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INSTRUCTOR: J.-P. Caron
PROGRAM: Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical Philosophy
CREDIT(S): 1
DATE: Jan 9, 16, 23, 30
TIME: 9 to 11:30 AM ET

DESCRIPTION: The critique of indeterminacy in aesthetics has been on the rise for some time in neorationalist-adjacent circles. Its targets are well known: from John Cage to relational aesthetics, the supposition of either a “noisy” or unbounded indeterminacy, or of an unconstrained openness of the work to its signifying outside would grant political valence to contemporary works of art independently of any determinate demand or concrete formal unfolding. But what if indeterminacy is not so much an end point as a local suspension of constraints that could enable the reconstitution of the wiring diagrams that constitute aesthetic practices themselves?

Richard Kostelanetz offers in the short essay “Inferential Art” an interpretation of John Cage’s seminal piece as triggering off the proper localization of the work through the process of its inferring from the sensible input: “Once she [the listener] grasps the implications of 4’33’’ she can infer that literally everything she hears within that frame (…) belongs to the piece”. Henry Flynt offers the concept of Constitutive Dissociations as a means of understanding such aesthetic devices: the changing of the aims of a practice without declaring the change, the fashioning of a “contrived enigma”.

This Seminar will work with ideas that while enabling the cult of indeterminacy might also be used as a lever to reroute the inferential pathways that constitute aesthetic practices. The local suspension of preconceptions regarding the structural constraints can be thought of as an enabling condition of the dissolution of practical Givens. Inferentialism, here, as a term stemming from the philosophy of language of Sellars, Brandom and others, is an index of the connections to be remade – between intuitive contents to be restructured and practical commitments to be revised. It is also indicative of a form of aesthetic rationalism that is not oblivious to the pragmatic constraints and procedural requirements of both political and aesthetic action. This amounts ultimately to a practical examination of the conditions of rational freedom consistent with Reza Negarestani’s dictum: “In a strict sense, freedom is not liberation from slavery. It is the continuous unlearning of slavery.”

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