Center for Discursive Inquiry

The imagination has a long and complex trajectory as a human faculty, but in this epoch of planetary-scale computation and the explosion of synthetic intelligence, genomic engineering, and robotics it has been decentered and accelerated in compelling and disconcerting ways. Now more than ever the security of positivistic reasoning has undergone radical questioning, addressing with urgency the fundamental perceptions of what we are, and what our reality consists of, yet opening as well almost unthinkable and unimaginable possibilities for our definition of what human modes of thinking and the imagination could be. However, the tension between the possibilities that the imagination holds and its material reality remain intolerably constrained and controlled by the structures of planetary capital. The question of global sapience, as potential and as problem, consists of dense strands of transparency and opacity. In this project, the focus will be on proposals for reconfigurations of time, space, and otherness that necessarily generate comprehensive interrogation of the formation of histories, and at the same juncture think time as informing possible alternate, non-linear futures.

This current research module explores and models the dynamics of the imagination as a manifestation of artistic production and critical thought, in part ‘as if’, in part as concept/object modeling, to effectuate other modalities which might lead to different modes of world-making. This ‘global’ (as opposed to individualistic) reenergized faculty of imagination—imagination on a global scale—asks us to focus on the relations between the empirical, the socio-political, the economic and the scientific space of what is common, and potential philosophical concepts of universality. It asks us to consider the condition of the subject in the world, the world that forms a subject, and the transgressive production of the global imagination through it, as well as the divisive violence that is incumbent upon the planetary impulse itself. 

The global in this case brings us back to the question of metaphysical meditations and socio-political ruptures, and vice versa; it demands that we address the traversals between what mind is and what is a world; what is an act of self-consciousness about it, and the acts of unconscious doings when both are acts in the world. The complexity and contradictions of the representations of transcendence and embodiment are not simply political or philosophical, but they can instantiate new perspectives on the role of the global artistic imagination.

Conveners: 

Amanda Beech
James Wiltgen
Christine Wertheim

Since 2017, the Center for Discursive Inquiry has focused on issues of how to think and generate possible new worlds, and how to conceive and begin implementing the processes of their actual construction. We are resolutely committed to futures that can realize new, more sustainable, just, and inclusionary forms; and encounters with what we deem a malleable past, with the goal of continual revision and reconfiguration. 

Recognizing that today the formal languages of science and mathematics hold sway over vast swaths of knowledge production, the latest iteration of our project focuses on language, exploring the variety of ways communities and disciplines utilize natural, artistic, and formal languages in theoretical and practical constructions in popular culture, politics, science and philosophy.

We look at how natural and aesthetic/artistic languages continuously rework the past in sociological terms, as well as at how they participate in the scientific imaginary and the production of facticity and belief. Simultaneously we explore how scientific languages themselves need these others if science is to ‘grip’ the space of the political. Integral to this is to respond to the mobilization for and consequences of oppositions to languages that rationalize, order, manage and control society, highlighted in post-structural critiques of the last century that advanced critiques of capital. By focusing on texts, artworks, and other media that pose questions about the dynamics of how human beings ought to live, as well as how they attempt to explicate the conditions of our own understanding of ourselves and the world, we examine how these different language-types construct, and interact with each other. This includes how less formalized discourses can succinctly gain traction on reality. In doing so, this research tests the claim that it is only by combining different categories of language that we can instantiate a dynamic model capable of producing an enhanced engagement with the real.  

In this iteration, questions of representation and referentiality, positivism and negativity will be foregrounded and leveraged here as a means to address the challenges posed by the contemporary moment that continue to brace us between radical disorientation and ideation of the future. Underpinning this problem of the political, the question of what to think and what to do, is a renewed problem of metaphysics, the junctures and disjunctures of thought and image, of knowing and doing, of concept and representation, as well as the problem of the identities of the disciplines of the arts and sciences themselves.

Conveners:

Amanda Beech
James Wiltgen
Christine Wertheim

Language and its Possible Worlds is a research group stemming from the work of a previous research group hosted by the Center for Discursive Inquiry, Cold War Cold World (2015-2017) that produced the publication Cold War Cold World (Urbanomic, 2017). A second volume, Construction Site for Possible Worlds, was published in 2020, also by Urbanomic.

Its focus is an in-depth navigation of ontology and epistemology at the intersection of the relationships between the conditions of knowing, and environments for constructing. A tradition of critique has overdetermined projects of knowledge to ‘end of the world’ scenarios, borne as much from recognitions of the banality of difference and the lugubrious ennui of neo-liberal capital. Instead, we charge ourselves with questions of the future, what is not merely speculative in antirealist hypotheticals, but which are deemed as possible; worlds that are moored. The Constructivist Working Group is the first phase in this investigation of building. We ask how thought, model and form can be practiced across scientific, logic based, mathematical and ordinary languages; how the “ordinary language” that is culture, can do more than mirror the paradigms of negativity and finitude that often spring from cultures of critique and skepticism, and move to propose forms of life, work and construction that re-engage questions of foundations, borders and territories – the scope of a world.

The focus in 2020 is an in-depth navigation of ontology and epistemology at the intersection of the relationships between the conditions of knowing, and environments for construction and re-construction. We ask how thought, model and form can be practiced across both scientific, logic-based mathematical languages as well as quotidian languages; and further, how the “ordinary language” that is culture can do more than mirror the paradigms of negativity and finitude that often spring from cultures of critique and skepticism, and move to propose forms of life, work and construction that re-engage questions of foundations, borders and territories – the scope of a world. Succinctly, how can we address with reflective urgency the relevant questions of the future?

Conveners: 

Amanda Beech
James Wiltgen
Christine Wertheim

Cold War Cold World (CWCW) is the research group focusing on the term “Cold World,” which many see as descriptive of our current situation. 

In this world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, we ask, can images and narratives construct agents who might decipher the mutable continuum and cascading contingencies we see today? And, more, how can this Cold World with all its apparent instabilities, this site of “lawlessness” and alienation, be central to the enhancement of human rationality? 

While the Cold War embedded, expressed and performed the dread of an epoch heralded by the confrontation with perplexing yet rampant forces of nihilism and extinction, today these have morphed and congealed into new forms of terror and fear, producing a ‘Cold World’ driven by a nascent full spectrum dominance under the aegis of ‘Algorithmic Capitalism.’ Potentially adrift in the massive explosion of digital images and algorithmic data-forms generated across multiple platforms, we encounter a strange type of machinic joussiance in a variant of Marxian hyper-commodification, produced by the iterative looping of a control society bent on modulations of tracking, prediction, and the diffusion of individuals. 

The CWCW Research Group argues instead for an alternative view in which Cold War aesthetics is loosened from its anthropomorphic moorings, providing navigational protocols for assessing these machinic formations as generators of new languages and other forms of communication that do not require a correlate between the unknown and human disappearance. The project both critiques what we identify as the Cold World paradigm—in terms of temporal formation, art, and political economy—and interrogates the moving image and narrative configurations as primary modalities of expression and experiment in epistemological, ontological and teleological formations in the contemporary moment. 

Cold War Cold World established in 2015 involves workshops, seminars and public discussion that combine philosophical, critical and artistic inquiry.

Directors:

Amanda Beech
James Wiltgen

This series explores Afro-Arab Futurisms in contemporary art and cultural production. 

In the past decade artists have responded to ongoing wars and continued corporate/imperial practices in the Middle-East and North Africa with alternative visions of the future. We have seen national conceptions of Palestine as a single high-rise tended to by a woman in a space-suite in the work of Larissa Sansour for instance, and artists working under the heading of “Gulf Futurism” in response to fast growing urban spaces in the Persian/Arab Gulf region. In light of these practices, this research group attempts to contextualize Speculative Arab Futurism in relation to longer traditions of futurist resistance in Afrofuturism.

Convener:

Sara Mameni