The Art of Change is a bold experimental work that introduces a radically new artistic form. Starting with the traditional notion of opera as a type of work that blends music, theater, art, and design into a single form, The Art of Change brings performers and thinkers together on stage and fuses live performance with historical video footage, recorded interviews and multimedia content. All of this is woven together into a tapestry that is generative, interactive, participative, and open.
As its title suggests, the work centers on the very idea of change and presents various ways of thinking, from the very pragmatic to the most speculative, about what needs to be changed in the world today. Actors, singers, instrumentalists, designers, and philosophers come together, with the audience, to speculate on this question and the many ways in which it can be answered.
The libretto, by philosopher Chiara Bottici, is the result of a process in which an initial text was developed through a collective authoring process that unfolded on Public Seminar – an online journal of ideas, politics and culture supported by The New School.
No two performances of The Art of Change are the same. Spoken dialogues within each performance are analyzed and processed on the fly through software which captures and develops the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech to generate instrumental scores for the musicians and electronics. What is more, each evening features two guests – a thinker and a musician – who bring new perspectives and their unique vision to the work.
Performances:
January 16th, 8pm
January 17th, 5pm & 8pm
January 18th, 5pm & 8pm
January 21st, 8pm
Creative Team:
Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Concept, Video Design & Composition
Chiara Bottici, Libretto
Ashley Tata, Stage Direction
Timo Rissanen, Costume Design
Abigail Hoke-Brady, Lighting Design
Thomas Goepfer, Sound & Video Design
Camilla Hoitenga, Flutes Solo
Levy Lorenzo, Creative Technologist, Percussion
Actors, singers and instrumentalists of The New School’s College of Performing Arts: Hayley Boggs, William Desbiens, Youngwoo Jeon, Kalun Leung, Timmy Ong, Yeji Pyun, Samuel Rachmuth, Veronica Richer, Jane Skapek (assistant director), Zachary Sebek, Alexander Theiss, Jackie Traish, Yunnan Xu
Guest Artists:
January 16: Simon Critchley, philosopher and Joan La Barbara, musician
January 17: Cinzia Arruzza, philosopher and Rebekah Heller, musician
January 18: Dmitri Nikulin, philosopher and Ross Karre musician
January 21: Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and Joan La Barbara, musician
The Art of Change is a bold experimental work that introduces a radically new artistic form. Starting with the traditional notion of opera as a type of work that blends music, theater, art, and design into a single form, The Art of Change brings performers and thinkers together on stage and fuses live performance with historical video footage, recorded interviews and multimedia content. All of this is woven together into a tapestry that is generative, interactive, participative, and open.
As its title suggests, the work centers on the very idea of change and presents various ways of thinking, from the very pragmatic to the most speculative, about what needs to be changed in the world today. Actors, singers, instrumentalists, designers, and philosophers come together, with the audience, to speculate on this question and the many ways in which it can be answered.
The libretto, by philosopher Chiara Bottici, is the result of a process in which an initial text was developed through a collective authoring process that unfolded on Public Seminar – an online journal of ideas, politics and culture supported by The New School.
No two performances of The Art of Change are the same. Spoken dialogues within each performance are analyzed and processed on the fly through software which captures and develops the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech to generate instrumental scores for the musicians and electronics. What is more, each evening features two guests – a thinker and a musician – who bring new perspectives and their unique vision to the work.
Performances:
January 16th, 8pm
January 17th, 5pm & 8pm
January 18th, 5pm & 8pm
January 21st, 8pm
Creative Team:
Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Concept, Video Design & Composition
Chiara Bottici, Libretto
Ashley Tata, Stage Direction
Timo Rissanen, Costume Design
Abigail Hoke-Brady, Lighting Design
Thomas Goepfer, Sound & Video Design
Camilla Hoitenga, Flutes Solo
Levy Lorenzo, Creative Technologist, Percussion
Actors, singers and instrumentalists of The New School’s College of Performing Arts: Hayley Boggs, William Desbiens, Youngwoo Jeon, Kalun Leung, Timmy Ong, Yeji Pyun, Samuel Rachmuth, Veronica Richer, Jane Skapek (assistant director), Zachary Sebek, Alexander Theiss, Jackie Traish, Yunnan Xu
Guest Artists:
January 16: Simon Critchley, philosopher and Joan La Barbara, musician
January 17: Cinzia Arruzza, philosopher and Rebekah Heller, musician
January 18: Dmitri Nikulin, philosopher and Ross Karre musician
January 21: Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and Joan La Barbara, musician
The Art of Change is a bold experimental work that introduces a radically new artistic form. Starting with the traditional notion of opera as a type of work that blends music, theater, art, and design into a single form, The Art of Change brings performers and thinkers together on stage and fuses live performance with historical video footage, recorded interviews and multimedia content. All of this is woven together into a tapestry that is generative, interactive, participative, and open.
As its title suggests, the work centers on the very idea of change and presents various ways of thinking, from the very pragmatic to the most speculative, about what needs to be changed in the world today. Actors, singers, instrumentalists, designers, and philosophers come together, with the audience, to speculate on this question and the many ways in which it can be answered.
The libretto, by philosopher Chiara Bottici, is the result of a process in which an initial text was developed through a collective authoring process that unfolded on Public Seminar – an online journal of ideas, politics and culture supported by The New School.
No two performances of The Art of Change are the same. Spoken dialogues within each performance are analyzed and processed on the fly through software which captures and develops the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech to generate instrumental scores for the musicians and electronics. What is more, each evening features two guests – a thinker and a musician – who bring new perspectives and their unique vision to the work.
Performances:
January 16th, 8pm
January 17th, 5pm & 8pm
January 18th, 5pm & 8pm
January 21st, 8pm
Creative Team:
Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Concept, Video Design & Composition
Chiara Bottici, Libretto
Ashley Tata, Stage Direction
Timo Rissanen, Costume Design
Abigail Hoke-Brady, Lighting Design
Thomas Goepfer, Sound & Video Design
Camilla Hoitenga, Flutes Solo
Levy Lorenzo, Creative Technologist, Percussion
Actors, singers and instrumentalists of The New School’s College of Performing Arts: Hayley Boggs, William Desbiens, Youngwoo Jeon, Kalun Leung, Timmy Ong, Yeji Pyun, Samuel Rachmuth, Veronica Richer, Jane Skapek (assistant director), Zachary Sebek, Alexander Theiss, Jackie Traish, Yunnan Xu
Guest Artists:
January 16: Simon Critchley, philosopher and Joan La Barbara, musician
January 17: Cinzia Arruzza, philosopher and Rebekah Heller, musician
January 18: Dmitri Nikulin, philosopher and Ross Karre musician
January 21: Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and Joan La Barbara, musician
The Art of Change is a bold experimental work that introduces a radically new artistic form. Starting with the traditional notion of opera as a type of work that blends music, theater, art, and design into a single form, The Art of Change brings performers and thinkers together on stage and fuses live performance with historical video footage, recorded interviews and multimedia content. All of this is woven together into a tapestry that is generative, interactive, participative, and open.
As its title suggests, the work centers on the very idea of change and presents various ways of thinking, from the very pragmatic to the most speculative, about what needs to be changed in the world today. Actors, singers, instrumentalists, designers, and philosophers come together, with the audience, to speculate on this question and the many ways in which it can be answered.
The libretto, by philosopher Chiara Bottici, is the result of a process in which an initial text was developed through a collective authoring process that unfolded on Public Seminar – an online journal of ideas, politics and culture supported by The New School.
No two performances of The Art of Change are the same. Spoken dialogues within each performance are analyzed and processed on the fly through software which captures and develops the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech to generate instrumental scores for the musicians and electronics. What is more, each evening features two guests – a thinker and a musician – who bring new perspectives and their unique vision to the work.
Performances:
January 16th, 8pm
January 17th, 5pm & 8pm
January 18th, 5pm & 8pm
January 21st, 8pm
Creative Team:
Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Concept, Video Design & Composition
Chiara Bottici, Libretto
Ashley Tata, Stage Direction
Timo Rissanen, Costume Design
Abigail Hoke-Brady, Lighting Design
Thomas Goepfer, Sound & Video Design
Camilla Hoitenga, Flutes Solo
Levy Lorenzo, Creative Technologist, Percussion
Actors, singers and instrumentalists of The New School’s College of Performing Arts: Hayley Boggs, William Desbiens, Youngwoo Jeon, Kalun Leung, Timmy Ong, Yeji Pyun, Samuel Rachmuth, Veronica Richer, Jane Skapek (assistant director), Zachary Sebek, Alexander Theiss, Jackie Traish, Yunnan Xu
Guest Artists:
January 16: Simon Critchley, philosopher and Joan La Barbara, musician
January 17: Cinzia Arruzza, philosopher and Rebekah Heller, musician
January 18: Dmitri Nikulin, philosopher and Ross Karre musician
January 21: Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and Joan La Barbara, musician
The Art of Change is a bold experimental work that introduces a radically new artistic form. Starting with the traditional notion of opera as a type of work that blends music, theater, art, and design into a single form, The Art of Change brings performers and thinkers together on stage and fuses live performance with historical video footage, recorded interviews and multimedia content. All of this is woven together into a tapestry that is generative, interactive, participative, and open.
As its title suggests, the work centers on the very idea of change and presents various ways of thinking, from the very pragmatic to the most speculative, about what needs to be changed in the world today. Actors, singers, instrumentalists, designers, and philosophers come together, with the audience, to speculate on this question and the many ways in which it can be answered.
The libretto, by philosopher Chiara Bottici, is the result of a process in which an initial text was developed through a collective authoring process that unfolded on Public Seminar – an online journal of ideas, politics and culture supported by The New School.
No two performances of The Art of Change are the same. Spoken dialogues within each performance are analyzed and processed on the fly through software which captures and develops the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech to generate instrumental scores for the musicians and electronics. What is more, each evening features two guests – a thinker and a musician – who bring new perspectives and their unique vision to the work.
Performances:
January 16th, 8pm
January 17th, 5pm & 8pm
January 18th, 5pm & 8pm
January 21st, 8pm
Creative Team:
Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Concept, Video Design & Composition
Chiara Bottici, Libretto
Ashley Tata, Stage Direction
Timo Rissanen, Costume Design
Abigail Hoke-Brady, Lighting Design
Thomas Goepfer, Sound & Video Design
Camilla Hoitenga, Flutes Solo
Levy Lorenzo, Creative Technologist, Percussion
Actors, singers and instrumentalists of The New School’s College of Performing Arts: Hayley Boggs, William Desbiens, Youngwoo Jeon, Kalun Leung, Timmy Ong, Yeji Pyun, Samuel Rachmuth, Veronica Richer, Jane Skapek (assistant director), Zachary Sebek, Alexander Theiss, Jackie Traish, Yunnan Xu
Guest Artists:
January 16: Simon Critchley, philosopher and Joan La Barbara, musician
January 17: Cinzia Arruzza, philosopher and Rebekah Heller, musician
January 18: Dmitri Nikulin, philosopher and Ross Karre musician
January 21: Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and Joan La Barbara, musician
The Art of Change is a bold experimental work that introduces a radically new artistic form. Starting with the traditional notion of opera as a type of work that blends music, theater, art, and design into a single form, The Art of Change brings performers and thinkers together on stage and fuses live performance with historical video footage, recorded interviews and multimedia content. All of this is woven together into a tapestry that is generative, interactive, participative, and open.
As its title suggests, the work centers on the very idea of change and presents various ways of thinking, from the very pragmatic to the most speculative, about what needs to be changed in the world today. Actors, singers, instrumentalists, designers, and philosophers come together, with the audience, to speculate on this question and the many ways in which it can be answered.
The libretto, by philosopher Chiara Bottici, is the result of a process in which an initial text was developed through a collective authoring process that unfolded on Public Seminar – an online journal of ideas, politics and culture supported by The New School.
No two performances of The Art of Change are the same. Spoken dialogues within each performance are analyzed and processed on the fly through software which captures and develops the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech to generate instrumental scores for the musicians and electronics. What is more, each evening features two guests – a thinker and a musician – who bring new perspectives and their unique vision to the work.
Performances:
January 16th, 8pm
January 17th, 5pm & 8pm
January 18th, 5pm & 8pm
January 21st, 8pm
Creative Team:
Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Concept, Video Design & Composition
Chiara Bottici, Libretto
Ashley Tata, Stage Direction
Timo Rissanen, Costume Design
Abigail Hoke-Brady, Lighting Design
Thomas Goepfer, Sound & Video Design
Camilla Hoitenga, Flutes Solo
Levy Lorenzo, Creative Technologist, Percussion
Actors, singers and instrumentalists of The New School’s College of Performing Arts: Hayley Boggs, William Desbiens, Youngwoo Jeon, Kalun Leung, Timmy Ong, Yeji Pyun, Samuel Rachmuth, Veronica Richer, Jane Skapek (assistant director), Zachary Sebek, Alexander Theiss, Jackie Traish, Yunnan Xu
Guest Artists:
January 16: Simon Critchley, philosopher and Joan La Barbara, musician
January 17: Cinzia Arruzza, philosopher and Rebekah Heller, musician
January 18: Dmitri Nikulin, philosopher and Ross Karre musician
January 21: Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and Joan La Barbara, musician
Contact John Drummond for more information.
This paper considers Cornelius Castoriadis’s articulation of social imaginary significations with an emphasis on their link to the radical imaginary. Castoriadis wrote on social imaginary significations for more than thirty years, and his understanding of them changed significantly during this time, yet this is not reflected in debates on his work. The paper argues that there are three distinct phases in his reflections. The first phase can be dated 1964-1970. This early phase is characterized by Castoriadis’s break from Marx and subsequent settling of accounts with Marxism. Central to Castoriadis’s critique of Marx was the recognition of history (or: the social-historical) as the domain of meaning and unmotivated creation as the work of the radical imaginary. Importantly, Castoriadis also considered the intertwining of the imaginary with the symbolic, on the one hand, and with social doing, on the other. Castoriadis’s approach in this early phase can be considered phenomenological in the broad sense that Merleau-Ponty gave it in the Phenomenology of Perception. The second phase is dated 1970-1975; that is, the period in which Castoriadis wrote the second part of The Imaginary Institution of Society wherein he announced his turn to ontology. This is his most self-contained and systematic articulation of social imaginary significations. Castoriadis extends and develops his notion of magma in relation to social imaginary significations and emphasizes the social imaginary creation of a world ex nihilo as an ontological creation, whilst the radical imaginary is presented as a part of his emergent general ontology of à-être. The third ‘kaleidoscopic’ phase is dated 1976-1997 and may be understood as a period of consolidation and expansion. Although his basic understanding of social imaginary significations did not dramatically alter (although further developments are visible), his thought went in a myriad of different directions and patterns – hence kaleidoscopic — that nonetheless shaped a wider background against which his elucidation of social imaginaries were configured. His reconsideration of the sacred, the ‘ground power’ of institutions, and the development of a poly-regional ontology of the for-itself were key to this changing background. The paper will conclude with a critical engagement with the implications of the changing permutations of the imaginary element for Castoriadis’s thought.
Dr. Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University and permanent External Fellow at the East-Central European Institute for Philosophy, Charles University (Prague). She is a founding co-ordinating editor of the Social Imaginaries refereed journal and book series, and from October-December 2019, was an inaugural Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Hamburg. She has published widely in the social imaginaries field, including most recently Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions (Eds. Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith), 2019, Rowman and Littlefield International, London. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Castoriadis and the Imaginary Element (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield International).
The 2020 Annual Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference
Keynote Speaker: Catherine Malabou, Kingston University and University of California, Irvine.
Conference Description
Although the rise of populism has often been interpreted as the atavistic return of racism and nationalism, the underlying sources have more to do with the collapse of the welfare state model in advanced post-industrial countries, which has resulted in the search for new forms of solidarity that could replace welfare state structures. These structures were first developed in the early twentieth century when a new type of nation-state and industrial economy came into being along with the developing capitalist regime of accumulation. Such a regime brought about the destruction of the existing networks of solidarity—based primarily on family, religious community, and workplace ties—thereby leading the state to intervene in different social services, including health, employment, and senior care, as well as in labor policy regarding such issues as the minimum wage, the length of the working day, retirement, and accident insurance. However, these interventions by the state, whether they responded to labor union protests or arose from anti-socialist preemptive actions by conservative forces, have been accompanied by the growing bureaucratization of its practices, which have come to constitute, along with capitalist commodification, one of today’s fundamental sources of inequalities and conflicts.
The shifting line between the private and the public has had ambiguous effects. In the end, state intervention was carried out not in the form of a true democratization but through the imposition of new forms of subordination. The social result with greater globalization and deindustrialization in most of the advanced industrial countries has been a sense of abandonment, as well as a loss of empowerment and autonomy in all segments of the population. At the same time, with the emergence of post-Fordist capitalism in the late twentieth century, this subordination to the state has taken the opposite form—that of a reduction of state intervention and care, based on the idea that the endless expansion of state services cannot serve as a panacea for all problems. As a result, new distortions in the private/public divide recently have appeared. In turn, the private sphere has become increasingly contentious, first, because of growing privatization of previously public services and, second, because gaining access to those services is left to individual initiative.
The feeling that governments are incapable of dealing with social problems has regenerated the awareness that collective self-management is perhaps inevitable, at both micro- and macroscopic levels: from neighborhood collectives up to lending circles, non-profit societies, religious organizations, and solidarity economies. The contemporary interest in structures of mutual aid relates to the fact that we are living in an era that is clearly looking for new models of human flourishing and social development. Not only must we deal with multiple and recurring crises (finance, food, energy, and environment), but there is a growing recognition that today’s normative agenda has to be much more encompassing and holistic, including issues of gender equality, fair trade, environment, and cultural and religious diversity.
A need to reconceptualize the concepts of the “common good” and “collective interest” is developing out of this set of conditions, leading to new definitions of civic sense, responsibility, and autonomy. The need for intermediary structures between the private and public sphere frames the space of intervention for mutual aid as a new form of social coherence.
But the concept of mutual aid has a complex and contradictory history. According to Peter Kropotkin, there is an innate biological evolutionary tendency toward mutualism in all living beings, an immanent social rationality that orients humanity toward a self-regulated political organization and society. Against social Darwinism, Kropotkin argues that species not only compete but also, and mainly, collaborate. Such an evolutionary vision later formed the core of Edward Wilson’s sociobiology, marking the beginning of the altruism/selfishness debates within which the problematic of mutual help has remained enclosed for decades. Libertarianism, for example, presupposes that individuals’ social behavior is grounded in a natural principle of selfishness that should then become the basis of aid. This vision allows for a deterministic idea of the capitalist economy in which Robert Nozick argues for the principle of a “minimal state” grounded on the fact that no distributive justice can come from above. Similarly, Friedrich Hayek argues that the “true” nature of liberalism lies in the doctrine that seeks to reduce to the minimum the power of the state. Democracy is then only the means for collective decision-making or a utilitarian apparatus for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. The capitalist free market, in turn, is said to be the only type of social organization that respects the principle of individual liberty.
If the theory of mutual aid can no longer be grounded in an opposition between the two poles of society and the state, but must be reconceptualized in terms of the mediation between both, the modes of its mediation become the key to the implementation of mutual aid practices. Ideas of family, nation, and religion thus take on new potential significance as the forms of mediation between individuals that can create the basis for networks of mutual aid. Are these the key categories that would embed mutual aid in broader affective, ethical, and metaphysical frameworks, or are there alternative possibilities that would establish new types of networks?
This conference seeks to develop new concepts of mutual aid that are not predetermined by conceptions of biological, economic, or political certainties. Key questions include:
- Why is mutual aid not linked with theories of social contract, and how do we determine its degrees of separation from the state?
- How can mutual aid be reconceptualized by renewing intellectual traditions?
- What are the moral implications and requisites of the concept of mutual aid today?
- What are the privileged domains of application for mutual aid and what are the organizational principles underlying them?
- Does mutual aid imply a reorganization of the economy, or is it compatible with or even essential to a capitalist organization of economic life?
- Does the concept of mutual aid offer tools for reimagining socialism in a way that avoids an overreliance on state power?
- Does mutual aid require a reconstitution of subjectivity that moves it away from the autonomous individual of liberal theory?
- What are the prospects and problems of religious frameworks, such as Pentecostalism, that function as the basis for mutual aid?
- Can the rise of populism be understood as part of a search for new networks for mutual aid? Does mutual aid imply the restriction of its networks to limited groups, implying a relationship to political identity?
- How does the concept of mutual aid relate to state power and the sovereignty of the state?
Abstract Submissions
Please note: Abstracts for this conference will only be accepted from current Telos-Paul Piccone Institute members. In order to become a member, please visit our membership enrollment page. Telos-Paul Piccone Institute memberships are valid until the end of the annual New York City conference.
We invite scholars from all disciplines to submit 250-word abstracts along with a short c.v. to telosnyc2020@telosinstitute.net by September 30, 2019. Please place “The 2020 Telos Conference” in the email’s subject line.
The Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy was founded by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel in 1987. It is the original model for all of NYU Law’s colloquia. The Colloquium is now convened by Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron, two of whom will host in any given year.
Each week on Thursday a legal theorist or moral or political philosopher presents a paper to the group, which consists of students, faculty from the Law School and other departments of NYU, and faculty from other universities. The choice of subject is left to the paper’s author, within the general boundaries of the Colloquium’s subjects, and the discussions are therefore not connected by any structured theme for the term as a whole, though in past years certain central topics were canvassed in several weeks’ discussion. The Colloquium aims, not to pursue any particular subject, but to explore new work in considerable depth and so allow students to develop their own skill in theoretical analysis.
Each week’s paper is posted at least a week in advance on this page, and participants are expected to have read it.
The public sessions of the colloquium will take place on Thursdays, in Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floor, from 4:00 to 7:00 pm.
Colloquium 2021
Professors Liam Murphy and Samuel Scheffler
September 2nd
Kim Ferzan, University of Pennsylvania, Law
Rethinking Credit for Time Served
September 9th
Liam Murphy, NYU
International Responsibility for Global Environment Harm: Collective and Individual
September 17th ( Friday 2.00-5.00)
Moshe Halbertal, NYU
September 23rd
Jeff McMahan, Oxford
September 30th
Emma Kaufman, NYU Law
October 7th
Rick Pildes, NYU Law
October 14th
Samuel Scheffler, NYU
October 21st
Steve Darwall, Yale, Philosophy
October 28th
Chris Kutz, University of California, Berkeley, Law
November 4th
Anthony Appiah, NYU
November 11th
Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley, Philosophy
November 18th
Teresa Bejan, Oxford
December 2nd
Ruth Chang, Oxford