00:00:04:

00:00:09: Hello and welcome back to our Im Kunstraum Podcast series.

00:00:13: My name is Maximilian Steinborn, I'm responsible for press in communication at Kunstraum And i am really pleased to introduce this new episode To you.

00:00:21: as part of current show attitude era We're sharing a lecture by the philosopher Patricia Reed A talk she gave on the second of May twenty-sixth At This Year's Donner Festival In Kremse Co-hosted together with Kunstraum Niederösterreich.

00:00:35: The lecture is titled Planetary Hope as Not-Yet Realism.

00:00:40: Drawing on the concept of the not yet conscious developed by German philosopher Ernst Bloch, Reid explores how we can rethink hope in times of climate crisis and global rise authoritarian forces against fossil fuel post truth utopianism of maga and similar movements.

00:00:58: she argues for hopeful not yet realism that believes another world possible without ignoring planetary limits.

00:01:06: Patricia Reed is a theorist, artist and designer based in Berlin.

00:01:10: She's head of the Critical Inquiry Lab at Design Academy Eindhoven... ...and a lecturer on sound practice research at Volkvang University.

00:01:20: She also a forthcoming Research Fellow for Digital Cultures in Vienna.

00:01:25: Her research project Figuring Planetary Space Abandoning Man's Measure was recently published by the International Architecture Biennial Rotterdam as part of its Agent Of Change program.

00:01:50: Yeah, thanks... Well first off all thank you for sacrificing this beautiful afternoon For those who saw the film earlier.

00:01:59: it's hard to believe that we are in ruins when such a nice day.

00:02:04: But I also wanted to thank Federica and Thomas for their invitation.

00:02:10: It is really great here to open up some conversations.

00:02:14: I'm glad you saw some spectacular visuals earlier because we're going to go bare bones here today and save the stage show for real performers later this afternoon.

00:02:25: And thanks for kind introduction Maximilian, really looking forward to our conversation later on!

00:02:31: Yeah, and I'm so glad to have seen the film earlier.

00:02:42: And I promise you that had not seen it in advance there are so many overlaps... ...and its kind of reassuring having overlaps with such an esteemed figure like Isabelle Stengels.

00:02:57: So basically i was asked to prepare some thoughts on Mad Hope as well this exhibition Attitude Era, both of which are located in our broader historical present conditioned by climate catastrophe Geopolitical tumult Genocidal violence Increasing economic stratification The monopolization of technology platforms often run By those who explicitly espouse neo-fascist ideals.

00:03:35: And all this is driven you know, a necropolitical dependency upon an energy infrastructure that fuels resource wars as we see very acutely today while choking all of us in divergent timelines.

00:03:52: So the infinite scrolls our feeds The ceaseless circulation of despair focuses on attention amidst trivial depictions like perverted wellness regimes the latest skin care tips probably oriented to those of my generation.

00:04:12: Protein maxing and the buffoon-like comedic tragedy, of powerful leaders uttering nonsense with consequence for Those who seek solace in hard sciences.

00:04:32: Predictive models on many fronts likely color our picturing to that of a willfully naive disposition, where the only clear-eyed relation to our present is one realistic critical unhope.

00:04:51: Now I promise this talk we'll not continue to rehearse what many already sense know and feel in her presence aligning with what writer & curator Shuman Bazar posted just yesterday on his Instagram On The Obligation To Reject UnHope even if dooming is a natural and addictive response to the conditions of world to be

00:05:17: apprehended.".

00:05:20: So it's against this equation between hope, naivete that we're obliged to revisit in conditions of this world.

00:05:29: That condition its possibility intelligibility sensibility.

00:05:36: In other words Hope does not take place in historical material vacuum but rather takes hold in conditions.

00:05:44: So without thoroughly grappling with these conditions, we risk portraying a kind of vacuous hope that is a kind-of-hope devoid of strategy.

00:05:54: so for those who watched the film maybe this figure of Gaia could be this grappling with this condition.

00:06:04: To this end and my own sort terms I prefer i'll be sketching our historical condition which is a crucial difference to past thinkers of hope grappling with post-Second World War order, like Ernst Bloch for whom the triumph of humanist man in Euro anthropocentric register was conceptually possible.

00:06:30: What does Hope look like in planetary conditions?

00:06:33: Wherein The Human more specifically Humanist Man Is not the measure Of all things including Hope itself.

00:06:43: So what I'm referring to is basically a different condition of historical understanding, such as that outlined by historian Dipesh Chakrabarti.

00:06:52: Where in human-made climate catastrophe effectively invalidates the centuries long division or Western separation between natural history on one hand and Human History On The Other And where the human emerges captured by this disputed term of the Anthropocene.

00:07:14: So, The Planetary as Chakrabarty has written it addresses us in a different referential terms than the global histories of Euro-modernity that project narratives of human and interhuman events upon a seemingly inert backdrop of a passive earth—in other words —a figure detached from

00:07:37: ground."

00:07:39: whereas the planetary addresses us in terms of our biogeochemical embeddedness within Earth's systems.

00:07:49: So, the planetary address is as in this kind metabolic interdependent and hyper-relational term such that whatever ideals we may project upon it feedback with nonlinear material an energetic consequences upon our conditions of inhabitation.

00:08:09: And what this does is transform a rather mechanical picturing of agency, bound to our local capacities alone.

00:08:16: Of immediate environmental transformation like those found in accounts of hope.

00:08:22: that sort of emphasize or privilege individual will.

00:08:27: while This may be known to us as a kind of epistemological recognition Since the discovery of the biosphere which was literally one hundred years ago this year We're in the nascent stages of internalizing this transformation upon self-understanding, and the agencies that transformed agencies that cascade from it.

00:08:50: So as Lukas Likavchen echoes on a recent article called The Long L', This planetary addressing thus designates a categorically different kind of agency an agency oriented towards biogeochemical metabolic transactions that happen both within the species and across other

00:09:12: species.".

00:09:14: So when hope is connected to a capacity, to enact or activate conditions of betterment it's a form of agency.

00:09:25: However its my suggestion today That what our seeming deficit of Hope discloses Is not outright disappearance but is related to the uncertainty of orientation in the face of this transformed agency, The Planetary Compulse.

00:09:45: Which indeed it's a far more complex in quality and coordination.

00:09:51: So just as Ray Brassier noted that our failure to change the world may not be unrelated to our failure To understand It so too can we speculate That Our deficit Of Hope May Not Be Unrelated to our failure, to narrate human self-understanding within the large scale complex integrated societies we inhabit today.

00:10:14: With decades of training and coercing adapting us into individuals in a niche environment of neoliberalism what does hope look like in complex integrated conditions that cannot be reduced to individual aspiration?

00:10:30: but must contend with it in collective and metabolically attuned terms.

00:10:37: How does the agency of hope mutate in non-mechanical conditions that do not conform to the meter scale of our human phenomenological immediacy?

00:10:48: Or, as curator Basam Elberoni put it in his twenty fifteen exhibition What Hope Looks Like After Hope?

00:10:56: quote what would hope look like if we injected Placed it in a world where causes are untraceable and effects incalculable severed It from its more eschatological concerns about the future And blocked it from using the posturing of human rights, and humanism?

00:11:19: end quote.

00:11:21: So basically what I'm suggesting is rather than lament or mourn this seeming hopelessness of our present We treat it.

00:11:27: Rather as a symptom of an end-of-a World condition and the understandable uncertainty of agency, an orientation that arises in a different niche of complex inhabitation.

00:11:42: The premise behind this approach is if a planetary epoch is to name a substantial difference from how this historical world is currently ordered and encoded—an end-to-the-world as we know it —as Denise Ferriero de Silva puts it—is

00:11:57: required."

00:11:59: Referring to an end of an epoch, we can bracket as long-year modernity.

00:12:06: So when were speaking in terms such paradigmatic shifts We're confronted with a mandate to construct other ways navigating reality Understanding ourselves humans including our positioning and relations Our way's knowing And how justify the activities that do Especially technological interventions.

00:12:29: So when describing the planetary age as a paradigmatic transformation, it's not just knowledge about this planetary condition that we get from something like our system sciences.

00:12:41: But how it addresses us and re-orients knowhow?

00:12:45: The millions of practice in human self understanding as well as our agencies.

00:12:51: so my working thought experiment today is at the turbulence that were experiencing.

00:12:55: an inner moment is due to this sort of interstitial conflict between these epochs.

00:13:02: Such that the question evolves into what hope looks like and how does it function in the end-of-a-world condition?

00:13:09: Are we lamenting the futility of a genre of mechanical humanist hope belonging to a vanished world, or can this symptom critically emerge as an opportunity invoked by Walter Benjamin who noted that true catastrophe isn't merely this kind of unsuspecting event, that punctures are every day but rather concerns historical continuity where a critical moment has been lost having become engulfed by the spirit of routine and all that is familiar.

00:13:46: So following Benjamin we can infer that the construction of hope at the end of a historical world Is equal to an agency to witness opportunity.

00:13:56: Now, to be sure this is a deprivatized realm of social opportunity.

00:14:01: And although it interfaces with and affects the personal It's irreducible.

00:14:06: so you know like finance and individual chance-taking So the catastrophic lies in remaining fundamentally unchanged unlearned an unmoved by disruptions.

00:14:17: Be those disruptions?

00:14:18: You knew epistemic environmental economic socio normative likely a combination of all the above.

00:14:28: So as it continues attachment to the way familiar historical worlds are configured, no matter their condition true catastrophe-as hopelessness marks a shunning possibility in favor of staying the course No Matter The Consequences.

00:14:45: so with some of these stakes and distinctions outlined what we could call hope in planetary conditions it's useful to elaborate upon the operation of hope itself, which helps position the role of art be that visual sonic or otherwise within this kind of framework.

00:15:03: So Hope at its core is an attachment to a condition of betterment where politics can be understood as a dispute over exactly what betterment entails and for whom since whatever may be better does not fully empirically exist in The here now have our immediate world It is what Alain Badieu would call an inexistent.

00:15:28: So for Badieu, an in-existence isn't something absolutely absent or completely not existing but rather signals a minimal degree of influential existence In certain configuration of the world.

00:15:43: So, for example in the case of women's suffrage.

00:15:46: Women, of course existed pre-existed The right to vote but they inexisted In relation to the Right To Vote and the agencies that are brought about therein.

00:15:57: so even in the rather naive sounding Prevents of simply hoping For a better world We can describe one more complicated operation That any struggle for hope as Betterment is also a struggle of learning how to witness the world that does not yet concretely exist in a given configuration, and the transformations in lived experience that come from it.

00:16:25: So I'd like to keep this in mind as what we call in philosophy an eminent example of hope.

00:16:31: And What That Means Is That It Arises From The Empirical Stuff An Entities Of An Existing World Yet Remade Reconfigured Rerelated To Such Degree that a novel world configuration manifests.

00:16:46: Now there are some similarities with Ernst Bloch's Treatise on Hope, The Principle of Hope albeit in a more effective psychological level where he links hope to the not yet conscious.

00:17:00: Bloch describes the Not Yet Conscious as quote precisely because this thinking is not yet finished.

00:17:20: And it has to be discovered and inherited by each succeeding

00:17:23: age.".

00:17:25: So the works of the past contain pre-monitory, prefigurative images in society's next stage.

00:17:34: In Blocks formulation we could suggest that a kind conceptual transcendence occurs so way exiting existing logics based on this recombination of unfinished past ideas.

00:17:48: So the question or problem of hope in this sense becomes bound to an agency, To witness just such unfinished ideas.

00:17:57: and The capacity to witness such unfinished Ideas presumes a necessary sensitivity to them.

00:18:06: so the question at hand which resonates I think deeply with artistic practice that Of course traffic's in the sensorial is how to open and alter our sensitivity, since even critical assessments of a given familiar condition may render us insensitive to these inexistence or something like weak signal as well as past ideas that have been discarded relevant the framework certain historical world.

00:18:34: And it's regimes organizing sense.

00:18:38: so ultimately what I'm suggesting here points to a picture of hope that on the one hand is conceptually transcendent and empirically imminent.

00:18:50: So this is what the title of this talk is gesturing too with a planetary not yet realism, A Picture Of Hope That Isn't An Attachment To Betterment Based Purely On Projected Imaginary Ideals but manifests in an imaginative recombining, remaking and reconfiguring of the stuff entities and unfinished ideas at hand.

00:19:15: Yet nor is it a form of realism that stands in for some sort of immutability like when politicians tell us to be more realistic But its one that grapples with the muck this world or the ruins Stengers was putting up.

00:19:31: So on Josephine Berry's words quote A realism suspended between a complicity with the objectifying and dissociative regime of capitalism, And its role as a vital navigational tool that could help us plot a collective course out of incipient ecological

00:19:48: collapse.".

00:19:51: So in philosophical terms this picturing of hope In The mode Of This Not Yet Realism Echoes With Nelson Goodman's description where new worlds are always the result of a remaking of past, and making is always a remake.

00:20:06: So how to work with the ruins so-to speak?

00:20:11: This not yet realism bound to hope can be understood as shorthand response To Ray Brassier's poignant question As for How We Can Escape The Tyranny Of Actuality Without Recourse To The Absolute Transcendental Of Shear Ideals.

00:20:28: So in more concrete terms, this not-yet realism works against the delusional and hopeless attachment to unbounded global capital accumulation.

00:20:37: However it is not a rehearsal of distant objectivisms from realisms of the past.

00:20:43: so this realist address of the planetary guards against this sort of ahistorical trap of conflating something like interdependence and hyperrelationality with a flattening or sameness of life conditions while all the while committing to a local negotiation of the systematicity of our world.

00:21:04: This is realism that asks how to traverse scales, construct solidarities temporalities materials and subjects as it means to adapt sensitivity beyond the immediacy Of a familiar given word ultimately opening consciousness to the realism of possibility itself.

00:21:25: In other words, it's a genre of realism at odds with the actual state of our world.

00:21:30: A genre of realism amenable to the transformation of existing

00:21:34: conditions.".

00:21:36: So the reframing here is that rather than painting and mourning hope in the heroic terms of a kind of Eurohumanism we see it as an agency to nurture sensitivity to inexistant signals—an unfinished thought available for repurposing.

00:21:53: So it's here worth highlighting and contrasting a few important factors aligned with our existing geopolitical contexts in relation to the operations of hope that have been more generally or abstractly described.

00:22:05: First, the relation to past in todays global neo-fascisms is distinctly not about witnessing and cultivating as sensitivity but rather about reconstituting and fixing a past world's configuration in ethno-nationalist terms.

00:22:25: So here the past is not something to examine for its unfinished thoughts, But an object of their fetishized nostalgia To be arrested and instituted into permanent condition.

00:22:37: A bit cynically as China Mayaville once said We already live in utopia.

00:22:42: it just isn't ours.

00:22:44: So the not-yet consciousness of block relates to temporality in the past with a nonlinear openness and its search for unfinished thought.

00:22:54: And this, I think it's importantly at odds with the linear temporality given to us by Euromon or historical world that guaranteed betterment right which Stengers was talking about this sort of infinite progress as a foundational narrative where time moves into forward direction.

00:23:14: However, as Suhail Malik has pointed out this kind of guarantee of progress inherent to the cosmology your modernity.

00:23:22: It basically dissolves ancestral and descendant accountability where progress because progress is narrated a certain.

00:23:31: so basically we don't have to have responsibility or care about our interventions in here now when progresses guaranteed.

00:23:40: So Malik's observation arrived from his critical appraisal of what he called the de-futurity thesis and this is found in prominent authors, great authors but you know everyone so susceptible to critique.

00:23:53: So prominent authors like Mark Fisher who have widely addressed our hopelessness as a neoliberal deflation of future expectations, and the general lack of desire or belief in betterment as a kind of psychosocial condition over a moment across a spectrum of registers.

00:24:13: So what's unquestioned in these authors' mourning about so-called slow cancellation of the future is this specificity of historical grounding through which very concept of the futures understood So, simply stated what the de-futurity thesis risks lamenting is The death of a linear directionality in the future belonging to your modernity which locates hope and anticipation In an almost exclusively forward looking register.

00:24:46: so rather than lament the demise Of this historical version of futurity And the hopelessness we now feel connected To it We can rather witness It in realist terms As the need to re-figure concepts of futureity as such, ones that reimagine our relation and sensitivity to unfinished pasts.

00:25:04: And a commitment to their remade recontextualized emergent novel

00:25:09: worlds.".

00:25:11: So I think the importance of this rather you know wandering picture of temporality that operates as an implicit critique Of this linear directionality of time we find in blocks not yet gestures to the problem of narrating a fundamental challenge posed by planetary understanding that addresses us in ancestral timescales, cosmic dimensionality and geological time.

00:25:37: So Ancestrality & Descendent relations here surpassed bio-kin familial pictureings of the privatized domain of nuclear family structure gesturing to species domain, summoning the image of thought introduced by Marx and his species being.

00:25:55: And what we can recall from Lukas Lykovchen was introducing this formulation of planetary agency as a biochemical metabolic transaction that happens both within the species and beyond other

00:26:08: species.".

00:26:12: So The Wandering Temporality Of A Hope In Not Yet Realism helps unsettle these sort of linear inheritances, a futural understanding inherited in the conditions of your modernity while accidentally opening up cosmic space to establish self-conception and deep time as an non catastrophic opportunity.

00:26:35: So do close out those reflections on hope And connect this a little bit more specifically to the forthcoming exhibition, Attitude Era in Kunstraum Niederösterreich.

00:26:47: It seems important to address fictionality—to which hope across political spectrums is always sort of partially bound.

00:26:56: While many words have been spilled about The Fake News Of Our Time, purely liberal deliberative desires to contest by fact-checking how fallen flat to say the least, pointing to the hopelessness of sheer facticity alone.

00:27:15: Sheer facticity after all points to the world as it is without this social opportunity of The Not

00:27:21: Yet.".

00:27:22: So the nature of populist fiction today epitomized by the always spectacular example of

00:27:29: U.S.,

00:27:30: whereas Asensio Robles has pointed out one defining political questions at our moment the extent to which new forms of populism are truly committed, to dismantling global order that is simultaneously denounced and depended upon.

00:27:50: The curators of this exhibition fruitfully pointed me to Abraham Josephine Reesman as an influence on their work and her pop cultural analysis of the US populist turned, narrated through the lens of professional wrestling in her book Ringmaster.

00:28:07: So this was introduced to me when we had our sort of preliminary discussions.

00:28:13: In Ringmaster Riesman elaborates upon an old term from Carnival slang called kayfabe very weird word.

00:28:22: Kayfabe is where you present something that isn't true but it's presented with such undying commitment that it almost becomes reality.

00:28:31: So as Reisman outlines, early instances of kayfabe meant you could not express this fakeness to the outside world.

00:28:38: so the show had to deceptively go on... ...to convince spectators about its realty to some degree.

00:28:48: Today however she's identified what he calls neo-kayfabe as a practice which, quote is not just a simple lie like faking that what you see is real but comes from a deeply cynical place.

00:29:04: That announces its fakeness except for the parts that audiences want to be real.

00:29:13: it's the layering of overt lies To express a deeper often emotional truth and quote like the fulfillment of an emotionally racist ideology captured by the ridiculous proclamation, that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in the last election campaign.

00:29:32: Rather than fact-checking such statements as a kind of countermeasure, Reisman suggests rather we account for –in reality–the violent harms produced—in other words… fictions and fakery.

00:29:51: So what's useful to highlight in this perverse example for the purposes of a hopeful night yet, is premise not on reacting to a dichotomous separation between fiction and reality as if one could resolve a fictional lie by way of sheer facts but upon strategizing the relation between fiction & reality in this domain of history.

00:30:21: So while hope has almost exclusively been bound to these kind-of future projections, as Bloch and others have asserted it is also premised upon a certain relationship with the past.

00:30:33: It's an operation of de-totalizing the past And this is what Reza Negarostani has written What actually means To Have A History As form of agency to recognize contingency which is entirely different from an ethno-nationalist glorification of a deceptive past premised on totalizing fixity.

00:30:55: So in this sense, despite hope being this kind of anticipatory commitment it's premised upon an agency discovering unfinished paths that take shape towards detotalization.

00:31:09: Hope and the sense are bound to labour & practice against perception of inevitability becoming sensitive to historical incompletion, by liberating it from a mere inventory of events and repurpose for pathways unseen.

00:31:28: So the example of neo-KFAB seizes fiction as a kind of pernicious e-reality where lies are components in an effort to fix a future by arresting historical pathways.

00:31:43: In other words, a catastrophe that forecloses upon the teachings of any crisis.

00:32:07: but upon reconstituting a relation to reality as embedded creatures within complex earth systems.

00:32:16: Such a premise of reattachment demands an estrangement in ourselves from familiar humanist pictures of hope rather than mourning their deficiency towards the planetary condition, as historical opportunity and not as

00:32:31: apocalypse.".

00:32:34: So to wrestle hope for kind-of naive wishful thinking or mourning its lack in the face of overt rather addictive doom requires us to couple fiction to reality, rather than pose it their opposition.

00:32:49: This is not a confirmation nor affirmation of actuality but a way to open sensitivity and intelligibility towards a realizable actuality that has yet materialized... ...but nonetheless exists as a

00:33:05: possibility.".

00:33:07: As Bloch noted, the work of hope requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming to which they belong.

00:33:21: While what Susan Sontag called an aesthetic disaster may critically alert us to a present and future trajectory of calamity remaining trapped by apocalyptic thought alone To which, in our humble domain of the arts we may orient our practices towards an aesthetics-of catastrophic opportunity.

00:33:45: Thank you!

00:34:01: Yeah thank you that was pretty dense... We

00:34:06: saved it for fun and concerts this evening?

00:34:08: Or maybe just for Q&A because I will try to look into a few aspects more deeply or basically ask her elaborate on it little bit more.

00:34:21: But first of all, I'd like to thank you because it did incorporate quite a lot of stuff related to our exhibition.

00:34:28: And we talked about this K-Fab once again from wrestling language and basically meaning truth is no longer bound to verifiable evidence but engagement rates.

00:34:42: so the more engaging things are, the more entertaining they're basically.

00:34:49: So now you did say, which I thought was interesting fact-checking as a liberal response to such development doesn't help.

00:35:01: And yeah basically wondering what would be the alternative?

00:35:05: How do they counteract someone telling lies if not by proving them wrong?

00:35:14: Yeah well it's more like necessary but insufficient.

00:35:19: You know, like yes you should do it.

00:35:21: of course you should say... But I mean some of these lies are so ridiculous that even granting attention to them in this sense is almost like validating in a way?

00:35:31: It's also about how we've had now two cycles or one and half cycles with Trump And all those strategies for fact checking whether they would be in debates.

00:35:47: It's not like having a weight upon the support that she receives, for example.

00:35:54: So it is not necessary or important of course but to think this type figure will come down by simply pointing out fact-based isn't enough and I think points at something more general which this sort of falling over the liberal democratic order which is premised on, you know in this kind of Jurgen Habermasian sense that we can all have a consensus reality and we could have rational unreasonable debate around it.

00:36:28: The question is... Is today's setting quite dubious or difficult to discover?

00:36:40: And so Are those same means that we would have applied say, thirty forty years ago when you had a very different media condition?

00:36:49: Do the same strategies apply now?

00:36:52: and if not what could those be.

00:36:54: And I mean...I'm not a journalist so i guess more interested in how this impacts let's say artistic work right also without hyperbolizing this artwork I make is bringing down global capitalism.

00:37:10: No, of course not you know although we do see a lot of really grandiose language and a lot press releases but it's... This where i'm interested about attuning sensitivities because that something we DO do right?

00:37:24: We provide experiences when we create work effectively creating worlds for audiences to enter and compare the world with the actual existing world, sort of training different sensitivities.

00:37:39: So I find that more compelling than or let's say it's an additional strategy to merely pointing out a facticity which because its pointing too as what is conditioned It's not giving us any aspiration for something other.

00:37:58: Its just pointing like The What Is Of Here And Now.

00:38:02: Okay, this is basically the realism you talked about.

00:38:05: This not yet conscious that has to be part of the counter strategy too.

00:38:11: Yeah what's possible?

00:38:13: Okay can you give an example like okay there's art and then there's activism which can be more impactful than artists.

00:38:24: so Or have you recently seen a somehow convincing activist strategy to counteract something which is somewhat in line with this realism?

00:38:36: That has this utopian element.

00:38:39: Well, I'm not necessarily utopian so like i would clarify that it has its own histories to reckon with.

00:38:46: right This

00:38:46: Not Yet Element

00:38:52: Something as possible.

00:38:53: otherwise And maybe this is also, I think helpful to keep in mind if we are committed.

00:38:59: If we're involved with activism and so on... Is not looking for a singular example because these issues are complex and large that it's going to be about aggregate actions interventions etc.. In the way like yes its important do immediate let say On-the-ground resistance type of work.

00:39:24: but again Are we always going to be on the defensive?

00:39:28: And what can we start to co-create based on what is available in our milieu, you know that includes technologies and so on.

00:39:40: To try to imagine other things I think this happening... That i'm thinking of somebody like a Kim Stanley Robinson figure science fiction writer And Isabelle Stengers was also talking about the power of science fiction or even Octavia Butler, which is a bit more diagnostic.

00:39:57: But the point being that these are figures who don't have necessarily scientific output and they're trafficking in stories.

00:40:04: but there's deeply researched stories right?

00:40:07: Unicorns will rain down tomorrow in Kremz.

00:40:11: maybe it happens... ...but its pretty unlikely either way.

00:40:16: They're deeply researched and mutating the existing sets of knowledges towards other scenarios.

00:40:23: But I think we're lacking these kind of imaginaries that are outside of the framework of DOOM, which is already a sort of capitulation to just carrying on with this status quo right?

00:40:40: Are there questions in your audience?

00:40:44: Yeah you over.

00:40:50: Now a brief question about not yet realism, because the way you laid out the trajectory is that this course of Western modernity has and for legitimate reasons come to an end.

00:41:04: And what's supposed to follow it?

00:41:06: or from now on taking into consideration all the discourse on planetary consciousness and so on?

00:41:14: Not yet realism which tries to rescue in this very blocky and sense like stuff from the past, things from the passed unrealized potentials.

00:41:27: How do you reconcile this tension also between something having finished?

00:41:34: And being at the same time unfinished?

00:41:37: because not yet realism will need those bits and pieces to build something new?

00:41:46: Yeah, great question.

00:41:47: I think because basically my short ends would be... Basically every historical epoch is like defining problems and it will reject certain problems or certain findings as irrelevant trivial.

00:42:00: what have you?

00:42:01: And so i think part of the work Is also kind of scouring through these The way that when Stangers-I'm not sure if you saw this film but she refers to Prigodzin going into some discarded You know thermo probably something chemical finding and then by reappropriating it, recontextualizing comes up with this groundbreaking Nobel Prize winning idea.

00:42:25: The one example I always like is just to kind of concretely show how this happens.

00:42:32: in medieval thought you had the theologian Augustine de Hippo wanted to make a general theory.

00:42:38: In modernity, you get the linguistic turn in which humans become the sole bearer of meaning-making.

00:42:48: That we are the only ones who use symbols or signs because symbols tokenize your language as a kind of symbolic system.

00:42:58: So basically... The ideal of modernity shuts down these possibilities that were being raised prior.

00:43:07: And now when we jump forward to today and were trying to understand, you know We have theories of like Umveld theory or biosemiotics things Of that nature.

00:43:18: Looking at the embryos.

00:43:20: It's not That we adopt one-to-one but The embryo is a thought.

00:43:23: thinking Like that where?

00:43:25: Were Not making such A big distinction between Language and The way you Know animals communicate Or something like that word in a Way demonopolis our privilege over language, those embryos were already there in medieval thought.

00:43:41: So a more contemporary example through biosemiotics we can see okay... We can look to this guy doing the stuff.

00:43:48: This Can Be Inspiring and This Can Help Nourish Our Thought Going Forward Even Though It Was Blocked By A Certain Framework Of Thought That Only Saw Language In Purely Human Natural Language.

00:44:00: Terms of Symbolic Token Use

00:44:08: Yeah.

00:44:08: Thank you very much, Patricia for this wonderful talk and I have a question that's indeed more practical since you've also mentioned infrastructures earlier And i was incredibly inspired by your I think twenty eighteen essay where you were conceived something like promiscuous publicness something that you, in the end do need a certain collective mobilised to realise.

00:44:45: that kind of agency I guess.

00:44:47: And given the contemporary infrastructures of communication and also exchange... ...I wonder what channels of distribution or what channeled possibilities of organising, of mobilising Do we have that are not dominated or steered by techno-fascists?

00:45:16: So how do we circumvent the kind of division between black and white rhetorics?

00:45:24: in a way.

00:45:25: Yeah, I mean if...I wish i had the answer to that question.

00:45:29: It's a deep problem right?

00:45:31: And actually- I don't have the answers for it and maybe its'a cheap answer than what im giving you now but also an honest answer is we need to recognize what we do or contribute like?

00:45:47: Im not an organizer, Im terrible at this.

00:45:49: you want ideas and brainstorming, yes.

00:45:51: But then we work together to bring forth something.

00:45:54: but on this sort of concrete question of infrastructures there's definitely people much more embedded in let's say the practical technological side.

00:46:03: who know if all... You know?

00:46:04: There are of course alternatives.

00:46:06: so one and so.

00:46:06: fourth The issue is always scale problem.

00:46:10: right.

00:46:10: it kind that these communications monopolies are predicated on network effects.

00:46:17: So we don't have twenty Instagrams because it's not a competition model, It is the network effect model and very centralized And I think part of our legal system and troubles with regulation.

00:46:30: or because Very often The most silly version of capitalism is just like... Or the defence of it five different cars and the best kind of car is gonna like sell the most, then the consumer gets to choose.

00:46:46: So it's a competition based model.

00:46:48: but in a lot of these technologies they have completely different commodification logic that isn't following the same as standard commodity And we haven't yet figured out how deal with that.

00:47:04: I just think sometimes its kinda question You apply an older logic to a newer problem, but you have to actually update it.

00:47:13: To the like technical and practical things that's doing so.

00:47:18: I'm-I mean i don't really Have a sufficient answer.

00:47:23: It's a real problem because we're kind of always complicit in A lot Of these things unless you Really do something Like go off grid or whatever.

00:47:31: But then That's also what Kind of withdrawal model?

00:47:36: one can afford to just kind of retreat from a social order.

00:47:43: But yeah, I don't really have an answer.

00:47:47: but it's absolutely necessary because when we're speaking about the complex... basically affirming a complex condition.

00:47:56: And what would that mean on a progressive end?

00:47:58: This is going to be deeply dependent on robust infrastructures, because infrastructure's... What they do is coordinate and they coordinate without having you know, niceties of like an informal gathering of six friends or something.

00:48:13: Right?

00:48:13: That's a very different thing.

00:48:15: There is maybe paper I could suggest from Aurora Apolito who normally a mathematician and has pen name when she decides to use her mathematical brilliance for anarcho-communist ends.

00:48:30: It's called this scale problem in Anarchy because based on Abilities in mathematics to understand certain things she basically was like Analyzing the fall of a planned economy or planned market system that you have in a communist thing But adapting that analysis towards contemporary computational capacities.

00:48:55: So it's maybe something that could be interesting because it's both historical but also very Practical and written by somebody who has the knowledge too, you know explain it in technical terms, because there's also a pragmatics inherent to your question.

00:49:12: How do we do that?

00:49:16: Are they more questions?

00:49:20: Because if not I'd like to finish slowly and ask one last thing which shouldn't open completely different subjects at the very end but i'm simply curious!

00:49:35: And maybe you can nevertheless keep it short.

00:49:38: So why would you not use the term utopian?

00:49:41: Well, because I thought this was almost synonymous.

00:49:45: And since Bloch obviously wasn't hesitant to use it and actually rehabilitate that concept... Why wouldn't she use it but instead be rather affirmative about a term like Not yet Conscious or not yet Realism?

00:50:02: I think it's not that...I mean, I don't reject wholeheartedly.

00:50:06: We need to keep the term active right?

00:50:09: However i'm very mindful of its abusive history in a way and also just the historical way That was related with like a cartographic mentality which is very much Like im gonna make a plan Im going to impose on a terra nullis And do what we learn complex feedback driven, you know since cybernetics.

00:50:34: You can't just impose a plan and an active plant anymore right like things need to be responsive if you put things in the world do take a step?

00:50:42: You have to respond etc.

00:50:44: So I think my hesitation rather than rejection is more about A sort of cartographic imaginary of utopia.

00:50:52: I'm specifically thinking of Like i forget The author but basically Thomas Moore Of Spain who wrote about utopia when it basically becomes a plan of colonizing the Americas.

00:51:05: And so with like, the way land parcelation and someone worked?

00:51:09: So knowing that history is also about recognizing kind what China may have said right we already live in utopias just not ours.

00:51:21: The violence can happen but I think above all its more on practical side very often, and it doesn't necessarily have to be.

00:51:29: I mean you're right maybe we need to hold it open for like different mediations of what utopia could be but in the historical legacy of it being very much related to cartography and so on And this sort of imposition plan enactment-of-plan then i get a bit nervous.

00:51:48: Yeah...I don't want us to get nervous.

00:51:51: So that's why um..i'm going to finish now.

00:51:54: Thanks a lot!

00:51:55: That was great and I hope you have a beautiful festival, enjoy the day.

00:52:02: It's still pretty lovely outside.

00:52:04: so thanks for being here!