![]() “ Man is not an animal…Man is a time-binder…a different category” Alfred Korzybski.Īlfred Korzybski devised the Anthropometer (or Structural Differential) in 1923 at the New School for Social Research in New York in response to the ‘emotional stress’ he experienced trying to convey to the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and the behaviourist psychologist John B Watson his theory that humans do things differently from animals. A Polemical Demonstration of Korzybski’s Structural Differential' So in terms of this idea of ‘Illustrating Theory’ you have managed to do this without, I assume, the response of “Oh, it’s just illustrative”. It visually represents your understanding of difficult philosophical texts and concepts, making them comprehensible in pictorial terms, while at the same time maintaining an aesthetic quality that exceeds (or is perhaps superfluous to or in excess of) their pedagogical function. It manages to do that very rare thing of being both a pedagogical and aesthetic work simultaneously (in one). (JC) What I really enjoy about this work is that it manages to do what I am speaking about above but in an explicit fine art/gallery context. In a way this dumb/clever excess is at work in the ' Paradoxical Pareidolic Neoteny of Lacan's Final Schema of Desire', which we will explain, all being well. There is something like an aesthetic surplus operating in the gallery context, which can, and does mitigate against the diagram’s positive pedagogical instrumentality. ![]() John Cussans: For me this has to do with the function of diagrams and visualizations in artistic and pedagogical contexts which have distinct but inter-penetrated raisons d'etre. A diagram as I understand it is not simply illustrative, but is a machine for producing thought by making connections and organising concepts. This particular allegory takes the form of a diagram. I also see it as a contribution to ideas around communism, the individual, the collective and notions of sacrifice. It is a didactic tool, which I have used to demonstrate political positions in the world today, and it is an impetus for discussion. With a screening of Dean Kenning’s animation: ‘ Metallurgy of the Subject’.īeginning with Dean Kenning's Metallurgy of the Subject (2010), a diagrammatic allegory of sacrifice based on philosophical re-conceptions of 'community' and ‘communism’, and John Cussans' representation of The Inverted Pyramid (according to Georges Bataille) the artists will engage in a diagrammatic dialogue about the Paradoxical Paereidolic Neoteny of Lacan's Final Schema of Desire.īy way of an introduction to some of these ideas, via the dialogue that has already begun:ĭean Kenning: Metallurgy of the Subject is an allegorical attempt to understand recent philosophical conceptions of 'community' and ‘communism’ by writers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Bodiou, Maurice Blanchot, Paulo Virno and Giorgio Agamben. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical exploration is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and a further development of Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm for thinking the production of subjectivity as a speculative, but also pragmatic and creative practice." Alongside this Deleuze-Guattarian trajectory the book also brings in to encounter the writings on aesthetics and ethics of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and pitches Deleuze against Alain Badiou's own theory of the subject. Each of these, it is argued, offer powerful resources for thinking subjectivity beyond its habitual and typical instantiations specifically in relation to opening up a different temporality of and for the subject today. Central to the enquiry are the writings of Felix Guattari and Giles Deleuze separately and in collaboration, as well as their philosophical precursors, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. "How might we produce our subjectivity differently? Indeed, what are we capable of becoming? This book addresses these questions with a particular eye to ethics, understood as a practice of living, and aesthetics, understood as creative experimentation and the cultivation of a certain style of life. Five diagrams of the Finite Infinite relation. Talking on his new book: On the production of subjectivity.
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