Patricia Reed "Instituting the Intolerable: Shame, Ignorance and the Schema of Monohumanist Man"

Day 2 Keynote Lecture by Patricia Reed at the 2024 Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference organised by the Architecture Philosophy and Theory academic group of the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft.
www.dgs2024.nl/
"Instituting the Intolerable: Shame, Ignorance and the Schema of Monohumanist Man"
For Deleuze, shame is not only one of philosophy’s most “powerful motifs,” but enables an exit from schemas of ignorance that institute an unseeing of the intolerable. As an impersonal affect, shame produces a visceral schism unsettling prosaic mental frameworks through an abjection experienced by the body as it both recognizes complicity and bears witness to what it was hitherto, insensitive to. Shame, as it were, compels forms of practice (a creative yoking of concepts with pragmatics) not for, but before the intolerable. Through Sylvia Wynter’s elaboration of Monohumanist Man as the autoinstituting figure schematizing Euromodernity and its particular epistemologies (often foundational to idealizations of the State and its striated space of reasons), unlike the immobility of guilt, Deleuzian shame will be outlined as an affective catalyst for empirical and praxis-based counter-actualization. What draws these thinkers into relation is a negotiation with a common problem: how it is possible from within the conditions techno-sociogenic givenness, to sense and act from without the given, whilst recognizing the impossibility somatic/cognitive detachment from an historical milieu.
Patricia Reed is a theorist, artist and designer based in Berlin. She is Co-Head of The Critical Inquiry Lab, an MA program in Design-Research at the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL). Recent writings have been published in Navigation beyond Vision, Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World, KI-Realitäten: Modelle, Praktiken und Topologien maschinellen Lernens, The Unmanned, Pages Magazine, Glass Bead Journal, The New Normal, Construction Site for Possible Worlds, e-flux Journal and e-flux Architecture. Reed is an affiliate researcher in the Antikythera program (US), and is Area Lead for the Design, Technology and Materialization program at the School of Materialist Research. She co-wrote the Xenofeminist Manifesto as Laboria Cuboniks which was republished by Verso in 2018, with subsequent books in Greek, Korean, French and Spanish. Reed has been awarded an Agent of Change grant in 2023 from the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, for which she is preparing a monograph entitled Figuring Planetary Space. A compilation volume of Reed's works will be released by Holobionte Ediciones (Spanish) in 2024.