Lecture at Antikythera

9 Feb 2023

Lecture on “Spaces of Embedding within Planetary Dimensions” on February 9, 2023 (10:00 PST) in Los Angeles – a co-session with AA Cavia.

To be operationally consequential beyond sheer discursivity, the “planetary” must construct distinct “spaces of reason” in order to localize concepts of inhabitation otherwise.

We depart from a consideration of the co-emergence of a new conceptual figure of humanist ‘Man’ along with a particular figuring of space as constitutive of the birth of Euromodernity during the Renaissance. Through this example it becomes clear that not only do historical epochs arrive with certain discursive ‘episteme’ enclosures, but a particular figuration of space to embed, and thus make-representable said conceptual attachments, otherwise known as ‘aesthetemes’. The provision of a particular space of embedding is what enabled the behavioral, material, and practical ramifications of a once purely abstract human self-image of humanist “Man”, for worse and for better. It is this invention of space that afforded the localization of such a concept ‘Man’, rendering the concept, practicable and realizable—including its spaces of embedding reasoning.

During this talk we’ll explore such a precedent through new figurations of space derived from late 20th Century mathematics and their integration within philosophies of computation, such as those spaces of ‘conceptual embedding’ elaborated by AA Cavia.

Suggested Readings:

Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism” in boundary 2, vol 12/13, 19-70.

Bernhard Siegert, ‘The Map is the Territory: Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?’, Radical Philosophy 169, Sep/Oct 2011.

Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 2012. Reading Chapter 10: “The Jesuit Perspective in China”

Patricia Reed, “Thinking Beyond Experience: Prosthetic Agency in The Form of Not,” in In The Unmanned (catalogue of Fabien Giraud & Raphael Siboni), ed.: Anne Stenne, (Milan: Mousse Publishing), 2022.