#Accelerate; The Accelerationist Reader II (Session 1)

Okay, I think we're live. Hello everyone. Welcome to the first session of the new Center for Research and Practices second module of the Accelerate, the Accelerations Reader Seminar. Before we begin, I'd like to thank you all for being here with us, all the enrolled and auditing students as well as members of the News Center, whether they're here or they're watching this live on YouTube. A few organizational notes is that we had scheduled this class to happen once every week.

But then because of other planning and schedule conflicts, particularly with our guests, we had to change dates and do it like we did with the first module and do it compressed in two weeks, Sundays and Wednesdays and then another Sunday and Wednesday, right? So for the class to go smooth, it's very crucial that you guys all subscribe to the classroom as soon as possible. Jason I think has sent the invite for everyone to join the classroom. The ongoing discussion and assignments and all the readings and stuff are all on the Google Classroom where you have to subscribe and put the code in order for you to attend.

And the classroom is basically open for all enrolled students, audit students, as well as members who have requested to audit the class. If you haven't received that email, please send us a note on Facebook or here and Jason can share with you the code so you can get into the classroom. Now the reading material also is all there and like the first module what we are going to do is trying to ask people to commit to one reading to present from Wednesday on. So Wednesday and then next Sunday and next Wednesday it will be great to have you guys all present one of the texts. Now we have to go through and divide that up and decide

who is going to present what but I am hoping that by now a lot of you have received the actual reader and you are not really depending on the material. If you have, all we need to do is make sure that two people sign up for Wednesday and then by then everyone's in the classroom and can go look at the material and decide what they want to present. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a questionnaire and then email it to you and then you can respond and telling me and Jason, letting us know which text you're going to, which text you've picked to present and what day. And I'm going to make it easy by making the choices very clear and obvious. But it would be great if by the end of today we have people, presenters decided with the

text decided by 4 to Wednesday. Also about the assignments, what me and Jason thought of doing and this is going to be an exciting thing that we're going to do is we decided to rather than asking you guys to write four assignments like the first class, we're going to still ask you to write four pieces but each person in a class which is an enrolled student or is a decide to commit like an auditor with commitment to the assignments to pick up four terms so we're going to create an acceleration as glossary. And that sort of like doesn't exist right now. Nobody has done that. And we would like to, and then me and Jason will write a sort of like a nice long introduction

out of the discussions in the class. And then we will have that published as a first sort of like first of its kind for this discourse which is the Acceleration Discourse. Now we have selected a bunch of terms which we think you can pick from. That's just like to get the conversation going. But as we go through the material, terms that comes up, if somebody thinks that it's something they're interested in, we can add those terms and they can pick those terms up and they become their sort of like responsibility or assignment to write about that. So basically you're responsible for four words. Each enrolled student and each auditor who would commit to partake in this research project

will pick four words and we also accept to accept it. Am I echoing? I am right? I shouldn't really echo. Okay let me just see. It's Brittany. I'm going to put Brittany on mute and hopefully that would deal with it. How does that sound now? Good? Okay I think it was Brittany. Charlie is that okay? It must be your connection Charlie because it seems like everybody else is fine.

Sorry about that. I have a very strong connection here so I don't think it's my connection and other people People are typing and it's fine for them. So if I can just wrap up what I was saying. Yeah, so basically that's what we thought would be the best way to approach the assignment for this module of the accelerator. So now let's just like quickly introduce yourself. I'm going to ask and unmute so people will get to know who you are and what you're doing. I'm going to start with whoever's on my monitor with Tristan. Tristan, do you want to unmute yourself and just... Sure.

I'm Tristan. I work in a bakery. I was doing a PhD in philosophy. I'm currently applying to do a degree in adult education. Hello. I'm very involved in co-op. Is this not working? I unmuted myself. Can you hear me? Everything seems to have frozen up. Hello? Hello? Okay. Let's see. Petra's here. Can you hear me? Okay, so I think Jason's trying to show the syllabus.

Tristan, is your audio working? Can you hear me, Mo? I can hear you. Can you hear me? It will be good if... Tell me, what are you trying to do? Because we don't hear you. Okay, maybe I was trying to ask Tristan to introduce himself so we can go over the introduction and I can start my presentation.

But I guess we're waiting for you to do something, right? Do you want me to present myself? Go ahead, Tristan. Okay. My name is Tristan. I work in a bakery. I used to be doing my degree at Velocity at York. I'm now applying to do a degree in L Education. I'm very involved in cooperatives and organizing and involved in some new center stuff and I'm very excited about this course. Jason. Yes, can you hear me? Yeah, you know, I think the best you, because you know what I mean, this is totally like

interrupting the class. How do you want to proceed with this? Because the technical problems on your end are like not letting us like go forward. You need to just like mute yourself and mute the camera, mute yourself. And I guess until we figure out how you can handle the classroom on your end, you should just watch this like silently without participation. What do you think? Hello? You are on speakerphone.

Yeah, you put me on speakerphone. so what do you want me to do okay here we go it's near the microphone So I'm hoping this will reduce echo. It does seem to still have a... I mean... Okay, so can you hear me now?

Yes, I can hear you. Okay, so I just found a way to do this that does not produce an echo on our end, and I don't think it produces an echo on your end either. doesn't produce echo on my end but I'm only hearing you from the phone not from my speakers on my computer I don't hear anything from the computer speakers okay can other people hear us? I have no idea they should be able to as long as you have the as long as you have the audio yes Igor said he can hear you but what I wanted to make But how could Tristan, why Tristan wasn't able to speak? Why is Tristan's audio not working?

Let me see here. It appears to be muted on his end in a way that I cannot change. He should be unmuted now. Do you want to try now, Tristan? Sure. Whenever I tried to speak, the system just seemed to freeze up. OK, you're not freezing up now. Do you want to? You're presenting. Go ahead, Tristan. I'm sorry, what am I presenting? No, just yourself. OK, I'm Tristan. I've been involved in philosophy for a long time. I work in a bakery. I don't know what it is that you want.

Patrick, go ahead. I thought maybe it's a good idea to just at least once people introduce themselves so and then we don't have to do this again. But that was the purpose of me asking you to speak, Tristan. So Petra, if you can hear me, you can go ahead and introduce yourself.

Maybe she can't hear you. OK, Laura, go ahead. You next. unmute yourself there we go today we got a lot of problems that's okay maybe we could just skip this let's just start I'm like I'm like ready to like I'm ready to give up and I have like lots of I want to go through. So maybe we should just skip this and we just march into the material. Laura, Laura, hold on a minute. Go ahead and try Laura. Can you turn it? Yeah? Hello, hello? Can you hear me now?

Um, just a minute. Let me see here. Okay. Well, my name is Laura. Laura is going through for other people. Okay, go ahead Laura then. I'm not hearing it. Okay. Hello everyone, my name is Laura. I'm from Italy and I'm now writing my PhD in Sydney. And I was part of the first, I participated in the first Accelerate seminars and they were great. So I'm here again. That's it, I think. Okay, you know what, this is, maybe we should just like, but just that this is gonna crop causes a problem because there's a lot of interaction that's gonna happen in a class so i don't know how to proceed

uh... picture you know or i think the problem is called by the fact that you are logging in with that large project and speakers account and something happens or uh... no Definitely not. Okay, so we've got, okay, you know what, I think we should just, I'm just going to start what I was planning to do and then hopefully we're able to get some interaction going on. Everybody can hear me, right? What if we try, let's try at least one or two hundred people and see if I can come to get for down. Okay, that's okay, you know, let's just start, it doesn't matter, let's just stop

the testing and let's just start. We have a lot of ground to cover and I just feel like we're going to run out of time if you don't start. That's fine. Not bad. Okay, so... So, if you want to, I do have the syllabus here.

we could go through it and I can present the syllabus visually and then we could go through the various parts of the syllabus. Okay, why don't you do that and then gather my thoughts. That's a good idea. Thank you very much. Okay. Yes. All right, so I'm going to post it and Bo's going to talk about some other things in just a minute. So I'll just start by going through the syllabus a little bit here and I'm going to present this now and you should be seeing it on the main screen. there usually just takes a second for it to come through

you you Thank you.

the best of the job and we're just sitting here silently looking at that at the purple logo so I don't know all this problems are happening tonight I've never I've never encountered this many complex problems in the same hangout session I I my mind just wants to blame everything on the fact that like we have this new setting which is like you actually have an actual classroom but I know that's irrational so let's just like I promise you that's not it but yeah I understand so if you guys subscribe to the classroom

if you subscribe to the classroom you will see the syllabus in the about section of the class so you can access it there but basically today we are going to basically deal with three texts I would like to first present Benedict Singleton's text on maximum jailbreak and then related to Reza Negarestani's Labor of Inhuman, and then Jason will present in Grant Hamilton's text. And that will be our material for today. But as I said, it will be great if we can

get you guys to commit to, or not all of you, but some of you, to commit to presentations for Wednesday based on what's on the syllabus for Wednesday. But we get to that later. We don't have to worry about that right now. Now, I would like to begin my presentation with a little bit of notes on the core concept of accelerations. I'm going to read you two quotes from the manifesto that to me kind of like wraps up quite nicely what are at the stake and what is going on here.

Today's politics is beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes of organization necessary to transform our societies to confront and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and spread, force and speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed toward common ends.

The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch toward post-capitalism. Now, what's interesting about the quote, particularly the second part, is the fact that it contradicts the notion of Marxian notion of contradictions of capitalism. because as we might remember, for Marx, end of capitalism can be accelerated if the contradictions of capitalism increases.

So here what we see is a shift away from the acceleration of contradictions of capitalism to another form of acceleration, which is acceleration of... Jason wants to call it acceleration of the processes, right? But we can also think of it as the way I look at it, because my research has to do with networks and computers, is almost like acceleration in rewiring the bits and parts that make up of capitalism. Because to me, the problem mostly is how what we want to call neoliberalism has inserted itself as the binding tissue between a lot of still usable bits and parts of larger technology of social.

and if we can somehow rewire these bits and parts in a different network configuration, to me that represents part of what accelerationism means. So if capitalism has always been networked and receives its strength from inserting itself as the binding tissue between the constitutive parts of the network, then it should be possible for post-capitalism to rewire useful parts of the capitalist network, salvaging them for other purposes. Now, this project for me is like a form of platform building.

And the idea of platform building is part and parcel of Benedict Singleton's text. In the maximum jailbreak text, particularly in the second part, I mean the text itself is kind of like divided into three parts. He first talks about a historical figure from Russia, and then he moves on into two distinct ideas of this figure Fedorov, and then he gets into his own ideas of design, trap, and escape. But further on, and unfortunately this piece is not written, and Benedict presented it

at the incredible machines conference in Vancouver he more precisely speak about platform building well but I would leave that until the issue of platform comes up in in the text so I'm just going to go to the beginning of a text how many of you have the have the book and can follow if I quote and stuff. Okay that's lovely. So let's go to the maximum jailbreak.

What did you say? A good number of us in the room in Grand Rapids do have access to it. So probably about four or five of us. That's good. What is interesting in Singleton's text is the insistence on ambition. And this ambition is really a qualitative thing that's been missing from the leftist project basically. And if you, I can't really give you page number because my copy is electronic and I'm reading off of, but right away he's talking about the common element and point of transit

And between them, today is going to be just terrible. Everything is not working. Just give me one sec. And the reason why he talks about Fedorov, of course Fedorov is affiliated with having very strong Christian beliefs and he talks about him quoting Bible and using Bible to

justify a lot of his ideas, but really what he admires most in Fedorov is the fact that he was ambitious. And this ambition applies to two categories. One, Fedorov's desire to end death, and the other one was Fedorov's desire to leave Earth, or actually to turn the whole planet Earth into a spaceship traveling into the universe, not be bound by its planetary status as a satellite of the Sun so basically singleton follows these two different strands of strands of thought in federal

as decanting into two two two slogans storming the heaven and conquering death But then he explains the death part first and the way the death part is explained is actually relates to the second one because how Fedorov wanted to end death was basically not only end death for the person that was living but also sort of ending death by calling those who died back to life or by creating a biological system in which you will continue living through your biological replication. From there Singleton moves on into the second.

I just want to read you some of the quotes I have. Life seems a sort of an accident, an oversight or indulgence on the part of death, reconfiguring the environment so as to carve out a larger and more hospitable space for life. Nature appears as a force of necessity, and it is against the acceptance as necessity of that which could be made otherwise that Fedorov directs us. Now, we read Fedorov earlier on from the book that Singleton is quoting in the last module of The Accelerator. He speculated that someday, by erecting giant cones on the Earth's surface, people might

be able to control the Earth's electromagnetic field in such a way as to turn the whole planet into a spaceship under human control. We would no longer have to slavishly orbit our sun, but could freely steer our planet wherever we wish, as in the phrase he used as early as 1870s, Captain and crew of Space Ship Earth. So basically, what we're dealing with here is gravity and death as two traps that have entrapped humans. The way things happen to be, but how things...

Okay, so the shift here that relates to the ambition has to do with being able to move from how things have to be to the way things happen to be, but they can be changed. So, it kind of reverses the order of the study of nature, right? Because in the first instance, you study nature to know why things are the way they are with the emphasis on how things they are, which implies how things have to be, to why things are the way they are in order to change them from where they are to where you want them

to go. complete two different approach to study of science. And Singleton claims that for Fedorov, it's the second one that takes precedent. We learn about the world in order to immediately put that knowledge in the use for changing it. And then you see that theme followed through by Reza in the labor of inhuman, as far as it relates to what is the nature of human being. I'm reading again from a text, if cosmism posits escape as a central principle, it is in the mode of an actual physical event rather than an individual or collective retreat into an inner psychological bunker.

Escapology, not escapism, as such, it is a venture inseparable from technology, or more precisely design, the process which orients action towards the future and leaves technology in its wake. Fedorov acknowledged that this project required substantial advances in a plethora of fields to provide its material scaffolding, but he did not recognize it as one of incarnation of the project of design in itself so being a designer singleton himself the emphasis is not so much on what is being designed but on the utility of these designs and their adaptability to our goals which

themselves are always revising and always changing and the sentence was what or more precise design the process which orient action towards the future and leaves technology in its wake. So the image you want to think about maybe for that is a spaceship that's kind of like going up and it's kind of like the platform actually crumbles because whatever went into this thing going up to the sky doesn't really matter as long as that project of launch is accomplished. Now, of course, we have the negative image of Voyager exploding and in fact that is invoked in the beginning of a text as a moment in which space exploration

went into a freeze because of the death and tragedy associated with that explosion, right? But really most of the time there is an explosion when a spaceship is launched and usually the whole platform burns down, right? But that doesn't matter and that's the metaphor sort of like for the way accelerationism deals with technology. This is why the accusation of being like lovers of technology or like being obsessed with technology or being obsessed with technoscience doesn't really stick. Because if you follow the work and if you follow the words of people associated with the concept called accelerationism, particularly left wing accelerationism, you realize that the notion of technology and design is very utilitarian and is not the center of the project.

Now, Singleton kind of like switches the conversation from talking about launching and going to the space and getting out into a philosophical discussion of traps. and traps, I mean, I'm doing this, but I'm not Zizek, and I'm just like, I haven't done coke. It's just like, for some reason, I just feel a little bit nervous today because of all the technological problems you have, so I just keep like scratching my nose, and it's my mustache hair just getting in the way. I'm really sorry about that. The switch from launching into an outer space

into thinking of trap, which is something about like being enclosed, is kind of like interesting because at first you go like, what are we doing talking about traps? But actually, as he explains it, he kind of like makes it clear what is the significance of the trap metaphor. Now, I'm going to read a little bit here. It says, how a hunting trap of traditional style might be understood if placed in a gallery. anthropologist Alfred Gell draws on the ominous intentions. It's from N codes. We read in the mind of its author and a model of its victim, and more particularly the way in which

that model subtly and abstractly represents parameters of the animal's natural behavior, subverted in order to entrap it. So this is what Alfred Gell actually talks about. I don't know if you guys have heard of Alfred Gill or not. He's a very influential anthropologist who died quite early in his life, unfortunately, tragically, of cancer. I actually was very interested. He wrote a very, very, very important book called Art and Agency, which is his sort of like main book. And this quote is not from that book. And I totally recommend you to download it or buy it and read it. He provides a new way of understanding of the place of art. in our contemporary society and he has this great model which very early on sort of like

put me in a kind of trajectory I am in terms of studying art and curatural studies basically made me more interested in larger issues involved with the place of art in the social setting rather than the art itself. And I just had to talk about this because I've admired Alfred Gell a lot and when I first read this piece and realized that Ben was quoting Alfred Gell, I had this amazing moment of like, yes, somebody's bringing Alfred Gell back into conversation. So from the quote, it's kind of like clear what a trap does, right? It says, it subtly and abstractly represents parameters of the animal's natural behavior

subverted in order to entrap it. So a trap is sort of like, and this relates to what I was saying earlier, it's sort of like using what you have to sub, using the natural setting to subvert it towards what you, towards your goal, towards what you want, right? In this case, is to put the animal into the trap. So basically, what is a trap? The maker of the trap mobilizes and organizes an ensemble of forces into a new conjunction, acting as a technician of instincts and appetite, who twists trajectories already at play in an environment in unexpected directions.

So the whole thing about trap is that it has to look and feel natural. And then once it feels natural and it camouflages itself, it actually needs to look hyper, hyper natural. It has to have that extra thing that attract the animal. But it cannot be a thing that provides the animal with a clue that, oh my God, it's a trap. It has to be hypernatural in a sense that it has to completely both attract and camouflage. And then once that happens, it's able to work successfully. successfully. The construction of a trap provides general model of design, observes separated foreign space and time have,

independently, it would seem, made this connection. Seeing the trap as the basic paradigm of design, more broadly writ, the ability to coax effects from the world by identifying and manipulating its extant tendencies, rather than imposing form on it by the application of force alone. So from this he extracts the whole idea of what design is. Basically he thinks design, good design is like trap building because it entraps its users without setting up new form but by using the natural form, by using what's there to kind of attract and create an audience or create users for that design.

And he quotes Jean-Pierre Vermaunt saying, traps set at points where nature allowed itself to be overcome. So basically, in a way, trap building also takes advantages of the weakness of nature. And then he identifies cunning, which is a form of intelligence, that complements craft and craftiness in the making of traps. Now, reading a piece, one can't forget the fact that what's at play here is a form of

dialectics without the word dialectic being involved because what you end up here is a dialectic between nature and what's being made by man which is culture or technology the dialectic between you know like it becomes very very clear when when he talks about how the person that went in the trap is very different than a person who successfully escaped the trap right because what happens is through entrapment by being trapped you access a level of intelligence you're forced to you forced to think differently and you're forced to become smart in order to get out of the trap and the subject that enters is very different

than the subject that exit and to me these are also like different ways of using dialectics without really talking about dialectics Closer to the end, Benedict's piece kind of like melts into Reza's. I'm going to read the part where I think it's starting to sound like what Reza's talking with an inhuman is the part that he says, rendered thus freedom from entrapment is not freedom from,

but through alienation. So this alienation here is not a negative alienation as we know it in Marxist discourse or even liberal discourse as like you alienate it from your work, you alienate it from a society. But this is a type of alienation that's required for gaining a kind of knowledge that then will set you free. This creates a pernicious stowaway in the project of extended escape from the perspective of any unreconstructed humanism, the continuous transformation through revisionary reconstruction of the agent that pursues it. This is already here and has already happened.

The human body is the host of an artificial intelligence in the atypical sense of the term as an intelligence that operates through artifice. All of these are much inventions of technology as they are a means to invent it and are a foundation to human as language. humans are not native to earth, write Robert Zubrin, lacking proper adaptation to the terrestrial environment in general. We live on a planet with two permanent polar ice caps, a planet whose land masses in large majority are stricken with snow, ice, freezing nights, and killing frost every year and whose ocean average temperature is far below that of our life's blood. The

earth is a cold place. Our internal metabolism requires warmth, yet we have no fur, we have no feathers, we have no blubber to insulate our bodies. Basically looking at, this is the mark of an accelerationist disposition, encompassing those schools of thought that can suborn a description of the world's perceived shortcomings and the corresponding elaboration of how it ought to be in the shape of the image of the future to the logic of how things get done, how freedom is possibly within this and how its progressive maximization can be pursued through the systemic deployment of generative constraints. Basically biology and technology being super interrelated, not only interrelated but arguing

that technology came before human was developed. The lack of fur, the lack of the ability to basically, Earth being already the trap, has set humans as apes on the trajectory of liberating themselves from this trap, which then bleeds right into biological development. and Singleton is not the first person who brought this up. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Simondon and other people on, they all have argued that the line between biology and technology are blurred

and we don't know where biological evolution ends and technological evolution begins. But really, this is what, to me, this is what Singleton's text represents. Now, I think before we move to Reza, maybe it's good to open up the floor and see if you want to have something to say. Particularly some of you might have read the piece already. The book has been out for a while. So I'm going to let you unmute yourself and interact. I wanted to mention that often this jailbreak gets almost reverted back to like a Nietzschean sort of, you know, So it almost gets conflated with a kind of religious will to escape to the otherworldly.

This is often a critique I find from more traditional left-wing people like, oh, you want to escape the world rather than fixing it. And I've heard from other people say that Mars One Project, friends of mine had an event with one of the guys who made the selection process and he actually said, actually in a more niche in fashion, you need an affirmative project for humanity to rally around. Like the old space missions created a whole generation of scientists back in the day during the space race. And that was what little kids would watch on TV and dream about. So yeah, some people just as some kind of evangelical religious will to escape the world.

Igor, we didn't hear you, so I don't know what happened. Well, now I can hear you. Now I can hear you. No, I can hear you now. Okay. I just said, often traditional left-wingers, when you mention the space project, they conflated to some kind of religious theological desire to escape to the otherworldly, like to achieve transcendence, and they say, no, stuff this, we need to think about the problem, we need to fix this world, it's all we have. However, another friend who's working with, he's done meetings with the Mars One project, select people who were selected in it, and he said, on an opposite, he's like, humanity

needs an affirmative project to rally towards, how the old space race actually created a whole generation of scientists, of designers, aeronautics, people who were fascinated from seeing all of the space race stuff on television, man landing on the moon. So yes, hunger and disease and inequality, they're not to be neglected. However, they're not enough to get little kids dreaming to an extent. Well, it's like, I mean, what you're talking about is the sort of like manifest image effect of it, you know what I mean? Like how it changes the relationship of us the way we saw ourselves in relation to the world, right? You're talking about that aspect of it, right? But let's just even be more sort of like, let's just be more realistic, right?

Even like space program is good. even military technology which is designed to subordinate and annihilate and destroy will have effects like effects on science in general and open things up for like in a in a positive a I'm not saying that you justify military spending right but I'm saying like think of it like we won't even have the internet if it wasn't for military spending so this this this this this this shift is very important that needs to somehow take place in the mind of the old-school left to really understand how like the subtlety of the relationship

between left leftist accelerationism and technology and how it differs a lot and next week we're going to see this with with Nick Lance piece of the kind of like machine vitalism and collect techno wars early 90s techno worship that kinda like Nick Land collect what a key endorsed you know I kinda like a rhizomatic the Louisiana white heavy and love of this chaos and how this chaos will just like somehow some form of like beautiful governance and control emerge out of it and all that right it's very different so you you're you're on you go you're on you're on mute like as we saw with Chatelet, that desire for chaos to an extent.

And you can say the Internet was formed due to the Cold War, but do you really want just war as an impetus to generate new technologies? No, you don't. It's horrible. So I guess having a sort of competitive space race between some major federations of nations would be a lot more positive than a war to generate a new Internet. Yeah, this is like, you know what I mean, I see the advocacy, I mean I've talked extensively with Reza about this, advocacy of a space program in a way it's one of the best anti-military, anti-militarism arguments available because it kind of like, it stops the kind of military spending by repurposing military infrastructure into another type of project which is space.

And in a way, you have to tell these war-crazy people, saying, like, it's like Star Wars. Go and fight your wars in the outer planet. Stop bombing people on Earth. Maybe you can find people to kill over there, you know. It's like, send them off Earth, you know. Maybe that spaceship will never come back, but we'll benefit tenfold from the technological advances that will happen and as a result of sending this sort of military ship towards like, you know what I mean, other planets, right? Now, I would like to also like talk about Reza's piece, and then Jason, if Jason has some, Jason would do the Ian Hamilton grand piece,

But, you know, here in the piece you notice that like even the space program that is invoking in a metaphorical way for the whole project of science, right? So it's like, it's not like Ben Singleton is like designing ships or like, you know what I mean? He's like trying to use the idea of space program as a way to change, hopefully change our attitude towards science, if I'm not wrong. So, anybody else wants to chime in? Laura, if you've read the text, I would like to also hear from you. Yeah, yeah, I was actually about to say something. It's more of a... Jason, you have to do that magical thing on Laura's side because we can't hear her.

Can you hear me? Hello? No? I guess you're... Laura, you know what I mean? One way to do it is to maybe leave the room and come back and you might be able to connect that way. I don't know. Okay. Okay. Okay. If you guys want to participate in the discussion, go ahead and turn your mic on, unmute yourself and join us. Because at some point I want to move on to Reza's. Reza's. Yeah, well unfortunately. I think this idea of repurposing institutional constraints and using them to make new commitments

or make commitments out of them is a good segue into Reza's. But thinking about Nietzsche, this is sort of how Nietzsche talks about the development of commitments and sort of rational, holding oneself to fidelity. And the first place is developing out of this sort of religious mindset. It comes out of something that has a totally different purpose. And so, I mean, Foucault's work is also the same about how all of these constraints sort of force subjects to become true to themselves in some ways and design is about taking that and then repurposing. I don't know, I guess

I'm curious about how to push further on sort of the relation between design and minus design and mine as practice because Metis kind of seems to form like a very basic bare bones description of what it is to recognize a role, recognize yourself as bound by the role and then be able to step outside and recognize it from another perspective and then re-appropriate it. Well, what is, I think to me the philosophical switch and you see it come up all the time, that the conflation between a causal binding with logical binding right saying like A causes B right

and then immediately going back and saying like then B is the logical conclusion of A right that prop that has to be broken that is the major problem here with the with the traditional left is this conflation of causation and causal binding and logical binding this is like you know like in in his own work Ray Bracier basically reduces his philosophy to this one sentence that that rationality or reason is caused by nature but is not logically bound by nature.

You can totally like take that out and apply it to the discussion we're having here, right? Outcomes of military spending or space spending are caused by military spending but not logically indebted to militarism and can be repurposed for other things. In fact if you look at the last 30 years history of neoliberalism, you see the adaptability and flexibility of neoliberalism. That's how neoliberalism actually financialized and monetized everything and anything. By being able to separate it from its benevolent essence and turn it into its own agent.

Whether it's women's equality or gay equality or any kind of other sort of like phenomena can be easily, for neoliberalism it's very easy to separate it and be like oh yeah, maybe these movements were caused by some goodness but they're not necessarily logically bound by goodness. I can easily empty them out of their logic and insert my own logic into it. I think this is what needs to be understood and learned and it's the reverse mechanism here that really separates acceleration from the non-acceleration left. The acceleration left from the non-acceleration left. Very important distinction. In fact, I think this

also separates the kind of attitude right wing acceleration has because I think right wing acceleration is much closer in its attitude to the traditional left and 20th century than left wing accelerationism, you know like some people like some people both on sort of like Nick Lant's side and on Marxist side kind of like think oh left wing accelerationism is just sort of like a, I don't know like a uniform that you put on the same accelerationism. It's not really different whereas there's fundamental differences. In fact it's a complete different type of accelerationism because Because again, for Nick Land, as Benjamin Noyes talks about, I'm just going to go back straight

to his quote, right? This is how Noyes characterizes acceleration. If capitalism generates its own force of dissolution, then the necessity is to radicalize capitalism itself. The worse the better. We can call this tendency accelerationism. That's so not true of left wing accelerationism. The worst is better. Who said the worst is better? That's not really what left wing accelerationism is about. I read the quote. It's about salvaging and it's about sort of like using some of the processes but towards other logic and understanding that that you can actually separate and

and centrifuge the two from each other now I also wanted to talk before we move on to Reza I also wanted to talk a little bit about about the concept of platform building that comes up in the text right you know the etymology of the term platform comes as noted by Ben goes back to 1500 and it relates to theater production, performance, entertainment, but also to plotting and conspiracy, to entertaining and to overthrowing regimes, right, like plotting. And again, ambition is very important here. For you to have a platform, you need to have ambition. And this ambition has to be put against neoliberalism,

which insists on the market as this sort of chaotic, generative, self-generative force of future and basically rejecting that and saying that we're going to produce a future on our own platform. Platforms, in my opinion, are generic and they rarely reference themselves. when you have a platform it's for something else it's for the thing that's happening on top of the platform you never go to a theater to watch the platform platform kind of like it's in the background it maintains a minimum interface they quietly facilitate their function

they have a major function they uphold things they bring things up they allow things to happen but they do it like modestly without drawing too much attention to themselves. And for a platform, actually, you can argue that the process of entropy for a platform begins when it starts referencing itself or it becomes known as a platform. That's when the entropy begins. And platform stops acting like a platform and becomes more like a black hole in which rather than being a launching ground for something else, become a place that things get sucked into it. Now, I want to compare this to art

because I come from an art background and I find this a very important comparison. You look at the role that, let's compare a place like a museum with a name, right? Like MoMA or like New Museum. them. These spaces are not platforms anymore. They maybe used to be platforms but they are not platforms anymore because they become so much about themselves that by entering that place as an artist you basically lose yourself. You become part of that space. They are kind of like, they are more like parenthesis or brackets. And actually the whole idea of why cube is a bracket because it brackets out and kind of like hold things and it's not a trap like you cannot you cannot apply the trap idea of Ben to a gallery setting

because galleries are kind of like this exceptional spaces of or at least what they claim exceptional spaces of contemplation and really hardly a gallery can act as a platform. It only does so when it involves other things that are what it's supposed to be doing. Say like you say let's have a book launch here or you know what I mean like let's have a debate there and all of a sudden the white cube becomes an actual platform. But in most cases you You can really apply the logic of platform to galleries. It's much more applicable to what we do at the news center for instance. You know the ubiquitous of our interface.

We don't even have an interface. We use Google. We use Facebook. We were almost, we have one little logo and that's it. We're really behind all these other types of interfaces and we sort of like let things happen through these things without really maintaining like one of the things with the website, I'm sort of in charge of the aesthetics of the website is to not use photographs. We've resisted adding images because the associated power of images for me kind of like start making us about this and that and we'll try to like stay away from that, try to be as plain as possible, as platform as possible to be able to really be used like

a launching pad rather than referring back to ourselves. So if you guys are ready, we can maybe move to Reza's piece. Anybody have anything to say before I go? Laura, you want to just try it for like, just for, see if we can get the mic. Yes, no, go ahead. OK. Yeah, what I wanted to say is just a little nugget. When I read the piece, when it came out on E-Flux, I think, last year or something like that,

I was looking into human-computer interaction and interaction design. So this idea of how can you escape eventually the interface in terms of an escapology, in terms of creating something different. And I found out that there is already in places that you have like a human software interaction, for instance, in space programs. So I found it almost like, I don't know, I found it interesting how already in like space technology there are things that perhaps could be useful for us on Earth as well. as well, like, that was, like, the main thing, I don't know, so perhaps it is really worth

like keep researching and keep looking into, I don't know, what this, I don't know, perhaps like, yeah, big projects that seem so far away from us, I think this human software interaction and it's mainly a series of protocols that are in themselves that perhaps not even particularly like interesting. But the idea, I found it like, I don't know, very interesting and very relevant with what you're saying about the idea of like escaping planet Earth and like moving space and that was it. But yeah, it was a really interesting piece. Unfortunately, cinema, Hollywood has not been able to really deal with this in a proper I just went to see Interstellar hoping that Interstellar would kind of like I mean Interstellar is not horrible

but Still the most organizing principle in a movie is so like this heteronormative family relation between this guy and the sort of like love of family and Love of you know what? I mean this this process of like oh if I travel to space I'm gonna get older when I come back and I'm gonna miss on my child my children's like life and all that And I think there's so much potential the movie had so much potential for like it does advocate science It does advocate you know what I mean the type of attitude towards space program that you see in Ben's writing But it doesn't really like it dislike

Like, yeah, Cosmo Audibleism. I was going to say that, man, but then I was just like, don't bring in your subjectivity into it. I really, really thought, like, you know what I mean, there was something going on between the girl and the father. I was just like, why is this so central to the movie? But, yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I think people, people in the, people in the, people with Jason would like to bring some questions up. Jason, do you want to like introduce, it would be maybe this is a good moment for you to talk about what's going on on your side and introduce people. You're on a speakerphone. Yes, okay, can you hear me?

Okay, so now we're going to do a little bit of questions from this room. I'm going to present the people in the room. Jason, tell us about what is the room and where you are, so it gets also recorded. Okay, so are you now seeing the room featured with all of us sitting here? Yes. Okay, so where are we, you're seeing that visually right, not just audio right? Yes, I see, I mean the monitor changed and you guys are on. Okay, great, great. Okay, so basically this is our first attempt at trying to do a hybrid of like a physical room,

in that room, and then also the hangout. And anyhow, theoretically speaking, you could physically than we have here now. You could also have a room just like this in New York City, just like this in Berlin, just like this in Sydney. Actually, if we were organizing this and we had enough people to help do it, is that we could have actually physical learning experiences that are connected all over the world at one time together. This is just an example of how that can work. And because the audio is working here, I was just thinking maybe we could just have people just say their name. I think the introduction would take too long, but maybe we could just do it real quick.

So if you want to just, the people in the room, if you want to just like, raise your hand and say your name and say hello real quick. Maybe we can share with you. Sure. So out of this group, Michael and Kelly would like to raise a question about Benedict Coulton and some of the suggestions that we had. So, do you mind, could you pass my speech?

When I think about entrapment as a condition or as a process, I think about the prevalence of two distinctive qualities, vulnerability and deception. When I think about police entrapment in particular, I think about the vulnerability of the person that's being trapped and the inability of the person to see through deception involved. So looking at that model of being trapped or entrapped, I see this space program as a colossal trap because of our whole thing too. to escape suffering, our vulnerability to heroic actions in new settings, sacrifice,

risk, all that is involved in escaping the planet. And so I guess I worry that the escape from the planet to another site is a front on the the part of the government in science to waste our valuable resources that could be used to diminish human suffering and take us to a place where we'll repeat the same mistakes in a much less delicate democratic way. Well, let's just discuss this before we move on, because then the things we get forgotten

and and and conflated and mixed up well it it's it you know what I mean my my my response to that will be like will be like but we're not using those resources in a right way to begin with it's not like oh my god we got the most amazing social services and now what's gonna happen is the government's gonna cut back on that and then put the money towards space program usually funding for space program as as as you know it's the complex thing it comes from multiple different agencies and it comes from different places and it would definitely always involve the military and in a sense my support for it if you want to

bring it down to concrete local example of say United States of America it comes from a strain it does on sort of like the military development and on how it it reduces the money spent on stuff far worse than those kind of stuff that you explained, which I can totally understand what the problem with that is. So that one thing. And the second thing is, if you see Interstellar, actually these two, this binary is played out, right? They actually have to secretly have a space program because majority of the people would rebel and be completely against the idea because as the story goes, the planet Earth is almost dying and the resources are getting less and less.

and then the idea that like the government's putting money towards a space program is even more appealing to people so they actually have to sort of like keep it secret and that's kind of like part of the dynamic of the story so I think this binary has to be explained and through a democratic process this binary has to be kind of like broken in a way that sort of like satisfies your concerns if you were looking for me to say something if somebody else like Igor or Laura or somebody wants to jump in go ahead that's what I wanted to say I wanted to mention the political aspect as well you raise an interesting point which is what I hear a lot is that if we tend to escape

without resolving our political organizational issues on earth we're just going to repeat it it's typical in say cults in say Burning Man ventures where they think they can just throw everything out, get you at the bathwater and create a utopia somewhere else where none of that awful, nasty stuff called politics happens. And then obviously the political returns because it's inerrant in just being human and having to negotiate divergent objectives. And that's a good point which needs to always be addressed, I guess. but it doesn't mean that we can't still have a space program which doesn't neglect the political and is used as a sort of rallying cry for organization.

Like the ESA and the probe that they launched on the asteroid, that was an excellent example of European nations who for centuries have been warring each other, all collaborating on a single goal. Or you look at ETER, the fusion project, It's so many countries. And what's actually interesting about ITER is the political organization that's involved becomes a model for international global organization. They had to develop new units of accounting. They had to develop all these ways for solving complex engineering problems with multiple countries collaborating. So it's really not just about NASA and a bunch of science geeks.

It's actually in most cases the model today is ETER or the ESA. I also want to add a philosophical point here which has been brought up in both philosophy and art which is sort of like the relationship between pre-modern and modern, right? And a lot of people think that what we witnessed with the advent of modernism was that a lot of old problems and old questions rather than being resolved or answered were abandoned for better problems or more complex problems or brand new problems. And then what happened was through dealing with these new questions and new problems,

some of the older problems were better dealt with than when we were dealing with them directly in the old paradigm. So sometimes moving to new problems or even creating new problems to resolve will actually deal with the older problem. So and you know what I mean? This itself can be a useful way of looking at it. You know what I mean? Like we don't, and you know what I mean? You have seen it, right? You know, when we moved from say the old economic system into capitalism, whenever this took place, you know what I mean? From like feudalism and serfdom to capitalism. It's not like we dealt with all the problems of feudalism, right? But we basically changed our questions and changed the question on the problem, right?

But then a lot of the problems eventually, like slavery, like later on, you know what I mean? Equality, racial equality, gender equality was dealt with. Not before capitalism was launched, but through this shift from one to another. So I think maybe that could be a good answer too. Yeah, and as Igor said, the problem this way becomes irrelevant because other things kind of like indirectly address it. Okay, go ahead, Jason. Okay, I'm going to pass it to Evereen.

Do you want to set the screen back to your class? Yeah, I have a set of screen in class. I just wanted to draw a pair of between what Lowell was saying and the and also singleton's writing. Mo, you were talking about how it responds to one of the questions. We're not using the resources in the way we should to begin with. I wanted to draw between that, what you just said, and the very last paragraph of singleton's

reading which and I quote he says that's visual accelerate right until its project of insurordination becomes more clearly he goes on to say that it places a program in which an insurrection not only a confident insurrection not only against gravity but also human beings a process by which social technical structures are taking hostage by precisely what they make possible. So, just wanted to draw a link between what you're saying and what I just quoted, if there's a link there. For me the link is self-evident, but I think you just showed the link by the code you provide.

You provide it. Let me go back to the... where is it? Is it like at the very, very end of the piece? I really want to see the text in front of me before I put my foot in my mouth. Where is it exactly? What is the beginning of the paragraph? How about that? The first word in the beginning of the paragraph. No, it's the very last paragraph. Yes. In which I think Sylvain Singleton really summarizes and compones his argument.

I think it's nice you wrap it up. for some reason I feel like the end of my paragraph is completely different than yours. Okay. It's a very large paragraph in charge with cosmism, accelerates design until its project and its originate becomes very, becomes global visible. Are you reading from EFLUX? Yes. That's the problem. I was reading from the book, so I really can't really comment on it.

Maybe leave it for a little bit later. I'll think of it and respond to you in a classroom text, because I don't have that copy in front of me, and I don't want to hold the class up and go pull up the page and read it. But do you have other comments, Jason, from the room? No, I guess right now. I had a quote which I did not read that began with Cosmism but I can't seem to find it. Okay so if there isn't much maybe we can move on to Reza's labor of inhuman.

I'm going to be... So basically, what Reza does here is it defines one of the philosophical pillars of acceleration. And this piece was in the making for a while and we all were like received drafts of it as email by Reza before it became sort of like part one and two on eFlux. And very exciting work. I kind of like relate this piece is very important in development of the Negar Reza's philosophy because as you might remember Reza was affiliated with sort of like speculative philosophies.

And I think you can still see the influence of speculation in the whole project, the openness, the way contingency has to be factored in. And I was just paying attention to what Jason just posted there. and the way contingency dealt with, the way the project of humanity has to remain speculatively open, right? But what happened was, I think through some serious interaction with new material, Reza began to put some constraints on the speculative aspect of his project.

And sort of like, it's a type of a qualified speculation. And I think that a lot of it had to do with sort of like a return to some of those metaphysical categories, interactions with Peter Wolfendale, with Ray Bracier. Beginning in July of 2013, I kind of noticed, actually maybe even earlier, Reza did like a talk at MIT in the spring of 2013 where he was given this sort of like question by audience about like the extent of approval of speculative realism Reza had and Reza kind of qualified and said I don't think pure speculation is sort of like what interests me anymore.

And I was like oh the switch is already taking place. And then in July of that year there was a conference organized by Rory Rowan at the Miguel Abro Gallery and Suhail Malik, of our board members and Ray and Reza had a presentation on, I forgot what the name of it was, but it had to do with rationality. And I totally noticed a break and the way Reza talked about it was sort of the beginning of this inhuman project which was sort of like separating what he called biological, phenomenological, psychological, historical, anthropological, as sort of like this sentient

category. And then he began talking about rationality and thought as this alien abducting force that sort of like takes a takes hold of these material sentient substrate and kind of like uses it or has the capability of using it towards a movement rather than just being sort of like this aspect of navigation also started to enter his discourse and I was very it was very exciting for me because I was already doing sort of like I my own sorry for bad work half-assed translation of

chatelais to to live and think like pigs Robin Hedden began translating the book and my research on technology was sort of like making me car and reading chatelais was making me realize how the type of the type of political order we were having is so like tries to reduce the power thinking and to reduce us to this like sentient phenomenological chaos in order to then use a kind of a metal logic of control over it right so it was really exciting for me to see to see Reza also kind of like embracing this idea and and sort of advocating for a return of a sort of hypothetical, revisible rationality back into the discourse as a way to get out

of the network, to get out of the chaos, to get out of the emergent. And again, you see how fundamentally different this is from Nick Lanz's sort of like understanding of how nature and technology mix and melt and go together. Now, if you go to the text, you kind of like see right away in the very first paragraph. And you know, I also want you to know that like I'm involved with Reza in the translation of this piece into Farsi. I'm not doing the translation. Another friend of Reza is translating it into Farsi and what I'm doing is I'm helping to pick up better terminology in Farsi for some of the concepts because it's not very easy to sort of like find equivalent for words that almost like have no equivalent in English.

I'm going to go back to the text and try to... There we go. Now up until that point, things weren't clear because critique of humanism was part and parcel of a lot of different projects, particularly part of the project of speculation as well.

And for a lot of us, we already were familiar with the concept of inhumanism, which was just a rejection of this anthropocentric world, rejection of the sort of like the manifest image the ways Wilfred Sellars explains that in terms of like how we create an image of the world with us in the middle and in relation to our own existence and in relation to the idea of humanity. So Inhumanism was very clear but this piece kind of like caught us all by surprise because basically Reza turned Inhumanism, it almost seemed like Inhumanism had gone so far that it would kind of meet the new man right from the back. And here I use the word man and I don't really mean male, but we just have to kind of like

find a way. So I'm going to stop myself from saying man and use human. So basically an inhumanism that goes all the way, it goes so far away from humanity that goes full circle and it returns back to what? The idea of human but from a different, complete different approach. And right away in the beginning, just this essay begins beautifully. is the extended practical elaboration of humanism. It is born of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightenment humanism, right? So all of a sudden it's like we're back at what we were critiquing starting from Nietzsche and on, right? We're back right where we were in a way. A universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand.

This self-portrait of man is what Sellers describes. as manifest image. Inhumanism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposedly self-evident characteristics while preserving certain invariances. At the same time, Inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction. It demands that we define what it means to be human by treating the human as a constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention. So what does it mean? It means that all those sentient categories that I kind of like put together earlier on should be open, should not count as constrained.

It's again like what I was saying in the very beginning of Ben Singleton text, right? Our relationship to human should be changed as sort of like finding the limits of the human and always talking about what is the limit of this thing that we've considered human. And understanding humanity or studying what it means to be human should be reversed to mean what human should and can potentially be. And so this is the sort of like the type of inhumanism that this new humanism is really about. So before moving on forward, let's see if people want to, because this is really like,

if you can get through this part of it, we've done like major sort of like understanding here. Anybody wants to chime in? I like that piece which describes almost the term speculation where he goes prescription without description with mere whim and that critique of Kitsch Marxism I guess. The Kitsch Marxism part is really like it's further right? Yes. I'm trying to pull it up on my copy.

The worst reader in the world is Kindle, right? Basically. Do you have the code? Do you want to read it? I'm just having a little bit of trouble myself. So, um… It says that the Kitsch Marxist says, no, this is it, it says without the, okay, it's actually kind of like, like it melts beautifully to what I was saying, without the constructive vector, being like constructing what it is to be a human, the project of evaluation and critique is transformed into merely a consumerist attitude towards norms, right?

So basically the intellectual creates the norm and then everybody else consumes these norms. Consumption of norms without producing any is the concrete reality of today's Marxist critical theory. For every claim, there exists a prepackaged set of critical reflexes. One makes a claim in favor of the force of better reason, the Kitsch Marxist says, who decides. One says, construction through structural and functional hierarchies. The Kitsch-Marxist responds, control. One says, normative control. The Kitsch-Marxist reminds us of authoritarianism. We say us. Kitsch-Marxists recite, who is us?

The impulsive responsiveness of Kitsch-Marxism cannot even be identified as a cynical attitude because it lacks the rigor of cynicism. It is a mechanized knee-jerk reactionism that is the genuine expression of norm consumerism without the concrete commitment to producing any norms. Norm consumerism is another name for cognitive certitude and noetic sloth. Now Igor, because you sent me there and then I realized, oh my god, we didn't even talk about norms because that will be the next thing to do before jumping here. Now since you made us fast forward, can you go back and talk about norms a little bit

until I find my notes in my copy because I went way forward in my reader so that maybe we can talk about norms. I talk about norms but I'm sure you can talk about norms for a minute before I find my notes. Yeah that's actually a great one and I would love your clarification a bit on really defining formally what a norm is because we have a lot of sort of in common speech there's a lot of different uses of the term norm and he talks about it's a commitment making and he also I would bring it back to sellers as well and the manifest image. Sellers does not destroy the manifest image as useless in fact it's essential we cannot from science deduce say ethical concerns or you know political concerns, we can be informed by the scientific image, but it is actually the

manifest image which poses the questions which then science goes out and observes for us. So in my view, and I could be wrong about this, but Norms is like, it is the setting of manifest image, it is the setting of those sort of commitments. He makes a thing between saying what we want to do and doing it, and that is what he defines as sapience as opposed to sentience. but then I could be wrong in that one. In the text he said it's a distinction between sentience as a strongly biological and natural category and sapience as a rational subject. The latter is a normative designation which is specified by entitlements and concurrent responsibilities.

It is important to note that the distinction between sapience and sentience is a functional demarcation rather than a structural one, right? So these categories are not about how things are but how things function. So if you look at it in terms of like, oh, here's this object here which is sentience and here's this object here that is sapience, it's not going to work out. You have to think of how things actually work. And to me, the best way to understand the idea of norm is when Reza describes language, right, which is just like a few paragraphs or one paragraph after that. It says, stabilized and compares stabilized communication with non-stabilized communication.

And that stability of communication is what norms are, really. So yeah, you're right Igor, norms are about how scientific image is used to update the manifest image, but it gets manifested in the way that language or communication gets stabilized, right? And a kind of like intersubjective norm is established through the stabilization of communication, right? So it says, stabilized communication through concepts as made possible by the communal space of language and symbolic form versus chaotically unstable or transient type of response or communication, such as complex reactions triggered purely by biological states and organic requirements or group calls and the alerts among social animals.

Without such stabilization of communication through the concepts and modes of inference involved in conception, both the cultural evolution and the conceptual accumulation and refinement required for the evolution of knowledge as a shared enterprise would be impossible. So this is sort of like where things are at, right? A stable communication is what produces the norm, but norms are what? Revisable. There's nothing concrete about norms. As soon as a new intersubjective mode is established, as soon as a new communal agreement is made, norms revise themselves and get changed.

But at any given moment, there is a norm for you to use to make sense, to transmit culture, to externalize the culture in terms of speech or art or objects or any kind of knowledge, right? So this is to me, this is what norms are. Now you can correct me if I'm wrong. If anybody else has something to say about norms, you can go ahead. I think that's dire, completely confirms, yeah, I agree with that, yeah. Jason, do you have anything to add? Now, what?

She had something as well. She chatted, she put it in the chat, comparing it to Deleuze. So, yeah, I just, I am thinking of this idea of norm. Can we think about it similarly to the image of thought, Deleuze's image of thought? I know that's a conflation. I know it's not good to make... No, no, no. It's image of thought. But the part that is Delusian is the image of thought. But the part that gets added to it is the fact that this image of thought has the ability to transmit, right? So it's not like image of thought the way you think of image of thought for one person. It's an image of thought as shared between a community, a discursive community, a group

of people that are in a kind of conversation and they can go through the motion of what it takes to verify and then say, okay, yeah, that makes sense, that now is the norm. And yeah, so it's an image of collective thought, right? And to me, the strength of this piece which later on shows itself in other work that Reza has written is that in fact, inhumanism means collective humans. In fact, this new human or this new humanism that Reza talks about, it can only be possible collectively. It's all about a collective idea of human. In a way, saying like anything you thought of as human was never human. It was too sentient, too chaotic, too social animal for it to be

considered the label of human. The label of human can only be applied to a discursive community, to a group of people, to a collective that are involved in what? In the Brandome's idea of making truth, asking for truth, giving and asking for reason, and outlining the space of reason as a landscape of navigation rather than an a priori access to explicit norms, so norms are not there to be found through epistemological projects, but norms as they're developed and created for the purpose of moving from A to B, now that place of A to B could

be history, knowledge development, or could be change of an artistic movement or whatever you want to call it right but basically move revisable norms by a collectivity of discursive discursive a collective this a discursive collective right that's generating norms they're not finding norms they're making norms because these norms are utilitarian they're used towards movement but Aaron well that's the thing this is what we should hopefully we'll be doing right we added all these words to the dictionary so so hopefully we get a glossary right so maybe maybe we can we can work on maybe

we can do this but I think what you're asking here that like if I can describe norm in relation to a trap you see how these texts all kind of like say the same thing but from different places right so Ben describes it in terms of how you use these ideas in design right but Reza's talking more met metaphorically and relates it but really the the philosophical foundation of acceleration is sort of like sellers intersecting with random intersecting with Breisner and Negorestoni and Wolfendel, right? Like, this is sort of like, and I mean, it's not like these things completely overlap, right? What makes it interesting is that there's a core between these philosophers that they

all share, and then there's parts that are only shared by two or three of the five or six, and then each has something to bring to the table, which is completely unique. and what Reza brings to the table is the idea of navigation and is the idea of this sort of like movement that to him takes him back to Hegel and to history. So really what excites me the most right now about Reza's project is his reconfiguration of a new philosophy of history. The work he did for, the work he produced for one of the gigs he did in Vancouver sort of like began that. And then the course that Reza will be, the seminar that Reza will be teaching next semester at the new center

will be all around this idea of this new philosophy of history, which basically breaks away from the sort of like cybernetic history that Benjamin gave us with the idea of Angelus Novus, the sort of like this angel of history, which is basically our computational mind always looking at already happened past and trying to use the information about what had already happened to figure out what's the future right it's a break from that the new kind of past is a new kind of history which future is already in the past trying to rewrite its own future it's kind of like more like Terminator Rezo's writing a Terminator like philosophy of history and that's what that

seminar that research is going to be about and hopefully some of us will be there to like figure it out with him and help him help him do it that navigation is what Rezo brings the table and you see it beginning with this piece you see how it becomes kind of like part of that part of the discussion. Igor, just say it please. Igor Buzalovic It just seems because we're kind of in a post-modern. So if you can just get on the microphone and explain it would be lovely. Igor Buzalovic Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes. Igor Buzalovic Okay, I'm just saying because we're kind of in like a post-post-modern epoch, we're recovering we're recovering from this bad hangover. But that bad hangover was a good party,

and we learned a lot of things in a way, I think. And thanks to all of that deconstructive work that the post-structuralists did, we now have this new foundation for what to do going forward. So all of metaphysics of presence, the analytical stuff, those false dichotomies. And I think a common theme is now that we know all of this stuff, rather than, you know, in Châtelet's way, talk of chaos and just, hey, it's all chaos, no grand narratives. It rather posits a real challenge, but it's a great challenge. Now, what do you do with this freedom? I think Baudrillard has a great quote where he says, what do you do after the orgy? And he's talking about the orgy of sexual freedom, of all modes of representation, anti-representation.

He's like, what do you do after the orgy? Seems to me all of these authors are responding very well to that challenge. to an extent. That's what I meant to say with the deconstruction. Now, it's interesting that you brought up Chandelier, you know, did you finish reading the book or you're still finishing it? It's a very easy read, right? Yeah, it's a very easy read, yes. To me, that book is really like the beginning of the Accelerate project is, oh my god, just as Amy Arland comes in, we're talking about Shia Lele, she's going to say, didn't we discuss all this before? Hello, Amy. Amy is one of our board members too, and she's

also like a member of, she's a board member, she's a member of the new center, and I'm glad to have her here in the class right now. Yeah, so, the deconstruction, right, was, was essential to and you know what I mean the project of post-structuralism as you know it began with Foucault's order of things right in a way because that's where he kind of like moves into archaeology of knowledge right and it's it's 60 we're talking about late 60s early 70s right like 60s right and really you can you can you can see how this new conception this new conception of the world, right? Really, who benefited from it?

It was neoliberalism that benefited from it, benefited from its knowledge. I mean, I'm not saying it benefited from it in a sort of like a bad way, right? Like this new knowledge was put in use much earlier by the system than by academic system or by the left, right? By the time left tried to understand what really was valuable about all this stuff was already too late. But really, as we brought it up with Amy, and others who participated in the Chateleire reading list, it's all of this chaos that a new human can be created. It's all of these little bits and parts out of deconstruction that really you can reconstruct. So yeah, I guess you're right. We needed that catastrophe

because Ray refers to post-structuralism as a catastrophe that destroyed human knowledge. right? But maybe it was a necessary catastrophe. I'm not sure. I think I agree with Ray. Maybe it was good to just skip it, but maybe we couldn't have skipped it. But back to Reza, he says, one cannot assess norms without producing them. The same can be said about assessing the situation of humanity, the status of the commitment to be human. cannot be assessed in any context or situation unless an interventive, constructive attitude towards it is developed.

But to develop this constructive attitude towards the human means to empathically revise what it means to be human. A dedication to a project of militant negativity and an abandonment of the ambition to develop develop an interventive and constructive attitude towards humans through various social and technological practices is now the hallmark of Kitsch Marxism. So this is what separates the two projects. So the Kitsch Marxists, what they do, and you know, I'm bringing this up to make sure that when you catch yourself in the middle of that, it's time to kind of go like, okay, what am I doing? So the Kitsch Marxist what it does, a dedication to a project of militant negativity and an

abandonment of the ambition to develop an interventive and constructive attitude towards a human through various social and technological practice. So basically, and what it does is it actually puts constraints on what it means to be human. This radical negativity that you see exercised by a certain strand of Marxism is not really constructive all it does is whether directly or indirectly it reduce and limits what it means to be human and through that foreclose down the idea of future. Now for all the people who accuse acceleration of right wing tendencies here comes the next

While not all of Marxism should be tarred with the brush of Kish Marxism, especially since class struggle as a central tenant of Marxism is an indispensable historical project. So what does that say? You know, at the end of Chatelet's book, what Chatelet's asking for, a new class struggle, but a new class struggle that somehow relates to the globality, the planetary order, right? Not the old class struggle. Its form may not be a political party or even union, right? But a new form of social class struggle is really at the heart of this project, in my opinion. And these are important quotes to remember.

Every time someone accuses the project, it's time to return to really what is politically at stake here with this new human. You know what I mean? it's more than Blade Runners it's really, it is I mean we all love Blade Runners right but it's really more than that I wanted to mention as well that possibly Amy can probably get some really useful info here and we alluded to that in the xenofeminism seminar they've alluded to it and they're gonna say the secret sauce in the last seminar but about the post-structuralist benefits we can take from it was, I think, to make this call for universalism

properly and truly universal and, you know, enter in those other people who don't, you know, you know, the white male, the white human, the white male of humanism is a real problem in humanism as we see in race and gender. And so I'm really interested as well in what, what does, you know, feminists are coming out when we start to try and construct these new universal norms. Another thing to remember is that the same project of inhumanism, and this is how I define myself against right wing acceleration, is machine vitalism.

We have to have a difference between a recognition of the significance of machines than venerating them. And how the very same first paragraph of the book can be read not only as it relates to humans but as it relates to machines, right? Because to me that's the critique I have of the followers of land. i've revised that are actually a friend of mine was a scholar and teachers are compared to jay back who work is using my my modification of rather resins works from the beginning of the essay in his book and the way i revise it i said in machinism is the extended practical elaboration

machinism it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project up machinism so it's like we we really have to be careful about like about like our our commitment to the machine and think of machine itself as something revisable right so right away uh... right away this is the problem at the end of Blade Runner right what Blade Runner does is like is like the machine and the human kind of meet in a kind of a ontological that meet the ontological possibility and limit right on the roof where the movie ends, right? And that's sort of like a machine is an open-ended project.

Human is an open-ended hypothesis and project. And that's how I think whatever Reza says in the essay about humans is applicable to machines. Go ahead. Oh, do you see there, I don't know, I locate a lot of that sort of opposition between Reza and land and right and left accelerationism in their conceptions of intelligence. I mean Reza's work on this is totally new, but this idea of apps, of general social intelligence or general artificial intelligence versus land who has a very traditional sort of machinically

rooted sovereign idea of what intelligence is. I mean he believes in IQ scores as a valid descriptor of some kind of performance, whereas performance for Reza takes place in this distributed network of general social intelligence no absolutely and I actually I'm reading Lance piece for next week as well and I totally notice that underline all that stuff and all these differences we will be like will be wonderful next week to bring them up and compare because you get a chance to read original stuff from Nick Land in early 1990s and kind of like you totally see like what part is shared and where they diverge. And actually you also see divergence. I mean even though Nick Land is writing before Chatelet,

you kind of see the differences right there too between the type of intelligence that Chatelet is talking about and the type of intelligence that Nick Land is talking about and the type of like, yeah, so it's like it would be good to leave this discussion for next week. Now, we're close to our time and we still didn't decide who's going to present next week. I would totally encourage you, some of you, to pick from next week's text and at least two people I would like to pick something to present next week while I create the form and ask the rest of you to commit to other works for the rest of the class, right?

So if two of you can volunteer next week, that would be amazing. We text for next week. Jason, you're on microphone, so if you can go to the syllabus and tell us which ones are the next week's pieces. Just a question. Okay, so, I'm going to do a screen share here, and we'll go to the syllabus. Let's just assume the screen share might not work, but let's just hope that it works. I think it's, yeah, let me try it over here for a second.

Okay. It looks like it's working on my end. Can everybody else do it? Yes. Okay. I'm going to go over the syllabus and obviously we'll do that to everyone. So basically, I guess before we do some of these other things, I just want to talk about about the course schedule, which you can see here. Is that reflecting on the screen? Or it's not moving, is it? No. Just read us, please, the text for next week.

Okay. So for next week, the text, next week, so this week was typically Mo was running We'll also run the last class and I'll run the two central class, the two course meetings in between. And the one for Wednesday, December 10th, our guest will be Tiziana Terranova. And the readings for this week are Nick Land's circuitry, Nick Land and Sadie Plants, and A couple things by TTRU which stands for the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit.

The first one being Cybernetic Culture and the second one being Swarm Machines. And then I thought since Physiotic Terranova is speaking on that day, we might as well go work on that same day so that we're prepared to discuss with you a little bit. And then on December 14th, which will be next Sunday, that will also be me as the instructor, the main instructor quote book. And for that day, I put Ian Hamilton's grants in that one so that we can read it alongside Mark Fisher. And that will be Terminator vs. Avatar for Mark Fisher. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea.

I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great idea. We have two guests, one of which will be Paul Fisher and another one is Patricia Reed. And the readings will include Antonio Degrees' Reflections on the Manifesto. People may know Antonio Degrees' from the book Empire and study from his artwork. We'll also discuss the acceleration of Manifesto itself. Reed Refts' Here's Cormetianism and its Critics. And Patricia Reed's Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism. And the other thing that's listed there is the image that she made, so it's not a reading.

And it doesn't take up. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. But basically, all I want at this point, the rest of them, I will make a form online for you to commit to for the session three and four. But if people can, if at least two people can pick up pieces to present on for next, for the next session on Wednesday, it would be lovely. And I would say some, like, someone should definitely do Nickland. Yeah, who would like to present on the Nickland reading? Is this Wednesday? Yes. I wouldn't mind doing the Nick Land piece with the crazy poem that I love.

You will do the secretaries which is kind of like a movie poem and a whole piece. It will be lovely. So I'll write you down for that. And if somebody else can, you know it will be lovely if we actually get two more people because then it will be lovely because somebody will present Taravanas right where, like, she's going to be among us and then somebody would do the Sadie plant and Nick land. Sure. I'll do the plant and land. You do the Sadie plant and Nick land, right? Yes. I'll write that down to... Who is doing the Sadie plant and Nick land? Aaron Marcus. I will. Aaron, okay. Yes.

And then, do you hear the sacred and the culture? That's a shorter piece, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's pretty short. You know what I mean? I will do the CCRUs just because I want to be part of the class and do something, right? So I'll take on to do the CCRU pieces as long as somebody does Terranova. I want to do Terranova. I can happily do that, but if somebody else wants to, it's open. Well, the thing is, Jason, you really still have to do the Ian Hamilton grant that you were supposed to do this week, but we delayed it to next week, right? Well, I think actually the Ian Hamilton grant goes better for the 14th, because that's the

day we read Mark Fisher, because the grant and Fisher are both about science fiction. Okay, no problem. Then you do Terra Nova, and Terra Nova's your guest, and that works out perfectly. So you do the Terranova and then you do the Ian Hamilton grant on 14. Yeah. And then who would like to do Mark Fisher? Jason, the rest of it, like I said, I'm doing a form and then we'll do it off the class time. Okay. Yeah, I'm fine. No problem. Okay. So, let's just, you know what I mean? started a little bit late but also since Jason didn't do his thing maybe we can

like save up the time for for the third class or I just like with all the problems we have I just feel so exhausted I just want to like 8 o'clock I want to end the class and maybe use the time we saved about we saved basically about 15 to 20 minutes and we can add maybe maybe add that to the third class and let the third class run longer and that will be the period in which Jason will present on Ian Hamilton Grant. And then maybe we can end right now if nobody has an objection and if you guys don't have anything more to add. The only other thing that we could do is go over the requirements for the seminar, but I think it's true. It's probably good to end quickly.

Actually, you know what? The requirements are okay. We should be able to go to the requirement. You have a good suggestion. Do you want to do that yourself? Yeah, I can do that. Okay. Okay, so I'm going to go over the requirements and I just made just a few really small modifications to this syllabus just now, but because of when the guests were and things like that. So, can you hear me right now? Can other people tell me whether they can hear me? They can hear you. Charlie's been having problems from the get-go. I think Charlie should have left the room and come back or something Okay, okay, so there will be a video and let me just go over this just real quick

So if you go to the classroom later, you will be able to see the uploaded syllabus. I'm going to upload the final version of it, a slightly revised final, final version of it right after the class is over. So the glossary terms, one of the main things we're going to do for this seminar is we're actually going to all work together to create a glossary of basic terms in the accelerationist discourse. So we have a list of terms here which include terms such as abduction, accelerate, accelerationism, alienation, concept versus

object, contingency, cybernetics, diagonalism, politics, future, horizontalism, infrastructure, humanism, jailbreak, localism, irrationalism, planning, platform, process versus dialectic, prometianism, speculation, and verticalism. So, it's a lot of words there, but if you notice, throughout these texts, these terms are very central to the text. And so, we're going to make an art project for the class for each of us to take on a take on a certain number of these terms and try to help define them. So basically what that adds up to is, I'll just read directly from the requirements.

Students will choose four terms to define. Each student chooses four terms. Define them in 500 to 1,000 words, something like that. And then the terms and definitions will be posted to the Google Classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon, providing some preliminary threads for discussions, tutorials, some final presentation, or potential publication. And so we're looking at creating some sort of a document after this that you will actually, you know, as long as it gets revised enough, that you will actually get some kind of credit for having helped to compose. that's the basic idea for the requirements. You can read it in a little more detail on

the syllabus. Yeah, totally. Amy is right. We should use that to fix the acceleration Wikipedia and more. And also, I'm super excited about this collective assignment because really it's like in the spirit of collective humanism of Reza. And it also is one of those projects that really like a lot of my friends who are like in rigorous PhD programs are usually asked to do by different publications. They do glossary entries on concepts or terminologies for different larger like encyclopedias or volumes and you know what I mean? They usually get incorporated into larger things. But here I think this has the potential of becoming a book on its own

and be either published by the news center itself or by one of our affiliated publishing friends and people who run like Zero Books, the new thing that just came out of the Zero Books, Punkdom Books, Repressed. Lots of people will be interested in actually publishing this as a standalone little booklet if we all do our job right. And me and Jason will write an intro to it, which will kind of be out of the discussion, like I said in the beginning, and it will kind of put it all together and then hopefully we'll get a real good book out of the class. So it's like all the audit people, everyone who's like a member and is auditing, everyone should kind of like try to participate. And my last note is if you feel like there's other terms that needs to be there,

please bring them up and we can discuss them and add them and you can take on those terms yourself. Don't feel limited to the terms that we drafted out of the book because there must be more terms out there that we can include and add. And then also, another thing I was going to add is that we do provide office hours for our enrolled students, right? So, all the enrolled students, feel free to request from me and Jason to meet you on one-on-one to discuss particularly your project or the words you picked or any other thing you have. And also feel free to use us as any kind of like other type of resource during the class and after it.

So we're there for you guys. The enrolled students, of course, are going to receive more attention from the instructors than the audits and members. But in terms of the output from the class, everyone will be equal. Yes, I'll do that. I'll do the GDoc spreadsheet so people can put names up for the words. Thank you Igor. So Jesse, what do you mean by that? Or diving? No, I was just following up on what Igor said.

So it's 8-10 and if you guys have any questions, bring it up. There's one more thing I was going to say. Or dividing up the terms. Oh yeah, let's divide up the terms on the Google spreadsheet. I will share it with all the emails and you guys can go look up and put your name in front of the terms or add more terms to the bottom of the list. Another thing is that please use the Google Classroom. I'm going to copy all the conversation here and put it there as the conversation starter and use the classroom to bring things up. If you have any questions, any topic you want to add, any link, any video, anything exciting, just put it there. It's always going to be there and you will always have access to it.

And yeah, let's make it like a rich Google classroom. And we'll be checking. And emails are, use our institutional emails to contact us. Mohammed.Salemi at the new center.org, Jason.Adams at new center.org. Those are the best emails to use. How do we go about adding a term that is not initially on the list? Just add it to the bottom. Jose. I have a question. I have a question. You're writing to a key term in the text as you're reading and preparing, and you think it deserves to be discussed, just bring it up. At some point, we will have to kind of like limit it to what people have picked. And I really think the terms that me and Jason have picked, they don't take precedent, but we thought about them a lot. So it's good

to give those a chance before you go ahead and add more, but we're certainly open to adding more. And we never got to go around and introduce everyone. There's a lot of amazing and interesting people in the class. I wanted to talk about Robert is a student I had back in Vancouver when I was doing an art history little seminar. And he kind of found me, and then I encouraged him to join us in a class. And he comes from a scientific background, geology. He's probably like one of the only scientists in the classroom right now. And like it would be amazing if you guys all network and connect and help each other. It would be awesome. But maybe next week we'll go over and everybody introduce themselves.

Somebody said hi to Robert. I think it's Igor. Yeah. Anyways, so thanks everyone. If you want to add something, go ahead. otherwise we're just gonna like stop the broadcast and the video will be okay last question Laura can one access the classroom if one is a member yeah of course they just have to request it and then we'll send them back to the classroom yeah please participate in the building of the glossary yeah thanks Any other questions? One last thing I want to say is if there is anybody who does not have the reader,

for whatever reason, I did post all of the... If you look at the syllabus or even just in the classroom, there are links to almost every single reading that's in the syllabus in the classroom, various places online. So all of that, you did like a file upload, right? Is that how it is? No, I actually just did links. It's just links to the places where you can find it. Okay, so did you put it under about or under like where the assignments and the other notes go? It's under the stream. It's both in the syllabus itself and it's under the so-called stream. Fair enough, that's lovely. Any other questions, guys?

Thanks everyone. Oh, I see Jose now finally. Okay, see you guys. See you Wednesday. Oh, please before you go, we will try to round everybody up at like 5 o'clock. So then we can start sharp on time. And then, yeah, so please be aware of like the link and all that that you automatically will receive and log in on time and then we deal with it. with it. And again, if you need me or Jason, you're entitled to office hours. So email us, and then we can meet. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Bye.