Decolonising Attention: Perception, Movement, Technics Within and Against the Postcolony: from month to month
Seminar 5 (11+12 June) in PAF
For our last seminar session in June we will read and discuss a text by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, two articles by former DAI Theory Tutor Marina Vishmidt, and a report about the Aymara theorist and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui from Bolivia.
reading:
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “All Incomplete,” London: Minor Compositions, 2021. https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1032 We will discuss pages 1-78 on Day 1, and pages 119-154 on Day 2
Vishmidt, M. ”’Only as Self-Relating Negativity’: Infrastructure and Critique.” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 13, nr. 3 (2021): 13-24.
Vishmidt, M. (2017). “Beneath the Atelier, the Desert: Critique, Institutional and Infrastructural.” In Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists. Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Tom Holert. Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, 2017.
Seminar 4 (30 April + 1 May) in PAF, St.Erme
more information coming soon
reading:
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Garland, 1977
Arne De Boever, Shirley S. Y. Murray, and Jon Roffe (eds.). Simondon, Being and Technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Amaro, R., & Khan, M. “Towards Black Individuation and a Calculus of Variations.” e-flux journal, 109 (2020).
Seminar 3 (25 + 27 March) in Bergamo
more information coming soon
reading:
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Preface, and pages 3-109
Karen Barad. “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” differences 23, nr. 3 (2012): 206–223. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892943.
Seminar 2 (17+18 February) in Arnhem
In this seminar, we must cut straight to the chase here: Ngugi’s mind is an eco-system (or radical ontology) of language, culture, material flows, play, performativity, critique, democracy, resistance, and solidarity. This is his decolonised mind: an emancipated non-dualistic mind-body-ecosystem that has overthrown white supremacy and achieved an authentically African and creative affirmation of democratic freedom. There are also clear indications that for Ngugi the great minds of any tradition either Western or African are masculine . . . What attention does the intersecting problems of gender and sexuality in Decolonising the Mind demand from our embodied practices of attending otherwise? Verges suggests another kind of framing for a decolonial, intersectional feminism today:
“This text was written from a particular position: from within the current struggle for total liberation, from a long commitment to anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, and a long engagement with feminist theory and practices in the Global South. By starting with a women’s strike, I wanted to show how it remaps ‘social conflict in practice,’ how it ‘politicizes the precarity of existence as a sequence that is inseparable from dispossession and extraction,’ and thus constitutes a radical critique of civilizational feminism. By ending with a call for solidarity with those who clean the world, enunciated by a young Dalit, I wished to suggest that the struggle against the racialization of cleaning and caring, while imagining a decolonial politics of cleaning, caring and repairing, shows the way to construct a post-racist, post-capitalist and post-imperialist, thus posthetero- patriarchal, world.” (ix)
We will spend day one on Ngugi, and the second on Vergès. We will intersperse through both days a postcolonial deconstruction of Hegel's Master Slave dialective, from the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).
reading:
Hegel, Master Slave Dialectic from Phenomenology of Spirit
Ngugi wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind
Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism
Seminar 1 (13+14 Nov) in Nida
We began our conversation centered on a series of questions: "Is attention mediated when it is directed? Mental occurence cannot be without nervous occurrence. The etymology of mind is gemynd “memory, remembrance.” Memory in mind is not storage, rather it is connection. What is the difference and/or relation between focus and attention? What is an object? (I'm thinking about mindfulness as focusing on an object.. and that there are also hyperobjects, virtual objects..) Are habits creative? Mindfulness in a social networked society: is the concept of mindfulness too focused on the self, on the individual brain? Mindfulness/attention while touching a phone..? Giving attention to.. sofware’s reliance on encoding hardware’s production chain and afterlife online platforms foundational economic strategies personalised pathways, i.e. algorithms giving me an experience that is based on a ‘past me’ reading is writing (i’m always in the background sending out data) false representation of user agency through interface attention and memory in my brain are being rewired because of neuronal plasticity networked subjectivities are formed through imitation/contagion ‘freedom’ on the internet entails control (surveillance) .... ? What is the relation of subjugated knowledges to subjugated cosmogonies? Differential rhythms of speech, listening rhythms, response and call and response and call and Crossing this border kind of knowledge Which kinds of knowledge? Oral knowledges/stories/narratives/fragments embodied knowledge of midwifery knowledge and scientia What are the tools/media of overrepresentation?
We are attempting in this seminar to bring together without synthesis of two domains of knowledge and action that have important strategies to offer for emancipatory politics and radical aesthetic practices: The Decolonial Option (postcolonial and decolonial theory, intersectional justice) and the Potentiality of Attention (Deleuze, Terranova, Citton, Marx on the organic composition of capital and the worker discipline of mindfulness). These are some of the conversations we orientated ourselved around in Nida.