Course Syllabus will be adjusted according to participants
Over the past decade conversations across humanities and sciences are emerging around provocative re-thinking of change, process, evolution, the ceaseless dynamic of complex bio-socio-cultural-geophysical systems. Acknowledging that wet, unruly, feeling stuff exceeds the scope of any finite a priori schema, and Turing-equivalent algorithms, beyond affirming Galileo’s Eppur si muove! we ask, Come si muove? How?
There are no pre-requisites, but it can serve as a supplement to studies of Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, or Isabelle Stengers, new materialism, complex systems and process theories.
There are no pre-requisites, but it can serve as a supplement to studies of Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, or Isabelle Stengers, new materialism, complex systems and process theories.
Winter Break
Heraclitus, General Introduction (9-12, 16-23), §38 - §42, §49, §50, §52, and Commentaries on those fragments.
In ZhuangZi (Chuan Tsu) chapter six, a dying Daoist master addresses his friends:
"As something other than me approaches, I am dying; if I were to refuse to listen it would be defiance on my part so how can I blame it? That Vast Clod of Soil (the Way) loaded me with a body, had me toiling through a life, eased me with old age, rests me with death. Therefore that I found it good to live is the very reason that I find it good to die. If today a master sword smith were smelting metal and the metal should jump up and say "I insist on being made into an [Excalibur]," the sword smith would surely think it metal with a curse on it. If now having once happened on the shape of a human being I were to say, "I'll be a human, nothing but a human," that which fashions and transforms us would surely think me a baleful sort of person. Now if once and for all I think of heaven and earth as a vast foundry and the fashioner and transformer as a master smith, wherever I am going why should I object? ..." (Graham 88-9 mod.)
January - February: Individuation, Process
• Simondon, Gilbert. "The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis," tr. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2007): 4-16. (introduction to L’individuation psychique et collective, 1989.)
• Simondon, Gilbert. "The Physico-Biological Genesis of the Individual" (part of L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (l'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information, 1964.)
• Combes, Muriel. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, tr. T. Lamarre (2012 (1999)), pp. 1-56.
Supplementary Readings:
Gilbert Simondon. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, tr. C. Malaspina, J Rogove. Univocal, 2017.
NO CLASS Monday January 15 (Martin Luther King), and Wednesday January 31.
February: Enaction, Sense-making
• Brender, Noah Moss. Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking: Merleau-Ponty, Cognitive Science, and Dynamic Systems Theory, 2016.
Criticality, symmetry-breaking
Post-Human Network Graduate Student Conference, Call for Submissions
Supplementary Readings:
Evan Thompson, Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience
March: Topological Approach to Process and Sociocultural Dynamics
Sha, "Topology and Morphogenesis," inTheory, Culture and Society special issue: A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamics, vol. 29, 4-5: pp. 220-246.
Supplementary Readings:
Klaus Janich: Topology, chaps 1-2.
Meiss, Differential Dynamical Systems, chapter 3, topology & function spaces, chapter 4, dynamical systems, chapter 5, invariant manifolds
April: Projects
Students will present applications related to, for example, architecture, urban life, biology, movement and gestural media.
Supplementary Readings:
Christopher Alexander, Nature of Order: The Process of Creating Life, opening pages; Appendix: "A small example of a living process."
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life.
Longo, Giuseppe, and Maël Montévil. Perspectives on Organisms. Biological time, Symmetries and Singularities. Springer, 2014. Opening.
Longo, Giuseppe, and Maël Montévil, "The Inert Vs. The Living State of Matter: Extended Criticality, Time Geometry, Anti-Entropy – an Overview." Frontiers in Physiology 3 (2012): 1-8.
Final Presentations
