We are delighted to announce the last session of seminars this semester held by the Center for Discursive Inquiry. Recently we have invited people to hold dialogues and conversations that draw from their own work to address our central theme At the Conjuncture: Art and the Imagination.

Reason Without Freedom?

Tia Trafford and Amanda Beech will discuss the ways that a commitment to freedom as both practice and norm has been key to formulating possibilities for difference, agency, and self-determination in laboring against or through the dominant hegemonies of capitalism. As we know, a Modern politics of emancipation founds its own crisis, compounding the infinite force of the object that is critiqued by means of freedom’s compulsion to aggress against it. Further, we know that postmodern critique in rejecting reason in the name of genealogy mutates this crisis to violence. In response, the question of whether reason can be extrapolated from critiques of freedom and what this reason is – when we have no premises, vectors or images for it – becomes urgent.

Tia Trafford is Associate Professor at University for the Creative Arts in London. She is author of Everything Is Police (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) and The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain (Pluto Press, 2020), and co editor of Alien Vectors: Accelerationism, Xenofeminism, Inhumanism (Routledge, 2019) and Speculative Aesthetics (Urbanomic/MIT, 2014).

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. In video, painting, print and sculpture her work proposes
art as a form of intelligence and power beyond the ideals of capitalism and the limits that art has
set for itself by means of its critiques of it. Exhibiting internationally her shows include Delphic Future, Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago, RIB Gallery, Rotterdam, 2024, and the Havana Biennale 2021. Forthcoming work includes a book of philosophy, The Intolerable Image, from MIT. amandabeech.com

This seminar is part of a larger strand of ongoing research held by the Center for Discursive Inquiry.

At the conjuncture: art and the imagination

The imagination has a long and complex trajectory as a human faculty, but in this epoch of planetary-scale computation and the explosion of synthetic intelligence, genomic engineering, and robotics it has been decentered and accelerated in compelling and disconcerting ways. Now more than ever the security of positivistic reasoning has undergone radical questioning, addressing with urgency the fundamental perceptions of what we are, and what our reality consists of, yet opening as well almost unthinkable and unimaginable possibilities for our definition of what human modes of thinking and the imagination could be. However, the tension between the possibilities that the imagination holds and its material reality remain intolerably constrained and controlled by the structures of planetary capital. The question of global sapience, as potential and as problem, consists of dense strands of transparency and opacity. In this project, the focus will be on proposals for reconfigurations of time, space, and otherness that necessarily generate comprehensive interrogation of the formation of histories, and at the same juncture think time as informing possible alternate, non-linear futures.

This current research module explores and models the dynamics of the imagination as a manifestation of artistic production and critical thought, in part ‘as if’, in part as concept/object modeling, to effectuate other modalities which might lead to different modes of world-making. This ‘global’ (as opposed to individualistic) reenergized faculty of imagination—imagination on a global scale—asks us to focus on the relations between the empirical, the socio-political, the economic and the scientific space of what is common, and potential philosophical concepts of universality. It asks us to consider the condition of the subject in the world, the world that forms a subject, and the transgressive production of the global imagination through it, as well as the divisive violence that is incumbent upon the planetary impulse itself.

The global in this case brings us back to the question of metaphysical meditations and socio-political ruptures, and vice versa; it demands that we address the traversals between what mind is and what is a world; what is an act of self-consciousness about it, and the acts of unconscious doings when both are acts in the world. The complexity and contradictions of the representations of transcendence and embodiment are not simply political or philosophical, but they can instantiate new perspectives on the role of the global artistic imagination.

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