For backstory, see Conscience and Humanity.
Embedded Files
overviewhistory2021.pdf2014-2015 Brown Bag Lunches – Department of Philosophy.pdfAn Artist Embarks on an Impossible Project for Tamir Rice.pdf2015-16 Brown Bag Lunches – Department of Philosophy.pdfPHILOSOPHY WITHOUT TEACHERS_ A RESIDENCY – SPEP.pdfjust one person’s reflection on our practice _ philosophywithoutteachers.pdf“Practices that know themselves as such –that involve both a social recognition that they are social practices, and a social willingness to take responsibility for them- are superior to those that are engaged in thoughtlessly, unconsciously, without self-recognition. The latter sorts of practices are the ones that I have been describing as alienated: they are practices that do not own up to what they are, do not see themselves as social, and so do not recognize themselves as subject to democratic decision-making processes.”
Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 231.
Askesis — Kidset Media.pdfThat is why people need to process their lives in some reflective and communicative depth to make headway with changing them.
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For creatures such as ourselves who symbolize and conceptualize our lives — who have a world — we need ways to go deep in systematic reflection if we want to truly transform anything.
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In our current age, structured as it is by capitalism and instant gratification, there is a tendency to want to feel good and to avoid tarrying with the negative. But truly philosophical and existential meaning — as well as anything that truly changes us — requires at times confrontation.
~reflection on PwT in June 21st, 2016
"American Ecstatics" is also related to this project, after the fact, for reasons that are at once contingent and indirect.
The river – Beta.pdf(18) How To Do Things Without Words - Public Seminar.pdf(2018) How to Disagree, or Experiments in Social Construction _ Blog of the APA.pdf(18') Beyond Gestures in Socially Engaged Art - Public Seminar.pdfTrauma-Feeding - Cleveland Review of Books.pdfPages that fill in the time of the history in this project include:
The Things that Matter Most (proofs).pdfEdited LINW salon.mp4A conversation with Susan Neiman and friends around anti-fascist organizing _ Blog of the APA.pdf00--EE 46-4 TOC.pdf(25') Poor in Practical Capacity.pdfReplacing reconstruction 2 with "Re-imagining Philosophy House"
There will be a postscript after the fifth reconstructon with this title: "Retelling social liberty."
The working book title is: Reconstructing Failed Projects
From a letter to friends, June 24th, 2026
[...]
I felt that I didn't give a good sense of my weird upcoming project idea. [...]
"What I didn't convey is that the thing I want to explore in it is the construction of what Graeber and Wengrow call "social liberty," naming the pre-contact understanding of freeness in embodied relationship and persuasion over command that they gather from indigenous research into America, as the new land was originally called before it became synonymous with settler colonial empire.
I"want to do this at the same time that I am working out pre-Pythagorean reasoning, something I associate with Ionia before the term "philosophy" was coined by Pythagorus in an inward turn to disembodied, timeless truths. In that pre-Pythagorean world, figures like Xenophanes and Thales practiced reasoning alongside observation, engineering, poetry, and ritual shorn free from oracular or authoritarian command. The imprisonment of the world in timelessness and the imprisonment of the body in asceticism was not yet co-extensive with philosophy.
The idea is to work out the construction of isonomia as democracy in an American context, with increasing depth through institutional traditions and scales.
[Reconstuction 1 confronts state violence. Reconstruction 2 faces domestic violence. 3 names intellectual violence. 4 expresses social abandonment. Reconstruction 5 unworks ecological, social, and cultural erasure.]
Anyway, that's the idea. And the form is a kind of fantasy -- a fictive retelling of stories as to how they could have gone in imagination to realize their possibilities, retelling decision points like one of those Cortazarian or children's books that unfolds at decision points (with kairos). Then, after the retelling, perhaps I will have a coda to each reconstruction to reflect on its meaning and ideas, briefly.
I want it to be a light book -- about 100 pages in print, maybe 50 thousands words. And I will be going back to one of my funky OA publishers that I love.
J.
Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p. 503: "Over the course of these chapters, we have ... talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey the commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones."
The emphasis they make on indigenous American social liberty coheres well with their social anarchist perspective. But it is coherent with the isonomia of Ionia as Karatani understands it in Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. In fact, Karatani makes (1) a condition of isonomy in Ionia, whereas (2) emerges from what became called the "philosophical" tradition as reasoning (rather than obedience). (3) is more complex in Ionia yet is a live current through most of the Ionian philosophers in different ways, especially in Heraclitus in his opposition to empire and even in Pythagoras in his internally created inner reality and cloistered school.
Reconstructions of Failed Projects.pdfKeynote address for the National Conference on Ethics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 2026. New title is "Reconstructing Failed Projects through Social Repetition"
Pop Life presentation.pdfReport abuse