Lecture at Center for Discursive Inquiry, Calarts

24 Sept, 2022

On Sept 24, 2022 (online) 10:00-12:30pm (PST)/19:00-21:30 (CET), a lecture on “On Spatial Aesthetemes and Conceptual Embedding” presented within the context of the CDI, Calarts working group, with this years theme “Generating Worlds”.

This talk departs from a simple question: What is planetary space? The hypothesis is that if we are to posit “the planetary” as an index for paradigmatic socio-historical transformation (and not merely a new nomenclature), we require commensurate spatiotemporal figurations to embed and relocalize ourselves as well as our relations with reality. The hypothesis derives from the historical triangulation between the emergence of Euromodernity and the reinvention of its corresponding space (conceptually, representationally/artistically, and operationally), as well as how this reinvention of space provided a representational ‘site’ (an aestheteme) to embed the coemergent philosophical figure of humanist “Man”. It is this reinvented space that afforded the localization of such a humanist concept “Man”, rendering the once abstract concept, practicable and realizable—especially its space of reasoning. We’ll then work through how the planetary entanglement troubles what is commonly understood as “local” within the ongoing legacies of Eurohumanist spaces of representation and reason, and begin speculating on how to reimagine our own embedding within higher dimensional (material, conceptual and real) conditions.

For this event Patricia Reed will concentrate on our strand:

Representations in Time: Art and the Politics of Scientific Imagination
If representations as elements of knowledge always arrive “after the fact”, estranged and protean, how might retrospective constructions contribute to an emancipatory future? If reality is incomplete and inconsistent, continually being fashioned and refashioned, with no pre-existing metrics for image formations to be measured against, then what forms of mediations, what generative torsions take precedent, and how do they reflect dynamic values by which to measure and instantiate increasing indices of freedom and equality?  How can these changes be marked, understood and indeed transmitted? Finally, what role, if any, does self-conception as a form of representation obtain for art, science and politics?