Reza Negarestani - Localization, Ramification, Navigation (2013)

Provenance

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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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  from a geometrical and logical point of view the ecology of universalism as the horizon where the universal and the particular the global and the local interact is a complex interweaving of continuity and contingency or to use Charles Sanders Peirce terminology cynicism and tychism we can generally investigate…

• 00:03:18

  And therefore, it is a point of contrastation or opposition, the diametrical opposition, with the local site under investigation. Now if we were to attach an observer to this local site so as to extend our art example into a cosmological example, the observer of the conventional form of site specificity is anchored…

• 00:06:15

  is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming-in and zooming-out effects. By simply scaling up or down the same image, but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images across different scales of magnification, it then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess…

• 00:08:48

  It is in this sense that the passage from the local to the global is not simply a form of transit through which the local element preserves its constancy. It is instead a mode of production of new orientations, structures, dimensions, and new intuitions of locality and globality. Disintegration and integration. Now, I…

• 00:11:47

  The local can then be understood as an encapsulated depth, or more intuitively speaking, a concept, a concept of the universe. A concept of the universe. A concept of the universe. A complex structure endowed with a very simple appearance. A surface that is but a depth unbound by a ramified path structure. The subject…

• 00:14:35

  The organization of the local, the identification of its internal exigencies and demands, is by definition an operation that can only take place in the passage from the local to the global, with the understanding that the global is neither the aggregate of particular instances nor is it endowed with the same…

• 00:17:55

  It assigns site new addresses and parameters at different levels. Such addresses can be revised or improved. And, such addresses can be reintegrated. But one thing is certain. The unpacking or dis-envelopment of such addresses for a given locality is precisely the labor of the universal, the construction…

• 00:21:41

  That is to say, to recognize this world anew. To recognize the world as a building block for constructing new worlds. The world of which we are part requires to recognize this world, a recognition that coincides with reconstruction of this world, according to the possibility of new actual worlds that can be made from…