Розкрито сутність поняття «рейтинг». Доведено значущість рейтингової оцінки для суб’єктів фінансового ринку, зокрема для страхових компаній, потенційних страхувальників, інвесторів та кредиторів.

I first argue that the Matrix trilogy is a Gnostic cyber-epic; I then use this interpretive lens to review the films' treatment of fundamental questions in epistemology, metaphysics, and value theory.

The quest for a unified “Theory of Everything” that explains the fundamental nature of the universe has long been a holy grail for scientists and philosophers, dating back to the ancient Greeks’ search for Arche. The mainstream of this research primarily focuses on the lifeless phenomena and laws of physics while ignores the realm of biology. However, a fundamentally different approach to the ToE has been put forward, presenting a viable alternative to address the challenge of a Theory of Everything. (...) This approach does not seek the ultimate “building block” but rather aims to uncover the intangible rules that fundamentally govern everything in the universe, seeking their universality across the vast spectrum, from the minute subatomic world to the mega mass cosmic world and the magical biological world. To address this challenge, a set of fundamental interrelationships is introduced and represented by a model, the Fundamental Interrelationships Model. This model serves as a foundation for representing and unifying a collection of the well-established laws of physics and theories, including the Big Bang theory and evolutionary theory. Thus, unlike most existing candidates, the Fundamental Interrelationships Model offers a comprehensive framework, encompassing both non-biological and living phenomena. As a truly all-inclusive theory, ToE shouldn’t only encompass non-biological processes and the laws of physics but extend to all facets of life, including evolution of life, evolution of society (civilization), humour, and justice, because life is an integral part of the dynamic cosmic system - the universe. Therefore, any hypothesis failing to integrate biology and sociology shouldn’t be considered a comprehensive Theory of Everything . (shrink)

We argue that Hamiltonian mechanics is more fundamental than Lagrangian mechanics. Our argument provides a non-metaphysical strategy for privileging one formulation of a theory over another: ceteris paribus, a more general formulation is more fundamental. We illustrate this criterion through a novel interpretation of classical mechanics, based on three physical conditions. Two of these conditions suffice for recovering Hamiltonian mechanics. A third condition is necessary for Lagrangian mechanics. Hence, Lagrangian systems are a proper subset of Hamiltonian systems. Finally, we provide (...) a geometric interpretation of the principle of stationary action and rebut arguments for privileging Lagrangian mechanics. (shrink)

The quest for a unified “Theory of Everything” that explains the fundamental nature of the universe has long been a holy grail for scientists and philosophers, dating back to the ancient Greeks’ search for Arche. The mainstream of this research primarily focuses on the lifeless phenomena and laws of physics while ignores the realm of biology. However, a fundamentally different approach to the ToE has been put forward, presenting a viable alternative to address the challenge of a Theory of Everything. (...) This approach does not seek the ultimate “building block” but rather aims to uncover the intangible rules that fundamentally govern everything in the universe, seeking their universality across the vast spectrum, from the minute subatomic world to the mega mass cosmic world and the magical biological world. This article explores how the Fundamental Interrelationships Model unifies our understanding of the evolution of the universe, encompassing the evolution of multicellularity, development of multicellular organisms, societal evolution, and the four fundamental forces, all within the context of the fundamental interrelationships. Thus, unlike most existing candidates, the Fundamental Interrelationships Model offers a comprehensive framework, encompassing both non-biological and living phenomena. As a truly all-inclusive theory, ToE shouldn’t only encompass non-biological processes and the laws of physics but extend to all facets of life, including evolution of life, evolution of society (civilization), humour, and justice, because life is an integral part of the dynamic cosmic system - the universe. Therefore, any hypothesis failing to integrate biology and sociology shouldn’t be considered a comprehensive Theory of Everything . (shrink)

I examine how co-parents should handle differing commitments about how to raise their child. Via thought experiment and the examination of our practices and affective reactions, I argue for a thesis about the locus of parental authority: that parental authority is invested in full in each individual parent, meaning that that the command of one parent is sufficient to bind the child to act in obedience. If this full-authority thesis is true, then for co-parents to command different things would be (...) for them to contest one another’s authority. The only course that respects the authority of both parents is for co-parents to agree to command the same thing. Further, what is commanded must not result from a ‘capitulation’ by one co-parent, rather, it should result from a compromise. Parental authority involves a duty to deliberate about which commands it is best to give the child. If a command results from a capitulation, one parent will rightly think of themselves as not having fulfilled their parental duty. Parental compromises are not best understood as bargains or conflicts, but by the metaphor of gifts given by each parent out of respect for the other’s authority. (shrink)

A summary of issues related to symbolic capital, authorial presences, and intellectual property rights, and the necessity of finding a way out of 500-600 years of capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons.

The use of deception and dishonesty is widely accepted as a fact of life in policing. This paper thus defends a counterintuitive claim: Good faith is a normative foundation for the police as a political institution. Good faith is a core value of contracts, and policing is contractual in nature both broadly (as a matter of social contract theory) and narrowly (in regard to concrete encounters between law enforcement officers and the public). Given the centrality of good faith to policing, (...) dishonesty and deception on par with fraud are justified only as a narrowly circumscribed investigative tool that is constrained by institutional commitments to the fair distribution of security and the rule of law. The practical upshot is the preclusion of most dishonest and deceptive police tactics on par with fraud, leading to an institution that is less proactive and more reactive. (shrink)

This paper offers a theory of filial piety on which piety is the ethical virtue that responds to the action of person-creating. Piety is the virtue of a creature qua creature. I begin by identifying the action of person-creating as the action of a parent. I then offer some points from the philosophy of action to delineate the action of person-creating. Next, I explain the metaphysical states that this action gives rise to and their value. Parent and child fall in (...) the category of relatives, discussed by Aristotle in his Categories. More specifically, Aristotle says that parent and child are relatives as creator and created. Agreeing with but going beyond Aristotle, I show how parent and child are creator and created as paradigm and image. A pious child is one who images their paradigm well. A child does this by participating in and perfecting the person-creating action of their parent, that is, by being a good person. I argue for the theory’s acceptance on the grounds that it better explains common intuitive judgments about filial piety than do the gratitude theory and the special goods theory (the two most influential and plausible competing theories of filial piety in the philosophical literature). (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that Platonic Forms are angels. I make this identification by claiming that Platonic Forms have the characteristics of angels, in particular, that Platonic Forms are alive. I offer four arguments for this claim. First, it seems that engaging in self-directed action is a sufficient condition for being alive. The Forms are, as teleological activities, self-directed actions. Second, bodies receive their being from their Forms, and some bodies are essentially alive. Third, in the Good, all (...) the types of goodness, including life, are identical. The Forms are appearances of the Good. Fourth, since the Good imparts as much goodness as it can, the Forms are alive unless there is some bar to their being alive. There are good reasons to think that there is no such bar. I then show that ethical vices do not give body to human form, but give body to other forms—those that are evil angels. Lastly, I provide a survey of the relationships that various religious traditions posit between ethical vice and the demonic. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview and analysis of policing, the area of criminal justice associated primarily with law enforcement. The study of policing spans a variety of disciplines, including criminology, law, philosophy, politics, and psychology, among other fields. Although research on policing is broad in scope, it has become an especially notable area of study in contemporary legal and social philosophy given recent police controversies.

In my "The Providential Advantage of Divine Foreknowledge" (2009) I respond to John Sanders' defense of the claim, made by many open theists, that foreknowledge of future contingents provides God with no providential advantage over a God who lacks such knowledge. William Hasker responded to that paper with a defense of Sanders, and the current paper is a response to Hasker's response.

Landscape Agency New York was founded by Gavin Keeney, c.1997, and encompassed a wide array of activities and effects – e.g., research, writing, design, consulting, and teaching. /S/OMA (Syntactical Operations Metaphorical Affects) was the mobile, and sometimes global design and teaching module within LANY, focusing primarily on entirely hypothetical and/or irreal projects, many becoming the foundation for lectures and courses delivered at institutions in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe, from 2003 to 2007. Lastly, the LANY Archive-Grotto was established (...) following publication of On the Nature of Things: Contemporary American Landscape Architecture (Birkhauser, 2001), primarily as a means of escaping the then-formulaic production of texts common to Landscape Architecture and Architecture. (shrink)

Co-parents who differ in their ideal child rearing policies should compromise, argues Marcus William Hunt. Josh Milburn and Carlo Alvaro dispute this when it comes to veganism. Milburn argues that veganism is a matter of justice and that to compromise over justice is (typically) impermissible. I suggest that compromise over justice is often permissible, and that compromise over justice may be required by justice itself. Alvaro offers aesthetic, gustatory, and virtue-based arguments for ethical veganism, showing that veganism involves sensibilities (...) and virtues, and argues that veganism involves a belief. Alvaro takes this to show that parental compromise is impermissible. I suggest that Alvaro’s arguments are implausible and that the shaping of a child’s sensibilities and virtues is an apt matter for parental compromise. (shrink)

Science and mathematics continually change in their tools, methods, and concepts. Many of these changes are not just modifications but progress---steps to be admired. But what constitutes progress? This dissertation addresses one central source of intellectual advancement in both disciplines: reformulating a problem-solving plan into a new, logically compatible one. For short, I call these cases of compatible problem-solving plans "reformulations." Two aspects of reformulations are puzzling. First, reformulating is often unnecessary. Given that we could already solve a problem using (...) an older formulation, what do we gain by reformulating? Second, some reformulations are genuinely trivial or insignificant. Merely replacing one symbol with another does not lead to intellectual progress. What distinguishes significant reformulations from trivial ones? According to what I call "conceptualism" (or "conceptual empiricism"), reformulations are intellectually significant when they provide a different plan for solving problems. Significant reformulations provide inferentially different routes to the same solution. In contrast, trivial reformulations provide exactly the same problem-solving plans, and hence they do not change our understanding. This answers the second question about what distinguishes trivial from significant reformulations. However, the first question remains: what makes a new way of solving an old problem valuable? Here, a bevy of practical considerations come to mind: one formulation might be faster, less complicated, or use more familiar concepts. According to "instrumentalism," these practical benefits are all there is to reformulating. Some reformulations are simply more instrumentally valuable for meeting the aims of science than others. At another extreme, "fundamentalism" contends that a reformulation is valuable when it provides a more fundamental description of reality. According to this view, some reformulations directly contribute to the metaphysical aim of carving reality at its joints. Conceptualism develops a middle ground between instrumentalism and fundamentalism, preserving their benefits without their costs. I argue that the epistemic value of significant reformulations does not reduce to either practical or metaphysical value. Reformulations are valuable because they are a constitutive part of problem-solving. Both science and mathematics aim at solving all possible problems within their respective domains. Meeting this aim requires being able to plan for any possible problem-solving context, and this requires reformulating. By reformulating, we clarify what we need to know to solve problems. Still, one might wonder whether the value of reformulations requires underlying differences in explanatory power. According to "explanationism," a reformulation is valuable only when it provides a better explanation. Explanationism stands as a rival middle ground position to my own. However, it faces numerous counterexamples. In many cases, two reformulations provide the same explanation while nonetheless providing different ways of understanding a phenomenon. Hence, reformulating can be valuable even when neither formulation is more explanatory. Methodologically, I draw on a variety of case studies to support my account of reformulation. These range from classical mechanics to quantum chemistry, along with examples from mathematics. Symmetry arguments provide a paradigmatic example: the mathematics of symmetry groups radically recasts quantum mechanics and quantum chemistry. Nevertheless, elementary approaches exist that eschew this additional mathematical apparatus, solving problems in a more tedious but less mathematically-demanding manner. Further examples include reformulations of quantum field theory, Arabic vs. Roman numerals, and Fermat's little theorem in number theory. In each case, my account identifies how reformulations change and improve our understanding of science and mathematics. (shrink)

The article argues that procreation is intrinsically valuable because it produces persons. The essential thought of the argument is that among the valuable things in the world are not only products, but the actions by which they are produced. The first premise is that persons have great value, for which a common consent argument is offered. The second premise is that, as an action type, procreation has persons as a product. Procreation is always a part of the action that produces (...) a person. This is because procreators take as their goal the creation of an organism that itself has development into a person as a goal. Such a claim also helps explain the moral obligations of procreators, the affective lives of procreators and the common preference for procreation. The third premise is that if an action type has a product of value, then all its tokens have intrinsic value. I argue that even when such actions fail to produce anything outside the agent, they are intrinsically valuable because of how they actualise the powers and virtues of the agent, in part achieving the agent’s goal. I then apply that argument to the case of procreation and person producing. (shrink)

Political liberals ask citizens not to appeal to certain considerations, including religious and philosophical convictions, in political deliberation. We argue that political liberals must include a demanding requirement of intellectual modesty in their ideal of citizenship in order to motivate this deliberative restraint. The requirement calls on each citizen to believe that the best reasoners disagree about the considerations that she is barred from appealing to. Along the way, we clarify how requirements of intellectual modesty relate to moral reasons for (...) deliberative restraint. And we argue against attempts to weaken our requirement of intellectual modesty by emphasizing those moral reasons. (shrink)

A discussion of what operates from "within" formal agency as irreal surplus to artworks and how otherwise discursive systems become abstracted by the artwork. Text by Gavin Keeney. Images by Parsa Khalili.

An essay on non-discursive forms of knowledge that inhabit art photography. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 209-26.

Diaristic, mixed notes on: John Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture (1837) and Modern Painters (1885); Caravaggio, Victorian Aesthetes, G.K. Chesterton, and Tacita Dean; Jay Fellows' Ruskin’s Maze: Mastery and Madness in His Art (1981); Slavoj Žižek at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, New York, USA, April 23, 2009, “Architectural Parallax: Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle”; “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice”, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, March 15-August 16, 2009; Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La Jetée (...) (2009); The Politics of the Envelope, Princeton Envelope Group (PEG), ARC504, Princeton School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, Friday, May 8, 2009; Rhode Island School of Design, Degree Project Reviews, Division of Architecture & Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, May 16, 2009; etc. (shrink)

Brief essay on Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" from Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), with reference to The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2005).

Essay on the modern artistic ego as sponsored by the exhibition, "Gustav Courbet," February 27-May 18, 2008, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, USA. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays on Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 191-98.

Review of “Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia,” Saatchi Gallery, London, England, and “Calder After the War,” Pace Gallery, London, England, April 2013. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 157-60.

Final Circular for the multimedia exhibition, "'Shadow-lands': The Suffering Image" (April 18-May 18, 2012), in association with the PhD project, "Visual Agency in Art & Architecture," Deakin University, 2011-2014.

Review of “The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-37”, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, November 25, 2011-March 4, 2012. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 153-57.

Chris Marker’s portrait of Alexandre Medvedkine in the 1993 film Le tombeau d’Alexandre/The Last Bolshevik is highly instructive of his own relationship to Soviet cinema. Most especially, this difficult or troubled rapport with the antecedents to cinéma vérité in the West (and its protean formal properties, in terms of structure and often satirical-critical commentary) comes forth in the figures he assembles to comment upon Medvedkine’s life work. When Medvedkine’s Scast’e (Le Bonheur/Happiness) (1934) leaked to the West (c.1967), sent like an (...) “SOS” in multiple bottles to various film archives (one by one from deep within the Soviet film world), Marker and SLON received a copy by way of Jacques Ledoux (curator of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, in Belgium). The film opened the floodgates of a retrospective survey of Soviet filmmaking repressed and forgotten other than by remote and distant figures (partisans) who somehow survived the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. (shrink)

This two-part, semi-gothic literary essay seeks a provisional definition of “benevolent capital” and a working description of types of artistic and scholarly work that have no value for Capital as such. The paradox observed is that such works may actually appeal to a certain aspect of Capital, insofar as present-day capitalism has within it forms of pre-modern political economy that may actually save Capital from its mad rush toward self-immolation.

A draft White Paper associated with Fulbright Specialist Program lectures at the University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia, in March-April 2015, concerning neo-liberal capitalist exploitation of academic research and publications.

This essay addresses arguments regarding the “place” or “non-place” in which ideas originate and whether they are wholly transcendental, wholly contingent, or a combination of transcendental and contingent. Far from a resuscitation or recitation of Medieval scholastic disputations, the essay seeks to situate these untimely concerns in the context of spent discursive and ideological systems that support capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons, exploitation only made possible because of a decisive and historically determined reduction of knowledge to fully contingent status (...) as spectral commodity. (shrink)

Photo-essay/travelogue from 2004 regarding the gentrification of San Francisco.

The 11 experimental, pseudo-avantgarde visual poems (wordless, other than title and date) are an indirect homage to the late-great filmmaker and photographer, Chris Marker (1921-2012), foremost to his penchant for utilizing disintegrating imagery in his film-essays and multimedia installations. All images were captured using a Research in Motion, BlackBerry 8520 cellphone, and subsequently 100-percent de-saturated, and 100-percent contrast-adjusted, using Microsoft Office Picture Manager. The images, as a result, resemble the primitive production values given to the pinhole camera, and the “dogmatic” (...) (uniform) adjustments (as above), applied to the original BB images, reference the early strictures applied to filmmaking by Lars von Trier. The above-mentioned, black-and-white adjustments notwithstanding, all images are used “as captured,” without cropping. The series begins and ends in Botwnnog, Northwest Wales, in May and August of 2013, respectively, with interregnums and brief idylls in Rijeka, Croatia, Trieste and Ancona, Italy, and Igoumenitsa, Ioannina, and Athens, Greece. Tracking the peregrinations of the author of the poems across Europe, and intimately associated with the then-nascent research and exhibition project, “Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture,”* the poems are also a compressed form of scholarship, albeit operating in the shadow-lands of knowledge per se, and evoking the non-discursive side of literary-artistic production, a penumbral zone within cultural production that nonetheless references the discursive arts (essay and/or full-blown treatise), but favors the paradox and/or tautology – privileging, then, the much-desired destruction of dialectics. (shrink)

This two-part, semi-gothic literary essay seeks a provisional definition of “benevolent capital” and a working description of types of artistic and scholarly work that have no value for Capital as such. The paradox observed is that such works may actually appeal to a certain aspect of Capital, insofar as present-day capitalism has within it forms of pre-modern political economy that may actually save Capital from its mad rush toward self-immolation.

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture is to be a highly focused exhibition/folio of works by perhaps 12 artists (preferably little-known or obscure), with precise commentaries denoting the discord between the autonomous object (the artwork or architectural object per se) and the larger field of reference (worlds); inference (associative magic), and insurrection (against power and privilege) – or, the Immemorial. Engaging the age-old “theological apparatuses” of the artwork, the folio is intended to upend the current fascination with personality, (...) celebrity, and fashion to reach the timeless horizon of the subject of Art and Architecture as the subject other than the subject of Art and Architecture proper. Word as image, and image as word, is the central paradox given to this discord – an elective, yet universal condition that also makes certain art and architectural works heedlessly existential-metaphysical (and, therefore, “theological”). This paper, as part of the essay “White Paper: Gray Areas and Black Zones,” is a preliminary investigation of the conceptual architecture for the overall, ongoing exhibition/book project. (shrink)

Co-authored research paper written with José Vela Castillo on the subject of Pablo Román's wall of 1,000 images, Vienna, 2013. -/- “Vienna” or “The Wall” is an ongoing project by architect/artist Pablo Román that, upon its completion, will consist of the round number of 1,000 images taped onto an off-white wall. One of the many walls he has designed/produced in the past months (architectural or otherwise), its elementary condition is at the same time enhanced and diminished by its very presence (...) as wall-cum-images, or as images-out-of-a-wall, eroding its foundational condition to a flickering-tele-techno-pixelated spectral apparatus. Its radically modern and outdated presence reconfigures contemporary reflections on what architecture and what the modern is, indirectly referencing “Fundamentals,” the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Rem Koolhaas. (shrink)

Photo-essay on six cities: New York, Melbourne, Hong Kong, London, Paris, and Ljubljana.

Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, (...) this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma , a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)

Essays from the political website CounterPunch. - Requiem: Dies Non, Not Dies Irae (September 18, 2001) - Mouth Wide Shut (April 8, 2002) - So Long Frank O. Gehry? (April 28, 2002) - Bête Noire (May 22, 2002) - “All politics is local?”: The Unbearable Lightness of NGOs (May 24, 2002) - Bush and Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Ideology (June 1, 2002) - The Adventures of Mademoiselle M.: Or Getting Screwed in Paris (June 8-9, 2002) - Loose Lips: (...) Liberty, Democracy and Bush (July 6, 2002) - Go Tell Karl Rove!: The Anti-Republican Party (July 13, 2002) - Be Still My Beating Heart (July 15, 2002) - Grave New Urbanism: The World Trade Center Burlesque (July 20, 2002) - Roamin’ in the Gloamin’: Van Morrison: In September (July 25, 2002) - Sublime Žižek: Guarding Lenin’s Tomb (July 27, 2002) - Vox Populi: Everyone’s a Critic (August 3, 2002) - Auteur-Driven Vehicles: The New New Laocoon (August 19, 2002) - Beaux Rêves, Citoyens!!! (September 5, 2002) - Immortality: The Quest for Fire (August 31, 2002) Parting Shots: A Refracted History (Summary) Of The Twentieth Century (November 2, 2002) - New Books Christmas 2002: Livres Deluxe (December 23, 2002) - The Drunken Flower (July 26, 2003) - The Infernal Machine: “Architectures” in Service to Nothing (August 23, 2003). (shrink)

This study firstly addresses three threads in Chris Marker’s work – theology, Marxism, and Surrealism – through a mapping of the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida onto the varied production of his film and photographic work. Notably, it is late Agamben and late Derrida that is utilized, as both began to exit so-called post-structuralism proper with the theological turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It addresses these threads through the means to ends employed and as (...) ends proper (as production of semi-autonomous works that also, paradoxically, index a much larger field of inquiry and theoretical praxis). It is perhaps French “schizophrenia” regarding theological versus political agency that best accounts for the sardonic deployment of irony and humor in Marker’s work in the face of Big History. Such means to ends (plus a subtle anti-intellectualism vis-à-vis fashionable academic trends) tend to underscore the severity and ultimate sincerity of Marker’s overall cultural-political project. -/- Dossier Chris Marker is also a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of Marker, as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also – arguably – secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural (problematized in contemporary French post-phenomenological and post-post-structuralist theory as “the event).” Consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, Marker resolves these irreducible warring aspects of life experience in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as autonomous subject and “mask” (or “screen”) for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its proverbial Other, or within the frame, as other to that Other. -/- Despite the complications of the as-yet unresolved post-modern condition (its nihilist-relativist bias), and its similar, mostly circular concerns with the image and/or media, Marker’s work is clearly not post-modern. In fact, when tested against immemorial cultural epiphenomena, that work withstands all attempts at categorization and/or art-historical analysis proper. It remains unassimilable to the post-modern cause ... What emerges, upon closer examination, and through rigorous re-contextualization, is the prescient force of Marker’s works toward that futural state buried in art that is also “theological,” versus atheological, and heedlessly anterior to cultural politics per se. -/- In the case of Marker, this age-old or immemorial “thing-in-itself” (the artwork as image of world-chiasmus) finds its foremost or penultimate formation in his very-still photography – the singular images that are also the building blocks for his renowned ciné-essays. Not without irony, this same austere, reductive force of the still image (as form of proscription) also inhabits the more complex, synthetic works (or montages) that he has formulated and presented “dramatically,” here and there, through the often-sketchy apparatuses of his new-media experiments, as of the late 1980s. Ultimately, this world-image as chiasmus was always present within his earliest literary projects, from the 1940s forward – most especially in books and essays, with or without actual images. -/- Marker’s “return” to photography (to exhibiting still photography in galleries), in the late 2000s, is in many ways a return to the singular object of the artist-critic’s desire; the image in/for itself, while that image – endlessly troubled or interrogated for decades – continues to speak “in tongues” anyway, often against, or oblivious to, the voice of the author/artist/narrator. -/- Marker is a High Romantic Christian Marxist. The “Christic” aspect is rightly well-hidden, but emerges when the eschatological versus historical center of his work is exposed (the existential-metaphysical fuse such as also inhabits the works of Caravaggio), and when his early years are examined in light of his later and/or final years. Marker’s semi-personal/semi-impersonal apocalyptic vision is writ large in diverse works that cross decades, figuring a redemptive, world-shattering formation of art as pleroma. (shrink)

Essays and documents in support of the works of Gaialight - DOCUMENTS: The Passion of Jeanne d’Art (2007) - Letter to Gaia (2007) - “Art as Such”: This is Not Pop ... (2008) - Writing Toward Darkness (2009) - Scarlett Words: Light America (2009) - The Darklight Elaboration (2010) - The Darklight Elaboration: Zeitgeist or Episteme? (2010) - Cam Girls (2011) - Brooklyn Buzz (2011) - Brooklyn Buzz: The Semi-divine Metropolis (2011) - Reconnaissance: Light War, Mass Surveillance, Video Games (2011) (...) - First Cause (2011) - Met Ladies (2011) - When Cam Girls Met Ladies (2011) / OUTTAKES (2007): 15 Questions About Editioned Art Photography (2007) - A Few Awkward Questions for Francesca Woodman (2007) - October Revolution (2007) . (shrink)

Sublime Žižek: Guarding Lenin’s Tomb (July 2002) - Žižek & Badiou: The Neo-Marxist Magicians (November 2003) - The Ruins of Thought: Five Scenarios Toward a Short Film (November 2005) - Slavoj Žižek at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, New York, April 2009 (April 2009) - Questions for Žižek (April 2009).

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production. Part One is an implicit critique of neo-liberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines, while Part Two returns to apparent lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, particularly the recourse to artistic production as both a form of mnemonics and periodic (and (...) renascent) avant-garde agitation. In-between these twin systems of taking the measure of things, Art and Architecture, as forms of speculative intellectual capital, emerge from the shadow-lands of half-conscious and half-unconscious forces to become gestures toward a type of knowledge that has no utilitarian or generic agency. Defying the tendencies of such discourses to fall prey to instrumental orders that effectively neuter the inherent radical agenda of both, Art and Architecture are represented in this series of essays as noetic apparatuses, operating at the edge of authorized systems of knowledge, quietly and secretly validating and valorizing the shadowy and recondite, collective and personal operations of intellect in service to no particular end. (shrink)

“Else-where” is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production from 2002 through 2011. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the real Real . While architecture nominally addresses an environmental ethos, it also famously negotiates its own representational values by way of its putative autonomy ; its main repression (...) in this regard is “landscape,” figure of the Other and figure of the Real. Engaging forms of spectrality, and not necessarily speculative intelligence per se, architecture is also “conscious” of its own complicity in capitalist orders, a complicity that in part underwrites its avant-garde forms of agitation since the onset of modern architecture. As a result, and over the course of the twentieth century, architectural vanguards have successively been depleted such that they return only as reified half-measures in the late-modern production of difference. As such, the essay “Actually Existing Ground” examines the failed promise of Landscape Urbanism. Since the 1960s, as with the allied arts, architecture has evacuated many of the utopian gestures given to modernism and embraced a form of ultra-contingency in a direct alliance with the post-modern and post-Marxist concession to markets and to cultural production as principal means of establishing formal hegemony. This recourse or surrender to the economic-determinist ethos of post-modernity, regardless of attempts to problematize it and/or critique it through types of what Manfredo Tafuri has called “operative criticism” , has, arguably, all but failed, and with the suggestive return circa 2011 of new forms of resistance an exit from the accommodating spirit of the times is indicative of the expectation of strenuous, yet highly formal and non-discursive operations within artistic and architectural production. The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines, inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art, to develop a nuanced critique of an emergent formal regard in the arts that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself – or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”. (shrink)

Essays and documents surveying the post-communist architectural scene in the Czech Republic. - 1/ “Wild & Wilder” (1997) – A brief travelogue with comments on Kew Gardens, London, and Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat (1930), Brno. 2/ “Angel City” (1999) – A short report on Jean Nouvel’s Golden Angel office tower in Smíchov, Prague. 3/ “Read & Weep: Scandal in Bohemia” (1999) – Essay on post-communist machinations within the architectural scene in the Czech Republic, including reports on: Jean Nouvel’s (...) Angel City and its critics; charges of “lite (postmodern) neo-functionalism” here and there; a cooked “open” competition for a proposed Kupka museum in an old mill on the island of Kampa (in the Vltava); a tourist-dodging transit through Josip Plečnik’s gardens at Prague Castle; and stories and legends regarding the Star Pavilion and oak wood at White Mountain. 4/ “The Body of the City” (2001) – Critique of Richard Meier and Partners’ proposed ECM Radio Plaza, a series of towers meant to complete an unfinished, communist-era “Rockefeller Center” in the Pankrác district of Prague. 5/ “Gnomic Works: The Sculptural Works of Kurt Gebauer” (2002) – Essay on the sculpture of Czech artist Kurt Gebauer with images from his exhibition in Zlín in 2001. 6/ “House of the Wind: May Day” (2004) – Prose poem written on May Day 2004 regarding wandering around Olšanské hřbitovy, a mostly 19th-century cemetery in the Žižkov district of Prague. 7/ “Architectural Eyewash” (2004) – An essay surveying: various complaints within the Czech architectural community regarding an outbreak of “architectural eyewash” in the 2004 Chamber of Architects’ Grand Prix competition; rumors and innuendo regarding a proposed Kupka museum on Kampa; complaints about Daniel Libeskind’s proposed Dalí House, Prague; etc. 8/ “Moravian Shadows” (2004) – Essay on “cultural shadows” in the context of Czech architecture, with a nod to Nietzsches’ The Birth of Tragedy. 9/ The Near & The Far: Moravian Garden (2006) – Notes and discurses on a very small, yet “immense” South Moravian country garden in Skryje, Czech Republic. (shrink)

Many of the following literary-critical texts (not all quite conventional “long-form” essays) originally appeared on the Landscape Agency New York website, LANY Archive-Grotto, on the web portal Geocities, between the years 1997 and 2008 – i.e., over a period of roughly ten years. Versions of some were published in various journals, academic or otherwise. In re-presenting them here, the intention is to trace a proverbial “red thread” that crosses the entirety of the work, arguably what might be denoted the works-based (...) agency of works, and, arguably, the telltale trace of what is otherwise known as the “life-work,” yet for works versus for authors. -/- The entire, retrospective apparatus of The Editioning of Gardens is also, decidedly, an homage to New York, New York, either where or from where much of the research was undertaken and “lived.” Manhattan, indeed, haunts these pages, directly and indirectly – that is to say, the unparalleled access to libraries, bookstores, universities, galleries, cafés, pubs, restaurants, cinemas, parks, and the streets is quite simply the source for the often-intense, yet suitably critical exegetical works. -/- This book is meant to both recapitulate themes crossing the “life-work” of the works collected, but to also illustrate the transitional gestalt of the 1990s and 2000s, something we collectively have not yet quite exited, and something that still haunts and gives pause to architects and landscape architects today. In naming this collection “The Editioning of Gardens,” the intention is to draw attention to the fact that it is landscape that underwrites almost all architectural interventions, whether acknowledged or denied, and that it is “landscape” – in the widest sense of the word – that we inherently and collectively inhabit. -/- NOTA BENE: -/- While many of the essays and texts presented here have been previously published as “working papers” or “reviews” on the LANY Archive-Grotto website, or in journals and P2P dossiers (i.e., in open-access collections posted to research repositories, here denoted Things Czech and Dossier LANY), their presentation in book form makes them more readily accessible and effectively new works as totality. Most have also been re-edited and re-formatted for inclusion in The Editioning of Gardens. -/- All texts are also dated so as to situate them in the timeframe in which they appeared (or were written), as snapshots or surveys of passing times. While re-edited and re-formatted for presentation here, they have not been re-written as such due to their implied “historic” and “time-based” nature. As collection, however, they function as an (un)timely reminder of critical exegesis as rite of passage – underscoring the significance of the title of the collection. This latter trait is what, ironically, makes the collection contemporary and post-contemporary – timely and untimely at once. (shrink)

Press Release for Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty (Punctum Books, 2022).

Why are teleological arguments based on biological phenomena so popular? My explanation is that teleological properties are presented in our experiences of biological phenomena. I contrast this with the view that the attribution of teleological properties to biological phenomena takes place at an intellective level – via inference, and as belief or similar propositional attitude. I suggest five ways in which the experiential view is the better explanation for the popularity of such teleological arguments. Experiential attributions are more easy, impactful, (...) and implastic. The experiential view accommodates cases of conflicting attributions, and it makes sense of the readiness with which we follow such teleological arguments. I respond to objections and explain how my view builds on existing answers to this question found in the philosophical literature. (shrink)

Darwin’s evolution theory revolutionises our understanding of the biological world. In parallel, this book is a critical breakthrough in scientific philosophy. It revolutionises our understanding of nature, particularly on civilisation, through discovering a fundamental mechanism which not only governs lifeless objects but intelligence-driven civilisation as well. This discovery provides an alternative to challenge the most fundamental issue – “the Theory of Everything”. As this mechanism is the most fundamental level, it is the foundation of similarity, including the amazing similarities between (...) a human body and a society. Upon this theoretical basis, following the rules of this mechanism and using a human body as a model, civilisation is systematically investigated. As such, technological development and its consequential social development are understood from the most fundamental level. As a result, the human future have been successfully predicted and many historical puzzles have been unequivocally solved, such as: why could the ancient Greeks create a brilliant civilisation; why were there so many great thinkers; why did Scientific Revolution and the model of university education originate from Europe rather than from other places; why did the Chinese civilisation remain stagnant when the West was rapidly rising after Scientific Revolution. Finally, one of the long-lasting enigmatic question, “what is beauty”, is unequivocally answered once and for all. It is the expression of one of the fundamental laws of physics but it is not symmetry. (shrink)