2017 Interstices Under Construction Symposium CFP

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Spinoza’s affective aesthetics: Art and architecture from the viewpoint of life

There is a peculiar aesthetic undercurrent traversing Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, harbouring untapped potentials and far-reaching consequences for contemporary discussions on aesthetics. The relationship between aesthetics and Spinoza’s philosophy, however, has been nothing but a huge missed encounter, resulting in the publication of only a few books and a handful of articles throughout a vast period of more than three-and-a-half centuries. Which begs the question: might there be, despite our persistent negligence, much more to the relationship of Spinoza and aesthetics than first meets the eye? I will argue that there might be. For once Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole, ranging from his philosophical and political treatises to his private letters and unfinished manuscripts, is read between the lines, latent seeds of a peculiar aesthetic theory become visible—an aesthetic theory that moves beyond subjective and objective approaches that have come to dominate the field, and rather grounds itself on affective interactions and morphogenetic processes. A subterranean journey through Spinoza’s affective aesthetics constitutes the subject matter of this paper, which interweaves subtle aesthetic hints buried deep within his philosophical archive, while unfolding relevant ramifications of these promising discoveries for the current aesthetic discourse.

Citizen and state in the philosophy of Spinoza

In Spinoza's view, the highest purpose of society is to make each human being in it as well off as possible. He takes wellbeing to consist in knowledge, and the freedom from irrational, highly passionate ideas. On Spinoza's conception of religion, many citizens in any given society are motivated primarily by highly irrational, highly passionate religious ideas. Here I argue that Spinoza's psychology suggests that there are two possible ways to overcome such ideas. Society might work to eliminate religious ideas in citizens, thereby relieving them of their most irrational and harmful beliefs; or society might work to give citizens different, highly rational beliefs while leaving religion untouched. I argue that, given Spinoza's other commitments, only the second method could work.

To see or be seen? The grounds of a place-based university

In “The Tyranny of Transparency,” Marilyn Strathern argues that, in the neoliberal university, “visibility as a conduit for knowledge is elided with visibility as an instrument for control.” It is, but we would go further. After Deleuze, we would describe the apparatus of the university as an “optical machine”: it is “made of lines of light … distributing the visible and the invisible.” The drive to transparency, or panoptics, dominates the university today – from audit to architecture – and serves what Levien de Cauter calls “transcendental capitalism.” But it obscures a shadow discourse, or scotoptics, which hides invisible “lines of flight” and “fracture” that are transversal to transparency and transcendental capitalism. What this shadow discourse discloses about our university is that it is a transcendental-colonial-Maori place, a place that is palimpsestic and contested, a whenua tautohetohe (contested territory). We need to know that our university is more than it seems to be able to conceive of it as a “pluriversity,” a place of possibilities, upbuilding and practical wisdom: a wānanga (place of learning).

What reading Spinoza’s Ethics out loud brings to and takes from the text

It is contended by Gilles Deleuze that concepts can be understood as characters, and their interaction with other concepts dramatised. He proposes Spinoza’s Ethics as a text worthy of such dramatisation. I test Deleuze’s assertion, by staging a series of “affective readings”, 24-hour public readings out loud of the Ethics which unfold the question of how the concept of affect as it is treated there might be dramatised, and how we might be affected by it in the reading. This paper provides the philosophical justification of such a reading, and argues that an affective reading is one which makes perceptible the differential relations between the forces operating on the concept, and therefore needs to perform the concept of which it speaks, in a space of thought in which the drama of thinking the concept can be seen to be taking place. In turn, then, this paper considers what is meant by a “performative reading”. Given that the veracity of a performative reading of Ethics rests on the idea that reading it out loud brings to (or takes away from) the text something a silent reading does not, it is important to distinguish how reading out loud grasps the text differently from reading it silently, both cognitively in terms of what it demonstrates, and practically in terms of its effects.

Colophon

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A Māori reflection on Spinoza’s primordial

Māori philosophy is at an exciting point as it looks to other sources for inspiration. In this paper, I refer to some key Māori concepts and terms with Spinoza’s notion of primordial substance in mind. Some Māori terms such as ira (the manifestation and persistence of a thing), whakaaro (indebtedness to a primordial substance) and Papatūānuku (primordial substance) are relevant here. I do not seek to compare Spinoza and Māori thought as such but instead to work with Māori concepts and terms with Spinoza in the background.

Common notions and composite collaborations: Thinking with Spinoza to design urban infrastructures for human and wild cohabitants

This paper explores the ways in which we might construct urban environments that are responsible to the needs of more than just human cohabitants. Drawing on Spinoza’s common notion and attentive to the possibilities of socio-natures that both construct and respond to the habitat needs of urban wildlife, I look at how urban design and wildlife habitat might be thought and planned together as a human/non-human composite, invoking a complex spatial and temporal choreography which serves divergent needs. Drawing on examples of urban design in Toronto, Canada, this paper offers a way to think of the city as a composite body in Spinoza’s terms, to become open to an awareness of the city as a composition of forces—a choreography of bodies that are constantly interweaving and overflowing imagined boundaries, struggles that are fought as much over time as space, the accommodation of the temporalities and spatialities of other life processes, other rhythms and cycles that would, without a recalibration, sync uneasily with the pacing and spacing of human requirements.

Biographies

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Introduction: The arts, architectures, affects, and ecologies of Spinoza in Aotearoa

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