Class Notes

CHID 395

Week 1 Tuesday

• The promise of speculative thinking
• World building is about the world itself – not necessarily about the narratives.
• A different way of engaging with the world and watching things.
• Phillip Thurtle - began work in molecular biology, interested in the relaitonship between molecular and organismic biology. But afterwards, realized that not having the conversations he wanted to have. H&PS at Stanford. 7 disciplines
• Will get a greater sense of importance, context for the world and the work you do.

What is a world?

• Infinity minus one
• An immanent narrative
• Lacan – conceptions of the real happen before our symbolic engagement with it.
• We cannot engage with the world without the symbolic – already mediated with our symbolic experience
• World as perception – perception is our way of engagement with the world.
• The world is engaging with us in a certain way.
• Does the world need to contain a subject to exist?
• Worlds are about relationships: even though there may not be subjects, there are always relationships.
• Omnipresent but never seen – worlds always support what is happening, but we rarely talk about it.
• World is the capacity for immanent narrative
• Narrative vs story
• Time and Narrative
• Worlds exist across stories and platforms.
• Worlds are generative: worlds are about relationships, between subjects, subject and object, objects, environments, data
• What worlds are constructed through a database?
• Imaginative worlds do not occur within a vacuum. Not a form of escape.
• Every escape has an orientation. From phenomenology
• Relationships are the precondition for everything to exist.
• Preconditions for subjects and objects – the virtual.
• The ways imaginative worlds are coupled with lived world creates politics.
• A world is always becoming

Week 2 Thursday: The Power of the False

• Narratives and windows
• Narrative as relation between the viewer and the window.
• Do we really see windows? Or do we see the world?
• “I see the pool tiles because of the water, not in spite of it” – the pool isn’t contained in the pool
• Are we really engaging with the window? Or the illusion that there is no window
• Do we want to overcome our situation in the world?
• Hegel, is there a difference between embodying and changing: the future comes about through synthesis. The dialectic is a model of time, of history. Overcoming contradictions. Can we think about time passing, futurity, which is not about antagonistic synthesis. Embodying rather than overcoming contradiction.
• A delicate balance between overcoming and embodying. What does this mean? How do futures occur? What makes time progress? Historicity
• The future is a paradox: an imagination.
• Can we imagine a future which is not a projection? We need some sort of imagination.
• The future is anti-truth: it is a fabulation. We have to make things up.
• We have to rely upon what we know to explain something which goes beyond us.
• Imagination does not exist in a vacuum.
• Can imaginary worlds exist as a means for themselves?
• What counts as real? A reciprocal dependency.
• How much is reality? What is the real?
• Narcissus: a rationalistic trope, you fall in love with what is represented? Look at the mirror, put it in a world. What’s the world for the mirror.
• The power of the false: from Gilles Deleuze. Confounded ideas about what truth is.
• Two themes: imaginative worlds and fabulation
• The importance of fabulation: the act of inventing or relating false or fantastic tales
• truth as timeless, eternal, non-temporal, truth as faithful representation, as ‘real’.
• Problems with formulation: trauma is too painful to represent; does not represent change, dynamic systems, what is unrepresented?
  • Trauma invades representation, that which we cannot understand, which we must wrestle with: the unrepresentable
  • This idea of truth only exists in non-temporal space; it doesn’t work in temporal worlds.
  • The fantastic is often a reference to a change in scale.
  • No world happens on the same scale.
  • Things which haunt us which we cannot see – the spectre, the ghost in the machine
• Occult (that which is not seen but which is felt) and trickster wisdom (something nonlinear, nonlinear events; beyond projection of the now into the future)
• Journalists build truth through representational veracity.
• Tropes and ways to think about fantastical stories: what is the truth within them?
• In the act of world-building, the logics come out: we have to build the world to understand the trick.
• Imagination is not linear (projection – linear algebra); it exceeds the characters, narratives, environments; it is immersive rather than causal (immersive is larger than causal: an environment for a subject, as opposed to a relationship between a subject and an object).
• Imagination points towards something much larger than what we get right now.
• Often we need to reconstitute the world in order to understand it. Not by answering a question, but by building a world.
• knowing through change instead of critique
• There is a kernel of fantasy at the very heart of our experience.
• The point of science fiction isn’t predictive: it is to create a world under which certain predictions can or cannot come true.
• Can we recognize the imaginative in our daily lives and our most mundane arguments? That is the world.
• Philosophically: speculation
• Dorothy Napangardi, Sandhills in Minia mina
• Lines aren’t just lines; worlds are nonlinear.

Week 2 Tuesday

• How does a picture make sense of the world?
• What is the function of mystery?
• Instability, incompleteness, movement.
• How do we think about rationality and order? Rationality as a supreme, universal way of thinking about how things are structured.
• Worlds abide by homogenous epistemic systems.
• Worldbuilding as a philosophical tool.
• Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
• Incompleteness which makes completeness
• We create uncertainty as we create knowledge.
• The territory and the model: Borges. What is consistency, mystery? Can only get at mystery through the power of the false, precisely because it’s not the territory.
• To what extent does the map make the territory.
• Is conspiracy theory giving body to mystery? Giving mystery a name?
• Mystery is fundamental. It comes from our being convinced that there is a consistency as opposed to our inconsistent experience.
• What purpose does the author serve as an intellectual vessel, and can authors simulate authors in other worlds who have unique intellectual production?
• Heterogeneity: people need to disagree, people need to conflict on how to inhabit the world.
• Metaphysical disagreement – how do elements in the world itself interact?
• The magical item – maybe our magic is more disturbing, not just concentrated in a particular item.
• Mystery should illuminate elements of our world.
• Why do we write? – to understand, to change, to reflect, to uncover.
• The role in speculating about the world: imaginative and speculative engagement.
• When you move from a subjectview to a worldview, the world emerges not just through the description of one subject, but through the engagement of multiple subjects.
• Worlds get us out of our heads.
• Observer’s dilemma
• Deeper engagement with the world than how to rationally depict the world.
• Do we discover or create worlds, or does it matter?The role of ritual
• Setting up the conditions for possibility
  • Are you provoking or provoked by?
  • Discovery: does it exist prior to its discovery?
• Anti-superhero movies
• Promethea
  • Words affect people directly – not a postmodern semiotics
  • Turns the daughter into a story – but how does the story function?
  • The eternal return: to rediscover that little bit of cosmology.
  • Difference within unity
  • Comic books are more of a duration than a moment.
  • The panel: the language of industrialization
  • How to recover richness from simple forms to give it depth and mystery?
• Plato’s pharmacy

Prompt: Write a world which includes the stapler.

The bleak moon casts a dull light across the blackened street. Two bodies lay still: three pairs of thin and deep indents to the forehead, two on the back. In the distance, a curdling scream. Three equally spaced staples to the forehead, two across the back. The body slumps, quiet. The figure waits several moments, then reabsorbs the embedded staples. It opens the pockets and collects the contents: one gray device, seven faintly bloodied staples. Three are unused. and moves quietly away. It loads the stapler and presses it gently against its abdomen. The stapler faintly clicks. The staple clings into the delicate flesh. It holds the rotting material together. It gives the decaying body a new body: structure. Structure is life in a rotting world. Another staple to the arm, then to the chest, and four on the right leg. But not on the head. Never on the head.

Week 2 Thursday

• Diagetic sound, involvement
• Deterroritorialization as a notion of abstraction, to a place of flow from one idea or another – one space to another
• Dialectic - thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
• Marxism
  • Where does value come from? Labor, demand, social capital
  • Affective labor
  • False consciousness, truthhood comes through the proletariat
• Affective labor – understanding the labor present in service, feeling, the exchange of signs
• Alienation of the self from the conditions of the labor
• In communication, production is not marked.
  • Avatar is produced, but it is the collective effort of many laborers.
  • Labor gets lost in a long chain of marking.
  • You’ve already destabilized the notion of production and the role of the individual
  • Sign-value and social value
• Complex systems destabilize the concept of labor, support fetishization. How to resist in the paradigm of production? Produce things which can take us somewhere else.
• Revolution – dissemination, the revolution can(not) be televised
• The multitude – Spinoza.
• Mass culture: Horkheimer and Adorno – enlightenment has two interesting components, a) makes technology, and b) makes critical thinking. Critical thinkers synthesize the cultural makers in a way to get us towards a more informed society.
  • We don’t have the same form of culture production that we used to have.
  • Thurtle: desn’t think that critical thinking is very important. What else do we need: we need imagination.
  • Critical thinking is walking backwards: technoscience leads first (producer), and humanity follows (the intellectual)
  • Imagination allows us to negate this assymetric dialectic: the imagination leads.
• The consumer: imaginative engagement and critique
• Authentic revolution – coming from traditional Marxism, work from within the inside: because there is no outside to capital anymore.
• Empire: global media production
• Spinozan multitde: in a world which is globalized, multiplatformed – includes all different forms of labor. Where is the individual? We no longer have a clear relationship between the individual and the mass?
• For Spinoza, Hardt & Negri, … – hold together mass production and individual production at the same moment.
• The crowd and the singularity.
• Deleuze & Guaratarri: line of flight, infinite deferral of synthesis – not quite, thesis and antithesis in eternal production.
• Authenticity ends up becoming the new topic in capital, authentcitiy has sign-value.
• What is the new authenticity? – recognizing the relationship between our singularity and our multiplicity. And this leads us towards imagination.
• Liberatory politics as opposed to authenticity, truthhood
• We have multiplicity, a matrix of variations – where we find a liberatory politics.
• A Marxist will tell you that world-building is escapism, leading you away from understanding systems of production.
• This gives us a way of thinking about the possibilities for a better existence.
• What is a better existence? – could be less oppressive, is it more creative
• Individualist liberalism: individuals are individuals, not only intellectually, but also politically or economically.
• When you are at the feet of the pyramid, your choice becomes inconsequential: it is no longer a right, it is no longer a choice.
  • Coke or Pepsi, it’s another flavor of how we participate in society.
  • You’re always already playing into a conception of society, society is already setting the rules
• Modernism/romanticist account of historicity: individuals drive history. Dialectical materialism: the material conditions of society (the ‘outside’) drive history. So what is the multitude’s theory of history?
• A more subtle notion of how we are different, without thinking about what it means to be an individual – both how can we be different and part of the crowd
• Where does the solution lie? In creating worlds which can alleviate suffering and increase creativity. We’re not giving up politics: we’re recognizing the complexity of politics.
• We will be building worlds which have to draw upon this world – imagination never exists in a vaccuum. But which express a small difference.
• Biopolitics – the ability to make live, and let die.
• Does world-building have anything to say about how we can merge the worlds that we imagine and the world in which we materially inhabit? Or can the premise of speculative knowledge only take us towards possibilities?
  • Write a manifesto and what you want to change (next week). When you world-build, you often end up getting ideas you wouldn’t get. World-building is generative. It’s about relationships, rather than objects: it’s a way for speculating about different types of relationships.
  • May not be predictive, in the sense of statistical modeling – but it is a form of modeling to think about what can come about from different tyeps of relationships.
• How does the multtide stand in relationship to intersectional epistemology?
• On the sex appeal of the inorganic
• We exist as historical subjects: now it is up to us to decide where we want to take it?
• Manifesto, initially: the principles to order the world around, and why
• The Futurist Manifesto: our society is not prepared for thinking about new developments in modernity, and we need an art which embraces it

Week 3 Tuesday: Liquid Liberation

• Bare life vs political life: you only have rights if you are recognized as a political life.
• Biopolitics
• In biology: the individual is dead
• Giorgio Agamben
• Biopolitics – comes out of Foucault, it’s no longer about disciplining subjects, but about making subjects more lively. Doesn’t fit into discourses on rights.
• What is the social function of wellness programs?
• Foucault’s formulation – the right to make live, and let die
• Necropolitics: there are active places where people are made to die
• Multitude – what is the function of the historian? In The Deep
• Can utopia only happen without memory? What is the burden of memory?
• What is the importance of the false? One of the things we don’t have in a state of perfection is time. Time is not about perfection, but circularity, decay. Aristotle – history is a tragedy.
• The Middle Passage and haunting – the role of the water in black American discourse. Water and trauma. Ends up becoming the middle stage which erases identity. The Middle Passage is a place of erasure.
• Freud’s conception of the oceanic
• Water has important psychological associations.
• From the aqeous environment of the womb to the aqeous environment of the ocean. Ties together many of these themes, trauma: water as a place of rebirth, ritual. Water as part of the subconscious.
• Civilization and its Disconentents – the mystic experience, the removal of the object//subject dyad. Oceanic as psychological: there is a state which is not fragmented in the way that ‘civilized’ minds are. This is the oceanic – a retreat from trauma to go to the oceanic. Water gives oneself a chance to be reborn from traumatic experiences.
• Defining of a new self – the heart of world-building
• Rationality as a suspension of time.
• The history of biology is a history of trying to cut things up and explaining them. This depends upon the suspension of time. It is only recently that biology thinks about how things change.
• Books are channeling existing ideas – the troubled concept of the author
• How does Marxism allow for the concept of a liberatory politics to emerge through popular culture?
• Afro-futurism, artistically exploring
• Drexciya
• There is a world which gives birth to world-building
• What is the role of myth in world-building? – active and dynamic, whereas literature as frozen into a canon (Deleuze)
• Myth is active and reproductive
• Not quite “never forget”, but “always relive” – Nietzsche, eternal return
  • Repeat to live through
• Storyview vs worldview
• A lot of people are into stories: but if you tell enough stories, you get a world
• How do objects come about?
• Worlds collide – they intersect with our material bodies
• Psychoanalysis – trauma to rebirth
• Don’t separate the idealistic from the mateiral: you cannot. You cannot separate the story from the real. There is no box strong enough to pull the two apart.
• Narrative – as opposed to the world, the image. What is the role of enw stories in old worlds? We need new worlds. In world-building, we’re not just interested in narratives, we’re interested in what relationships come out of it and what narratives a world promotes.
• “oral hallucinations from the Middle Passage”
• History vs hallucination: have others experienced it before?
• Can hallucinated experiences be real? Are hallucinations separate from reality? Reality is not just what we have around us: it’s so much more. This is why our storyview is different from others’ storyviews.
• Scientific experiments as: “am I hallucinating?”
• Manifestos
  • Challenge and provoke
  • Come in many forms
  • Theatrical
  • Fiction dressed as fact
  • Embrace paradox
  • Always on the bleeding edge
  • Are almost magic

Week 3 Thursday – Bergson, Memory, and the Virtual

• We are a beach
• How much of the ocean is made by the tidepools, by the shores? Are pools areas of comfort from trauma or ignorance? How is our selective ignornace sometimes bringing us closer to a greater knowing, greater consciousness?
• Marxism as understanding universality through partial commitment, through partial epistemic understanding
• History as causal, phenomenologically ordered and linear. We can get nuance in this – historians
• Foucault, geneology: not to think about items as a chrnology, but as potentials for something else to happen; breaking up the linearity.
• Let’s go further: our experience is a compendium of past, present, future – we take these things with us. Links us from memory to Deleuze’s theory of virtuality
• What is the virtual? – ask for Deleuze writing on the virtual
• Virtuality and immanence
• So much about memory – what does it mean to remember? How can memory be the basis for the future? How is the future the basis for the past?
• This idea of return – the return to the memory? Re-enactment? Repetition? Or do you run away? Or as a moment of re-birth, of re-engagement into new memory?
• We too often think about the virtual in opposition to the real.
• How does the virtual function, historically?
• Ontologically, different pieces: virtual vs. actual, possible vs. real
• Bergson – we need to think about the virtual vs the action instead of the virtual vs the real. The virtual is a state before things become actualized, and it is predicated upon certain relationships. And it is understood in terms of memory.
• The possible and the real – thinking about potentials, if we think about specific possible, it’s the thing which hasn’t happened, hasn’t been actualized
• Henri Bergson and memory: memory exists as a thing in itself, instead of as a reflection of the subject. It is not wholly of the subject, nor a material element of the world, but something which exists virtually.
• Language is sufficient for history, but not for memory – memories of olfactory sensations.
• Memory as my experience of abstraction to the universal.
• Memory as virtual coexistence – how would a new present come about if the old present did not pass at the same time that it is present? How would any present pass, if it were not past at the same time as present?
• We hold the past with us, it is a part of the present. The past is not actualized as present – the past is something which we hold.
• Virtual is an actual which has immaterial dimensions. It is something actualized which can be something else.
• The cone of memory, Bergson.
• The subject mediates the different levels in the cone of memory. If you change your memory, you can change your future. We need to run, and we need to hide. We need to select different areas
• Where do memories lie? – ontologically, the collective
• World-building is not an escape, it is a different tool to access insights about current relationships
• Memory is a place of great vulnerability and strength: relationships, stories. You can actualize certain things – what you actualize is always bigger than what you perceive as it.
• World-building is a way to think about how our memories and experiences can be politically engaged, give them a space – get out of the ocean, go to the tide pool and see how the things are relating. Then go back out to the ocean.
• What is change but play?
• Subject of zero-point, Merleau-Ponty – we’re tubes
• We carry the world with us – a possible argument against intersectional epistemology?
• Meaning is often a way to avoid memory – ‘maps of meaning’
• WHat is the logic of dreams?
• Biological unconscious, an associative way to think about what we take with us
• Memory and multiplicity – philosophy is the theory of multiplicities. Deleuze calls his philosophy a philosophy of multiplicities, multiple potentials. There are the actual adn the virtual. Il n’y pas object actual – every actuality is surrounded by a fog of virtual images. Memory is a way to be reborn, to think about something else.

Week 4 Tuesday – Actualizing Values

• Manifesto as made to be unfinished
• We already assume a way of processing reality which really is about our individuality. Reality is what we’ve already processed and already been making up.
• Perception – we don’t all have the same apparatuses of perception, but we all perceive.
• We share the experience of perception.
• How to understand the virtual?
• Potentials to be actualized
• The virtual exists as a cloud of potential around an object.
• Virtuality: the capability of imagining, and imagining itself as a form of actualization.
• Quadrivium
• Virtual X Real – usage in common speech
• You have instead the Virtual and the actual, and the real and the possible.
• The possible is the one thing you have actualized which doesn’t exist.
• Modal philosophy
• Deleuze: poststructuralist but not postmodernist
• The problem with the real was that it wasn’t even that interesting to think about to begin with
• The virtual and the actual as being more interesting
• What exists as real are objects – relations which exist between them are not ‘as real’; relationships themselves are preludes to something actualizing
• Kanizsa Triangle – it is the virtual, but you can sense that something exists there which is in tension, in the negative space, outlined bythe individual objects.
• Relationships which exist between things – the virtual.
• Information – not really the message itself, but the differences which matter.
• Reality and oppositional thinking – two things which trip us up
• Contextual, situated: not an ontological determination, but a situated analysis.
• Why is the virtual ethical? There’s an abstraction which exists around objects which becomes the source for values.
• Probabilities are already actualized – what are the conditions which allow for probabilities to occur.
• Probabilities are a relation
• A tension between teh many and the one in probability, which we don’t understand very well. Probabilities exist as many: for a probability to be actualized in depends on the sample size, etc. It’s not very good with meaning: it doesn’t give us a very provocative way to think about our experience.
• Excess
• Nietzsche and information
• Countable and count-as-one. Different modes. Also comes from Nietzsche. Two classes of things – the countable (something which statistics is good at, defining a category and counting – positivity) and count-as-one (counts which change your categories – not just a count, but also a perception – how we make the category influences the counting). Tension between the definition of categories and counting; exist in tension with each other.
• The triangle is not real vs unreal, but spaces in opposition to each other – different ways of belonging to the same event – they happen together, they’re bundled in the same mode; always in tension with each other.
• Tension has difference – difference ends up being absolutely productive; difference produce a world from a point. (Two points?)
• Different ways to engage with the complexity in the experience we have.
• Tensions create conditions. Difference becomes a condition under which certain things can emerge as opposed to other things.
• A cause is dictatorial: it does something, but retroactively writes itself into the effect. And often things cannot be reduced into a participatory gesture. What conditions does something emerge from?
• Something happens in society which makes certain ways of thinking possible, and then attractive.
• Social constructivism, scientific naturalization – both in nature and constructed socially, thinking about the conditions for emergence.
• Time exists within the tension itself and not the object.
• The dialectic is oppositional, but also it is through the synthesis throughout which you get the movie forward.
• Time is a part of the world, it is the tension between the virtual and the actual, desire is part of the world itself.
• The virtual exists both as futures and pasts
• Time is the result of tensions – we just measure time in a certain way.
• For Freud, desire is that which we cannot have. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is the world expressing itself.
• By the time we think about time, we’ve already measured it – divorced from space. The world is always a process, though – we try to talk about time as its own quality, we have actualized time.
• Differences without abstractions of binaries. Tools to think about new types of philosophies.
• There are different ways to actualize.
• Disjunction betweeen modes of experience produces depth – offset eyes, uneven ears.
• Depth comes from the tension we hold between two perspectives. It’s within all sensation
• Information is the difference which makes a difference (counting as one)
• The singular experiencing of existential value emerges from the tensions and multiplicites present.
  • Maximally abstract virtual reality
• Instead of going to the normal, go to the tensions – the weird, the bizarre.
• In worldbuilding, you need a moment where you feel frustrated, where you feel the tension. Otherwise, you’re not finding out about the world: you’re just ticking another box. Ethical research involves changing your mind.
• The virtual and the ethics of the virtual is at the heart of world-building.
  • Your world provides conditions, as opposed to determinations.
  • Relationships provide the codnitions for stories.
  • Stories emerge from the world, but are not determined by it.
  • Your world exists as a set of relations through which its products emerge from, which actualize: your world is virtual.
• Society is product-centric: what can you buy, cell, objects: but this is more about virtuals, fields, potentials: there is a liberatory moment, world as tension, as a recreation of the world.
• Purpose of manifesto – really to expose values more than precisely determinations of any kind.
• Your world is not reducible to determinations.
• It is the tensions, rather than the brilliance of your original presupposition, which matter. Manifestos are about reliving tensions to make claims.
• Tensions create objects, and tensions are created from differences in the world.
• The values produced by potentials emergent from conditions are more important than the determined acts, characters, arguments: this is what animates the ethics of what you’re doing rather than just coming upw ith a story.
• Compelling worlds invite recreation and retelling over and over again.
• Virtuals remain abstract
• The virtual world creates the conditions for products (e.g. The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit)
• World-building as very different from story-building.

Week 4 Thursday – Parallel Worlds

A Game of Cat and Cradle

• Associational forms of logic
• Metaphor, the function of metaphor – or homology (shared histories)
• No metaphors in biology: analogies and homologies
• Homology: shared historical continuity
• Nature and culture, the split – is this even an inherently Western split?
• Science studies: how do we create knowledge in society? – science’s stated goal is to make universal claims from local observation.
• “Situated Knowledge”, Donna Haraway. Situated knowledge is thinking about the role of local observations, the situated knowledge.
• Universalizing abstraction of science – “the view from nowhere”, “the God trick”
• Sandra Harding, “Strong Objectivity” – objective to get at universality through more committed partiality or to abandon universality as a useful concept altogether?
• A landscape based on knots, not on a ‘view from nowhere’ – dense understandings of when things come together. It is a view of more than one.
• Do we always need universals?
• Universal assumptions aren’t as universal as we think they are – can we use non-universal statements, if that’s what we use anyway – and we can use the wormholes.
• The God trick – erases traces of how it was formed.
• Knots — associations, entanglements
• Polysemouos words, bundling together, new concepts, neologism.
• Troubling: to take apart, to pull at, to undo knots
• Emgomeering: ethics within its own structure. Tighter control over the internal critique.
• Science studies – militarized metaphors.
• Cybernetics: the ontology of the enemy
• Why think in antagonisms?
• Cat’s Cradle: about making knots, untying knots, and about the beach ball – this is the source of play.
• Trickster logic — game theory and queering/feminizing it into cat’s cradle.
• You can’t homogenize – different from a Marxist conception (get from the right perspective and you have the right view of the world) – Deleuze, homogenization doesn’t happen, it givesyou a notion of a homogenous mass, but in fact there is the multitude – both about difference and the mass. Every mass creates a minor.
• Preserve and recognize commonality and difference
• The minor is always the most immediate thing – that which emerges under conditions, so it’s not responding to the major.
• A new literary movement – maybe agonistic, but what is more interesting is its expression of shared difference – a literature which reacts to the mass is just another mass literature.

Parallel Botany

• What makes a world ‘adjacent’ (‘parallel’) as opposed to other forms of imaginary creation?
• Perspective and premodern art – not about how it is situated in space, it is about how it is situated within the world.
• Capital: infinite circulation, you can put things where you want
• Some things can not be engaged within equivalent exchange.
• Parallel botany
• The importance of the world of form – meaningless shapes to fill the empty vertical space.
• Leo Lionni is very interested in the vertical.
• How to shape space, shape forms.
• References to truth
• Something about engaging with materials that we build the world from
• Dictatorial relationships to materials: materials need tob e able to speak to you
• How are spaces constructed in relationship to the page?
• What is a plant? Plantness – the act of speculation.
• Abstracting plantness – creating a new set up virtual circumstances.
  • Modeling: abstraction and virtuality
• Form and morphology: what makes a plant? What characterizes organic forms? Form and function – always about forms.
• Plants outside of time and space
• Plants which change perception: what is inside and outside of an imaginary space, as soon as you can see it, it’s no longer inside.
• What’s in an apple? Cut in half: and you have a new outside.
• What is the status of a plant which forms as a tube? Is there a negative interior which exceeds the unimaginable?
• Actualizing differential forms and images
• Take your ordinary moment, and make it weird.
• Whiteboards and screens

Week 5 Tuesday – The Technical Universe of Images

• We love representation, but representation is a very tiny piece of the surface.
• Two steps of abstraction:
  • From 3d to 2d, traditional image, pre-writing, pre-history. Very different from words. We apprehend it all at once, then identify its details. Writing begins from the details and you apprehend it from the details.
  • From bits to envisioning information. Already created from particles, technical images. All technical images are about particles.
• Magic – a way to engage with traditional images
• What’s historical is the sense of time, which comes from writing. It has a subject, verb, and an object.
• Technical images – have built into it a historical component into each of the particles.
• Technologies are always already recreating some aspect of society
• We cannot run straight to representation because we’re missing something – recreating a technological society much more than it is recreating a specific object.
• Idealized society – we always envision before we capture.
• You can only critique from the inside, you cannot get on the outside.
• Artificial setups – artificial constructs to understand nature
• What is interesting, what is surprising, what is valuable. What is informative and interesting.
• Marx’s labor theory of value: image generation models as conceiving of valueable images
• You’re bound before you create a message
• Freedom is to say ‘no’.
• Science is the controlled production of anomalies – to make anomalies productive – but this is also true of art, and of all creativity
• Art is a form of research, a way to make use of the world
• It can be absurd, but it must be consistent; the false
• Fiction and fact – is it informative?
• Electronic pragmatism
• What we call world-building, Flusser calls envisioning.
• A class on how to actualize, how to make things concrete – ethically, creatively, less oppressively

Week 5 Thursday: Creating Alternate Worlds in the Biological Sciences

• There is always a capacity to find another world in our current one
• Can we only analyze until after we characterize the world? I need to read everything before I start writing… no, you always need to be putting things back together
• Grids in the webpages, the fundamental language of HTML and the Internet
• Foucault – two parts of the grid, the partiion and the bringing back together (the reconstruction)
• A lot of people who read Foucault center on the partitioning, but we need a way of bringing back together.
• Teleology of the organism – its construction is in its final product
• Generative models and partition // reconstruction
• Holism and 20th century German society – as oppressive as anything else.
• Regulation is a primary aspect of world-building
• What is the color of air?
• We have never really experienced our biology without colored lens
• The view is not true.
• But the image institutes itself as universal.
• The notion of order does not make sense
• Biology is always about combinations and moving between them
• Stem cells have a virtual component
• Animations – how to connect information, how to link things
• Few parts of biology were computerized to begin with, but biology has become thoroughly computerized
• Most of the visualization techniques for biology come from the entertainment industry.
• We go to a very highly constructed media to understand what is real.
• The real not as representational – as can you see if they fit together, do they make sense together. Realism as a world-building mechanism
• What’s real vs not real doesn’t really make sense – nor does it really matter. It’s more about if it is informative, and what happens when you go from the virtual to the actual, the abstract to the concrete.
• Hegel – abstract, negative, concrete.
• Flusser – how exactly does it deviate from the Hegelian logical motion?
• Appeal to science has to understand that there is a kernel of the weird within the science, and if you don’t appreciate it, you are making a reductionist maneuver.
• Making as a form of knowing – thinking about how to build things back up.
• Making as a form of critique
• Studying relationships which allow for elements to occur.
• Frankfurt/Marxist distinction: critiquing and making, how is making itself a form of critique.
• Preconditions
• Worlds are the gift which keep on giving
• De Novo protein design
• There is no negativity in biology, there is no void.
• Biology is all full
• We have to go outside biology to fix our biological bodies
• Making sense of reality isn’t enough
• Dream logic – deep dream and network hallucinations
• The Illuminarium – the Cathedral of the 21st century, the cosmology of the present
• We cannot just represent the world: we must abstract and illuminate it, and under these conditions we have a God which makes sense.
• Science as a cathedral
• Money isn’t the currency here: it’s vitality
• We need meaning, and that often doesn’t come from science. World-building: we have to understand doesn’t replace myth: it ends up creating more myths. It creates an empire of myths.

Week 6 Tuesday – Worlding Objects

• Fantasy, dreams/hopes
• Futurology – to study the future; innovation studies, etc.
• Speculate, but don’t think about fantasy.
• Design — oriented, always pointed, directed in a certain way for a particular purpose.
• Things which could and should be, how could design be.
• Design as actualization; space, communication
• Design vs art
• Designers can create processes
• Design as solving problems
• Designers brand themselves in school more than any other academic branch, which is interesting – they are being self-reflective about their approach.
• What are the nuances between schools in design?
• Speculative design: critical design and design fictions.
• Critique of the relation between design and industry problem-solving.
• Hyperreal – could be actualized.
• What countsa violine?Os positivitiy good
• We don’t ;ean rea..u
• How e can privilege the socierty we tryttouporse in the morning.
• Critiques to do something else which is not so oppositional.
• Authenticity of criticism?
• Critique as needing to be constructive?
• Collaborative critique? – collaborative construction?
• Can SF be a positive thing despite its commodification?
• Paint a picture of interrelationship
• How to move from the reactive to the active
• World-building: the stated goal is to take objects and figure out how they fit in worlds; emerge out of a set of relationships: analyses are useful because they are about world-building – opinions reify objects and stances, they make a thing, a critique makes a thing
• Critique vs speculation
• World-building which is inherently about cosmology? – the ridiculous, irreality; but this might also be important.
• World-building as an analytic: exploration, showing that world-building is everywhere: the systems of work, views and values, tend not to be recognized; the praxis
• World building as critical making: creating worlds that produce objects.Can we build worlds in a certain way which allow us to see the richness of the world more clearly.
• Can we produce worlds which keep on producing objects? NOt definitive, we don’t have the causality: the world has the causality, and you are just a tube which funnels this. So you need critique to nudge this.
• Letting the world tell you who and what you are, and what you will be part of – the beauty of the cosmology
• Our ideas and our imagination – not realism or social constructivism, because it also has the material of the world: it is time for us to invite the world to drink with us.

Week 6 Thursday – Architectures and Landscapes

• Images are not consumed in the places which produce them
• Renderfarms
• World-building behind world-breaking
• Fetish as a religious object becoming a form of critique
• What is the limit of Marxist analysis? Does a Marxist analysis leave anything left to be understood? Why do people participate in fetishization?
• Fetishism as misdirected desire
• “opium of the masses” – opium as a historically situated phenomena (allowing for surgery, excising)
• Early capitalism: production. Late capitalism: desire, how to make people consume what we have.
• Marxism as a powerful mode of analysis. But we should still believe in magic.
• Magic – modernism, magic is what brings you away from rational thought. Or, magic is a way to think about the heterogeneous elements of the world.
  • Modernism reduces to a grid of interchangeability
  • The layering between the domestic and the supernatural is where we find it.
  • We can have critique and our dreams.
• Value comes about through exchange-value
• Where to push into?
• It is in the tensions where we find futures and realities.
• Dreams with more tensions in them
• Capital touches everything, but not everything can be reduced to capital. There are many inexchangeable parts of the world, but perhaps we don’t search for them, or we don’t understand them.
• Haraway, God trick - transcending it
• Should we fully transcend? If we do, are we just playing the game? What is the goal? To take what is around us to make more informed choices, but not just informed rationally, but informed by the types of values that we have for holding ourself in the world.
• Dreaming and critiquing
• Interdisciplinarity as a value – the relationships, the cat’s cradle (Haraway)
• Props as ‘backwards fetishes’ – here is an object, and what is the history which went into it?
• Utilizing the object
• Utilitizing concepts – magic, dreams, etc.; actualizing magic
• We are not going to transcend, but this doesn’t mean we can’t make some lives better
• Pleasure and its commodification; exchange
• Gift giving: you’re buying obligations, time
• Interdisciplinarity: a recognition that the big problems transcend the disciplinary boundaries we have set up to understand them
• Modernist logic of equal exchange
• What are the means from which ideas emerge, the relationships which can happen out of this?
• Interdisciplinary as a way to arrange ideas, not people; intersectionality as a way to understand identities, not quite collapsing them

Week 7 Tuesday – The Deep, Oceans and Water

• What did reading The Deep tell you about world building?
• Unmooring the reader – letting them stay adrift
• Windwos within the story and as stories to begin with
• Let there be light – creation
• Enlightenment
• Light as illumination vs light as ephermeral form – glistening, sparkling, etc.
• The deep – depth, surfaces
• The gradient of water as a method of meaning – epistemic truthhood
• Authentic depth vs the reality of depth
• Depth emerges as a difference between things
• A metaphysics of emptiness: can this emerge in the ocean?
• We see the world of substances as things which are and things which give (weight). But what would it mean for us to interpret a world of substance which takes?
• To make concrete
• Materiality is already there and already affecting us
• Part of being a world builder is to show a world whose coherence comes about because of the forces present in its material reality
• Sound as an important piece of media, an important dimension
• ‘Precipitate’ – a liquid analog for concrete
• Stories are often about characters and things
• Environments are often thought of in the natural.
• What is natural defines our temporal and metaphysical worldview – what is right, what happened, what is, what will happen, what does happen
• History makes us miserable – do animals have history?
• The concept of the object – Object Oriented Ontology, post-Continental philosophy. Objects have agency, given by a specific reading of Kant.
• The elemental – what is an element? What makes up the world? What are its forces and how is it different from an object?
• Is an element different than an object – Levinas, an element only has one side, one face. Thinking beyond what is an object.
• Thinking about the metaphysics of force, and in larger terms about what a politics of force looks like.
• Let’s not lose the elemental which structures our world, not into a world of objects and subjects.
• How do elements provide different ways for thinking about the world, for generating new patterns to live by.
• What is near and what is far? What is far is perceived indirectly, by what is near to us!
• Not the different, not the same – the critical excess.

Week 7 Thursday – The Power of the Wind

• To imagine a world where the insects are much bigger than the humans
• The cavities of dead bodies – what kind of spaces do these form
• Regrowth and re-instrumentalization
• Wind – something we can only see indirectly, but which we must feel
• Wind must continually move; if it ceases, it is not wind anymore
• The ill father
• What is the function of the archetype?
• Lore
• World-builders: you can tie together complex worlds which have difference but without being antagonistic to the current world through archtetypes.
• Lore as the building blocks through which myth is created.
• When is something born from the ocean?
• Lore exists across worlds but is expressed in myths.
• Things are never really separate, ever
• Meaning as created through an arc

Week 8 Tuesday – The Lure of the Impossible

• Impossible vs improbable
• Not all speculative futures are useful (?)
• To make a speculation isn’t to make a judgement
• What is the goal of speculation?
• How do you do predeterminations on something which has not been determined yet?
• We can’t expect to have it predetermined.
• Goals? Why do we do things?
• How do we create a better world?
• Invest in the ticked check-boxes that we like. But this doesn’t happen for any complex system.
• How do you engage in the future without relying too much on the past?
• Models for a better future
• Alfred North Whitehead on propositions: the possibility of an actual world, true vs. false and prehensive
• Process philosophy
• Not based on categorical imperatives
• What are philosophical propositions?
• There are two different ways of engaging with propositions, and we have two different subjects of engaging with the world.
• Evaluative: true vs false. This is all well and good. But it’s not the only one.
• Prehensive subject: to grasp, a subject which feels something before it becomes conscious.
• A philosophy to help us think about the rule of judgement. Not a judgement (true vs false). NOt everything in a proposition. It is an idea about how things might work. What happens when we think about how things might work?
• Emotionally invest in a way for thinking about how the world works.
• Lure – we come to become attached to it; it links our feeling and emotional investment.
• Intensity – how important they are, how pressing it is.
• On being a lure: although propositions can be true or false, it is more important to be interesting. Propositions can become a lure for feelings. It is more important for people to engage than to believe or recognize. Provocation
• Prehensive quality and the emotional bind: making a proposition becomes an attractor, a seducer for different emotions.
• What is the point of a speculation?
• Putting things out
• Futures become evoked in propositions.
• Consequences in the world are never straightforward
• Speculations are told about specific actualities
  • Not there to manage risk or to solve problems
  • Not removed from the world even though it is part of it.
  • When you build the world, you always start from this world.
• Speculation takes a differeent set of skills
• You cannot make evaluative judgements before the event occurs – this is authentic speculation.
• Going beyond what can think
• Actuarial tables
• Copernican vs Ptolemy
• How do the ery parameters of a model change?
• Matter of fact and what is important may be antithetically opposed.
• The power comes in its being constrained.
• Speculation as reorganizing the virtual.
• A way to find out why certain things are attracted to one another.
• Experiences intensified for importance
• How to hold yourself in the woerld to act as a lure for other futures