, coordinated by Amanda Beech (CalArts), Christine Wertheim (CalArts) and Matthew Poole (Cal State San Bernardino).
Saturday, March 9th 2024
8:30am-2pm PST
To join the webinar: https://csusb.zoom.us/j/83056661053
Session 1
On Materialities and Materialism: Structures and Constraints
8.30am – 11am PST/4.30pm – 7pm GMT
- Ranjan Ghosh is Humboldt Visiting Professor, Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany & Professor, Department of English, University of North Bengal, India
- Marina Vishmidt is a writer, theorist and educator. She is currently Professor of Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria.
- Reza Negarastani is a philosopher and the author of Intelligence and Spirit (2018) and Abducting the Outside (2024). He is currently directing the critical philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice.
Session 2
Art as a technology of the imagination
11:30am – 2pm PST | 7:30pm – 10pm GMT
- Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London.
- Sonia de Jager - S. de Jager is a A a cld -sj a. Ad -- a a, a, b/. c. More information at www.n-o.ooo.
- Anthony Bogues is Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory at Brown University where he is the inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
Symposium Outline
At the Conjuncture: Art and the Imagination
The imagination has a long and complex trajectory as a human faculty, but in this epoch of planetary-scale computation and the explosion of synthetic intelligence, genomic engineering, and robotics it has been decentered and accelerated in compelling and disconcerting ways. Now more than ever the security of positivistic reasoning has undergone radical questioning, addressing with urgency the fundamental perceptions of what we are, and what our reality consists of, yet opening as well almost unthinkable and unimaginable possibilities for our definition of what human modes of thinking and the imagination could be.
However, the tension between the possibilities that the imagination holds and its material reality remain intolerably constrained and controlled by the structures of planetary capital. The question of global sapience, as potential and as problem, consists of dense strands of transparency and opacity. The focus of this conference will be on proposals for reconfigurations of time, space, and otherness that generate comprehensive interrogations of the formation of histories, and at the same juncture think time as informing possible alternate non-linear futures.
We address the dynamics of the imagination as a manifestation of artistic production and critical thought, in part ‘as if’, in part as concept/object modeling, to effectuate other modalities which might lead to different modes of world-making. This ‘global’ (as opposed to individualistic) reenergized faculty of imagination—imagination on a global scale—asks us to focus on the relations between the empirical, the socio-political, the economic and the scientific space of what is common, as well as potential philosophical concepts of universality. It asks us to consider the condition of the subject in the world, the world that forms subject, and the transgressive production of the global imagination through it, as well as the divisive violence that is incumbent upon the planetary impulse itself.
For more information on our group and the CDI please visit our website.
BIOS and ABSTRACTS
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal. With over hundred research papers in journals like Diacritics, Critical Inquiry, Modern Language Notes, SubStance, History and Theory, Clio, Oxford Literary Review, Comparative Education Review and others, Ghosh's last seventeen books include Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke University Press, 2016, with J Hillis Miller), Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives ed. (Columbia University Press, 2019), Plastic Tagore (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2024) and the trilogy that he is completing to establish the discipline of plastic humanities: The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, 2022), Plastic Figures (Cornell University Press, 2024, forthcoming) and Plastic Literature (forthcoming). To know now about him please see www.ranjanghosh.in
Abstract: Plastic Imagination
We imagined material realities with plastic. It changed the world, the cultural and political life of the planet. But has plastic come to imagine itself? And in imagining itself it has imagined a materialization of a different order. Questions are asked as to how its own mattering interrogates radically our philosophy of death, the principle of undeath and the death drive, art and subjectivity, agency and philosophy of emergence and recenters how we think about object and objectivity. My short presentation will, thus, open up a fresh dimension of plastic imagination contrary to how it prospered and established itself in the eighteenth century and in the later periods. It is romantic with a difference; it is presentist with a new found urgency; it is disclosive with fresh modes of subjective revealment. How does plastic imagination then connect with what I call "plastic subjectivity"?
Marina Vishmidt is a writer, theorist and educator. She is currently the professor of art theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Mousse, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). Most recently she has edited Speculation for the Documents of Contemporary Art series (Whitechapel/MIT 2023).
Abstract: Burdened Materialism: Infrastructure as Enabling Constraint
This presentation will develop the idea of infrastructure as a condition of im/possibility and a mediation between the epistemic and the empirical layers of our software-stratified reality. It will then map the connections between this speculative kind of infrastructural realism and historical materialism. An enactment of these connections will be explored in the work of Cameron Rowland, who calls upon existing juridical, cultural and financial infrastructure to realise projects that mobilise the legacy of chattel slavery to introduce friction into the valorisation pathways of contemporary art.
Reza Negarastani, philosopher and the author of Intelligence and Spirit (2018) and Abducting the Outside (2024). He is currently directing the critical philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice.
Abstract: The troubled typicality of imagination
This talk examines a problem posed by Husserl, presenting it not just as a response to Kant but as a crucial step in freeing transcendental philosophy from transcendental solipsism. The core issue revolves around imagination, specifically phantasy, which Husserl argues lacks a synthetic transcendental role in perception, challenging Kant's emphasis on schemata. In the post-Kantian context, imagination, burdened by schemata, parallels occult arts of the soul. With Husserl, the great gadfly of empiricism, Hume, the transcendental function becomes obsolete as perception independently makes its transcendental ascent. Imagination no longer serves as the missing link between understanding and intuition, and schemata are replaced by the operational notion of types. This presentation contends that phantasy without a transcendental function is the ultimate test of consciousness, making it doubly aware of itself. In the realm of AI, this presentation explores rudimentary acts of imagination within phantasy-consciousness, illuminating how consciousness, whether human or artificial, grapples with its own form when encountering the other. One can become a conscious object in the double intentional act of the other.
Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Helen is the author of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (with Nick Srnicek, Verso, 2023), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018) and Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014). Her latest book, Post-Work: What It Is, Why it Matters, and How We Get There (co-authored with Will Stronge) is due to be published by Bloomsbury this year.
Abstract: Imagining Otherwise: Alienation and the 'As If'
As the philosopher Patricia Reed notes, ‘Despite the term having been locked down in a negative register, signaling social anomie or dehumanization and positioned as something to be overcome, on a perspectival front, alienation is a necessary force of estrangement from what is’. My paper builds on this understanding of alienation to consider transversal politics as an imaginative enterprise. Our capacity for cooperation and coalition building has clear links with Reed’s notion of estrangement, given that it depends upon our ability to think beyond our specific social locations and bounded phenomenological conditions. And yet, for all the self-transcending operations of the ‘as if’, imagination is never unsituated. What is the role of the imagination in recognising and responding to difference? How can we acknowledge the situatedness of the imagination while insisting also on the possibility of collaboration and collective struggle?
S. de Jager is a A a cld -sj a. Ad -- a a, a, b/. c. More information at www.n-o.ooo. Please note: the negation is affirmed. Please note: there is humor here. If you don't laugh much, what a shame. Qué pelotuda.
Abstract: Life reveals and sustains itself through patterns. Patterns (regularities which necessarily exist before life, and which can be latched onto and/or created by it) are the very conditions of spatiotemporal experience. The search for metapatterns in these patterns, a common goal for philosophy and much of science, can be said to reveal a desire for a synthesis between biology (that which sustains cognition and philosophy) and engineering (that which sustains cognition and science). The metapattern of these research patterns, therefore, seems geared towards the construction of something capable of revealing-engendering novel life patterns. In the contemporary landscape, the formation of this stratum can only begin at the conceptual level. This much seems obvious (perhaps), but as will be seen: the argument has its intricacies (the devil is, as always, in the details: in the grains). This interactive presentation will explore the creation of concepts. Notions of difference and equivalence temper the entire sequence that will follow, and chase after the metaquestion: which came first: difference or equivalence?
Anthony Bogues is a writer, scholar and curator and the author/ editor of 10 books . He is currently working on a book titled Black Critique and co-editing some of the unpublished writings of Sylvia Wynter, as well as writing the biography of the Haitian artist , Andre Pierre. He is the Asa Messer professor of Humanities and Africana Studies and professor in the departments of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University , and a visiting professor of African and African Diaspora Thought at the Free University of Amsterdam. Bogues has curated / co- curated art shows in the Caribbean, South Africa and the USA.
Abstract Art, Technology Aesthetics and A New Sensibility
In the early 20 th century the critic Walter Benjamin wrote about how art shaped the “ human sensory capacity.” Writing in the period where there was the emergence of “ technological reproducibility“ Benjamin probed the question of the relationship between art and technology and how reproduction might be a problematic mimetic relationship. Using a recently curated show from Art Basel:“This Life: Black Life and the Time of the Now,” this talk will grapple with the ways in which a Miami museum created a virtual exhibition. The show was curated by the writer. The presentation will describe the difficulties in the creation of the show and reflect on the driving issue of the exhibition, that of publics.
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