Seminar and Talk for Futuros Posibles

11, 13, 15 Aug., 2020

Public lecture (streaming) on 11 August entitled Diagrams for Non-Adaptive Worlds, 3-part seminar on 11, 13, 15 August, 2020 On Inhabitable, Planetary Worlds. For the Futuros Posibles program at Museo Tamayo, organized by Materia Abierta, Casa del Lago UNAM. More info (in Spanish).

Diagrams for Non-Adaptive Worlds

Synthesizing key themes of the seminar, the diagram will be discussed as a medium for thinking worlds which do not yet exist. Because actual worlds self-referentially reproduce their constitutive norms while encoding experience in a certain way, thought and practice largely adapt to these formal/informal rules (habits), making it difficult to think non-adaptive possibilities. The medium of the diagram can be seen as a construction site for premise-making, unbound to the coordinates governing a given world, as well as a space where relational consequences can be plotted. As a prothesis of thought, the diagram affords a mode of shared access to worlds not yet known or lived, opening up a comparative space through which to recognize the contingency of given, habitual configurations.

Seminar

On Inhabitable, Planetary Worlds

Divided into three sessions, this seminar addresses the transformation of spatio-temporal perspectives within a planetary-dimensioned condition. This is so, in order speculate on frames of reference that may offer cognitive and practical traction in a situated way, within such a seemingly unnavigable, multi-scalar, multi-species environment. If ‘planetarity’ is to become a valence of orientation for future, inhabitable worlds, it is conditional on reconfiguring a new space of relations/spatial relations, in order to discover accountable mobility within it.

1.     Temporality and Risk
This session examines the human as a time-creature. That is, as creatures invested not only in our present, immediate condition, but with our histories and possible futures. Because of this, we are also creatures of probability, allowing us to imagine situations and conditions that are not directly available to experience in the here and now. The human capacity to conceptually unbind thought from the present (in both space and time), is where the relationship between care and risk can be articulated as a crucial dynamic for thinking planetary-dimensioned social worlds.

August 11 2020 | 11am–1pm

2.     Inexistence and Intelligibility
Histories produce worlds. When we say futurity is a struggle for new histories, it is equal to the struggle for new worlds. Since these worlds do not yet exist, all such struggles are connected the problem of how to witness inexistent worlds. How can we see and sense a world which does not yet exist? Considering that worlds are constituted by particular frames of reference that condition perception because they set the conditions for perception, how may we come to tinker with frames of reference, in order to make otherworlds, of a there and then, intelligible in the here and now?

August 13 2020 | 10am–1pm

3.     Coexistence and Location
The diagnosis that we now live in a planetary-scaled condition, exists primarily, as a propositional claim, but offers little guidance in terms of manifest know how. For propositional knowledge to find practical traction, sites must be constructed for its putting into localized practice. What are the conditions of the local within planetary-dimensioned reality, and how are spatial intuitions reconfigured as a consequence? Planetarity demands a perspectival shift from existence to coexistence, signalling the need to re-spatialize worlds within and for an uncommonly shared, environment in common.

August 15 2020 | 10am–1pm