Formalizing the Subject (Session 1)

Hello and welcome to the U-Center for Research and Practice Seminar Series, Formalizing the Subject, Dialectics and Cybernetics in Cahiers pour l'Analise and the CCRU, with Danielle Sassaboto. I will begin by providing a brief description of the course and a bio for the instructor and then I will open the floor for Danielle. This seminar examines two unique think tanks to emerge in philosophy in the last 50 years, the Cahiers pour l'Elys, and the Cybernetic Research Cultural Unit. These two research groups paved the way to an unprecedented experimental and interdisciplinary

practice which reconfigured the classical philosophical dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism in the wake of new advances in the sciences and the arts. They also opened a lever to overcome the stale dichotomy between analytic and continental approaches in the contemporary context. As you shall see, both vectors of study are not just accidentally paired, but can be seen as two-folds that answer in divergent ways to an integral and cohesive set of imperatives, following thus overlapping theoretical and practical aims. Central among these was the pursuit of a formal and interdisciplinary experimentalism, leading

to an uncompromising rejection of postmodern relativism and of the post-Heideggerian phenomenological legacy, including its historicist and Deridean textualist sequels. In doing so, both vectors conceived of parallel projects for a thorough formalization of the subject. This would overcome the residual humanist piety which lingered in the 20th century philosophical attempts to radicalize the critical impetus of enlightenment rationality. Using either mathematical or formalization or cybernetic functional mappings outside the realm of regulated scientific practice.

They led to varied figurations of the post-human future and a reconsideration of the scope of the revolutionary process after Marx. These convergences, however, also reveal a crucial methodological dividing line within which diametrically different views about the relationship between the subject and the world are forged, and within which the future of collective, quote-unquote, humanity becomes problematized. Thus, as we shall see, the Cahiers followed, above all, the anti-humanist spirit of the Lacanian attack on the figurations of ego psychology

in an attempt to reintegrate these into the philosophical imaginary in continuity with the Althusserian rekindling of the philosophical dialectic and the revolutionary subject in the horizon of structuralist thought. It also expanded the formal systemological orientation developed by Bachelard and others. In doing so, they would take mathematical semiotic formalization as the means to reconceive of the traditional aims of philosophy in its materialist scope, and of the Marxist-oriented revolutionary subject.

In turn, the CCRU exploited an alternative schizoanalytic model and the machinic ontology closely aligned to the works of Billas and Gautari, against the perceived idealist and structuralist excess of Lacanian psychoanalysis, analysis, exacerbating the anti-humanist impetus for unearthing an impersonal subjectivity, which could not be reconciled with traditional forms of revolutionary practice. Accordingly, decanting all residual vitalist or humanist tropes from the Deleuzean text, the CCRU progressively produced aberrant theory-fictional mythologies in which cybernetic theory

and non-mathematical numeracies served to construct a hyperstitional practice that resisted recapture by the traditional valences of philosophical narrativization. They ultimately forecasted a productive intellectual mechanism not traceable, not tractable to the resources of deliberative cognition or recollective resistance within which human temporality was not only dislodged from a phenomenological individual horizon but precluded the possibility of incorporation into a communal subject guided by normative

historical imperatives. Finally we shall extend our study into the historical antecedents which guide both of these trajectories as well as their prescient influence in the contemporary philosophical landscape across a variety of registers. This seminar begins with an introductory session providing the historical and theoretical background guiding our investigation. During the following two weeks, we shall examine a variety of texts from the Cahiers pour l'Analise, following closely the debate centered around the relation between structure, concept, and form.

This interrogation leads to profound questions considering the legacy of structuralism and the role of mathematical formalization beyond its narrow application in the social sciences and psychoanalysis, probing the limits and interface of scientific and philosophical practice. During the following two sessions, we shall engage with the recently published collective writings from the CCRU in a systemic manner and trace its attempt to forge a hyperstitional practice in which Lovecraftian mythology and cybernetics converge towards the experimental practice of theory fiction, in which Deleuze and Qatari's machinic ontology becomes subverted

from a philosophical register into an alien register. During weeks six and seven, we will examine some of the contemporary ramifications of these two think tanks by focusing on two factors of research within philosophy and theory in which the influence and tensions between their orientations of becoming prescient and intensified, A, the speculative realist sequence, and B, the so-called neo-rationalist resurgence of universalist systematic philosophy, in which one also finds a re-evaluation of the legacies of modern rationalism and empiricism

after the 20th century deconstruction of metaphysics and critique of enlightenment rationality. Finally, in the last session, we will briefly consider the emergence and development of different versions and political inflections of the accelerationist program and the practical horizon within which the future draws its gradient therefrom. Okay, so that is our summary for the course. And now, very quickly, I will provide a bio of our instructor. So Daniel Cecilia Sassiloto is a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California,

Los Angeles, or UCLA. His research focuses on the fields of contemporary philosophy and Latin American literature. In particular, his research focuses on the reconciliation of rationalism and materialism and the methodological relationship between epistemology and ontology in contemporary philosophy. He is currently finishing a full-length monograph in Pentazolite titled Saving the Numenon, an essay on the foundations of ontology, in which he proposes a critical reading of the ontological term in contemporary philosophy and lays the foundations for

for a new transcendental epistemology, chiefly inspired by the works of Wilfred Sellers, Robert Brandom, Alain Badu, Lorenz Puntel, Ray Brassier, Reza Nagarastani, and Jay Rosenberg. All right. Well, that is enough for me. So please, Daniel, you have the floor. Thank you very much for the introduction. Welcome, everybody. Hello. I knew a few of you, but I don't know another good chunk of you. So, yeah, a couple of things have changed. I mean, I presume all of you have the syllabus or have taken a look at the syllabus. I've expanded it a little bit just to include some things there that I thought would be interesting. Today we'll go over that, obviously.

um before we get started with anything substantive uh i would just like to introduce ourselves uh respectively to say who you are uh your background what's your interest in the course and by the way i'm sorry if it's a little shaky i'm having to use a smaller computer this for this session just because my other one is wonky today um i need to take it to shop so if it's a little shaky, please forgive me. Next time it will be more stable. But yeah, maybe to get us started, we can just say who we are, what's our interest in the course, our background. And please let me know. Okay. Yeah. And also please, one thing that I really

do want to know is how extensive, what your philosophical background is. So I want to know just like how much philosophy you're familiar with just so that I can you know not be too elementary or too specialized so yeah whoever wants to go first maybe we can start with Eric hello hey does everyone hear me yep okay cool so hi I'm Eric I'm new to the youth center just got scholarship for the certificate program and I'm currently in Germany, a small town called Basler-Uflin. It's like two and a half hours from Hamburg basically and I study sociology and

philosophy and and philosophically my main interests are the connections or the implications of the really really foundational philosophical questions for social and political theory that was always what impressed me the most and i've got a i've got a quite a good basic understanding I think of post-structuralism and also read a bit of Zizek already. Like, okay, we all read Zizek, but I started to get into him a little bit more thematically. So, and also know a little bit about CCIU accelerationism, all that background. But I'm, I cannot really say how much I'm, I'm,

I'm excited to know how much I already know and I can learn here. Welcome. Maybe Alan can go next? I'm just going by order, I guess, from Wednesday. Hi, everyone. I'm Alan. I'm finishing. This is my last credits to finish the certificate in the news center. I am an architect from Mexico City and well my philosophical background is I guess like relating to this course I'm familiar with with the stuff we're going to see but I've never had the chance to like delve deeper either in the CCRU or even less with the

Cahiers so it's a good opportunity and well I've been following Daniel's seminars for a while so yeah I'm pretty excited to be here maybe Ekin or Ekin? Ekin, yes Ekin, Ekin yes nice to meet you Daniel we've spoken on Facebook a little bit it's nice to hear your voice yes my name is Ekin I was originally trained in analytic philosophy and then made the switch to primarily continental philosophy I studied media studies at Columbia for graduate school. I would say that we've spoken a little bit, maybe you know my interests nominally at least.

I've published a bit on Laurel and Stiegler primarily. I've been following generally post-contemporary deridants like Malibu and Stiegler closely. I'm pretty familiar with the philosophers, theorists and such that we would be examining, but I'm interested in this comparative model between Caesario and Cajés. I look forward to it. Jack? Hi everyone, I'm Jack. I live in Los Angeles. My background is in my BAs in English literature from Reed College.

And then I studied art and technology and integrated media at CalArts. My background with philosophy is semi-formal. I've taken some critical classes, aesthetics classes through school and all of that, as well as informal, just pursuing some of these readings on my own. fairly familiar with the CCRU works or the, I don't know, constituent writers as a part of the group. And recently I've been reading, I've been in the Deleuze class with Reza and Adam as a few of us are. Yeah. Other than that, I'm excited to learn more and see what everyone else has to share.

let's see who else Stefano yes can you hear me I'm using the new center I'm Stefano I am from Milan Italy I did my bachelor degree in philosophy at the University of Milan and then I moved to Warwick where I did my master's degree in continental philosophy with a dissertation on what I called experimental metaphysics, that is a kind of thought that would be placed alongside scientific analysis and endeavors in investigating into reality, and in which speculation and empiricism encounter themselves newly. I'm now working on an ontology and phenomenology of thought, of thinking, growing mainly from

Husser, Heidegger, and Deleuze. And so I'm working on questions such as what is thinking and what we actually do when we are thinking. So yes, that's it. That's pretty much for now, I guess. Jared? Hi, can you hear me? So this is my final course with the Center and my program third course with Daniel so my philosophical training before that had some exposure to to phenomenology and hermeneutics

deconstruction and the rhetoric department at UC Berkeley I primarily Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger. I did a research project on morphogenesis as articulated in A Thousand Plateaus, although kind of in the end more so along the lines of Delanda's interpretation of that. This was years ago. Then I got into the work of Quentin Mayesu and Ray Brassier when it was closer to have come out like around 2011 and then I took a long break in which I really didn't pursue philosophy very consistently at all until basically coming back to the

new center courses to the extent that I can isolate oh I will say I'm a little bit familiar with CCRU. I've read some passages from Fagnoumina by Nick Land, a bit of Kodlo Eschen's More Brilliant in the Sun. That's more his music criticism. But I have no long-term research projects at this time, so I'm still working that out. Cool. Let's see who's next. Stasha?

Can you hear me? Mm-hmm. Hi. I'm new to the new center, so I have just joined, and I finished my MA in contemporary art theory in Goldsmith and my dissertation was mainly concerned with cyberfeminism in Russia and concerning the topic of the seminar I've been reading a little bit of well I've been obviously reading a lot of Sedi Plante I've been reading a bit of Steve Goodman And like Jared, I was amazed with the writings of Kozue Shun.

But I haven't really looked into CSRU as a collective, although I did with some of their texts. and currently I'm most interested in the projects of rationality, so like this is mainly, and also like so far the writings of Caesarean members have been mainly the context to my research rather than the center of it so I would be I'm really really excited to look at them

more carefully and more properly I suppose that's it cool nice to meet you all nice to meet you Darryl hello I'm coming to you from Northern Canada I work at Athabaski University I I got a master's in arts and integrated studies from Athabasca University. My philosophy trajectory, I read extensively through Nietzsche to help me break away from religion. And since then, I probably mostly read Badiou pretty extensively. I've gotten myself familiar with La Ruelle in the last year.

of course a smattering of the loose and I'm looking forward to Daniel helping I guess myself trying to make this reconciliation between empiricism and rationalism taking one course with Daniel so I'm looking forward to trying to sort that out someone Hernan? Yes, hello. I'm actually from Argentina, but right now I'm in New York for a while visiting some family. So, yeah, beautiful here. I tried to meet up with James, but he's quite busy right now. Yeah, we will, we will. That's fine. I'm just kidding.

So my background, my formal training is in chemistry and biotechnology. my training in philosophy is quite limited. I did a year of seminars in the University of Buenos Aires, and now I'm halfway through the new center program. And I would say that my interest is in Deleuzean ontology, specifically the notion of intensity and how that might inform the genesis of representation and the naturalization of consciousness. So, yeah, that's about it. Alexei? I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. Hi, can you hear me?

Yes. Okay, great. Sorry, I had some technical problems. I just jumped in last moment. So, my name is Alexei. I live in Helsinki. I just graduated from program Intercultural Encounters, MA program at the University of Helsinki. So my background is mostly in post-colonial, decolonial gender studies, but more recently I've been doing post-humanism and new materialism. I have an interest in geology of media. So now I'm kind of exploring and expanding a little bit my research interest because I want to pursue my PhD in a little bit different direction. So yeah, I'm really interested in this course and it looks like really what I want to do in the future so I'm looking forward Valentin hi guys I just got I just got home

finally I'm from Russia I live in Berlin I I don't know a tourist I'm not very good institutions but I studied a lot of philosophy in Cicero particularly I'm a big fan of plan I'm a big fan of the center Paris see but I however I can say that I have any kind of good I wouldn't be able to explain what I think CCR use overall main idea would be or how I would like I have no clue how to even begin answering the question which is in the title of the seminar like what would

be the theories of the subject proposed by CCRU so I'm really looking forward to learn more about this and I think Federico and yeah Federico Hello? Hi. Can you hear me? Yep. I was having a lot of technical issues. I had to get another computer. I'm really sorry. No worries. So the master's degree in philosophy

in the Universidad Nacional of Columbia, in National University of Columbia. I had an undergraduate in visual arts and I'm currently training to do my dissertation and a master's degree on the subject of anti-humanism and Jacques Derrida. I chose let's say to go into the field of philosophy because I saw that in arts we usually have like this fetishistic way of seeing theory and philosophy so I wanted to get something more serious and they actually want to get like really deep into theory and philosophy like Well, it started with post-structuralism, and I found out about the New Center because of my readings of K-Punk in my teen years.

And I'm trying to go backwards, like go through the analytics as well and ancient philosophy. I have a lot of voids in my knowledge, so I want to get further into philosophy. I'm considering doing a PhD and I'm thinking about the subject of the machinic agency. They try to get an analytic view of anti-Oedipian, Dalassian machinic subjectivity, but from an analytic point of view. I would like to work this with the new center as well. Fantastic. And maybe finally our organizers can just briefly say, introduce themselves.

Hi, I'm Jamie. I'm a student at the New Center for Research and Practice, and I'm also a master's student at the New School for Social Research. I'm interested in this class because, you know, I think it does coincide with my research somewhat. I'm interested in kind of the intersection between different forms of mathematics, design, transgenderism, and anti-humanism, especially like biohacking, bio art, kind of defiguring and refiguring the body. And I am definitely like an unhinged anti-humanist, so I'm definitely interested in discussing the

different strains of anti-humanism that we'll discuss in this seminar. Fantastic. I think Mo just joined. I presume everybody knows Mo, but maybe Mo, can you just, for those of us... Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, so let me just turn the camera on maybe because it's rude to not have a camera on. Hello? Actually, let me close my window because there's noise coming from outside because there's a construction side one second I don't know Canadians love to say sorry I just said sorry I'm not anything wrong great hello hello yes hello how you doing I'm

Muhammad Salami I'm the organizer of the new center I joined because I really love to be able to join the first session of the most seminars and I'm really curious about how you will you will like conduct this seminar because it really has a lot to do with what I what I inquire but also I'm really interested in in the other organization not CCRU that you're going to cover and also knowing you I basically I even said on Facebook that like every seminar you teach it becomes also a different type of history of metaphysics. So I'm interested to learn more from you, really. And it's amazing and wonderful to have you. Thank you, Mo. Wonderful to have you, too.

Hopefully you can stick around. So yeah, as Mo just said, one of the things that I like to do when I organize seminars in general is to follow some broad genealogy that can sort of situate whatever it is we're talking about in the larger history of philosophy and history of ideas. And those of you who have taken seminars with me before will know that there's a basic template, historical template, that I tend to work within that helps me sort of map certain basic metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological questions that are foundational for philosophical questioning. So in today's introductory session, I'm going to rehearse some of these large motifs, because in a way they come, they reemerge in this seminar in a new corpus, in a new body of work.

So those of you who have taken previous seminars with me, I ask for slight patience if we revisit some things that you've already heard before. But of course, most of what I want to do today really is give a bit of theoretical and historical background to the two think tanks that we're going to be addressing first. And second, I want to really bring home the central contention of the seminar as a topic. So I try to think of seminars not just as surveys of particular materials, but they're always organized around an idea. And I suppose the central idea here for this seminar is that upon looking at these two think tanks more closely and studying their ramifications,

I came to realize that this is not just an accidental pairing. This is not just an arbitrary, you know, cluster of thinkers that you can sort of talk about together. But they are very much, in the contemporary context, representative of an iteration of a classical motif in philosophy, which is the longstanding historical battle between rationalism and empiricism in the contemporary context. So I want to explain why I say this in a little bit more detail. And I know that my camera's doing the weird flickery thing, but this is the first time I've used this software. So again, apologies. I'll get the technical details sorted out by next time. Regardless, so I want to basically clarify the central contention, which is how it is that empiricism and rationalism find themselves reiterated in this new configuration in these two think tanks.

And I also want to introduce the kind of general conceptual framework that will allow us to look at these materials in general. So there will be a little bit of history of philosophy. I will also speak in a very cursory and introductory manner about each of the two think tanks we're going to be covering. I'll say, in the most general possible sense, what I think, you know, we're going to sort of get out of it and what the central structure of each of the two sort of think tanks is. And we'll get into logistics towards the end about what, you know, just what exactly is involved in the course. Now, one little bit of information, and this out of focus thing is really annoying. I really apologize. But as I mentioned before, you probably all have taken a look at the syllabus.

I've decided to amplify the syllabus slightly so that we're not ending where we thought we were, which was the accelerationist sort of left and right accelerationist vectors. But I've included a module, a final module on xenofeminism, because I think it's a peculiarly interesting think tank on its own right. but obviously it's been influenced by both of the think tanks that we are going to be primarily serving and uh so i mean we'll we'll have a chance to look at this a little bit more detail so we'll talk we'll cross that bridge when we get to it but um for now what what i'll do now is uh as as usual those of you who know me i'm i'm old-fashioned in the sense that i i like powerpoint i know it's

kind of tacky and people think powerpoint is something you know that you shouldn't use anymore but I kind of use it because I think it's regardless helpful to to keep my train of thoughts in one piece so I'll be projecting a slideshow and just with some bullet points that I'll be you know going over I'll be stopping periodically for questions and comments so please at any point in time if anything's not clear or if there are any technical issues obviously just jump in and if anything you want to just like comment ask it's there's no wrong time to do it okay any any preliminaries anything anybody wants to say before we start jumping in I have a question concerning the PowerPoint I mean are you

planning on uploading them into the classroom yes I the the rule of thumb is after this each session I will be uploading the PowerPoint to the to the classroom to the full. Okay, thanks. Cool. Oh, and also, yes? Daniel, can you, it's Daryl here, can you explain, are you presenting this as if one side of this poll is a corrective to the other, or are you trying to synthesize them? So one of the things that we will be exploring is how some of the thinkers that are influenced by both vectors, like for example, Ray Brassier, in a certain way is trying to come out of both in a conciliatory fashion, or in any case, trying to sort of

find out what's most intelligible and productive about both ends of the spectrum. As I set up the connection between the two, which is of course indirect largely, It is not that one presents directly itself as a corrective to the other, but that both can be seen as alternative takes or as competing research programs, if you will, in a broader sense. And really, I mean, we'll get into more precise detail as to what is the real sort of common nook that sort of pieces them together and just spoiler alert, I guess, but it's materialism. As we will see, both the CCRU and the CA are very much interested in rekindling materialism in a new register informed by new advances in the social, natural, and formal sciences.

yet they have very radically divergent conceptions of what materiality is and what kinds of methods one can use to reconstitute and reforge materialism. So accordingly what we will get is a reiteration of very classical philosophical contrast between empiricism and rationalism in a properly metaphysical and ontological register in which these two think tanks propose those widely divergent conceptions of materiality, of being, but also widely different conceptions of the subject. And I think in a certain way, the subject is, in a way, more important than being in the other,

because, and thus the title of the seminar, of course, formalized in the subject, The Caillers is obviously older and comes first, and it emerges in the context of a very heated, obvious discussion with psychoanalysis, with structural psychoanalysis, Lacan, of course. And, of course, this Lacanian, the psychoanalytic concern, is tapped back into philosophy via Althusser and via the interests of the Althusserian school to rekindle the valences of the dialectical materialist method. So there is this question of collective agency and psychoanalytical agency. The subject understood not only as an individual or as the psyche or as the unconscious of the individual, but

more broadly as how to reconstitute or rethink collective subjectivity. So this is obviously at the core of what the CA is exploring, how to reconstitute the concept of the subject in the wake of these advances. On the other hand, the CCRU is likewise concerned with concept of subjectivity but it is on the other hand indebted to what we will see is the Deleuze or Guattari and schizoanalytic model and this comes with its own ontology of course. Now what the thinkers in the CAE do with Lacanian psychoanalysis coming out of it and what the thinkers from the CCRU do with Deleuze and Guattari is in large part heretical and in large part conciliatory or in tune with their masters and with their predecessors. I'm sure you,

or I'm not sure, but Ray Brassier coined a wonderful phrase when describing the work of Nick Land as Matt Black Deleuzianism. Matt Black Deleuzianism. And this is, I think, an iteration on an expression by a philosopher called Decombe. What's his first name? Agile Decombe, whatever, but Decombe who called, who did he call Mad Black, whatever, it doesn't matter. He called Deleuze a Mad Black Heideggerian, right? No, I think it's, I mean, that might be true. I think it was Hegelianism. Yeah, something Mad Black Hegelianism. That's what I remember. But who was the Mad Black Hegelian? Leotard and Deleuze and Guattari.

You're right. Yes, exactly. Leotard's libidinal economy and Deleuze-Guattari's machinic ontology. So yeah, Ray Bressier makes this kind of contention that what you find in Nick Land's work is this kind of transvaluation of Deleuze-Guattarian machinic ontology and vitalism into a kind of complete inhumanist register. And I think that the CCRU, to the extent that it's, of course, extremely, very much influenced by Lance Ward, is in the same spirit. It's a kind of mad black transvaluation of Deleuze, Deleuze-Guattari in schizoanalysis and machinic ontology into an anti-philosophical register. Anti-philosophical is anti-philosophy, of course, in the sense that Alain Badiou coins the term, which basically means it's within the genre of philosophy, after all.

It addresses itself to philosophy. It speaks of philosophers and it talks about the topics that philosophers talk about. But in its discursive status, it tries to consolidate itself as a discourse outside of philosophy. right I mean the classical examples and modernity of course Nietzsche is the great anti-philosopher who claims to be waging against the whole of the philosophical tradition and Badiou claims that Lacan is an anti-philosopher and I think of course today I mean this is a contention that I make in my work is that Nick Land in a way is our Nietzsche is our great anti-philosopher the great anti-philosopher of day. And in this regard, the CCRU is this collective which does not exactly, I mean, wants to position itself outside of the strictures of philosophical discourse proper, but of course it is still

woven with or inscribed within a philosophical register. And similarly in the Cayet, even though Lacan, again, the great, you know, according to Badiou, the great anti-philosopher that any contemporary philosopher, he claims Badiou, would have to traverse. He says, I call any philosophy contemporary that has the courage to traverse the anti-philosophy of Lacan, he says. But this is in fact the project of the Kaie, in a certain sense. Badiou would join later, and we'll go through the historical details in a little bit more detail in a bit. But one way to understand the project in the Cayet is precisely to try to reincorporate into philosophy what was

precisely a challenge to philosophy seen from psychoanalysis, issued from psychoanalysis. And as we'll see, this is also because philosophy in the 40s and 50s was progressively leading itself to a kind of crisis, a dual crisis. On the one hand, there was the psychoanalytic challenge waged by Lacan. On the other hand, in the post-war period, as you are all probably familiar, there was a great suspicion about philosophy generated by the post-Heideggerian school and, you know, the historicism that emerged ever since, which basically wanted to call game over. The philosophy had exhausted its at least classical pretensions to consolidate itself as a kind of universal discourse, as an ontology, as a discourse on being, whatever you want.

And so the fact of this rhetoric, of this rhetoric of the end of metaphysics, the end of philosophy, the death of philosophy, which of course is very much echoed in post-war France by thinkers like Derrida, even Foucault flirts with this at certain points, and Sartre of course. And what we find is there's this attempt to reconstitute philosophy after its crisis in the first half of the 20th century, after Heidegger, and after, of course, the practical and human catastrophe of two world wars. So I think that is another way to look at this. Now, I'm jumping ahead of myself, and I'm all over the place right now, because I'm actually going to go through these points in a little bit more organized detail but yeah any anything else anybody wants to say before we start looking at slides

Daniel do you know Medri-Beram Khadjian? No I do not. He's one of Badou's philosophy students and he he has a interesting anti-philosophy stance you may be interested in his writing. Very much so I I mean, send me the reference. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, yeah. Phenomenal, phenomenal. Anybody else wants to say anything before we jump into the, to the oceans? To drown. Okay, cool. So let me, let me project. I have to share. That's pretty much the same. I mean, I hope, I hope Google, is Zoom owned by Google incidentally? Just like quick questions. No. No. I mean, they should, Google should sue them. I mean, they pretty much just completely plagiarized their platform.

Are you guys seeing the... Actually, if you want, I will tell you. Yeah. Google's business model has been to basically outsource this work to corporations because they basically maintain Google Hangout with great loss. so now by by dropping google hangout these other companies and there's quite a few of them can basically offer what google hangout did for a fee and then you can basically connect your feed to google live and still have it on youtube so basically it's a way of outsourcing plus uh they just want to keep their very serious corporate clients so they're offering the google

hangout as it was free before for for a much higher fee to their g suite customers ah well that makes sense okay i think they're okay even if some of these people are copying or getting inspired by some aspects of google hangouts great no that makes that makes a lot of sense i mean i was i was a little shocked at how similar the applications were uh but i'm i'm happy because you know, this makes it easy to navigate regardless. Oh, one more. I have a question. Yeah, absolutely. It's in the subtitle. You put dialectics and cybernetics. Yes. And I was asking if we could, yeah, you will do, I think that if we could connect this dialectics and cybernetics to this

philosophy and anti-philosophy. I will be doing that in due course because one of the things that, So, so dialectics on the side of the CAE and the CCRU on the side of cybernetics will be speaking, I mean, in this introductory session in a kind of like overarching way. But now that you mentioned it, I will be careful to draw the connection to philosophy and anti-philosophy as we understand it. Because I think that's a, that's an interesting nexus. Also, I should say one thing before we jump in. I'm hosting a fresh graduate student from UCLA today who is going to be arriving any like in an hour or something. So I just need to open the door when this happens. It'll take a minute or something. If they arrive, they might arrive later. So just forgive me for that. Just I got to open the door for them. But it should be fine. So everybody's looking at the slideshow.

Yes? Yes, yes, we can see it. And can you see it when I change the slides as well? Yes. Great. For whatever, hold on, let me just make sure I, because the sidebar where everybody is sort of, how do I do this? Okay. Crap. I just need a second to figure out how to make the... All right. Great, great, great, great. Okay, great. So the first thing, as we all know, this is an attempt to think together. Two of the most interesting think tanks which emerged in 20th century philosophy, the thinkers associated first with, there's like a bunch of typos in this paragraph, but whatever.

So the Cahiers pour l'analyse, which is closely associated to this research group, which was called Les Cercs d'Epistemologie, and which ran in France from roughly 1966 to 1969. So the Cahiers pour l'analyse really is the journal that was produced by this research group called Les Cercs d'Epistemologie. And just forgive me for those typos, because I changed this like right before. And then the second, of course, is the Cybernetic Research Culture Unit, which emerged from the University of Warwick in England, and whose production spanned roughly between the years 1995 and 2003. And again, to reiterate the central thesis that I want to put forward here is really that these groups, it's not just to focus on these groups in themselves and the influence

that they had, but that the pairing concentrates in the contemporary context, an iteration of this perennial tension between rationalism and empiricism, which has animated philosophical history since its inception, since Parmenides and Heraclitus. And so we are still there. the same questions haunt us. And these two research groups, in a way, bring forth the same questions that Hermannides and Heraclitus were waging in the contemporary context. So it's always refreshing to try to see how it is that philosophy goes through these motions as these kinds of transcendental structures, right? And if you want to think of philosophy transcendentally, like Laurel does, for example, right? To try to have a theory of philosophy, then this kind of oscillation is as solid as one can get. It's really a historical invariant that

sprawls across all the epochs of philosophical history. And I'll have more to say about just exactly what I mean by what exactly becomes reiterated. So what follows, I'll be seeking to clarify this thesis and introduce the two vectors and try to explain it in terms, precisely of this iterative historical pendular movement between rationalism and empiricism, and how it ramifies, you know, how it has ramifications for how we understand philosophy, not just in the contemporary context, but as a whole. So that's the other thing that I think is interesting about this pairing or this course, is that as much as we focus on these two groups, we can sort of metonymically understand something quite essential about the nature of philosophy as

whole. And by doing so, you can get a feel for where philosophy could be going in the future as well. So I will be also trying to draw a sense of how what happens after the CCRU and the Cahier can be understood also as analogous to what happens generally in response to the tensions between rationalism and empiricism, which is precisely to try to find a middle ground or a out of both. Spoiler alerts, Kant. And there's a reason why Kant has become popular again today, isn't it? So the first thing to say, the CAHES and the CCRU in the broadest possible sense again. So I propose to first of all read the project elaborated in the CAHES as

an attempt to rekindle the valences of the dialectical materialist method associated with the rationalist legacy in the wake of new advances in the social and formal sciences. And this attempt to rekindle dialectical materialism is formulated in response, as I mentioned earlier, to, on the one hand, this kind of post-Heideggerian dominance of phenomenology and existentialism and voluntarism in the political domain, which had become prescient in France in the 40s and 50s, above all, emblemized by the thinking of Sartre. One of the things that we will be reading for next session when we start reading the Caillers, you'll note Peter Hallward in the introduction, who traces in more detail the history of the Caillers, and we'll of course be talking about that as well next week in more

detail. But one of the things that he mentions is that in the 40s and 50s, really Sartre's influence had reached a kind of dead end, which was this conception, the Sartrean conception of the free self-determining subject, the abyss of freedom from which the act sprawls, and in relation to which the concept of structure was considered to be derivative had become defanged or had become a stale and it became impossible. One of the reasons why the re-interrogation of dialectical materialism in a structuralist register becomes necessary is precisely because this kind of volunteerism that the Sartrean picture leads to had become completely inefficient in creating new

modes of collectivization. So this is really the kind of deadlock in which French philosophy sort of has to shuffle the board once again and pick itself up. And in particular, as I mentioned, it did so, it tried to do this by attending to structuralist approaches that had become prescient and emergent in the fields of linguistics and psychoanalysis. And this appropriation of structuralism was, of course, very much, I mean, of course, it has its roots in Levi-Strauss, a structural anthropology, but it becomes a sort of dominant mode or form of thinking. We'll talk more about what exactly structuralism means in this kind of general sense, but it becomes in the project of the Cahiers reflected above all in the schools and

the works of Altsusser and Lacan and their students and followers. So we will be seeing how this structuralist promise becomes the lever, methodological lever, to re-interrogate or rekindle the possibility of a dialectical materialist theory of subjectivity, and therefore of politics. On the other hand, I propose to read the CCRU as a higher to the empiricist tradition in what is an attempt to defy the valences of the dialectical method. So yes, the CCRU, as in general empiricists also consider themselves to be in direct tension with the dialectic. And it does so by looking at a different possibility for formalization or formal,

let's say, methodological instruction. So rather than looking at structuralist approaches in linguistic or psychoanalysis or in the social sciences, as it had become, as becomes predominant the Cahiers, the thinkers of the CCRU look at cybernetic theory. And in particular, as it is informed by the kind of work that you see in the machinic ontology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, which I'm pretty sure, well I'm not sure, but which is largely indebted to the work of Gilbert Simondon, for example, earlier in the century, but which also tries to not only circumscribe itself to developments in the science as proper, but which tries to forge

a new kind of materialist metaphysics and what they call hyperstitional practice, and we'll talk more about this, and by drawing from all kinds of experimental practices in the arts, everything from electronic music to, you know, different forms of, let's say, aberrant literature that, you know, from Lovecraftian mythology, gothic mythology to Gibsonian cyberpunk. And so it becomes this extraordinary place of intellectual production and cultural production. And the CCRU similarly conceives of itself as responding to what had become a prevalent mode of discourse, not just in the academy, but in the kind of intellectual

ambience promoted by philosophers and theorists, which was the kind of crass historicist relativism that was popularized, especially in cultural studies in comparative literature and places as such. Well, in England, mostly in cultural studies, but which of course peddled similarly to the kind of like post-Heideggerian trajectories in France and post-war France had like leaked into the humanities this kind of general relativism and textualist hermeneutics. And one of the things we'll see is that one of the very first texts in the CCRU writings collection addresses itself directly as a kind of challenge to this hegemonic academic

discourse that had become prevalent at the time. And, you know, the writers of the CCRU collective expressed a blatant disgust at cultural studies. And they say, you know, we just, there's a wonderful line that they write, which is something like, you know, middle class white people speaking on behalf of the oppressed is not our jam or something like that. And they thought that popular forms of cultural production that were largely neglected and pushed apart from the ivory towers of the academy were every bit as ripe. And that was where the true popular and emancipatory movements were occurring, not in this lofty discourse of the academy, but actually in the underground clubs and with the artists and popular pop literature and so on and so forth.

So in this regard, and this is to answer the question about anti-philosophy and philosophy, if the Caillère on the one hand does try to sort of rekindle dialectical materialist philosophy after Lacan, after the Lacanian challenge and after the derail of metaphysics, The CCRU is trying to not reconstitute philosophy, but actually position itself against both on the one hand, this kind of crass end of metaphysics relativist tenor that had become predominant in the post-war era, and especially in the English speaking world with the growth of cultural studies and all these other fields.

But also it presumes to be a kind of more ambitiously still a very violent anti-philosophical discourse that in the spirit of Nietzsche, Bataille, and others would wage war against the very foundations of philosophy, not just this kind of reduced relativistic mournful pathetic form that it had obtained in the fields that I mentioned. So that's like the basic construal of the two vectors. Nevertheless, in spite of these like diametrical divergences, we can see that they are looking to address a set of common problems, right? And these are really the questions that we will be considering as weaving the two think tanks together.

First... One question. Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So regarding the slide before where you said, OK, the CCAU position themselves against this historic relativism and theory and cultural studies and philosophy. And I asked myself, why? Why didn't they just choose sides? Maybe that they think, OK, they both share too much. I would like to understand what they reject at both sides. Right. Yeah, so of course we'll get into that as we delve deeper into the materials. But to give you a feel for what's at stake here, this goes really back to this whole

Parmenides and Heraclitus question. If you think about the origins of philosophy in its Platonic and Socratic form, one of the things that people tend to forget is that Heraclitus was considered to be on the side of the sophists, right? So Heraclitus is both, you know, the harbinger, the originator of the empiricist legacy, but in its origins, it was actually sharply separated from philosophy, which was rather understood on the model of the Parmenidean dialectical model. And one of the things that the CCRU does or takes issue with is precisely the dialectic. So we will see how this sort of brings back or rekindles from the grave very, very familiar tropes that you get already,

for example, in Nietzsche about the limits of the dialectical method and the limits of the classical pretensions of philosophy. Nevertheless, I think that there is a kind of you want to have your cake and eat it thing, which is generally the case with anti-philosophy. In other words, one of the things that Badiou, I think, is correct in diagnosing is that anti-philosophy, even though it positions itself against philosophy, it nevertheless belongs to the philosophical tradition. So when somebody like Nick Land or the thinkers of the CCRU peddle something like a post-philosophical or anti-philosophical materialism, or when they pit cybernetics against philosophy as a whole, you have to think to yourself, well, you know,

is this just rhetorical flourish? Is this just sort of taking a stand? Or is this, you know, just a different kind of philosophy, really, you know, which I think it is at the end of the day. I mean, if you're talking about materialism, it is at the end of the day, a philosophical position that you're articulating, regardless of the disavowed sort of hatred, right, of philosophy that you might want to have. Hold on. I have to actually to, in order to keep, I have to keep track of the chat window as well, but the part of the problem is that it goes over the slideshow as I see it. I don't know if you see it as well right now, what I'm seeing, but just let me see. Ressick precisely, just to make sure that Vincent de Combe is caught up in adding that prioritizing.

Yes. Oh, yeah. Well, one thing about just to say about the Badiouian concept of anti-philosophy, which is, of course, which I'm running with here. The way Badiou, for those of you who are not familiar with this concept, I guess I should just like introduce it, is that for Badiou, essentially anti-philosophy positions the act or the act of the subject against the category of truth. So truth, of course, the classical sort of philosophical category, which denotes universality and variance and so on. Philosophy, the discourse, which aims to forge a concept of truth. And every now and then in the history of philosophy comes the anti-philosopher to poop all over the party and basically say, you know, well, truth is impossible and so on and so forth.

And they produce a challenge to philosophy generally in the name of a kind of practical rather than theoretical imperative. So there's a kind of close connection between anti-philosophy and practicism understood as a sort of act or a doing, a kind of practice that cannot be reincorporated into the registers of philosophical adjudication. So this is a really, really interesting concept that helps, but you periodize philosophy in different ways. And I think Eakin just wrote something very interesting there, which is how he describes it in the book Logics of World, but he's actually devoted a series of seminars to the great anti-philosophers of modernity with Malabranche,

you know Lacan, Nietzsche and so on so forth so so I and you know these are getting published now I think the Mali branch is supposed to come out if it hasn't already so that's already available the one on Lacan is out and I'm pretty sure the ones on Nietzsche are going to come out also the one on Plato is about to come out regardless so that's all in our oh and Kirk of course as well so anyway so just to get back to the to the to the slideshow so so the the set of common questions that bind both of these think tanks together. And we'll return to some of these concerns about just like exactly where all of this fits into the philosophy and the philosophy spectrum. But first question is how to think of a notion of materiality freed from ideological or idealistic overtones.

This is, as you know, those of you who are familiar with the work of Althusser, one of the important questions that he and his group are raising time and time again in the Cahiers is how to reconstitute the concept of science and the distinction between science and ideology, which was dear to Marx, in the wake of the critique of scientificity and philosophy and of metaphysics that had become popular since Heidegger in the 20th century. So Althusser is very much looking at structural psychoanalysis for pointers, for finding a way out of this historicist relativist deadlock generated by the postmodern and Heideggerian sort of saga. Second, how to

think of a concept of subjectivity freed from pious humanism, right? So as I mentioned, in the case of the Calleja, for example, Sartrean voluntarism had become a predominant mode of of thinking, and it had led practical political thought to a kind of philosophical deadlock. And how to free philosophy and our conceptions of the subject and of activity from this kind of residual voluntarist humanism. So these two questions, the question of the subject on the one hand and the question of politics and agency, which are the two questions that I line up here, are obviously interwoven. So, you know, one of the things we have to always think about is how it is that both the CA and the CCRU are trying to simultaneously reconstitute the concept of the

subject and the concept of being outside of regulated forms of philosophical discourse and also ideological overtones or overdeterminations. How is it possible to do this? to resist the death of metaphysics and the death of philosophy. Finally, how to escape positively the patheticism or ambivalence of postmodern cynicism and critical irony after the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics and the critique of all universalist projects. So that's of course the big umbrella which sprawls across both projects in a way because the CCRU, even though it's not situated in the immediate consequence of the, like in the French post-war context of the effects of phenomenology and existentialism with Sard, Merleau-Ponty,

and so on. Nevertheless, what I mentioned before, which is the increasing influence of Heideggerian thought and post-modernity and deconstruction and literary criticism in the humanities, had become extraordinarily oppressive or constrictive, according to the people in the this is RU. And so both are trying to find a way out of this deadlock. And as we shall see, what results out of this is two divergent versions of materialism, two divergent conceptions of what means, what the subject is, and different formal means and methods to achieve the liberations of our accounts of being and subjectivity. And it is in this divergence that we see the reiteration of

the choice between rationalism and empiricism that I mentioned before. And what we can call, guess, a kind of neo-modern sequence, like neo-modernity, where we're once again in this kind of sequence and repeating itself. Let me stop there for one second just to check the chat. Anybody has any questions or comments, please jump in. Lacan didn't invent the term. Yeah. Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah, no, Lacan didn't invent the term. And in fact, there are times where he says, Lacan, I'm a philosopher, you know, screw this. And there's other times where he says, Adrian Johnson's very good with this stuff, incidentally. I have another question about the slide says it's about liberation of our concepts, or maybe

the thing itself of being and subjectivity in both and CCIU. And maybe that's just a word association, but is this that there is some kind of inherent emancipatory rector in both in the CACER and in the CCIU? And the question is just, okay, what is to be emancipated? Liberation on the side of the theory is coupled to emancipation in some way. No, exactly. And actually, so this is why the question of the subject is indissociable from the question of politics or emancipation or liberation or practice in general, right? Especially if you're trying to simultaneously defy anthropomorphic conception of the subject or

idealism or a kind of overlaid humanism in your conception of the subject, if you're trying to precisely decant the concept of the subject from these spooks, you're going to have to explain very clearly what kind of agency constitutes itself, especially when you speak about collective agency or something like an emancipatory process or a political process. What does this mean once you've sort of destroyed the kernel of the will or the kernel of, you know, phenomenological experience that characterizes these earlier humanist accounts of subjectivity? And what what we will see is precisely that both proponents in the CA and the CCRU produce radically different

conceptions of the subject. And in this difference, you can see very, very perennial tensions reemerge with regards to, for example, what kind of politics one can emerge, one can expect from each of these vectors. And lo and behold, the distinction today, for example, between left and right accelerationism is intimately woven into this divergence, this conceptual and theoretical divergence. We're not ready for that yet, of course. We have to go through the motions of understanding just exactly what these people think the subject is, how do you elaborate it, and from there we can have a more robust conception of what they think, let's say, emancipation can be or politics can be or cannot be in any case, right? The CCRU are famous for,

as you know as land progressively sunk into this spiral of not cynicism i would call it but this kind of uh you know trying to have no residual truck with any form of humanism or vitalism whatsoever or voluntarism the question of whether even the the term politics can can apply becomes precarious and urgent so that's another thing we're going to be interrogating in fact which is within the horizon that the CCRU sets out for us and within their conception of subjectivity, is there really any room for anything like collective organization, action, emancipation, or is it not really a deadline? Cool. There's an interesting discussion still going on Lacan

and anti-philosophy in the chat room, but let's move forward because I have quite a bit to go through. Let me see. That's not changing. There we go. And so one of the things I was saying is that, you know, this kind of pairing reveals a historic, it's not just curious, but it reveals a historical invariance or a kind of structural invariance in the history of philosophy and that this can shed light on what we can expect from philosophy or demand philosophy do in the future. So we will be looking at a variety of think tanks and vectors of thought, orientations of thought that occur from these two schools or whatever you want to call them. And I mentioned a few, naturalist metaphysics, speculative realism, neorationalism, accelerationism, post-humanism

and inhumanism, theory fiction, xenofeminism. So there's quite a lot there. And we don't have time to be extremely devoted to any one of these in much detail. So a lot of these topics will be overlapping and just emerging as part of a wider conversation that we'll have. And I'm trying to keep track at the same time of the chat window, sorry, to make sure that nobody, if anybody has a question, just try, because it's kind of difficult for me to keep going back and forth and then like un-noodle, like not making it cover my screen, basically. Okay, so a few words on the structure of the course. So there's two parts. First part really encompasses weeks two to five, and this is an examination of the primary sources.

So we will be reading the major text from the two-volume collection of the Calleja, edited by Peter Hallward, titled Form and Concept, which includes recent commentary by the authors that participated in the Calleja in a kind of like retrospective assessment. And we will be reading from, of course, the collected writings of the CCRU, which from 1997 to 2003. The CCRU again has this kind of extraordinarily erratic production that sprawls way beyond textual production. So there's, you know, all forms of visual and auditory art that would be cool to engage with, but we will be focusing on the collected writings. I mean, we just don't have that much time. So, and specifically the 1997 to 2003 collection,

collected writings, there's quite a bit, as you know, that occurs after in the blogosphere that is very difficult to track and to trace and to piece together in a coherent fashion. And a more comprehensive course just devoted to the CCRU would take a look at that, but we will just be concerned with the canon, as it were. Then in part two, which encompasses is weeks 68, we will be engaging in an examination of the ramifications and the legacy of these two think tanks. So we will be undertaking a survey of the most influential vectors of thought that were directly inspired by these two think tanks and which respond to the frictions between them constructively and critically, including the thought, the orientations of thought that I mentioned, like new process, naturalist, metaphysics, like Manuel de Landa, speculative realism,

Kenton Mayasue, neo-rationalism, Ray Brassier, accelerationism in both his left and rightist forms, so Nick Srinosetton Williams and the Sith Lord himself, Nick Land, and the recent xeno-feminist project, which is concentrated in the Laboria Cubonic's think tank or collective. So in what follows, I want to just draw this kind of course genealogy, philosophical genealogy, of broader genealogy, which can help us situate this course in a wider constellation of philosophical problems. So three conceptual diets, those who have taken seminars with me before will find these

three rather familiar. They animate much of my work. So the first one is the diet between materialism and idealism. And this is a diet which concerns the metaphysical question about whether what is said to be is mind-dependent or mind-independent, right? So I should put it the other way around just for coherence, but mind-dependency, if what there is is mind-dependent, that's idealism. If what there is is mind-independent, that's classically considered either realism or materialism, right? So materialists endorse the existence of a mind-independent reality, whereas idealists, at least in their absolute form, say that reality is, in some sense, mind-dependent. And this is a metaphysical question or determination. The second diet, empiricism and rationalism, concerns the epistemological question about how being is known or disclosed through different abilities or capacities.

Right. So empiricism classically endorses the thesis, according to which that which is knowable or known is disclosed primarily, first and foremost, through sensory intuition. Whereas rationalists claim, on the other hand, that there is a kind of knowledge which is not sensorially or, I'm sorry, like derived from the senses, but can be arrived to inferentially through the exercise of pure reason or reason itself. So the classical example, of course, here would be something like Descartes, right? Descartes thinks that the foundations of knowledge are achieved in a kind of retrieval of our innate ideas that you obtain from the armchair through a procedure that he calls radical doubt.

On the other hand, you have somebody like Locke, who is the paradigmatic modern empiricist who claims, no, there are no innate ideas. All knowledge begins in the sensible and from the sensible, right? Simple impressions yield simple ideas, but everything bottoms in impressions and the effect of the senses on the body. and finally there's this third uh uh dyad which is parmenidianism and heraclitianism and this is again a metaphysical determination or contrast but this concerns the distinction of whether being is said to be prior to becoming or whether becoming is prior to being so classically parmenides claims as you know that being is one and by one he means it is it it has the properties

of unity, it is unchanging, it persists in time, it is not subject, in other words, to the flux of the sensible. Whereas on the other hand, Heraclitians claim that you can never step into the same river twice, that matter, reality is flux and change, it's chaos in the last instance, and that instability, I'm sorry, that stability, unity, permanence is the exception, that in fact, natural reality is constituted and being is constituted as becoming. So the priority of being is, of course, a Parmenidean gesture. The priority of becoming is the Heraclitian gesture. Are these three diets somewhat clear? I'm slightly Russian, but hopefully this is not too

convoluted. Any questions? Let me check the chat just in case somebody's not very chatty. Let's see. I think you did an excellent job of carving this diad, by the way. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I have another question concerning empiricism and rationalism. Yes. And couldn't one say that basically that when you say, okay, you're an empiricist and you claim that there is no knowledge that is not derived from the sense. I ask myself if basically empiricism in its most radical way actually challenges any notion of rationality or reason itself.

And it says, okay, well, reason, rationality is the product of something else. Absolutely. And Eric, one of the, I mean, you sort of spilled the beans here, but one of the things that we're going to see is that as empiricism progresses or develops, and especially in the CCRU, it's no longer an empiricism that can be said to simply be dependent on the primacy of the aesthetic, for example, on aesthetic receptivity. But just like it challenges thinking or rationality as a whole, it also challenges the conception of aesthetic receptivity or sensation. So it's a kind of radical empiricism decanted from any kind of support in the human faculties.

That is to say, sensibility and the understanding or the intellect. But we'll see actually how the CCRU, the way that they promote this kind of radical anti-philosophy or materialism is precisely by voiding the kind of residual vitalism and aestheticism from empiricism. And they do so by producing, by basically reducing empiricism to a kind of functional pragmatism or what is really called a practicism. Nick Land calls it machinic practice, machinic practicism. And we'll see what this means in more precise detail later. But you're very much in tune. Yeah. Any other comments or concerns or anything?

no all right well so i wanted to comment um i i uh was reminded uh when you talked about the let's say critiquing uh the subjectivity that happened let's say this critique that happened up I remember that there's this sort of memory of someone who went to Birch are we I'm not hearing Federico are you guys hearing Federico? no can you hear me? I think his signal maybe turn the video off and ask your question

okay I'm going to try that. Federico, can you repeat your comment, please? Oh, yeah. Regarding the undermining that the CCRU made about subjectivity. Yes. I remember that there's this memory of someone who went to Virtual Futures in 1994 and commented, let's say, this discussion that went between the Landa land and I think it was Stellark, that they were actually criticizing this, destratifying, this mad destratification that Lann did about subjectivity. And the Lann that was criticizing Lann's destratification, telling him that basically this would be a reinforcing of, you know,

the things that he was trying to destratify. You know, that eventually that was what happened to him personally, this re-stratification of what he was trying to radically uh destratify no like no that's really interesting yeah i don't know about this conversation but i would be very much interested in uh in hearing more about it but yeah i think one and i think uh ray brassy has a very similar critique which is that there's only so much you can throw away before you end up back in sort of a kind of dogmatic metaphysical framework right that's actually the kernel of my own critique of of Nick, which I develop in a chapter in my, well, as part of a chapter in a book, which traces this kind of trajectory. But I agree with Delanda there, that there is a kind of deadlock that you obtain with

practicism at the end of the tunnel. Now, to be fair, one of the things that we're going to be looking at as well is the limits of what these, both of these trajectories propose. So just like the CCRU's practices model of subjectivity and agency has a kind of limit point or deadlock or faces a problem, so does the model of subjectivity that you get from the people in the CAIR meet a whole roster of familiar problems, right? And what's interesting is that both problems make the other camp go, oh, you see, you've relapsed into some kind of pious, humanist trope here, right? So the CCRU relapses predictably to a kind of dogmatic metaphysical

practicism that just is simply completely arbitrary and dogmatic. And de Cahiers ends up producing this concept of subjectivity as the cut or break or seizure of the situation, predigmatically in Badiou's sort of event, which is a kind of rekindled voluntarism hiding underneath the ranks, because you need subjectivation to sort of inscribe itself in the structure in a way that is somehow anomalous or illegal or something like that. And at that point, you have the residual Sartrean, the influence of Sartre, the ghosts of Sartre reemerge in the shadow of the structuralist legacy. And I think that's a very interesting thing, how if you look at both of these trajectories, their ultimate failures are analogous to the failures of the

classical rationalist and empiricist. In other words, the problems that modern empiricism faced and the problems that modern rationalism faced are the same problems that these people face now. And the reason why I think Kant has become popular and the reason why much of what we call neorationalism today begins precisely by a reconsideration of the Kantian and German idealist legacy more broadly in the pursuit of a transcendental materialism or dialectical materialism is precisely because it is with Kant that you get an attempt at a resolution from these two camps. I suppose this is something I should have said, but now it's crystallized after your comment, is that one thing that's absolutely crucial that marks the common ground of both

the CAIE and the CCRU is that both are very strongly or claim to be very strongly post-Contient registers of expression, right? Both have no truck with representation, both have no truck with epistemology proper. They, you know, they really don't care about that at all. But there's a price to be paid for that, right? And we'll see precisely what the price is to be Hey, I think somebody wrote something. Would be interesting to you. Yeah, me too. So Federico, if you can later send us the source, that would be lovely. One question. You said that both run into the same problems, basically. And I asked, would these individual think tanks or collectives subscribe to, okay, we

share common problems? Or is the question of, okay, like if you say, okay, the CCIU runs back into the dogmatic metaphysics, and from their point of view, they wouldn't, maybe they wouldn't say that. Like, that's maybe my question. Like, do they all share a universal framework, basically? Does it look from, is it like the perspectivism that's dependent upon which then to have you perceive different problems? Right. So, so I mean, so there's two parts to this question, really. One is, of course, each of these think tanks includes a variety of thinkers within it. So it's, it can be overly violent, especially in the case of the Cahiers, where, you know, it was, it went on for 10 volumes and, you know, everybody from Foucault to Derrida published there.

So it would be exceedingly crass to say that everybody just says the same thing at the end of the day. But there is a kind of common ground that the members of the CAIE, and especially after Badiou's arrival in the last two years, do share. And, of course, all of them – and so in the case of the CCRU, it's more complicated, of course, because they write as a collective and not as a separate author, right? And that's part of their whole idea of trying to destabilize the notion of authorship and individual subjectivation and trying to – and so on. But with regards to the question of whether they would admit to this claim, which is that they fall into familiar tropes or troubles that plagued classical empiricist and rationalist philosophy before them, absolutely they would have something to say back, right?

I mean, of course, no philosopher ever just goes and hears you're wrong and just stays quiet and changes their mind. They all have interesting and intricate defenses, which is why we still have a kind of debate going on between Badiouans and Deleuzians and Nick Land and Reza and so on and so forth. So there is a debate, of course. What I offer to you is that there is a clear issue, nevertheless, that is clearly identifiable in the rationalist trajectory, emblemizing the CAE and the kind of concept of subjectivity that they draw from, again, a kind of structural conception of the subject. And then on the other hand, the cybernetic model from the CCRU, which leads to a kind of practicism. Now, both have a set of problems that one has to answer.

And whether we have arrived after their original formulation to satisfactory answers to that question, that will be part of what we will be examining as we read these texts and we explore these questions. Okay. Is that helpful? That is okay. Thanks. Great. I think we'll come back to it. Oh yeah, yeah. No, of course, this is just like the or however you pronounce the French pretentious word. So one more, just this is by way of illustration, to illustrate this kind of iteration across the epochs of philosophy of this dialectic between rationalism and empiricism, beginning with the founding fathers. So with Parmenides, you have your classical rationalist

philosopher according to which being is disclosed to thinking to pure thinking in the idea or as the idea and it is subtracted from the flux of sensory appearances being as one is permanent heraclitus the paradigmatic empiricist claims that being is the flux of sensation the ceaseless coming into being an out of being which the idea cannot fail to apprehend because you know the moment that you identify something as whatever it is this river even ostensibly it's already becomes something different. So the idea can never match the thing itself, the process of material becoming, right? Which is what is presented directly to the senses rather than to thinking. In the modern legacy, I already mentioned this classical iteration. So Descartes, for Descartes,

who is the pragmatic rationalist, modern rationalist, innate ideas are discovered inferentially while sensation is mute. Primary properties are known by mathematical representings and they do not resemble sensory appearances. So as you know, with Descartes, you already have the basic distinction between physical representings and mental representatives. So what you have is a kind of algebraic geometrical language, which enables you to know of physical matter through these kinds of second order discursive representations, which are mathematical formula, right? So the sensible is only known, the material world

is only known secondarily through these abstract representings, which are fundamentally abstract in nature. They're ideal structures, they're mathematical algebraic formula. So the sensory can only be apprehended or known derivatively through the idea, right? Whereas on the contrast, Locke and Hume, the empiricists, claim that ideas are derived from sensory impressions directly. You have a kind of direct causal access or rather causal efficacy that goes from having or undertaking a sensory impression to having an idea of that impression. This is what classically Wilfred Sellers calls the myth of the given, right? The myth of the given is the idea that

the structure of the world imprints itself on the mind as a seal does on wax, right? You go from having a sensation of P to knowing that P is P or A is A or whatever. So in the contemporary context, or I should say, well, 20th century context, right? We can find once again, this kind of reiteration in, for example, the distinction in the attempt to forge a new thinking of science in the wake of evolutionary biology, but also in the wake of mathematical physics and trying to assess its legacy. And for example, the division between Bachelard and Bergson, who after all had their fair share of tussles, like in print, not tussles, but divergences. So with Bachelard,

you of course have your classical rationalist thinker, to whom the Cahiers is largely indebted as far as philosophy of science is concerned. Bachelard claims or argues that science thinks being as purely relational. In other words, that science thinks not of essences that are eternal within a particular discursive framework, but thinks of relationships between elements in a particular theoretical framework. And that one has to think of science or the history of science as a series of formal breakthroughs in relational, in how you set up a system of relations, which is progressive and historically bound to a specific practical interest, to specific distorting factors. And you can see just by reading this description, which is very crass,

I know, but it will have to do, how this is already very much in the spirit of a structuralist conception of materiality, right? A relational, fundamentally relational conception of materiality in which rather than thinking about what something is in terms of a set of internal properties or essential properties or qualitative properties or something like that, you think of the identity of something in terms of how it relates or is distinguished from other elements in a node or network of relations or a system of relations, right? But this system of relations is purely abstract. It's a formal ideography. It's part of a scientific theory. On the other hand, on the flip side of this is, of course, you have Bergson, the vitalist, right? The Alain Vittor,

in which, as you know, when he describes the movement of what he calls creative evolution, sensibility presents directly to thinking the qualitative and intensive nature of being as pure duration. So for Bergson, you know, the fabric of conceptualization of the intellect is nothing but a distorting sieve in relation to the endowments of the sensible. The sensible presents pure duration that is becoming directly to thinking, right? Which is why Bergson short circuits the distinction between representation and the thing in itself, or, you know, the appearance and reality so as to identify appearances with the things themselves. In other words, what presents itself directly to the sensible, to your sensory experience,

is the thing in itself. Appearances are the things, which is why also, incidentally, Bergson is not only an empiricist, but obviously a Heraclitian, right? Because he prioritizes the flux of sensibility, i.e. duration, what he calls pure duration, over sedentary, discreetly individuated bodies in space and time. But doesn't that disequilibrium, the flux in La Dure, doesn't it also quell and form a kind of equilibrium? So the flux is always settling and because my reading of Bergson is that there is something this this rift where

you know will comes into play Bergson is trying to sort of save free will despite it's occluded from our epistemic access through duration through movement through this this flux which is then quelled and thus out of reach so sort of this ideal beacon do you think that's something new that's sort of introduced, not maybe solely in Bergson, but this notion of will, at what point do you think that introduces itself? I think he wants that because part of the problem that he faces, especially when he gets into this deep discussion in creative evolution, I mean, so there's two parts of it, of course. Bergson is no, so on the one hand, just because he accepts the

primacy of pure of of the sensory and pure becoming and duration it doesn't mean that he doesn't have a theory of individuation he does but it's a very weak one right how is it that the the world of pure duration eventually yield the discrete bodies that populate the natural world the discrete forms of space and time blah blah blah i mean he has this entire account this is exactly what matter and memory tries to do but create in creative evolution he has a much more sort of like hectic and out of control project where he tries to tap this back to a bunch of other things. And one of the things that he wants to leave room for is precisely what you're saying, freedom and the will, and how to inscribe this into this kind of naturalist metaphysical order. And I don't know that Bergson, at least nothing that I have read, has persuaded me into thinking

that Bergson has anything close to a coherent account of how this taps into the metaphysics. In other words, it seems almost like a supplementary bit of the account, but I've never been quite able to figure out, maybe you can help me with this, but it's like, I've never been able to figure out how the will presumably plays a role in the constitution of duration and how it presumably can affect how individuation takes place. I mean, because the workings of memory, right, and the contractions of memory, which yield this discrete, you know, individuation for for berkson are not products of any kind of deliberative act they are they're they're they're somatic psychosomatic processes of a psychological nature as he says but they're not

a process that that is subordinated to deliberative cognition in the sense of like conceptual inferential thinking right as far as i can tell but then i mean to the extent that freedom requires something of that ilk, right? Something like deliberative cognition, something like, you know, rational adjudication or whatever you want. It's not clear to me how that can work within the framework that Bergson has laid for us. And to be fair, I think this is a problem that afflicts Bergson's metaphysics and metaphysicians, including Deleuze, although Deleuze is a much more sophisticated account of subjectivation, as far as I can tell. But yeah, you can... Yeah, I agree with this qualm. I recently reviewed David Lapujad's book on Berkson, Powers of Time, and he elaborates

on what Berkson calls sympathy, which a lot of secondary commenters have dismissed. So I recommend this text for kind of a new reading on Bergson, mostly through his writing on, I mean, through his whole oeuvre, however that word is also pronounced. I feel like it sounds like oval when people pronounce it. It's not oval. But yeah, I recommend this book. No, excellent. I mean, thank you. But one thing I should just say. So the question of whether there is actually a reasonable role, let's say, for the will to be placed in this framework, that still doesn't affect the fact that he is an empiricist, right?

I mean, at the bottom, we still have this kind of direct, I mean, the very beginning of creative evolution makes this like absolutely unambiguous, right? That you begin with the order of common sense, and the order of common sense, it's wet not just to common speech or parlance, but you describe things as they appear to you directly, and directly that is to the senses, right? So in that regard, that he is an empiricist, even if there is a room for the will, remains, I think, a fairly secure thesis. Okay? Well, I mean, I guess that's not fair, but... I have another question regarding this cultural studies, historical relativism, post-Heideggerian phenomenology.

and you now categorize the Cajere and the CCIU as rationalist and empiricist, but they both, like what we say, okay, postmodern theory, cultural study, all this clumped into one road. Where would you put this one in this diast between rationalism and empiricism? You mean the post-Heideggerian or the Heideggerian trajectory? Yes, yes. And what both the Cajere and the CCIU rallied again? Well, I think that broadly, well, in its original Husserlian inception, I think that Husserl was trying to do something very similar to what Kant was trying to do. Even though, I mean, so phenomenology in its Husserlian form is a form of transcendental

philosophy, of course, and also in its early Heideggerian form. So it is, and what exactly, So notice that Kant is missing here, because one of the things that doesn't show in this dialectic is how it is that after there is a rift between, say, Parmenides, Siraclitus, Descartes, Hulakos, and so on, there comes somebody who tries to grapple with what was coming from both and try to reconcile the two or to take what was true about either or about each. and Kant is the paradigmatic modern exemplar and I think Husserl and Heidegger are trying to do something quite similar. In other words, Heidegger's, so just to focus on Heidegger because he seems he's more consequential for the cluster that eventually leads to the, you know, sort of

death of metaphysics derail and, you know, the CCRU and the KRU take issue with, but Heidegger's early project begins as a transcendental phenomenology, right? Being in time is a transcendental phenomenology, which he calls a fundamental ontology. And in this regard, he's repeating the Kantian project of precisely trying to sort of adjudicate what are the conditions, transcendental conditions of experience, but not just circumscribing those transcendental conditions of experience to the conditions of representation or cognition. So Heidegger describes existential conditions of access that are more primary or primitive than the purely representational forms of aesthetic intuition and intellectual subsumption or conceptualization

that Kant describes. And even more so than Husserl wants to dislodge our practical know-how from this kind of representational framework of intentionality that still had Husserl beholden to the notion of the object, the transcendental subject on the one hand and the object on the other. So what I think that it begins like this, right, with a kind of like attempt to reconcile this kind of, on the one hand, rationalist transcendental project of trying to describe invariant structures, but of experience precisely, kind of like what Kant was doing.

Kant is precisely seen as trying to reconcile rationalism and empiricism, because when he tries to describe the invariant conditions of experience, the conditions of possibility of experience, he tries to describe these generic concepts, which describe how it is that we empirically receive, you know, experience the world through our aesthetic faculties, right, through the forms of space and time. And similarly, Heidegger wants to do something exactly like that. He wants to reconcile the idea of describing these invariant structures, but to describe experiential structures. Now, what happens after Heidegger is that when the transcendental project, just like Kant's project, faces a kind of deadlock, methodological, and we can't really get into this right now, but that's like, we devoted a bit of this in my previous seminar, a fair chunk to talking about this bit.

But when the transcendental project fails for a variety of reasons, you have the unleashing of a sequence, which is basically this kind of historicist hermeneutic sequence, in which progressively the aims of achieving precisely a kind of transcendental phenomenology or a fundamental ontology become increasingly precarious, to the point where you start seeing this kind of rhetoric of maybe philosophy is done, maybe it's the end of metaphysics and the beginning of something like post-metaphysical thinking, but this is no longer really philosophy. Philosophy is metaphysics. And this gets pushed to an extreme, especially after the sort of onslaught of the postmodern historicist and deconstructionist saga, when you get to somebody like Jameson, who very closely separates, for example,

theory from philosophy, and even goes as far as saying, theory is on the side of dialectics, on the side of historicism, on the side of change. Philosophy is always totalizing, blah, blah, blah, So this is the junction which the CCRU wants to oppose or situates itself. So it begins with Heidegger's sort of like Kantian gesture, but Kant is always the beginning of an end. Kant designates a limit point in modern philosophy, just like Heidegger designates a limit point in the 20th century philosophy. because in trying to reconcile the rationalist and empiricist vectors, Kant finally brought philosophy all together to a kind of deadlock and to the ground,

and Heidegger did the same. So what we're going to see is precisely how we are today in the contemporary neorationalist sort of configuration and its prescient ongoing hurdle with a variety of other approaches coming from orientations much more amenable to the results of the CCRU, for example, we're reaching this kind of heightened tension, conceptual tension in the contemporary context. And it will be interesting to see how this takes shape. Hopefully that's enough. I do need to make haste to reach the end of the day. But if anybody wants to say anything else, please jump in too. So, oh yeah, I mean of course the final point in this slide is that our predicament

or the contemporary iteration, this is the basic thesis, the Caillé represents the rationalist orientation and we'll see Peter Hallward actually has a much cleaner sort of exposition about how the Caillé relates back to French rationalism. But in this tradition, the essential iteration of the thesis is that mathematics or semiotics thinks of matter purely a structure or a pure form and of subjectivity as a break or cut with the ontological order of the same or the one or representation or you name it, right? But it is mathematics and semiotics, which gives you the basic vocabulary of ontology on the one hand and ontology, you know, it's mathematics is pure structure, pure form, no content. It decants itself from any kind of residual relativization

to natural language or to the sensory or to anything qualitative or essential. So it's a relational ontology as well. And subjectivity gets within this kind of model inscribed as a kind of exception, break, cut, fissure, or distortion within the relational order. So there's an attempt to think of being a structure on the one hand, and subjectivity as something that happens within the structural order as a disturbance or intrusion to the structural order. On the other hand, the CCRU, which is the higher to the empiricist tradition, conceives of cybernetics, and particularly in its Deleuze-Guatturian sort of frame, to think of materiality as purely functionally or mechanically without intellectual or aesthetic mediation, and consequently of subjectivity, not, you know,

in continuity with the kind of like Lacanian psychoanalytic structural conception, but schizoanalytically, they say, as something that is actually completely impersonal or inhuman, something that operates at the subhuman and superhuman levels, and that is completely resistant to narrativization into the traditional tropes of political or psychological or phenomenological agency. So obviously you can see very cleanly in this formulation how it is that both conceptions are almost diametrically opposed to each other, right, in their core. But both nevertheless, notice this, are agree in trying to conceive of a concept, an ontology and a conception of the subject that is essentially freed from its supports on any kind of like

experiential faculties, right? So both try to do away with this kind of residual, phenomenological, vitalist, or facultative wellspring. So that's, you know, the core iteration. It's a crass genealogy, but it will have to do for now. Now let me just say a couple of things about each of the two circles of a slightly more historical nature. Now, the Cirque d'Epistemologie, however you pronounce that, was a collective entity which was promoted above all by Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude, sorry, that was a typo there, Mille Nair, throughout its years and across the 10 volumes of the journal Cahiers included contributions by the following members.

And this is just like a small, well, not a small, but so there's a website, which I'll send a link to, which compiles the majority of information. It's a really comprehensive website, mostly edited by Peter Hallward, but also Ray Bressier and a few others. So they have the section where they divide the members of the, you know, circle, the epistemology and people who participated in the CAIR in a very useful manner. So notice that to the left-hand side, the members of the Cirque du Bissimologie and the editorial board included Alain Badeau in volumes 8 to 10 only, Alain Gros... I actually never know how to pronounce this, but I think it's Groschiard, Jacques Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Miller, and François Reynold.

So these are the core sort of constituents of this collective. And to the right hand side, you have a sort of further people who were actually aligned or members of the collective. Now, what's interesting is that even though Badiou only was there for the last two volumes, it is during this last period, these last two volumes, that we see something like a complete overhaul, not overhaul, but a very clear philosophical direction being taken place. I mean, Badiou really grabbed the insights that had been brewing for the first seven volumes, and in these last two volumes, really attempted something like a comprehensive systematic formalization of this. And this is where you get the kind of final, this is why Badiou is the kind of philosophical hire to this project across its 10 volumes and the kind of offspring of it.

But throughout its years, the Cahiers published a variety of authors, including Derrida. I just put them in purple so you could obviously – the big names here, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser. we're not going to be reading any of Althusser Derrida's or Foucault's contributions to the because they were relatively minor honestly I mean Derrida was really on another jam he was not he just basically threw a contribution in there same with Althusser's contribution is not all that significant it's one text each same with Foucault not very interesting Jacques Lacan on the other hand did have a very important text which was later compiling decree which is called science and truth. We're going to be reading that. I added that to the syllabus for next week,

so that's going to be one of our readings. That's an important text, which I think sets the foundations for much of what we're going to be talking about. Because in that text, Lacan launches an interrogation of the nature of science. And as you know, as I mentioned to you before, one of the things that attracted the people from Althusser's group and Althusser himself to the company of Lacan was how to reforge the conception of science or the idea of science and its separation from ideology precisely by drawing from resources from structuralism, right? So Lacan himself, as you know, I mean, psychoanalysis itself has always been haunted by the question of science, how to consolidate itself as a scientific discourse, as Freud himself, and Lacan himself thought it could be. That it never quite achieved it is another story or another argument to be had. So here's

an interesting historical detail of the composition of the group, which comes from the introduction by Peter Hallward, which we will be reading also for next session, but I'll just read this out. Indeed, the Circulus seems to have been a more capacious category than the editorial board and contained figures like Bouveres, whose projects had a bearing on the concerns of the journal, or indeed who may have contributed but who were not involved in the production of its content. The circle itself grew much larger with the volume eight with the addition of Alain Badiou and several others. Badiou in particular who was a member of the editorial board, unlike for example Jean-Marie Valliere or Vallegere who only joined the circle, would exercise a decisive influence on the trajectory of the final two volumes of the journal devoted to the genealogy of the sciences and

formalization. As you know, formalization is a term that was popularized, or not popularized, I should say, but was coined or used by Lacan to describe what was peculiar about the operation of psychoanalytic theory as a discourse in relationship to all other discourses. And anyway, so here's the link at the bottom of this page to this website, which is an immeasurable rich resource for all things Cahiers. You have, you know, lists of names, bibliography of their contributions, annotated translation, original text, links to the two collections, and it's the same group that compiled and were responsible for this two-volume translation of the major text, concept, and form. So we owe this majorly to Peter Hallward, who is a great scholar in his own right.

So just to give a little bit more meat to the bones, the late emphasis laid on formalization, which was a term popularized by Lacan to describe the way in which psychoanalytic discourse produced a formal ideography of the unconscious or a theory of the subject beyond the figurations of ego psychology and philosophy, would set the grounds to think of a new mode of theorization, materialist ontology, and as a mode of practice, and a new mode of practice, I should say, sorry, Marxism. In doing so, it brought together intimate interests of philosophers from different orientations in the French post-war context, the Altausserian school, Lacanian psychoanalysis, etc. Somebody just wrote to the chat, just let me see. Someone would explain Lacan in such a way to me, I'd find it quite wrong.

Well, is this a response to something that was said by me or something that was said before? So I'm sorry for my very oblivious comment. I'm just referring to the one sentence description of Kaye Purl-Lenely's stance as a rationalist. Yeah. Where you say about like structure and then substitution is exit out of it and I think Lacan himself would find it slightly ridiculous I hope, with like, this understanding of it. Yeah, I'm just like, yeah, I understand that Kaya Porenas is not Lacan, but I just wanted to say.

But, I mean, ridiculous, what is ridiculous? I mean, Can you go back to the slide? I'm not really prepared to give a different summary to Lacan right now. This one or the one before? No, the previous one. It was like 10 minutes ago. For example, just to make something very specific, I don't think Lacan would agree that

subjectivation is some kind of exit out of the symbolic order or something breaks down. No, no, no. Lacan would not say that. No, Lacan would not say that. No, Lacan does not think the subject is anything like a cut or a kapoor or anything like that. That is something that the, so what I'm trying to say is that the Kaye pour Annalise tried to use in a discussion with Lacan to try to use the resources of Lacanian psychoanalysis and also the resources of, you know, structuralist linguistics more generally to reconstitute dialectical materialism. materialism. So something like what you get with, so Althusser and Badiou will have a notion of, you know, the subject as a cut or as an eventual interruption to the order. That's not Lacan,

but that is inspired by the Lacanian, first of all, conception of the subject and the structuralist conception of, you know, ontology, a structuralist sort of basis for ontology. So I'm not trying to say Lacan is a rationalist. Lacan is an anti-philosopher and whether he is a rationalist, if you want to call him a philosopher, whether he would qualify as a rationalist or not, it's not something that I would be prepared to say. But regardless, what I would say is that the project of the Kaieh was an attempt to negotiate with Lacanian psychoanalysis in the attempt to reconstitute philosophy. And Valentin uses Lacan like this too, when he talks about machines? I mean, so two things about this.

First of all, my understanding of Lacan, which a lot of you would probably find suspect a little bit, but my understanding of him is very close to what you actually say about CCRU. Even though we know how CCRU was not really into Lacan explicitly, This is the first thing. Secondly, just to continue my explanation of why Lacan would not fit. Lacanian notion of symbolic and Lacanian overall understanding of social order or any kind of epistemological order that is perceived by something. is and his schemes of how subject actually works and the things like this whole topological stuff

and what he tries to formalize are two very different things both of which are structural in the sense that you paint different arrows around points but it's very different different ontological orders in a way, right? And what exactly is like escapes what? I find the whole thing about like what is this structured order and then subject escapes it. It's very romantic, very naive, and very funny for people who really read Lacan well. Well, no, no, but you got to be careful about keeping different score books here because I think you're right that Lacan would consider something like what Badiou does with his theory of the subject as a romantic, voluntarist residue, precisely when he describes the subject as something that erupts eventually in the ontological order and breaks them.

And, you know, that is precisely, I think you're right, Lacan would find that to be risible. and Lacan finds it reasonable and you're right also the reason why Lacan appears to you closer to perhaps the CCRU is because Lacan was an anti-philosopher and he did not think in this regard that you know you had precisely room left for such a conception of agency so maybe the reason why you're finding it ridiculous is because you side with Lacan against what the would try to do with Lacan in other words that you you do not think that you know those philosophers who try to weave a theory of the subject, a subversion, eventual truth, you name it, out of the Lacanian sort of framework, succeed at all. Now, that's a fair contention. And I

actually, one of the claims that I would make is, in agreement with you or with Lacan in this case, that, yeah, that there is a kind of, you know, and I mentioned this before, that when somebody like Badiou tries to organize or weave a theory of the subject as kind of radical subversion, he ultimately relapses into a kind of voluntarist, kind of quasi-Sartrean, you know, conception of subversion. And I think that this is precisely, as you well put, a kind of romantic recity or relapse that vitiates not only the kind of, you know, the structuralist, like, imminent grounds of ontology, I mean, that's kind of its point, right? Like the subject shatters the ontological order,

but that it even undermines the idea of trying to escape from a kind of stale voluntarism, right? And I think that that's precisely the kind of thing that Lacan was perhaps too cynical to fall to, even if, you know, that comes with its own shifts, set of problems. And I think Land and Lacan would see eye to eye on this, actually. you know I think both would agree if if there's one thing they would agree on is that they would find the Baduyian or you know Rancierean model of of subjectivation risible or or or at the very least you know romantically inflated um but I don't know the Rancierean model of subjectivation is very close no I mean not very close but I think it's kind of spiritually close

so I can and as far as I understand it because it's like what Lacan explains as double I'm not sure if you should waste time on it. I mean, me and Mila Khan, yeah. But I'm just like, I mean, I don't really understand yet the position of career pro analysis towards La Khan and now I see it more specifically after the discussion. So, we don't have to. No, I mean, yeah, but just to answer to that, just like very quickly, it's like, like, one of the things we'll do next time, I mean, for next session, we'll be reading Jacqueline Miller's text on structure, you know, the very important text on Souture, and Badiou's very important contribution to that debate. So I think there's actually quite a bit

there. And also, you're right also that, you know, focusing specifically on the structuralist, quote unquote, period of Lacan, which of course makes sense, you know, just historically and genealogically, considering the years in which the circuit with epistemology was running, seems to also elide the late work that Lacan does when he transitions or tries to do work with topology as well. And an interesting discussion would be, well, what does that imply with regards to the earlier structuralism that he gets from Jacobson and so on, blah, blah, blah. How do you negotiate these two things, especially when you consider that philosophers like Badiou then play a particularly strong role in the place a particularly strong emphasis in the role that topology plays in philosophy.

So I think regardless, these questions are going to be much more hopefully clear by next week. Okay, so just going back to this, the Cahiers launched an interrogation of the relationship between the concepts of form and structure. and they adopted, as we've been saying, a broadly structuralist strategy to tackle the theoretical problems of ontology and epistemology, as well as practical questions of psychoanalytic clinical practice, like Lacan does, of course, but also questions of political organization and collective action, like Althusser and his group tried to do, and Badiou as well. Thus, structuralism became a lever not only to rekindle dialectics as a theoretical option, but to reiterate the unity between thinking and practice that characterizes dialectical materialism,

And that's an important thing, that de Cahiers was as much interested in philosophy in the abstract mode, but of course, as I was mentioning, it's essentially also an attempt to reconstitute the valences of dialectical materialist theory for a political practice, for a collective political practice, for the left, basically, right, of course. Now, the structuralism in the broadest possible sense, and this is just a working definition, this is the one that Peter Hallward gives, which I think is good enough, can be understood as attributing, quote, unilateral causal power to the relations that structure configurations of elements in whatever domain, mathematical, linguistic, psychological, economic, literary, rather than a core primacy to the presumed nature or essence of these elements themselves, which are given instead as effects of the structure.

Paul worked this from the introduction. So I won't get into, you know, rehearsing this or unpacking this definition because this will be one of the topics that we will be exploring next time. But notice that one of the interesting things is that structuralism as the model, as a formal methodological model for the Cahiers, emerges from this kind of social scientific nexus and background. And it really becomes then sort of amplified into or bloated into a kind of generalized, I should say, into an ontological register or incorporated into an ontological register. And you can probably see just by reading this definition how it echoes the conception of science that was already formulated by Bachelard in the 30s, right, that I mentioned before.

So those things are all together, right? An attempt to reconstitute our concepts of science, the idea of trying to appropriate a structural understanding of ontology into a dialectical materialist philosophy that would be sufficient to forge a concept of the subject that could be amenable to a emancipatory revolutionary politics, right? So that's it. Just one quick announcement. So maybe we have about nine minutes left and then we're going to spend the final 10 minutes formalizing the presenters and the respondents for the. Perfect. Yeah, I only have two more slides to give and then we'll do it. And we can close this very quickly.

So the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, predominantly a student-run collective, right, which ran out of Warwick University between 1995 and 2003, was founded and promoted by the works of Sadie Plant and Nick Land, was closely aligned to the attempts to use cybernetic and schizoanalytic philosophical modes, sorry, elaborate above all in Deleuze and Guattari's capitalism and schizophrenia as a model for an alternative to structural psychoanalytic and philosophical attempt to rekindle dialectics. It meshed cyberpunk art, jungle house musical production and craft in literary mythology, among several other influences, leading to a variety of experimental projects and productive forms. a virtual futures conference, the Syzygy residency in South London, in collaboration with the Art Collective,

that collaboration with Orphan Drift, a huge number of collaborations and practices, which really speaks to the nomadic character of the CCRU and to its wildly irreverential spirit. spirit. It really did not, it wasn't only like the Caillere itself was a kind of, you know, testing the borders of what was admissible to academic discourse. They really went all the way out, right, and sort of meshing with modes of popular production and art that were completely, you know, sacrilegious or debased or considered low. So the thinkers associated with this group, besides land and study and city plan are from different provenances and often

tracking the authorship of the text to the collective and the contributions of its members is impossible right because they write as a collective and other than you when you read a an article that's written by just one of them the actual collection of Texas just a mishmash right so it's it's everybody and nobody at the same time so it's called we've shown Amy Ireland Ray Brassier Manuel De Landa, Simon Critchley, Mark Fisher, Ian Hamilton-Grand, Ressa Negaristani, Luciano Parisi, Code 9, Robin McKay, Harry Kunzru, you know, you name it. And there's more names that have been associated with it, but this is just like a small roster of the figures that have been associated with the C-C-R-U at some point or other. One question. Absolutely. Manuel De Landa and Simon Critchley were the contribute to the C-C-R-U work?

Well, if not to the textual writing, then he was definitely involved at some point with the environs. He was participating in the debates, he was talking to the people. Because Critchley seems like the arch enemy of what Csiu is attacking. I was surprised to see that charlatan Critchley on this list as well. that that is the that is to me the the odd pick if i had to because manuel delanda after all is a delusian so at the end of the day he's going you know it does make sense that he would go to to this kind of uh nook but but simon crutchley that's the one that i uh and and incidentally i have no idea of what he actually did again one of

the things that becomes very difficult to track and i've tried i've ridden to ray and others to try to sort of get my head or wrap my head around what he actually did what it was about about but again tracking the precise contributions is a kind of impossible task at this point at some point somebody will have to write a history of this uh in a kind of much more patient manner doing interviews and talking to all the the subjects yes i'm wondering about i'm wondering about amy ireland i think she was maybe five years old when ccru was actually operating or something or maybe not even alive because oh yeah yeah yeah so the i mean this set of thinkers i mean resa was of course only i mean he jumped in after the disintegration of of the warwick collective

itself and you know so so it's like a lot of this you know a lot of these names are like uh late bloomers or they joined late into the party i mean at the end of the day the ccru was still going until maybe five years ago. You know, it was going in the blogosphere. It was going around, you know. Again, what you call the CCRU, it's sort of fishy. You know, Amy has been doing a lot of work on that. I mean, she's one of the people that is most sort of illustrious and with regards to, for example, making sense of the numagram and all that stuff. But, you know, she's been associated with it. Now, whether you want to call her a member or not, that's a different story. I mean, the CCRU was not, it was much less formal than the CAE, of course, right?

Where you had an editorial board, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, this was just like a think tank, a production collective where people jumped in, did something, jumped out, and there were collaborations and events and publications and all that. But, you know, it was a very nomadic existence or structure. So, yeah, I mean, it's, so these, you know, I mean, this is just, this is a set of names of people that have been associated with this. Now, whether they are actually members or not, that's, who knows, right? But it's particularly hard, and this is the last point I'm making this slide, which is it's really hard now to track this because now that Nick Glenn has been shrouded in political controversy, a lot of people have just sort of turned 180 completely and sort of tried to disavow and distance themselves from this altogether.

And they don't want any truck with this associations anymore, just because of, you know, professional or ethical, you know, survival, I suppose, or something. But so that makes things slightly harder. Okay, and this is the last thing I'll say, and we'll get to logistics. So without getting ahead of ourselves, hyperstition is the process whereby fictions make themselves real in a way that is not simply reducible to a crass idealism that claims beliefs or thoughts articulate reality, right? So part of what I was claiming is that the cybernetic cultural research unit is trying to weave something that they name hyperstition, right, or hyperstitional practice. And this is precisely this kind of mesh of Lovecraftian Gothic mythology with kind of Borgesian, you know, theory fiction with, you know, metaphysics and so on and so forth, and cyberpunk.

So that gives way to this new practice, this kind of like radical, you know, practice called hyperstitional practice. And this constitutes itself as a, what Nick Land at one point calls an anti-logos, which defies the traditional valences of philosophy and philosophical discourse and of the dialectical method itself, and presents itself in the form of a kind of practice of metaphysics, which openly draws from non-standard numeracies like the Kabbalah. occultist practices and other forms of experimental expressive mediums to achieve something like a global defiance to the order of sense and of the human so practices metaphysics becomes a kind of the the philosophical bedrock of this entire project um and yeah yeah well the

thing is you know people can can shift gears right because ray brassier was i'm sorry i'm reading from Sasha's question, would it make much more sense to speak of Amy Ireland as a member of Laboria land and CCRU? Well, one thing to keep in mind is this is not exclusive, right? So somebody like Ray, who was, you know, openly associated with the CCRU, or Reza, who, you know, was at some point, I suppose, member of the CCRU, is now squarely allotted in, you know, neorationalism, and so on and so forth. So migration can happen, right? The history of philosophy is ripe with these examples, and this is no exception, right? But regardless, so just to wrap this point up, the idea is that, you know, this kind of antilogos finds us as bedrock and kind of practices

metaphysics, and what this yields ultimately is a kind of historical narrative in which you have these protagonists or these subjects, which are these mythological creatures, these proto-Lewcraftian conceptual monsters, which organize macro processes of human history or in human history within human history, which disrupt any kind of scale of time or historicity relative to our phenomenological psychological or sociocultural frames of understanding so this is a what is interesting is that this mythology leads to a kind of reconsideration of an impersonal or inhuman

subject which becomes then bolstered through kind of lovecraftian mythology into a kind of demonology right i mean and i'm sure you all have a sort of have encountered this to some extent or other But the CCRU weaves this extraordinary roster of agencies and characters that are from organizations to demons and so on and so forth that are surrogates for philosophical concepts, but which help them build this kind of narrative about what's going on right now, like, you know, about the course of history as it goes. um so we're going to be talking of course about how about that how the the practices metaphysics becomes bloated into a roster of characters i was going to say um something about where we're going

to look ahead but that can that can wait for for next time let me just stop doing this i guess um how do i stop did i stop sharing already yes yes okay great great great great okay great okay cool now um what we're going to do is there are six remaining sessions and for each session here i'm going to share my screen yes yes share jamie did you say there are six sessions six remaining sessions no there's seven seven remaining sessions so so everyone there are seven remaining sessions for thank you mo there are seven remaining sessions and for each session there is going to be one presenter and one respondent. So here I've shared, hopefully you

can all see the screen. Also, can I say one thing very quickly? I'm going to be adding two texts in two of the weeks, one by Sadie Plant and another one that I'm still debating, but the Sadie Plant text will go probably on week, I have to look at the syllabus myself, but I think it's gotta go on week seven or six okay okay yeah but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it yeah sure that's fine okay so the next two sessions will concern the Kaya for Lana Lisa so we'll need four volunteers one to present next week one

to respond next week so presentations typically around 15 minutes or so responses usually run five minutes or so sometimes they range a little more so can I get a set of volunteers for next week September 28 on Peter Hallward Jacqueline me there Francois and Badu and the rest I have a more formal question. Do we all have to do one presentation and one response or just one of them? That's like minimum actually. Minimum is one but you can do... No, I wanted to ask if I have just the formal requirements. I have to do minimum one presentation or if one response also.

Yeah, minimum one presentation response, but of course you can do up to two because it's good to have two presenters and two respondents every week, but Hopefully not more because we also have to leave room for the lecture and for just general discussion. Okay. Yeah, I will. I will gladly present. I'm very passionate about these theorists next week if I can present on them I'd be very happy to anyone want to respond to anything I say can be over overwritten by Daniel because he's really the ultimate arbitrator here I mean I'm happy to have everybody like each

of you present once in whatever week and also just just quick quick question with you for your presentation in each of the weeks, you don't have to present on every text, obviously. You can choose to focus either on a particular text or on a set of questions or issues that sprawl across the text. So what I really, I mean, try to avoid just coming here to try to summarize because that's like, we don't need that. What I'm more interested in doing is trying to see you think with the with these thinkers so even if it's a particular issue that that attracts your attention in one of the texts that you're reading from the from that week's reading list or it's a set of or it's a set of questions that overlaps with a bunch of authors uh regardless i'm happy

to to to to have it be that way what i definitely don't want is just for somebody to come and summarize a text right because that's that's a i mean i'll be i'll be trying to like give pointers to to guide the discussion for for all the techs so we don't really need that i want to see more like a critical engagement and constructive engagement if possible okay so who wants to respond to again uh i would like to okay great okay so now yes i would like to take the one one of the presentation i think um uh daryl or i cannot see the name also want to present at October 5th and I also would like to present there. You would like to present or respond? Respond to Ekin and present at the 5th October.

Okay. So he's got to be responding in week two and he's got to be presenting on week three. That's fine. So does someone want to respond to Eric on October 5th? Badou, Zizek. No, Eric is presenting on week two, so he will be responding to Eric on week two. well I presume right I think that's how it works or am I wrong I wanted to in week three I wanted to present and then week two I want to respond no let's have someone else respond to Eric on week three I wanted to present the Jamie Jamie Jamie the responses have to be on the same week obviously right like I mean somebody presents and then there's a respondent right after that's

the the general template I suppose yeah so so so Eric is is presenting on week three yeah and then week two we're next week I'm presenting Ekron so Ekron is presented week two and and then I'm sorry that's how I understood Akin I'll respond to Eric. No, please. Let's get someone new. In the chat, Daryl is saying that he can respond on week three.

Daryl, I can't see the chat because I'm sharing my screen. Okay. Okay. Week four. Okay, so now this is the foray to the CCRU. So it's McKay and some of these communal texts by the CCRU. So is there anyone who is interested in presenting on these? Oh also if you scroll down, which okay if I scroll down and you watch me, we have some land and some more CCRU. So this is McKay, land, CCRU. Anyone want to present on these? I think, no. You sure? I wanted to actually respond because I was more interested in presenting on a week with SETI plans.

Okay. That's got to be in the last module. So that's got to be later. Okay, so... It's fine. We can still decide it and write it down so then we don't have to go over this again. Yeah. I mean, I'm cool. Yeah. Okay, now, but who wants to present on October 12th? Somebody. Land, McKay? Come on. Okay, I will present. Thank you. Now, would someone like to respond on October 12th? Sasha, you can also respond on Sadie Plan in the last... Yeah, yeah. And I would like, yeah, I would like to respond on the session on cyber and xenofeminism. Beautiful. Some people are writing in the chat. Just for organization, can you just jump into the, like, can you speak, please?

Yeah, please, because I can't read them. Yeah, it's like getting a little, like, ooh. But, yeah, so we need a respondent for week four still. Yes. I'll do it then. Okay. Okay, cool. And then I'll present in session five on the 19th. Great. Anybody wants to respond week five? Session five, sorry. Let me respond week five. Great. Okay. Let me, yes. It's Valentine, I'm so sorry about that. No, we know your voice, Valentine. Yeah. Session six, who wants to present?

I can present. Can you hear me? Yes, Stefano. Okay, I am. And who wants to respond to Stefano? I'll do it. Hernan, good. Session seven? I can present on session seven. Great. Can I respond to session seven? Yes, Federico, there we go. And for the last week, we have a respondent already. Sasha's responding and yeah, Sadie will go in later. Also, just remind yourself, for next week, there's a little context also that I added. I will send you the updated. Can I present or respond some week? Is there anyone who hasn't volunteered? Me.

Okay. Can you present on the last week on Land, Brassier, and the Accelerationist and the Xenofeminist? Sure, yeah. Okay. Beautiful. Great. So we're all set, right? I think Alan is- I have a question. So I don't have a week when I respond, so can I maybe be a second responder for the week three? Absolutely. Sure. Why not? Alan, do you have anything? No, I didn't get anything. Maybe I can present like- Well, so there are some people who are going a few times like- Akin for example is going a few times I can would you mind well, I'm only I'm going once then I'm presenting once a responding one I know I know but Alan doesn't have anything right now. So is there someone who is who has two?

I'm not I'm I can I'm not calling you No, nobody has two presentations No, I'm only responding on the week six. Okay, never mind. Sorry. Yeah, everybody is just someone. Jamie, can you let me just do this bit? So, Alan, what would you like to do? What week would you like to present or respond? I guess like six, seven, or eight. Okay, any preference? No, it's okay. I guess maybe

six or eight, but I'm okay with anyone. Okay, so how about you do also a presentation on week six? Okay, on the material side. Okay, so let's just do that. Okay, well, great. Thank you, everyone, for coordinating that in a timely manner. So, Daniel, is there anything that you want to say to us in conclusion? Yeah, so I will be sending the updated syllabus with the LeContext. It's Science and Truth. It's included in Ecrib. So I will be also uploading that because you can find it in that collection, not in the cahier. That's an important text, I think. And other than that, yeah, no, nothing. Oh, well, yeah, I should just say. so at the end of the course there's a paper all you have to write a paper seven to ten pages the

paper is very simply any kind of critical engagement with any of the materials of the course topics weaving it back to any of your own concerns uh it doesn't have to be a you know critical philosophy piece but i'm interested in seeing you think with these materials and try to incorporate it into your own stuff now yeah what i was going to add is like due to the significance and kind of importance of this seminar, historical importance of this seminar, we will be interested. We, I mean, New Center will be interested in, in quickly gathering these essays and maybe putting them together in the form of a compilation essays, both as a PDF and a print publication. So I totally encourage you to take your essay seriously because we could

have a really wonderful publication out of this study that that Daniel has worked so hard to put together in terms of syllabus right and also remember one of the easiest way to to sort of like conduct this is to also weave it to your presentation because you're going to spend time reading reading that text thoroughly so you can probably build your essay closer or weave it to your the text you pick for your presentation and then pick other things that relate it and also you can always communicate with us and with daniel via email to kind of like get more resources or like more sources that that will help you develop good stuff so we can maybe maybe have a nice publication at the end of the course this is something we will be doing with select seminars

starting this year so i totally encourage you guys to take it seriously because a lovely publication can come out of it. Okay. One more thing, just, just because if anything, so I have to always strike a balance between trying to be philosophically introductory and be rigorous. And that's a difficult balance to strike because I understand different people have different backgrounds or formations. So I don't want to be excessively jargony or excessively convoluted or, or, or, you know, and I, so what I ask of those of you who have training on one particular aspect or tradition or something like this is to try to be sort of generous in the sense of give time to sort of introduce the concepts and we can go with this.

Because, you know, some people have read some parts of this stuff. Some people have not read any of this at all. And so, you know, you have to work your way up little by little. If anything seems obtuse, obscure, unpersuasive, or confused, of course, that's what we're here for. So I'm happy to always be sort of questioned and interrogated. Things will become progressively clearer as we move along. But if anything didn't stick out as clear or convincing during the seminar that you want to ask or interrogate more carefully, I'm always available via email. Everybody will tell you that I like getting into philosophy chit-chat regardless. So, you know, if you just want to write to me or talk to me via social media or whatever, I'm always there, you know, happy to talk philosophy.

There's also the Google Classroom for extension of the conversation. Right. So any medium. If anyone has any difficulty accessing the classroom or anything like that, you know, feel free to contact us as well. I wanted to say I have two courses by Vincent Le, one on Nick Land, which traces his whole work from his dissertation to the CCIU stuff, and then one course which is CCIU work and tracing the other projects which were influenced by the CCIU. That would be awesome. I have recordings of the seminars, the slides, and the readings,

and I will post them on, I will share the links in the cloud. Lovely, because I just read his review of Intelligence and Spirit, and that was also pretty interesting. He just sent me this stuff for free, where that would have cost $80 to access this, and i asked him if i could share it with you and he said yeah no problem phenomenal that's that's fantastic that would be very helpful okay so i think we're well overdrafted now so it's a pleasure to have you all here thank you very much and uh enjoy the rest of your weekend thank you thank you thank you very much bye bye bye bye bye bye bye i hope you enjoy your like cold day i had Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Cheers. Thank you.