Center for Discursive Inquiry

Please join us on Saturday May 24th for this in person and streamed event.

Center for Discursive Inquiry Spring 2025

Symposium: Exhausted Apocalypses: and the Radical Imaginary of Ends

Saturday May 24th 2:00–7:00 pm PST

Held in person at RIP Space: 1250 Long Beach Ave #326, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Streaming online: http://twitch.tv/ripspacelive

Speakers: Riley Gold, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Tara McPherson

Chairs/organisers: Maisa Imamović and Amanda Beech

In the past, stories of the apocalypse sold seats, today Hollywood isn’t so interested. At the same time, real alternatives to the world we live in are absent from social media platforms which predominantly express the brain rot styled banality of infinite difference. And when it comes to critical projects, many have given up on conceptualizing capital as a finite system as well as the possibility of any other world.

In this program, we will ask if the rational imagination can speak to the finitude of capital. If capital currently defines what our life and death is (our mortality) then how can we think of the finitude of capital without conceiving of our own? Will our imagination get stuck in hopelessness, or create distractions that dangerously ignore the reality we're caught in? What role does fiction–the stories we tell about ourselves and everything else–and its technologies play in this?

The event will follow with music performance by Kai-Luen Liang

PROGRAM

14.10 — Welcome and introduction: Amanda Beech and Maisa Imamović

14.25 - 15.05pm — Riley Gold

A Film History of Automatic Control: Motion Pictures from the Honeywell Corporate Records

Riley Gold is a Ph.D. student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. He researches histories and theories of automation as they relate to media and environments. He holds a research master’s degree in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam.

15.10 pm - 15.50pm — Ezekiel Dixon Román

Accelerationism, Sociogeny, Apocalypse

Ezekiel Dixon-Román is Professor of Critical Race, Media, & Educational Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is the Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study. He is a cultural theorist of technologies of quantification, power, and racialization and is the author of the award winning book Inheriting Possibility (2017, University of Minnesota Press).

15.55pm - 16.35pm — Tara McPherson n is the HMH Endowed Chair and Professor of Cinema + Media Studies in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study. She is a core faculty member of the MAP program, USC’s innovative practice-based Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her scholarship engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect, and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

16.35-16.50pm — Break

16.50pm - 17.50pm — Plenary. Chair, Amanda Beech

18.00 - 7pm — Music Performance by Kai-Luen Liang

This series is part of:

At the Conjuncture: Art and the Imagination

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. The focus of this conference will be on proposals for reconfigurations of time, space, and otherness that generate comprehensive interrogations of the formation of histories, and at the same juncture think time as informing possible alternate non-linear futures.



We address 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, as well as potential philosophical concepts of universality. It asks us to consider the condition of the subject in the world, the world that forms the 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.



For more information on our group and the CDI please visit our website,

RipSpaceLive - Twitch art . media . tech . hack

UPCOMING EVENT!
Online seminar At the conjuncture: art and the imagination

CENTER FOR DISCURSIVE INQUIRY (School of Critical Studies) HOSTS Bahar Noorizadeh
October 28th 2023 10am - 12:30pm,, PST (via zoom)
Via zoom
Email [email protected] for the link to join and to get the reading

Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a co-authored and socially-connected project that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021, Taipei Biennial 2023, Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, Transmediale Festival, DIS Art platform, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Noorizadeh has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Sternberg Press; and forthcoming anthologies from Duke University Press and MIT Press. She completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she held a SSHRC doctoral fellowship.

Admiror: A Palaver on Capitalism and Sentiments
Admiror is a collaborative work by artists Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen that stages five episodic dialogues on the sentimental logic of capitalism. A decade before publishing his magnum opus “The Wealth of Nations”, Adam Smith released his less discussed premise for the ethical foundation of free market economy in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Moral sentiments, linked to the feeling of “sympathy”,rested on the imaginative affordances of the spectator. Together they formed the emotional order that enabled the operation of free market capitalism. Admiror departs from the imaginative emotional role-play underpinning modern market relations, and evolves into LARPing ideas around the revolutionary subject and theories of contingency and change. It tracks the transformation of the mechanics of imagination from the body to the market, exploring the dialectics of “structure” according to models derived from European enlightenment and of the “speculative” that artificial intelligence today is aspiring to. In this, the work tries to understand the affective underbelly of these structures, their inherent mysticism, and desirous qualities. It tries to articulate the potential for thinking the subject of the revolution, mapping the process of “rehearsing new models” onto the ever shorter window of change climate change offers us.
Reading
Reading: Martijn Koning, “Money as Icon”, in The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, What Progressives have Missed, Stanford University Press, 1975.


For more information on our group and the CDI please visit our website,
https://criticalstudies.calarts.edu/center-for-discursive-inquiry