The final project will consist in a presentation, functioning at once as a speculative proposal for a future art project while being grounded in at least two of the assigned readings (and attendant associations which these will inevitably entail). The presentation of the speculative proposal (last class, online) should be inventive in terms of media and mode of delivery/address, in ways that reflect the material at hand.
This presentation will assume a second form in a written document (MA/MFA: 3000 words, PhD: 5000 words).
Importantly, the speculative project should be connected to an aspect of your work that the readings help articulate and open up. You can think of it as a line cast into the future using the readings as jumping off points. The proposal should feel uncomfortable, like trying to inhabit a world that you cannot yet know fully. The goal is to not try and be comprehensive about this new pathway, but to imagine its long-term potential implications for your work (and indeed the effect of the act of speculation on the present as well!).
The form of both the presentation and the written document should be engaged with experimentally. I’m looking for ways of doing theory that depart from normative contexts, and will be actively encouraging the searching out of forms and writing modes that most poignantly convey the trajectories of interest.
TROPES
THE POINT IS TO CATALYZE YOUR ACTUAL PRACTICE: the speculative project should be connected to an aspect of your work which the readings help articulate / open up
START FROM THE READINGS: read them closely, so that they permeate the background of what you will be talking about. The readings might already have gaps/frustrations/incompletions that might be the starting points.
WRITTEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE FUTURE: the development you discuss has already happened. This immediately opens up other registers given that factuality is described differently, has definable contours, rather than something only dimly glimpsed. (Like a SIGIL.)
WRITTEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A FEELING – ABDUCTION (PEIRCE), rather than induction or deduction – you have nothing but your INTUITION: look for the faint signals which need amplification, the invisible elements in your practice (Heraclitus)
THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT LIES IN WHAT IS PRESENTLY BEING DISCARDED (for whatever reason) AS UNIMPORTANT OR IRRELEVANT: remember Tony Conrad’s Law: every work harbors excesses, more than a particular historical period can decipher, digest
INVENTION OF A NEW CATEGORY OF OBJECT (OR PROCESS, OR METHODOLOGY) necessitated by certain futural developments
OR… A NEW WAY OF WRITING THEORY because of future developments (see below)
INVENTING AN ANCESTOR TO MAKE SENSE OF A FUTURAL DEVELOPMENT (working on the past in order to induce another future – remember Keeling and the four films that conceptualized different relations between past – present – future)
PUSHING AGAINST ACADEMIC WRITING (AS THEME ALSO): you’re all writers working in a space that can be engaged creatively, and want to push against some of the strictures of academic writing. Listening to your own frustrations on what desires, curiosities get put aside in the name of respecting a “train of thought” (which is of course highly formalized). I’m certain you’ve all felt dissatisfied with the way you’ve been asked to articulate an idea in the past. (WRITING TO INFECT THE READER WITH THE POTENTIAL OF YOUR IDEA)
How you want theory and fiction and narrative to blur in your account.
The tone here is much more one of seduction than defense. Thinking of the mode of address is important.
RESOLUTION IS IMPOSSIBLE AND UNNECESSARY: you’re sketching something out without being able to appropriately conclude, as is custom with standard research papers. THEREIN LIES THE DISCOMFORT.
WAYS OF WRITING THEORY
STYLISTIC INTENSITY: Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than The Sun is a dense explosion of vectors relating a technocultural history of Black music. You may find the writing at times over-heated, but the style definitely conveys the kind of affect at play here, one concerned with various “outsides,” alien and technological, that harbor emancipatory horizons for Black people. Here the language is doing a lot of work.
Nighttime crooning: Most artistes begin their career by crooning at a local nightclub. prices levitra I was so absorbed in the photo opportunities that I forget all my fears about being immersed buy pill viagra in the Florida Everglades. Ginseng see to find out more now online cialis being a natural herbal product has no side-effects at all and also promises to treat all type of health problems in a much effective and efficient manner. A strong interconnection has been observed by doctor’s scientists together between type 2 diabetes and ED. sildenafil soft browse for more info now
THEORY AS RITUAL/POETICS: Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ trilogy of works centered around a single Black feminist writer (Spillers, Alexander, Wynter) invokes a rich poetics through which to enact a theory in motion. Dub (part 3) is around Sylvia Wynter – as M. NourbeSe Philip puts it, Dub is “Part prayer, oration, exhortation, commentary and story, Dub amplifies ancestral voices to become mythopoesis in the making.” As for her M Archive (around Jacqui Alexander), which is particularly relevant to our Speculative Proposal’s gambit as a line cast into the future, it is “told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human.”
INVENTING ANCESTORS, CONTEXT: Robert Morris’ Three Extravisual Artists describes in detail the fictional, but extremely compelling work, by three invented artists. This was written at a time when categories of art-making were exploding and incorporating more of “the world” than before, but these are still super strange. See also Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman.
NON-HUMAN PERSPECTIVE: Patrick Anderson’s Autobiography of a Disease is an attempt to write from the perspective of a bacterial cluster, at the core of a serious illness which almost killed the author. As the blurb mentions, “This orientation is intended to represent the distribution of perspectives on illness, disability, and pain across subjective centers-from patient to monitoring machine, from body to cell, from caregiver to cared-for-and thus makes sense of illness only in a social context.” As such this is a prime work of auto-ethnography, auto-theory, albeit a particularly radical one from a nonhuman perspective.
AUTO-THEORY: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a prime example, blending philosophical and theoretical perspectives with first-person autobiographical experience. Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias also flips on a dime from the intensely personal to more abstract determinations from other fields. It underlines the fact that disability scholars and thinkers have made significant inroads into auto-theory: see also Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points, Annie Ernaux’s The Years, and Merri Lisa Johnson’s Girl in Need of a Tourniquet…)
THEORY-FICTION/REVISIONISM: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (Complicity with Anonymous Materials) is at once a dark narrative centred on Iran concerned with the obsession with oil and a grimoire of philosophical perspectives (Deleuze/Guattari, Bataille etc.) cast in an obsidian pallor. It’s impossible to describe. One of its charms is the slipperiness of the historical references and their attendant implications – one never is quite sure if these perspectives are to be trusted, and yet, they do their work on the reader. Note that Negarestani was a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), in the 1990s. The group (including Nick Land, who has since committed fully to the right-wing) pioneered theory-fictional approaches such as the Lemurian Time War, also included in the folder. That story takes a revisionist approach, using William S. Burroughs as a time-travelling figure perverting certain historical verities….
INFECTION: I would be remiss to not mention The Occulture’s Ludic Dreaming, of which yours truly wrote two chapters (I won’t say which). The gambit was to loosen causal logics by writing each chapter as if taking place in/alongside a dream. References are at times embedded (without quotations or citations) so as to make the writing style strange. We thought that standard academic references did violence to the reading process, interrupting it, instead of keeping it attuned to a story, which has incantatory powers. We very much appreciated the way weird fiction (eg. Ligotti, Miéville) draws you in, infects you, and thought that theory could be delivered in the same modality. (We even developed a concept called “hexegesis” to replace “exegesis” with the occult connotations in full effect.)
I should also mention Steven Shaviro’s Discognition, a chapter of which we’ll be reading late in the course. It’s important because the theorizing that Shaviro is doing is based on works of speculative fiction (which it should be said are written by authors well familiar with scientific approaches), which is a reversal worth noting.
FORMALISMS
THE IN-CLASS PRESENTATION ACROSS MULTIPLE MODALITIES (which can be used and refigured) IS LIKE A TESTING PROCESS, SEEING WHAT STICKS. USING MEDIA AS SUPPORT, INTEGRAL PLAYERS IN THE FICTION YOU’RE WEAVING.
Duration: 20 minutes total
THE PAPER BECOMES A REWRITING, DISTILLING OF THIS, EXPANDING, INCORPORATING CLASS COMMENTARY – the mode of languaging is crucial
PhD—5000 words (double-spaced)
MA/MFA—3500 words (double-spaced)
THE PRESENTATION AND PAPER ARE TWO CUTS INTO THE SAME PHENOMENA (KAREN BARAD’S IDEA) – which means that the MODALITIES OF BOTH have to be engaged equally creatively (not just the presentation).
consultation
As soon as you have a grasp on a potential area of investigation, I’ll be happy to help orient you with other references and chat about possibles. Email turnaround is generally fast, face-to-face meetings tend to be really useful.
statement written after last year’s symposium
The glorious messiness of still uncoordinated, half-baked insights, shards of past practices seeping into uncomfortably adumbrated textures of unknowing; leaps of faith which cannot yet (and may never) find confirmation; hesitations, slippages, feints, digressions; none of this should be valenced in a manner which points to an absence of rigour. I realize that such a statement flies in the face of any neoliberalized institution, in which consolidation of a point-of-view, a style, a theorized totality, are to be valued for their capacities to function as shorthand calling cards in an oversaturated art market. Instead, to admit stupidity, unknowing, while seeking to overturn, challenge received orthodoxies at every turn is to admit the ultimately convulsive nature of thought, and the delusional nature of one’s attempt to arrest its divagatory, bifurcational movements.
I know that the challenges of being suddenly immersed in a world that was for some of you perfectly foreign were gigantic, and might at times have seemed utterly insurmountable. I appreciated the difficulties you all faced in coming to grips with the very idea of speculation, one rather out of fashion within the cybernetic world of negative feedback which captures any noise and refigures it to more elegantly capture. If I insisted on understanding the modalities of cybernetics, it was in order to specifically draw your collective attention to not only its insidiousness (and immanence qua invisibility), but also to means of potentially refiguring it, insinuating into it, withdrawing altogether from it. This is by no means an easy task, given the manner in which capitalism incorporates prodigious, unimaginable quantities of negativity in order to paradoxically continue its accumulation.
Being on the cusp of a barely adumbrated but intuitively promising world affords significant discomfort. Indeed, a feeling of cognitive and somatic strain permeated the room as the symposium wound down. One of the morning’s auditors noted the wondrousness of being in the presence of unconsolidated, in-process, future-tending speculation, which given the shock to thought this course induced, were welcome harbingers. The presence of airtight, hermetically controlled perspectives could only have signified failure in this context, a too-rapid reincorporation within the homeostatic folds permanently tasked with neutralizing challenge, domesticating discrepancy. My own post-symposium disposition was suffused with the kind of elation which autonomically arises when natural propensities to classify and dismiss as conform no longer function. Accordingly, I thank all of you for taking up the multiple challenges I set up, and for not jumping to essentialized conclusions too quickly, for daring to remain vulnerable and unknowing while bending the circuits of your own histories, practices, allegiances, fears into generously energetic relays in preemptive dialogue with an as-yet-unmapped futurity.
I’m expecting to have conversations with each and every one of you throughout the Winter term, to continue what we have begun together, to witness the flashes of insight which have been made possible by our concerted effort to grapple with our place in the world as artists, activists, sense-derangers, mètic thinkers.