[Ascp-news] Reminder PoD Seminars start tomorrow Tuesday 5/8 -- Geoffrey Hondroudakis

[Rebecca Hill]

A reminder that the 2025 PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE AUGUST SEMINARS start on Tuesday 5th August

The first seminar is on Tuesday 5/8 6-7:30pm at RMIT City Campus and features Geoffrey Hondroudakis.

Bio: Geoffrey Hondroudakis researches and teaches media philosophy, theory, and the history and philosophy of technology. His work focuses on how knowledge is organized – materially and conceptually – especially within infrastructures of enormous scalar complexity, such as the cultures of planetary-scale computing. Geoffrey lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.

On the Minimal Conditions of General Differentiation: Subject, Scale and System in the Post-Universal Episteme
In this talk, I offer a reading of the epistemic crises of the long 20th century, emphasising system and scale, as conceptual lynchpins. If, as Clifford Siskin has argued, ‘system’ is the central, but undefinable, genre of modern knowledge, then I claim that system entered a generalised crisis in the 20th Century broadly attributable to the formalisation and generalisation of computing. I call this crisis the ‘transsystematic’, as it involves encounters, across disciplinary formations and areas of inquiry, and sites of practice, with situations where systematicity itself entails its own failure, limitation, recursion, and transgression. Systematicity thus becomes unmoored from notions of universality or absolute fundamentality that once functioned to secure its postulations. This further functions to problematise the post-Kantian frame of the subject, given that the subject functions as the multi-scalar, recursive, ‘transsystematic’ problem par excellence. Given the ubiquity of transsystematic problems across disciplinary formations, then, I argue that this crisis has been largely navigated through techniques and concepts of scale: the construction of localised domains of sense, and the nesting and interrelation of these. However, both scale and system remain, in this transsystematic situation, heterogeneous in how they are conceptualised across disciplines and sites of practice. The question that scale attempts to answer, but largely serves to defer, is what minimal conditions do we require to adequately differentiate generalities: how can we attend to the particularity of different zones of sense, while also ensuring some degree of general communicability across these differences, without in turn collapsing them in those ways demonstrated to be untenable across the encounters of the 20th century?

REGISTER HERE<https://events.humanitix.com/on-the-minimal-conditions-of-general-differentiation>


WHERE:
RMIT City Campus
Building 80 level 10 room 17
445 Swanston St

All are welcome





Dr Rebecca Hill (she/her)

Senior Lecturer

Responsible Practice Lead

School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

Convener, Philosophies of Difference

Co-Director, Luce Irigaray Circle





Building 9 Level 5 Room 42

City Campus

GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001

School of Media and Communication

RMIT University



ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5573-3074



RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where it conducts its business.
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