6 Symposium Speculations on Anonymous Materials - Reza Negarestani

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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• 00:00:09

  I'm very happy to introduce now Reza Negrestani, who is an Iranian philosopher and writer who currently lives and works in the USA. He has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies, lectured at various international universities and institutes, and initially he was a lecturer in mathematics at the University…

• 00:05:43

  And I would say I will introduce this definition and then I will briefly refer back to this idea that this is not a very new idea. This has been the case since probably the beginning of the Greek philosophy from Socratic understanding and then goes to for example late scholastic philosophy, renaissance and then…

• 00:12:45

  Of what the system is. Now this is understanding of the system. And now you cannot understand a system unless you act on it. You manipulate it. Because the behavior of the system is coupled with the tendencies or the abstract properties that they need to be amplified. But also functions are manipulable entities. The…

• 00:18:11

  The understanding of starts with this the way that you can gain traction upon these various levels without overextending the conceptual resources and the rules that they functional rules or perspectives that are exclusive to these levels. You can have them but in the sense that you don't want to overextend them. So…

• 00:26:33

  If you intervene with something and under certain for example criteria and the invariance doesn't hold up then this is not explaining that. Then you need to look for another form of explanation probably in another level. So what they need are these kind of cross cutting perspectives namely tools of manipulation…

• 00:32:20

  Because all of this extra conflatory stuff that happened between different levels and made this problem difficult to be solved now they have gone away. Because we applied a form of heuristics that dissociated this content of conflation into different strata and now we can approach this problem in a kind…

• 00:38:52

  Thanks a lot Reza for like I think you brought up or you brought up again like several of the key like ontological philosophical questions like we briefly encountered or like had already discussions about like during the day. Maybe before I started the Q&A or opened the floor I have a kind of methodological question…

• 00:47:08

  and different forms of design but this is brings back to the understanding of art that it's a multi modal basically friction upon for example material that entails certain forms of emotion material inferences and that makes problem complex this is something that I really don't have any answer further questions…