[Ascp-news] PoD Public Seminars in August at RMIT

[Rebecca Hill]

The non/fictionLab’s Philosophies of Difference Group is pleased to announce that we are convening four in person seminars at RMIT in August. All are welcome


Tuesday 5/8 6-7:30pm at RMIT City Campus

Geoffrey Hondroudakis (Melbourne University)

On the Minimal Conditions of General Differentiation: Subject, Scale and System in the Post-Universal Episteme<https://events.humanitix.com/on-the-minimal-conditions-of-general-differentiation>

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?

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.



 Tuesday 12/8 6-7:30pm at RMIT City Campus

Cathy Legg (Deakin University)

Getting to Post-Post-Truth<https://events.humanitix.com/getting-to-post-post-truth>

Pragmatist philosophy teaches that there is no ‘criterion of truth’, and Rorty claims that it follows that we lack any useful notion of truth. I argue that this inference is too hasty, and that an important question for our current moment is how we can ride out necessary ‘epistemic trust-busting’ (Fuller 2017) without ending up in a ‘post-truth’ epistemic hellscape. I propose some suggestions about epistemology as praxis, adapting Charles Peirce’s idea of knowledge as “a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected”, for the digital age. I argue that as educators our best response to the recent ‘post-truth’ phenomenon is to pay less attention to our theories, in which we show up to truth-sceptics as experts, and more attention to our own epistemic practices, in which we show up to truth-sceptics as fellow persons. Genuine listening and learning can offer practical proof that truth is not dead, notwithstanding the dire theoretical generalisations of sceptics, nihilists and relativists.

Bio: Dr. Catherine Legg teaches philosophy at Deakin University in Melbourne. Her main research interests lie in the philosophies of mind, language, and logic, where she works to bring the distinctive ideas of pragmatist Charles Peirce into mainstream debates; she also has research profiles in AI and education. She is current editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s “Pragmatism” entry. In 2008, she inaugurated the field of 'cat metaphysics' with the assistance of the late Bruce, who had a ‘personal chair’. This remains something of a niche area.

Tuesday 19/8 6-7:30pm at RMIT City Campus

Rebecca Hill (RMIT)

River Place<https://events.humanitix.com/river-place>

This paper is an effort to think in resistance to the hegemony of the settler colonial project, of global technicity and capitalism, of the devastation of life-worlds on earth. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida describes this world as space and time “out of joint”. I offer a reading of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s “Assimilation No!” and her teaching “There is only the river.” This paper suggests that the dislocated, out of joint of consciousness of modernity/coloniality encounters an irreducible limit in listening to Oodgeroo’s poem and the teaching of Country – “There is only the river.”

Bio: Rebecca Hill is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. She teaches feminist/queer theory and literary studies. Rebecca is codirector of the Luce Irigaray Circle and convener of the Philosophies of Difference Group. She conducts research in feminist philosophy, decolonial theory, and critical Indigenous studies. She is the editor of Topologies of Sexual Difference: Space in Philosophy and Art after Irigaray (with Louise Burchill and James Sares; forthcoming, SUNY, 2025).





 Tuesday 26/8 6-7:30pm

Allan James Thomas (RMIT)



I have never been human: on the possibility of an autistic ethos of asymmetrical reciprocity <https://events.humanitix.com/i-have-never-been-human>

The universalising pretensions of humanism derive from a moment of mutual recognition: I am like you; you are like me; we are all human together. But where this recognition fails, difference becomes a criterion for dehumanisation: human rights are for humans only. A genuine equality cannot be premised on symmetrical recognition, but rather calls for an ethos of asymmetrical reciprocity. In this paper I aim to draw on my own neurological difference as a framework for just such an ethos. My autistic specificities are such that the world as I live and experience it – my form of life, my lifeworld – is distinct from that of the neurotypical. They don’t recognise themselves in me, but neither do I recognise myself in them. Damian Milton calls this empathic disjuncture the “double empathy problem”: neither side really “gets” how the other works, or thinks, or communicates. Neurological privilege means that neurotypicals interpret this empathic breach as evidence of dysfunction: the autistic other isn’t just different, they’re wrong, disordered, less than fully human. The autist, on the other hand, has no choice but to work to find the terms in which we can approach the other as other, rather than looking to find ourselves reflected in them as the same. I propose this demand as a model for a situated, local, and particular response to the ethical demand that other forms of life, other lifeworlds impose upon all of us: to neither reduce the other to the same, nor reject them for their difference.

Bio: I teach Cinema Studies at RMIT, with a particular interest in the work of Gilles Deleuze (which resulted in Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World, published by EUP in 2018). The discovery of my own multiple neurodivergences has turned those interests inwards, towards a politics of neurological difference, its consequences and possibilities.







Location

RMIT City Campus

Building 80 Level 10 Room 17

445 Swanston Street

Melbourne





Tickets: Please register via the links provided above or via the poster.




Dr Rebecca Hill (she/her)
Senior Lecturer
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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