All right, so time begins at the beginning. What the beginning is, however, is not given in time, and so in consequence we must ask what happened before there was time, which is a temporal category. So what happened before there was time is a plausible question, only if there is time already. But the alreadyness of time begs the question. In consequence of this, there is a passage from Augustine's Confessions confessions which deals precisely with the problem of what God was doing before creation. It was a heresy. The Manichaeans suggested that if God was responsible for creation, why did he leave it so late? However, this ignores the fact that there was no time until
creation had established it. So in consequence, the heresy was deemed to be a heresy concerning God's powers. This is irrelevant. What's important is not the heresy, but the fact that as soon as time is positive, it has a retrospective effect, which tends to demolish or undermine the idea that time is linear. The extension of this entails that we think of time not as a linear medium, with a passage from a past to a present to a future, or indeed the future rushing towards the present and insofar as it heads towards the past. Rather, the entire question of time is wrongly formulated. According, for example, to Schelling, time does not consist in linear passage, but in the iteration of eternity.
Well, there's history as well, and the history is here in my very presentation to you, because because the technology that I'm speaking to you through isn't fully effective. I don't have the correct application, so the image quality is partly a technical limitation, but it's also an effect of the historical distance between us. Technology is historicised, and history is organised through technology. I think this is one of the things that's central to the film. So the film presents a disruption of linear time, and also of the inexorability of time. One of the complexities that I think the film presents and maybe the whole hyperstitional axis, which became increasingly important in years between then and now, somehow it never quite encountered
was to do with the inexorability of time and how that inexorability, the ever-onward march of time, organises history, one thing after another, with cause, with effects, with repercussions, with recursions and so on, but nonetheless there is a sequence. and the organization of that sequence on the one hand happens through inexorable negation that is time of what has happened and the presentation of what happens next but also it's organized through the narrative of that sequence and the combination of the two I suppose is history so as much as the philosophical ambition was to destroy times negation to negate times negation Nonetheless, time continues and here we are ten years later.
It was a couple of years ago where I'd sort of discovered this idea of new materialism and as kind of like a way of seeing the world and I guess Armin would call this thing metanoia you know that that's one thing that I've sort of it's really kind of touched me where your kind of experience of maybe like a reading a text has a kind of it forms kind of like a break with how you see the world There's like a before and after. So that's kind of what happened to me and some artist friends. We were working together at the time and we kind of got high from these texts, you know. Together we were getting high because it was so different from what we had kind of inherited.
This inherited knowledge that was all about this power that comes top down. And anyway, it was just this huge relief for us where we could kind of see a way for us to be able to kind of navigate the world. And that's one of my kind of things that I'm struggling with, like what the stakes are and whether I'm supposed to maintain a critical distance between me and my work, between how I see the world and what I want to say to the world through my work or through my knowledge.
Yeah, I'm Roger Deuce. Okay, I'm Pete Wolfendale. I'm an independent philosopher from the northeast of England. I think that we can't start with the metaphysics of time. We have to start with the logic of time. This is to say that we need to ask the question, what does time mean, before we can ask the question, what is time? And this issue with the logic of time, or thinking about time in relation to logic, is something that has come up quite a bit in the summer school so far, particularly in the discussions and talks for Luca Fraser and James Trafford. Like I said there, it's pretty much a platitude to say that in the attempt for thinking to erect boundaries for thought,
thought itself extends beyond those boundaries by the force of thought itself. James introduced this idea that the problem with classical logic is that it's obsessed with truth preservation, which means that you can never give up any premises you start with. You always have to conserve whatever you've got. And what this means is that the actual kind of inferential movement from premises to conclusions is in a strict sense non-temporal. It doesn't go anywhere. There's no actual movement. All you're dealing with is a kind of crystalline structure of what things are consequences of what other things. So in order to kind of actually introduce logic into time, it's necessary to get rid of this idea of truth preservation.
And when you do that, logic becomes much more interesting because it becomes much more about how one reasons in the world or how one conceptually navigates the world. And that means that in order to get new information and build up a better conceptual picture of the terrain you're in, you have to be willing to make mistakes. And being willing to make mistakes means being able to recognize that they're mistakes and give up on them. So, for instance, one needs to be able to uncover contradictions in the beliefs one starts with and get rid of them. Which means getting rid of one or the other belief that's contradictory. This kind of movement means that the inferential process that takes place, the temporal rather than atemporal one, gets to somewhere other than where it starts.
This means that when it's recursively applied, it gets you very far away from where you start. The structure is essentially, it's going to give you, if you're working classically, then it gives you the classical structure, but then when you move back to another level, it's just similar to what it's more recursion actually maybe, you find that your structure is also compatible with a valuation which says that everything is true. And that's not normally the sort of thing that you want out of your logic, right? Our way of thinking about this is in terms of the sort of traditional Socratic process of dialectics, where Socrates will ask someone, what is justice? So we ask for a kind of definition of a concept, and someone will clumsily give him an initial definition.
And what Socrates will then do is draw out the sort of explicit consequences of that definition, which are then revealed to, in some sense, be contradictory, they're inconsistent, which means that the definition has to be revised. So you end up with a different concept of justice from what you started with. But that's not the end because the process can continue. The dialectical development of the concept can proceed and develop further. This idea of a sort of recursive process of thinking where you actually, you can't go back, it's sort of asymmetrical. That's the sort of fundamental logical structure of time. And it's the fundamental logical structure that's dealt with by computer science.
Computer science is just the science of recursion. Recursion structures, our thinking, recursion structures, our language. The easiest example is maybe I see you filming. I see you filming while I'm thinking. I see you filming while I'm thinking and you don't know what else I see, that I see Jean holding the microphone. Every time I include a part, like I see into a bigger part, I see that you're seeing me or I see that you're filming me and so on, I can produce an infinite amount of information. I can produce something new all the time. And that's maybe also contrary to reflexivity. With recursion or thinking about recursion, I can explain can explain how something new can come into existence or happen.
Within a reflexive model you always have like one reflection over the next, over the next, this kind of meta meta meta reflexivity, whereas recursion always means that you integrate a part into a whole, both changing the part and the whole. So some apparently tautological sentences like, and I take an example from literature, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, that's often quoted wrongly, it's four roses, and that's, I think, important. A beautiful extreme, that's how it continues. We were thinking a lot about why is it four roses, and why beautiful extreme, and why does Gertrude Stein 15 years later say this is the first time in 150 years of English literature that the rose was really red. Computer science is the general study of recursion, and the important thing is that recursion is incredibly powerful
because without it you don't get algorithms, you don't get all these interesting things you can do, but it's also dangerous because you can end up just you can end up falling back at reflexivity and bad stuff so it's it's a it's an interesting yet dangerous concept you know the space of recursion is if one sets up an opposition between two modes of recursion one would be in the field of computation as a consequence of specific operations within algorithmic structures. And on the other hand, the kind of recursion that belongs to natural languages is a kind of fundamental feature of what language is as such. For me, I think the very notion of recursion can't be opposed between these two models.
It seems to me that recursion is a way in which linguistic coding in whatever medium or whichever agent is the agent of language, be it the electric computation machine or the person, the human, it's how they encounter time. In a way, it's how the operation of coding both meets up against the inexorability of time as a negation, but also tries to compensate for it and produce memory. So I see the same, at this kind of meta level, I see the same operation happening in the two fields. Necessarily, they have different formalizations, and necessarily they have different manifestations as well, simply because one is actually computational and the coding happens in very specific ways, and natural languages happen in their own way and have the flexibility and semantic richness that natural languages do.
A representational system is engaged in constructing, you know, a tractable map of the world that it is trying to navigate. but the construction of the map is causally conditioned by patterns or features of that world. The dot coating device shows the functional role of the coated sign. The quoted sign design, red, is exhibited in a special way in a meaning statement.
And what you're doing is you're showing the role played by the quoted sign design in the familiar language, in the language that you are using. The other and almost the dominant way of thinking about this that's turned up in the summer school is that prevalent in semiotics, so particularly Peirce's idea of abduction. So Peirce tried to come up with a sort of, as opposed to an oppositional and a mereological
conception of this temporal process of thought, a modal conception in which what you're interested in is variation and invariance. Like we see a chair and we think well what does it belong to? It's a singular chair but we can like put it in a box and say it's part of the general of furniture, for example. Or the other way around, we think about something general or universal, like furniture, and then we look for a table or a chair, which are particulars that are part of it. But what Per said, if we want to understand what really something new is, or if we want to make something like a new scientific invention or so, we've got to do something else.
We need a different mode of inference, namely abduction, where we neither have the singular nor the general. So abduction is a necessity in order to invent something new. Within an abductive process, one tries to understand the move from the particular to the universal, rather than from the universal to the particular, which is classically understood as deduction, which is truth-conserving. One tries to understand this move from the particular to the universal as a move from the local to the global. And this means that actually what you start out with is not a singularity, not a pure particularity, but a sort of received universal. For me, now, this is consequent to the summer school, both notions of abduction, the computational, but also the Persian model of abduction,
are both wrong or kind of limited recognitions of the full power of deduction. Abduction is set up in opposition to deduction. Hold on, I'm going to have to stop for a minute because the garbage truck is erect. I don't know. I mean, it's also personal for me. And I would be curious to know what the stakes are for the others here, the ones who have been at this for a lot longer than I have. Hi, my name is Deneb. I'm doing a PhD at Columbia University.
And I'm very interested in the question of neutrality as a different alternative to the question of universality in a way. way and how those the way in which this dynamic of universality as a theelos of the project of the Enlightenment in a way plays out and the ways in which from different places and also different intellectual contexts of I think the 20th century in a way give a different history to that specifically looking at Brazilian literature and Brazilian anthropology and some of the debates that have emerged in the 20th century considering the tech the
question of also technical development and the way in which European Anglo American and European modernity modernization have functioned very much as the parameters and as the models for modernization and the way in which modernization has actually been kidnapped and hijacked and tweaked when it's taken to its limits, then the limits of modernization are actually, they find themselves in what is understood as being the third world, precisely because from a sort of Latin American perspective, that is where the antinomies and all of the sort of like paradoxes of modernity get played out.
So on the one hand, this desperate necessity to kind of like reach for the future and bypass this sort of like myth of a dynamic evolution that would be in a way instantiated by Hegelian dialectics, so to speak, in which for example, for Latin America to actually be modernized, it would have to follow certain dialectical steps. Well, I'm really interested in what an accelerationist feminism might look like, or an accelerationist politics of sexuality. I think that it's kind of quite widely perceived accelerationism as being quite masculinist. There's been a lot of criticism of the manifesto form as being quite thrusting, quite masculine.
and there is a widespread perception that as a sort of clustering of ideas is not very hospitable to women. That's something that I kind of have never really felt or registered myself and I'm quite interested in taking what accelerationism can give me and using it as the basis of developing a feminist politics. What that might look like or involve is still kind of being sort of formulised and being thought about. I'm looking back to a lot of techno-feminism from Shula myth Firestone onwards. A lot of really strong feminist thinkers who've been thinking about what technology, particularly automation and cybernation, in various spheres can do for us.
There's been work addressing the rise of industrial technologies and the way that cybernation and automation in the industrial sphere can lead to greater instability, higher unemployment, but may also function as a tool for the elimination of drudgery. This has been applied to the domestic sphere, to the feminist household. With Shula Myth-Firestone in particular, she's very famous for her work in terms of reimagining reproduction. So, thinking about how technology can liberate women from the tyranny of their own biology, as she controversially calls it. Yeah.
Is this good for you? Sounds good? Okay. Nick, it's running. Okay. So, I'm Nick Cernik. I'm a co-author, along with Alex Williams, of The Accelerationist Manifesto, which is really this attempt to sort of diagnose some of the problems within the contemporary left, one of the internal reasons why the left has failed over the past few decades. And in its place, the attempt to set what we call an acceleration of politics, which is really this attempt to recover the idea of the future, the idea of progress, and the idea of modernity as a grand overarching narrative, really drawing upon a lot of Marxist ideas about a post-work society, and the emancipation from work as this next grand step that humanity
could possibly take. So this involves rethinking the nature of modernity, because you can't just return to a sort of classic narrative about modernity. So rethinking this in light of post-colonial and post-structuralist critiques. And really in a sort of sense, it's this idea that sort of the future can come back and speak to us ourselves and try to voice a sort of option available to us if we mobilize a political project behind it. Okay, hi.
My name's Benedict Singleton. I'm a strategist based in London. My background is in design and philosophy, which I guess is what led me to be here in some way or another. So I've been working in design for quite a long time and I ended up basically working a lot in kind of emerging areas of design, so designing services and organisations and this kind of thing, which is how I ended up meeting all the people involved in accelerationism and, well, I suppose left accelerationism as it's now been called, So Nick Cernak and Alex Williams. So Reza Negristani. Also Reza Negristani. I actually enjoyed Reza. Reza Negristani. The constitutive gesture of how you can move back and forth
between the universal and particular accentuation, between quality and quantity, between intensity and extensities. And in fact, mathematics from this perspective its roots in how to approach, how to grasp extensities, variabilities at the bottom. You really do get the sense that there's like a some sort of slow socio-cultural shift going on, and that actually people in all these different disciplines and different backgrounds, I mean mine really couldn't be more different than like a philosopher of mathematics or something, But nonetheless, people seem to be picking up on the same things,
on the same general conditions which need to be addressed. So things like, one of the obvious examples is contingency. So in design terms, you're always working with contingency anyway because no matter how good a plan you draw up in the first place, it's always going to change when you start doing things. But this is a bigger problem in philosophy. and so on. It's like, how do you actually deal with that necessary contingency with the fact that you haven't, that you can't know everything at the beginning of the project, if you see what I mean. So it's always going to change, and the foundations that you build are always going to be impaired in some way. So you get things like that, which is thematically really common. You've got people talking about, James Trafford talking last week about kind of like being at the very
edge of thought, like what happens in, from his point of view, within the philosophy of logic, What happens when you actually kind of reach the outside and suddenly there's nowhere else to go and you reach a complete dead end? You have to, I think he used the phrase, uproot the whole structure of your thought. I mentioned in the abstract that Kant's passage on the Nihil Ulterior, which I think is something which, I don't know, I'm kind of really interested in this idea in a very heretical way, I guess, in terms of what Kant was getting at. And this is partly down to Ian Hamilton Grant's essay called Black Ice. He published in the early 90s, I think. It was one of the first things I read when I was getting interested in philosophy. And this idea of the Kantian outside.
So the idea that there is a kind of, that the transcendental structure and the outer limits of that structure can't possibly be construed in the way that a straightforward reading of Kant has them and that there's something interesting happening which is I think also why a lot of people got interested in Lovecraft and that there's like a kind of Lovecrafted you know a way of understanding Lovecraft I think is like a sort of a transcendental quake I guess like where the structure of transcendental experience is somehow like shaken and exposed for being a contingent transcendental. Okay, anyway, I want to steal this idea of the kind of horror at the outside, right?
So this kind of prophylactic recoil from the idea of being something beyond the shores of the transcendental. But then you have Deneb talking about engineers and architects going and living in the Amazon in 1905 and like desperately trying to kind of keep hold of the old world while everything around them is completely different and slowly starts operating the structures that are thought and so on. We drink beer, they drink manioc or fermented drink that has the sort of function of beer and the conceptual function of beer, except that that doesn't mean that we found like oh that's great, that we understand, now we're both drinking beer. Specifically, I'm interested in trying a way to come to grips with the research question
and with the task that Eduardo Virgil Castro's recent work poses to Western philosophy in terms of its process of decolonization. Should Western philosophy want to truly be decolonized, it would actually have to deal with its own cannibalism, so to speak, which is the act of assimilation of the other. So it's not necessarily the indigenous person that is cannibalistic, neither the jaguar that is necessarily the animal, but the cannibal emerges precisely as an act of supposing that the indigenous person is eating the other who is also human, but the indigenous person manages to abstract and intensify the alterity of the other to such a great extent that for all
purposes and matters it's not a human that is being eaten one of my big reference points is the trans feminist Beatriz Presiado and her work on testosterone so she has this she uses black market testo gel which is a synthetic androgen that's administered through the skin to kind of hack her own body and see what ingesting these substances does how it transforms her how um how she responds to it and she calls it the auto guinea pig principle so instead of thinking about how um sort of the how pharmacopornographic
biocapitalism produces things that get used in quite limited ways she's interested in thinking about okay well we have that we are within the landscape of pharmacopornographic biocapitalism it exists you know pornography and pharmacology are two of the big subject producing industries at this particular historical juncture we can't change that but we can try and find a way through we can try and find a way to resist it through seizing the tools that we've got. And this is what she does by taking testosterone in this black market fashion and seeing how it changes her body and talking and tracing out these various different histories of drugs as a way of materially altering your body, your experience of the world
and doing something quite radical from that. In space research you get this kind of actually existing accelerationism basically where people are working very hard in private sector as well as in the public sector, all different kinds of organisation to sort of examine some of the kind of fundamental things about human behaviour and how humans operate around each other and the limits of technological possibility and so on. One of the things that really intrigues me about that actually is that in a sense it's kind of like space invading the Earth and like taking over areas of it. So to give a couple of examples, when the Curiosity rover was first on Mars, Mars has a 25 hour day so the people operating it had to keep to Mars time and slowly started moving
out of sync with Earth time. So within their control room it was effectively kind of like a remote location, another site. I don't necessarily think that you have to take science fiction or speculative fiction as being the basis of a feminist project. I think it can be an interesting tool. But actually, just thinking about how the ideas of gender, technology and embodiment speak to each other, I think that can be very productive. Thinking about the way that technologies are marketed, the way that they're talked about, and the way that certain kinds of gendered expectations get embedded within those. I think that's quite an important part of the process, as well as thinking about how we can appropriate, seize, reimagine technologies and do something quite radical with them,
not assuming that the way that they've been designed necessarily determines the way that they will be used. How can we kind of conceptually grasp that sort of contingency where something that had always been going on suddenly emerges as, like, into full view, as it were, whether Whether that's in a moment a conspiracy or Virilio's concept of the accident, for instance, you know, where there's always, you know, every invention of a technology is the invention of a new accident and it's not immediately apparent what that accident will be, it's something kind of outside of the initial attempt to create a technology and that it produces some other effect that you didn't anticipate. animals are humans that lost their humanity, there is an extent in which Western philosophy has to be, you know, it has to lose its own
philosophical potential to be able to start to inaugurate itself again. I'm not sure what an accelerationist move has to be. I think I think capitalism functions by accelerating its processes and its technologies. I don't think that critique or protest can effectively resist or oppose that acceleration. So I'm interested in the political horizons of intensifying rather than resisting platforms of capitalization.
Also to then actually try to plug in the more, the sort of like, accelerated or more modern vectors that have been in a way created in the southern hemisphere and bring that to an actual discussion about the contemporary state of techno-capitalism. The Manifesto and the work that we're doing around it is very much centered and trying to instill a sort of utopian imagination as well. So sort of Mark Fisher's work on capitalist realism as the sort of closing down of social possibilities and the closing down of social imagination. The inability, the inescapability of capitalist realism, the inability to think outside of that. The sort of famous Jameson line about it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
And sort of what does this mean in terms of the loss of any sort of utopian vision for today? We have plenty of dystopian visions, but we've lost the sort of sense there could actually be a better future. So a major part of our work is to try and rethink these sorts of ideas without making it just a sort of abstract utopia, really a sort of concrete utopia that plays upon existing tendencies in the world and elaborates what a potential future could be on the basis of these tendencies. So instead trying to say that we can't turn back, this is I think maybe the fundamental gesture of accelerationism, is to say that we can't go back, we have to go forward, and
what does it mean to think about going forward if we want to develop a better future. I don't know. There are these different streams of it fractioning out. But you would expect that almost through such an intense encounter for like a couple of weeks, it turns itself into a sort of research programme. You know, there's a kind of division of labour. There's people who sang
of the waves of that history. And then the next chapter, to give away sort of the end of the book, argues for essentially a post-work society. So this idea that we can use automation, we can use machinery to eliminate as much work as possible in society. Now I should say, this doesn't mean we eliminate all work in society. Some of it will still be necessary to do. But the idea is that we can reduce the amount of work necessary and we can have a universal basic income so nobody is reliant upon work to survive. So this is sort of the part of the immediate demands that we make. What is the probability that it happens in the next minute or the next day and you give yourself the intensity of default which in the jargon is called
hazard rate. So that's the intensity of probability and if that is given it It means that the probability that that company will default in the next interval of time, delta T, is measured by that. There's the danger of pseudo-agreement, when you have a whole bunch of new thinkers all saying to each other, ah, that's really interesting. And it's easy to agree, but after a couple of weeks in the summer school, you start to get down to say, well, actually, I'm not sure we do agree about that. The core moment of the inception of the summer school can be traced back to the emergence
of speculative realism through, of course, the conference in 2007 and the consequent publication in Collapse in 08-09. Spective realism, as has been well established and in a way superseded by what's happened since, tried to displace the centrality of the human actor of cognition as the kind of condition for understanding or comprehending what the real is, the world, universe, even social conditions. Specter realism quickly split and wasn't in fact a coherent movement or even couldn't be identified in some ways between the object-oriented side, which gained enormous cultural and philosophical traction in the 15 years since, and what's now called the neorationalist side. The 2014 summer school was the crystallization of the kind of neorationalist
wing of specter realism and this wing emphasizes that the apprehension of the real is conceptually organized and here in some ways it's quite a traditional philosophy it recalls the principles and demands of the 18th century enlightenment places human cognition or human apprehension what's called sapience at the center of its endeavor and it determines that rational thought is the condition for shaping the future, not open relationality, which is constitutive of our thinghood or our animality or our affective condition. The specifics of how neo-racism was to be constructed kind of got lost. The absence of concrete outcomes of the summer school, apart from the xenofeminist
transformation of gender relations, was, I think, partly a result of this fascination with the mathematical, logicistic endeavour. Left accelerationism, as it was then called, tried to overcome the quandary by saying that the construction of the future is a leftist claim and giving content to what that rational construction would be through equality, justice, and thinking of a post-work future. Of course, we now understand post-work to be fundamental to capitalism's reorganisation over the past 15, 20 years.
I'm going to go ahead and get started. I'm going to go ahead and put it in the middle of the middle. I'm going to go ahead and put it in the middle. I'm going to go ahead and put it in the middle.
I'm going to go ahead and put it in the middle. I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more. I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more. I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more. I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more. Thank you.
The relationship between the film and the Summer School has become the primary case study for what hyperstition is. The Summer School's thematization of hyperstition, in fact, ended up with a film called Hyperstition, which was its future. The film was not in place at the time, but in a way became a retroactive reorganization of what the Summer School is, and in fact even what we now understand to be the primary image, the narrative that we have, that the summer school survives more through the film than through anything else. So hyperstition was affected. It wasn't just discussed. It wasn't just the object of discussion. It was in fact the very praxis of the summer school choir film. But this again reveals something or crystallizes something fundamental about the complexity of hyperstition,
which goes all the way back to its identification and designation by kind of Landian explorationism in the 90s and 2000s, which is hyperstition to the fundamental mechanism of contemporary capitalism, which is not a commodity form. Capitalism sells products, and to sell the products through the brand especially, it presents an image of a future, which then organizes the present and consumptive desire in order to make the brand successful and so on, and produce the very future that it has presented. So the image that the brand presents becomes the organizing force for consumption in the present and produces the future of which is the success of the brand. This is a hypothetical discourse and it's the main engine for consumptive models of capitalism or even indeed financial models of capitalism.
So first of all I'm going to reconfigure what we take this term to mean and then I'm going to discuss two facets of escaping from this condition. So one of these is navigating modernity or transmodernity, in particular examining the question of universalism. And the other is around the construction of progeny. This is a transmodernism set deployed by Colombian philosopher Fernandes Zalemel,
which without instituting the old 70s of the modernist paradigm, emphasises revision, local-global dialectics, oscillation of differentiation and integration, partial gluing of relative coherences, and relative universals, trans-modern modernism. I think that's one of those. This is an overcoming of postmodernity, I think, from what I've read, and I may be wrong, I may be reading this wrongly, that he thinks that they're both necessary moments. I say overcoming in that Hegelian dialectical sense, as a sort of sublation of postmodernity. post-modernity. But doesn't he think that they're kind of like they're two moments of a simultaneous process of the post-modern? My opinion has always been the most interesting thinker of the post-modern.
Precisely, my favourite phrase from the entire story is the post-modern is the vanguard of the modern. He sees, instead of talking about post-modernity as an end, like an epoch which is the end of modernity, he sees the post-modern as a moment of the modern. It's the moment after that is never quite properly elaborated, the moment where that disruption is then reintegrated in the synthesis of new form. And I think precisely what Zalamet is talking about with the transmodern is that synthetic moment. Zalamet's text I've read is Ariadne and Penelope. He talks mostly about this in cultural terms. He talks about how various postmodern artworks and the way in which they have fragmentation. and he links this to a cultural situation where there's, since there are no commonly existing universals,
everybody has their own goals and their own ideals and so on and so forth. And then he talks about other contemporary artworks which he hopes can, again, transversely link these and thus give a kind of universal thing to them without effacing... So, I mean, it's a whole thing we've talked about, the whole problem of having something universal without effacing multiplicities and divergences. I'm just coming out from a different self-made text. Yeah, but it's interesting that our understanding of the university is very much conditioned by a sort of older set of formalisms. Yeah. That could perhaps contemporary mathematics or 20th century mathematics is already vastly superseded and come up with a variety of much more complicated... Yeah, that's what it seems to me. I mean, I wish they'd translate some of his...
Yes. It sounds like... Hopefully, hopefully. So, when it was over, it was over and then the players are in the room. Okay, we have a question for Pingo? So we continue in this spontaneous Pingo. We finish earlier and go to Kreuzberg. For those who are interested. It makes no sense to go to Kreuzberg before 4 o'clock, because at 4 o'clock that starts the big demonstration at Hermannplatz and most people will be there. Schreitl here who works with me at the pre-university and he lives in Kreuzberg and when we met before or like in general whenever we meet he gives me the latest news of like what's happening on the street because I live in this ivory tower you know. 40 people managed to enter the roof and they
occupy the roof and there's actually one guy from Sudan who's threatening to jump from the roof when police takes action. So his case in particular is I think it's an example for how our right for asylum has been... ...ausgehibed? What do you mean to say? Undermined? Yes, how it has been undermined because he comes from the sign actually from Darfaux and They said, yes, we believe you. You're coming from there, but we don't believe your story.
The past is still present in a certain mode. It's not present in the way the present moment of instant our consciousness right now is, but its pastness is still haunting us. We're still haunted by the past. So that is maybe a more common thing to say. But I think also we're haunted in a certain way by the future. Futurity is not predetermined, but there are different possibilities or potentialities. And the potentialities exist even though exactly how they'll be realized, how they'll become not just potentialities but become actual, is not predetermined. It's not just logical possibility in the sense that you could say it's logically possible
possible that I could turn into a dragon ten minutes from now because there's no violation of logic. I can't see any process turning me into a dragon in the next ten minutes so even though it's logically possible I don't think it's possible in terms of how time actually operates but there's certain things that may happen in the in the future which are present as potentialities in our present moment. We have certain technologies and we can see how they're developing and how they could continue to develop. We have certain political systems and we can see how these systems are working, consolidating. We see what's happening with finance and how it already led to one disaster. We see political things going on here behind me which we don't know what's gonna happen.
Are the police gonna move in? We don't have the present moment. It's not a bare present. These different possibilities or different potentialities exist as part of it. So I think that's part of a present-day reality and in a certain sense what science fiction is about it's not a prediction of what, literal prediction of what will happen 50 years from now or 5,000 years from now. It's an examination of today but it's examination of certain potentials that exist in our situation. It's a fiction but it's a fiction about things which are which really exist in the present but they exist in the mode of potentiality rather than the motive what's physically actually here.
Meir Su says, the past is unpredictable. That implies that the past can be changed. Maybe he's a good example when he talks about, famously by now, about the archifossil. That means fossils that are billions of years old. They existed in a time that hasn't been present to itself,
that no one was there to witness these objects or to feel them or to taste them. them. For Meyesu that's the beginning of a philosophical adventure, a whole philosophical project to develop something like a non-correlationist philosophy. Ray Brassier thinks the way to fight against or come up with something different to this correlationism is to rather not go to the past to think about archifossils but rather have a look into the future and like his very extreme thesis is we are
already dead the Sun has exploded so from this future of all of us non-existing nothing existing anymore looking back into our present we can develop a very different way of thinking so again here we have a speculative temporality that doesn't work in a kind of linear chronological way but looks back from the future to the past which is our present. The narrativization of temporal becoming is always fictitious, is always a more or less arbitrary superimposition of narrative structure and form onto what is in fact a disordered
sequence of occurring or alternatively you can say that the challenge is always to find a way and this is like I take it that this is like what someone like Hegel is trying to do he's trying to say that the very it's the time's resistance to narrativization allows us to construct narratives in which the disruption of narrative or the you know the the interruption narrative becomes something that forces you to reconfigure your narrative resources and that that's what prevents the narrativization of time from turning into mythology some kind of mythological fantasy of history and I guess and this
I guess there's a kind of a dialectical relationship between the demands of narrative as being an attempt to make sense of what happens to us, to rest some kind of meaning or significance from contingent happenings and occurrences. on the one hand and the resistance and the way in which the world time in particular resists this you know this resist narration or there's something about it's the ways in which events unfold that's
that is always going to puncture or subvert this narrative demand. are two kind of levels of the story. One in which the protagonist Powers, who's a neurologist, who is himself gradually losing consciousness. In other words, he's sleeping for longer and longer portions of the day and his conscious experience is contracting. At the same time,
what's interesting is that this kind of personal narrative is correlated with an account, is correlated with a cosmic condition because there's an astrophysicist who's a colleague of powers who is measuring radio signals from distant stars and who claims that actually these pulsations are symptoms of the real time or cosmic time and are actually signals of the the diminution of cosmic time, that the universe itself is running out of time. So the conceit, the metaphysical conceit of the story is to establish a parallel between the experience
of the neurologist's powers and his increasing fugues, his losing consciousness, and the disintegration of space-time itself. And this is, you know, 96 trillion, 688 billion, 365 million, 498 thousand, 695, et cetera, et cetera. These figures, these are the kind of star signals which are counting down to the complete annihilation of space-time. And as the big spiners out there are breaking up and they're saying goodbye. By the time this series reaches zero, the universe will have just ended.
Thoughtful of them to let us know what the real time is. And the real time is a time whose unraveling constitutes our conscious experience of time. The time in which we measure our lives. Okay. So, science fiction enables the entire universe to be exhibited from beginning to end. This is the novel I've based a lot of what I'm saying around today. It's Stephen Baxter, British science fiction writer, who has a ridiculously vast imagination and wrote this book, The Ring. It features, amongst other things, parts of the early universe,
due presumably to overcrowding of the existent parts of it, moving out to occupy, as Paul J. Macaulay puts it in his introduction to the novel, the yactoseconds immediately following the Big Bang. This becomes a plausible address, as it were, for individuals. Of course, this happens after the fact. But the moving out of communities to occupy some part of the early cosmos It turns out to be possible just if the physics of the beings required, or the physics the beings require to survive at that yoctoseconds after the Big Bang, are conditions that are physically meetable at the present time. So in other words, once our bodies can be completely re-engineered,
we can go back and inhabit parts of the early universe. So even if there's an end to the universe, even if it's come to an end, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of us. Hooray! You can't oppose the beginning and the end because in a way they're indissociable and every, you know, and because there's no straightforward kind of, you can't measure out or apportion kind of units of time or units of becoming. So in other words, your distance from the beginning or from the end is something that is a kind of fictitious construct. You're always at the beginning and always at the end.
That's what the catastrophic spiral is. It has no beginning and no end. Any points can be kind of coordinated with any other points, but across different dimensions. What differentiates the series of eternities from the constant motion of past to future or of future to past? The directionality is irrelevant. We could conclude from all this that time is a given, that it's always there, that the idea, therefore, of an initial state or the idea of an end state is completely false. It's undermined by the entire question of time. On the other hand, there is a reasonable set of assumptions by means of which we can make time not into temporality but into geography.
Insofar as this is plausible, for example, one of its proponents, a guy called Julian Barber, who's a physicist, considers time to be one of the constituent sites of a place he calls Platonia. Plutonia, he says, has an alpha, a point from which everything gets wider, but no omega. The degree to which from the alpha to the omega therefore can be reached is a degree undermined by the augmentation of infinities one by one. I used to be a trader of options for ten years and it's true that even though time is a formal variable in the formulas and in the theory time is of course felt completely differently depending on whether there is volatility or not so in the days
where there is no volatility and nothing goes on and no action on the market floor even time was frozen and by the way inside the formulas of derivative pricing there is a complete correspondence between volatility and time. So the main variable is not time as such but is volatility multiplied by the square root of time. You can argue in a way that when there is volatility and things going on time is passing and when there is nothing going on nothing nothing takes place. So it's true that in finance you can rescale time anyway and make time actually depend on the activity of the underlying and you can even formally show that there is a transformation where the real variable is that comprehensive
variable which is volatility not time. The Greeks in response to the question what came before time answer not in terms of this or that theory but in terms of stories or myths. The function of stories or myths is to account for the space between time and times in existence. This space which they call chaos, is entirely to do with the space from which not so much narrative issues, but the space from which, once narrative has issued, theorization can work in order to purify it. The question of the purification of narrative, however, ignores the fundamentality of its state. That is to say, if narrative is the space of chaos between an initial chaos and a consequent
rationalization, then it's mythology, its narrative, its story that has the real upper hand in terms of understanding not the passage between time and its in existence, nor the passage from in existence to time, but rather precisely the number of sequences of which that passage permits, and therefore the number of spaces, jumping back to Julian Barber, occupied by time in Plutonia. There's a constraint of narrativization, a demand that we try to make sense of what has
happened to us by creating a narrative which imposes some kind of intelligible order on temporal becoming but on the other hand we know that this the attempt to superimpose narrative order onto temporal becoming often involves a a falsification because there's something about the unfolding of time, the ways in which events happen to us that, you know, resists narrativization and that subverts our narrative resources, the ways in which we try to make sense of what has happened to us. Time forces us to create
a narrative about what is happening to us while also robbing us of the resources we need to create a homogeneous or seamless narrative about what has happened to us but there's a point at which which this time's subversion of narrativization, in a way, spurs the transformation of narrativization in a way which allows the... what is un-narratable in time to speak, to find expression in a
narrative and that's the point at which narrativization ceases to falsify time by because it then the the obligation to create a narrative about what has happened to us about temporal becoming is an expression of the way in which that becoming robs us of any ready-made narrative about what has happened and forces us to find new ways of making sense. Theseus is a spacecraft sent out to the far reaches of the solar system in order to find out who or what sent the probes.
The alien lifeforms encountered by Siri and his crewmates, who they call scramblers, are quite alien indeed. Watt says in his notes and references to the novel, to the novel, I'm weary of humanoid aliens with bumpy foreheads and of giant CGI insectoids that may look alien but who act like rabid dogs in chitin suits. Instead, Watts devises aliens who remain biologically plausible. His background is a marine biologist. He quit being a working scientist to be a science fiction writer instead. He wants it to be biologically plausible, but he wants it to be as different as possible from Earth's forms of life. So we get a lot about the physiology and life cycle of the scramblers. They're large anaerobic organisms. On Earth the only anaerobic organisms are monocellular. Exploding
anemies and self-canabolizing insects are not credible political precedents. I guess What's interesting to investigate is Ballard's attitude towards modernity, technological modernity in particular, and his refusal of any kind of sentimentalised pathos of a return to human authenticity, a reassertion of human authenticity. What's also interesting about him is that he's not straightforwardly Nietzschean because of his kind of, you know, he trains a doctor, so there's this kind of empiricist ration about sensibility. He's interested in knowing and in measuring and in describing and exploring.
He's not at all interested in fusing with the ineffable or celebrating the unspeakable He wants to be able to say and describe what is happening when your ability to say and describe what is happening is under increasing pressure. I wanted to write about change, impossibility. I wanted to write about the next five minutes, not the last 30 years. And the only form of fiction, it seemed to me, that had the vocabulary of ideas to deal with the next five minutes was science fiction. Now, I wasn't interested in interplanetary travel, time travel, outer space.
That didn't interest me at all, and I've never written a science fiction set in outer space or millions of years in the future. I wanted a science fiction for the present day. I mean, it seemed to me when I started writing in the late 50s and early 60s that the future was a better key to the present than the past. If you take the most basic sentence from a novel, from fiction, like the next morning he got up or so, without immediately recognizing, but if you have a bit of a closer look, you see that there are two temporal directions. One is like the next morning that looks towards the future and the other one is the normal
narrative retrospection of he got up. What you do as a reader, you automatically process the kind of retrospection towards a kind of chronology. And only by reading, by being immersed in fiction, you produce the kind of story. As we trade, the market will always follow a different time dimension. And this expresses itself in a kind of event that happens every time we use the formula, which is instead of relying on the internal clock of the theory and on the internal clock of the stochastic process that is inside the tool and that is given to me by the theory,
I have, on the contrary, to feed into the formula the market price of the derivative itself as it takes place in reality. So the formulas are used in reverse. So it's not as if I was running a statistical arbitrage kind of algorithm where once and for all I program into my model what the model thinks that over time the stochastic behavior is going to be. No, there is a constant interaction with the marketplace itself. And it is every time that I use the formula that I'm going to calibrate it, as we say, to the prices of the derivatives that are existent in the market as of now. When I feed into the formula the price of the derivative that is given to me by the market,
I find that the parameters of our formula change from what they were supposed to be, and every time I recalibrate the model, the recalibration destroys the assumptions of the model that I was using until then. So there is then two timelines, if you will. The one that I call the internal episode of the tool, in which from the moment I'm here until the maturity of the derivative, The theory tells me that time should evolve this way and the stochastic process is going to evolve that way. And the real time in which I'm using the formula and which in a completely exogenous way that is not possible to recover by the model, in a completely exogenous way I'm going to perfectly contingently, every time I use the model, recalibrate and therefore change the assumptions
and the parameters of the model. I think it does figure to the idea that it's very difficult to turn that stuff into anything algorithmic because you're always looking for precisely what's outside of the algorithms that currently are in place. You're looking for the way in which hasn't been listed amongst the ways in. If you see what I mean, the algorithm can cover the doors and the windows and various stress points in the building and things like that. So that would immediately mean that you would have to look for something outside of that. So in a certain sense, it's not anti-algorithmic, because in a certain sense, you're extending the algorithmic process. You're educating the algorithm
over time, but then the actual moment of creativity itself, like, steps outside of that kind of logic or of possible states of worlds, which all can be listed and assigned probabilities. You know what Eli calls the blank medium of contingency. We're actively trying to precipitate that with a new plot. In my company we are not writing books on finance, we are producing a technology for pricing of derivative. So it's written in the technology itself that we are shipping it to traders. It's not theory that we are doing, it's practice. Therefore you have to take into account the meta-theoretical problem. Eight years ago I started thinking about what could be the meta probabilistic framework that could allow me, at least philosophically speaking, if not mathematically speaking,
to frame that paradox. And I found this category of contingency, especially when, for instance, I read the book of Quentin where he says that contingency is something which is bigger and more serious than probability or than the game of dice. And I was very, very sensitive, and to me I was struck by it by kind of lightning to the overturning of the ontology that at some point he suggests by saying that we should no longer think of the ontology in terms of the verb to be, which I interpret as to be in a fixed state. But we have to think of the ontology as the verb can be, meaning can be this or that or can not be at all.
So in that formula, which seems complex because it seems that it's constituted of three different clauses, can be this, can be that, or can not be at all, I interpret Meyesu by saying that we should this composite formula transform it into a single formula. It becomes just a pure element, an atom, if you will, which will then be the definition of an ontology where contingency becomes the basis and no longer the state. The answer is to overturn the problem and to say that the actual world where the market lives is actually the world where contingency has become the main ontological element. And this is a world where I no longer want to rely on states of the world with fixed probabilities,
but rely on the contingent claims, which are called contingent claims, and I think it's no accident that they are called contingent claims, which is the other name of derivatives, contingent claims that admit of prices of the market in a way that is no longer ruled by probability, but ruled by the market. So the market becomes my theory by force, in a way. If time does occupy parts of Plutonia, if there are some parts of Plutonia, in other words, but not all, that are time, then in no way is time a fundamental medium in which narrative takes place, nor in which events take place. However, if an event takes place at all, or if there is one space in Plutonia in which an event takes place at all, this means there is a difference between that event and another.
If that difference is parsed spatially as opposed to temporarily, does that make a difference to how we think about time? In other words, does the story or narrative of Plutonia alter what we think of as time? Or is it not rather the case that the distinction is sufficient? Parsing it as antecedent and consequent, for example, as Schelling does repeatedly, may be a way of thinking about how it is that something new arises in the world. But if the very category of novelty is parasitic upon the time that justifies it, then perhaps the idea of simply a difference between occurrence and something else, i.e. not a determinant negation, so to speak, of what is not temporality, but merely an indeterminate negation, the number of spaces filled by things other than time in Plutonia.
If that's the case, then what we have is a series of possibilities, a series of possible states established in Plutonia, therefore as actual to the extent that they are Plutonia, and if that's the case then we do not any longer have to think about some fundamental medium in which anything takes place. All that the law of the world so to speak is responsive to is the determinate fact of a plurality of possibilities some of which exclude others when they occur others of which do not but the totality of which includes both their inclusion and exclusion. Thus it is from Plutonia we derive worlds. However, this is a narrative. The dialectical point would be to make the interruption of narrative,
which reconfigures the resources of narrative, into something that actually spurs narrative, makes you construct, makes you struggle with the resources of narrativization in such a way that you can gradually say something true or say or kind of say something that is, that doesn't falsify the catastrophic or the powerfully disruptive unfolding of time or of becoming.
What was interesting about speculative realism, that conference which was held in 2007, was here you had four people, each of whom had a philosophy. Certainly were well versed in the history of philosophy and were picking up certain lines of thought from philosophers who had gone before them, but who seemed to actually have an original philosophical position and a programme of research that they themselves had set out and were pursuing. I think philosophy deals with questions which are of concern to everybody as a thinking being,
as someone who's trying to make their way in the world, to try to orient themselves within the world and to try and understand what they are and what they should be doing. In a way, Collapse was also a venue for people like that to publish their work. And these were people who I felt were actually doing philosophy. and that might seem strange but really philosophy is a discipline certainly at the time frowned upon anyone who was actually doing philosophy, anyone who was actually putting forward an original idea, working through it and exploring it. So there's not really a space where philosophy can be done and where it can be let's say received by those who are interested but who aren't trained. Nick was the kind of person who would say something like,
philosophy is just like having a wound and scratching it with a stick. So that kind of thing appealed to me. But also what was exciting is that he was interested precisely in connecting philosophy to culture, to music, to economics, to technology. There is a very similar pattern that you find in the structure of societies, societies, in the structure of companies, and in the structure of computers. And all three are moving in the same direction. That is, away from a top-down structure of a central command system, giving the system instructions about how to behave, towards a system that is parallel, that is flat,
which is a web, and which change moves from the bottom up. And this is going to happen across all institutions and technical devices. It's the way they work. The practice of somehow not just commenting, but of producing philosophical machines that would create around them a kind of microculture. Nick's primary influence was Deleuze and Guattari in the theory of capitalism as schizophrenia, which sees capitalism as a kind of engine for abstracting, for sloughing off every kind of human heredity and tradition and for dismantling the social and opening out the libidinal flows of the human onto a kind of unknown future.
And according to Nick, capitalism is the mechanism through which this happens. And so the concept of accelerationism is, if anything, in order to emancipate ourselves from the prison cell, which is the human, the only thing that we can possibly do is to try to accelerate these processes of abstraction, of deracination, of disorientation. So interestingly then, where he finds these signals from the future are in the music of the time like Dark Side and Jungle which were like the tail end of the rave phenomena where rave music began to become very dark and began to find this synergy with the dark science fiction at the time like Terminator.
predator and horror and the kind of invasion of the home by video and by electronics and the kind of first inklings of the internet. There's a certain sense in which we draw more upon Deleuzean and Marxist ideas of accelerationism. This real sense that for Deleuze and Guiterie that capitalism was a de-territorializing force, like Marx argued that relative to feudalism, capitalism was a sort of liberating social system. The problem is that the moment that it de-territorializes these sort of traditional social structures, it also re-territorializes in terms of the wage relationship and the profit imperative. And because of these two things, we've now become constrained again. And so the idea is to think of post-capitalist future that would unbind those re-territorializations
and really think about what a sort of post-work, post-capitalist future might look like. So I'd say it's more Deleuzian and Marxian than it is, say, Landian idea of accelerationism. There's a certain amount of rejection. There's a certain amount that's happened in the interim that's shown us that Nick's kind of picture of capitalism as being this kind of diabolical engine for accelerating the end of humanity simply hasn't come to pass. Instead, what we've got is an incredibly complex mediated world in which we're still really, really boring humans and the technology that exists is there to help us be really boring humans. I was very illiterate in contemporary art, I didn't know anything about it, but then surprisingly it seemed that was the sphere in which collapse was most enthusiastically
adopted. In the absence of this public forum where philosophy and philosophical ideas would be explored, contemporary art was actually taking over, that contemporary art increasingly was becoming the place where philosophical reflection happens. It's very difficult to get the public to come to a philosophy lecture, but for some reason it seems compelling, as a kind of cultural validity, for people to come to a contemporary art exhibition and expect to be provoked into thought. The work I do typically isn't theoretically led, But I think theory helps me kind of understand what the work does or what I'm doing.
and I think that the more I sort of develop the relationship between practice and theory of what I'm doing, the more these things become entangled. So actually now I'm not, I don't even really have a clear idea of the causal relationship between theory and practice and whether it would make any sense to try and disentangle a causal relationship. Yeah, I mean, it makes me realise more and more that art is kind of just skimming off the top, you know, and the art skims off the top of a lot of these discourses and including
myself. There's a very interesting dynamic that goes on where it's what I call an interrupted relay. So it becomes a collaboration, but the collaboration is never simultaneous. What happens is an artist will take ideas and will make something that you don't recognise, but that somehow gives you something more to think about. So there's an exchange there which can be very very positive but at the same time there's the whole politics of the art of the contemporary art market and of the the kind of appropriations of theory which are not always entirely a matter of engaging with ideas but sometimes more a matter of providing a kind of intellectual jewelry for me
Robin McKay's the most important philosopher maybe at least of the 21st century. The reason I'm saying that is not just because he wrote this or that or had this or that idea but because of the things he invented and the ways of the practices of how to do philosophy in a different way. What he would call like hypostitians, invention of concepts, invention of people, invention of like whole philosophical movements like speculative realism or things we did to get on accelerationism or even like persons like Reza of Nagastani is an invention is he is it himself is it someone else
And in the introduction we compare it with what Deleuze calls his line of volcanic thinkers. There are just these eruptions here and there, and you can't really see what's chaining them together. And that's what accelerationism seems to be like, that there are these eruptions at certain points in history. And it seems to be these points where capitalism is both ascendant, it's making new conquests, but at the same time there's this sense of impending crisis. crisis. So the book is really, in a sense, it's a fiction. I mean, it's a creation of an ism, which in no sense could it be said to be there. In no sense do all of these writers subscribe to the same tenets or the same principles.
So I'll start off in the sixth chapter here. Let's start off with this idea of plans versus platforms. So what are we aiming at and what do we want? In answering these questions, we must be careful to avoid two problems. We must avoid both the belief that a fully comprehensive blueprint can be set out in advance, and the opposing belief that a new social order will just emerge spontaneously. It's not actually clear yet who, not only who is doing the research,
but what it is that the researcher or the contemporary thinker has to do, how to respond to that. So, weirdly, we are behind. We are almost, there's something accelerating, but it might not necessarily be us. So what I see, one of the tensions that emerges then is a sort of like, try to make up for the delay, as ultimately a deeply humanist gesture of trying to make human acceleration again be a sort of historical, but maybe also hysterical pilos of modern thought.
Who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who means who And not to be blind in practice, you need theory. I often use this example of charity today. That's for me practice as it was, you know, like, my God, what do you bullshit here about Lacan, Hegel,
all these distinctions when children are starving in Somalia and so on and so on. Why is this ideology at its purest? because the message between the lines is do something, don't think too much. So for me, the first step towards authentic practice is theory. We can see how capitalism in its dominant forms, in its exploitative forms, at once took the criticisms of post-capitalism seriously, but also was able to accommodate them within itself. And what we have now is both a kind of post-capitalist capitalism. We can see a kind of fusion between the post-capitalist moment with capitalist forms.
Even post-capitalism couldn't defeat capitalism, couldn't take it over, but became a reshaping, a re-vectoring of how capitalism does organize itself in the present. The synthesis is the political terrain that we're now in. And one of the great difficulties that we face is that if we still think an image of the future as a condition for changing the present and reorganizing the past, well, this is something that capitalism does anyway, does itself. And in a way, yeah, just like that, this is what capitalism does itself. Actually, I'm very skeptical about the claim that the horizon of political possibility has been opened up.
I think that's wishful thinking. I see no evidence that capitalism is on the retreat. On the contrary, it's in full force, despite all these crises that have happened. The rich don't look worried to me. They would be if there were riches, if some kind of radical revolutionary transformation was on the horizon. And what is profoundly depressing is that these mass, you know, there's a lot of collective mobilisation, and, you know, especially in the Arab world, and it led to kind of abject failure. You have to change the way you think about historical possibility, I think. There's a model of collective agency which it seems to me is ineffectual, and which is precisely preventing the possibility of a radical structural transformation.
If one believes in the necessity of revolutionary transformation, which I do, then I just don't see that the rhetoric of collective mobilization seems to me as simply inadequate to the task. You have to identify the structures and the mechanisms that perpetuate the status quo, and they are not going to be shifted by people chanting and marching. That's not going to happen. And I see no reason for optimism. Things are going to get worse. Much, much worse. And in that sense, power will become even more relevant. It's not worse things yet. So this is the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where the summer school took place.
It seems appropriate that the Aiskewe is under construction because the film had to be reconstituted from many different sources spread across the internet. The success of Accelerations and the success of Xenofeminism, the success of the film itself spoke to how so many different areas were ready, ready to change, away from the kind narcissism and the sort of victimhood of the politics and the social field in the early 20th century into the new forms which is so dynamic now which help us build a route to the 22nd century in surprise the film produced a kind of recursive effect on the summer school and its narrative form was itself recursive, it was a completely non-philosophical film.
So, the failure of the film was the claim or the promise to present philosophy in some sense, in a really violently non-philosophical way, in a conceptually destructive form. In a way, the philosophical failure of the film was exemplified by the leaking of the film of the film into elements which had nothing to do with the summer school whatsoever. The historical contingencies of what was going on, kind of factionalism around the summer school, within the summer school. So, but that philosophical failure is partly the historical truth of the summer school. The philosophical failure of the film, which is also its violence against constructing a coherent narrative of what happened.
But here we set up a kind of very old and quite banal dichotomy between philosophy on the one hand, a conceptualization, and the events of history on the other hand. And so I think the challenge really would be whether we can understand the philosophical failure as a theoretical success to speak about a theory of history, which is not philosophical but nonetheless a good theory, because it accommodates the incoherences and in a way incapacities of conceptual construction to speak to the construction of concepts in non-philosophical ways.