Papers by M. Curtis Allen
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2024
This article presents formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of De... more This article presents formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events in the Logic of Sense as a “post- Cantorian orientation of thought” (Livingston 2012), grappling with an essential incompleteness or inconsistency at the heart of both Being and thought, one which Deleuze champions positively under the equation Ungrounding = Becoming. Through it, Deleuze’s sometimes slippery use of the concept of singularity (and its relation to the virtual) is elaborated, elucidating a post-Cantorian metaphysics of events, distinct from and preceding Badiou’s, that concretely defines the role of the singular in Deleuze’s early major works.
Open Philosophy, 2018
This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Log... more This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), out of which the whole of the TLP can be re-read. Inspired by, though not dependent on, the themes of virtuality and singularity found in Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ (presented as a Wittgensteinian ‘immaculate conception’), Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘logical space’ is here complexly related to the paradoxes of the ‘metaphysical subject’ and ‘solipsism,’ within which the strictures of sense are defined, and through which the logico-pictorial scaffolding of the TLP precipitates its own systematic dissolution. It shows how nonsense envelopes not only not idle chatter, and metaphysical confusion, but sense itself.
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2022
Compression is an essential technique used across diverse information systems, one in which suppo... more Compression is an essential technique used across diverse information systems, one in which supposedly redundant or superfluous information is minimized or eliminated in order to make the storage, transmission, or reception of other information more legible or efficient. Compression is involved in everything from computer data storge (encoding) and efficient computational processes (floating point arithmetic) to the formatting of media (telephony, radio, streaming) or the engineering and circulation of sound and image (dynamic compression of volume, JPEG resolution). Beyond any particular technical implementation, though, compression names the peculiar perceptual regime of late modernity—it is our percepteme, our episteme.
As Galloway and LaRivière (2017) have noted—everything is compressed, from the logic of digital computers to our attention spans. Yet, if compression designates the essence of experience today, it is precisely in response to a complementary concept of noise. Noise is the lived affect of our material conditions which cannot be made significant to us: not only the literal acoustic noise of late modernity (the waste-product of technologies which hang over perceptual spaces like smog hangs over cities) but, perhaps more critically, compression emerges to cope with a new, properly “cognitive complexity” embodied in the unprecedented entanglement and mediation of social relations through the technical/computational unfolding of the value-form of capital. Such complexity—lying beyond the grasp of any human individual—is logistically offloaded onto the nootechnical exteriorizations associated with, for instance, AI algorithms. On the other hand, it is individuated in experience as noise. Because such noise is perceptually intractable, compression becomes the necessary shape of our aesthesis, one that rigorously flattens the available modalities of experience/value—yet giving birth to new forms of abstraction, perception, and thought.
While several thinkers—notably, Jason LaRivière and Cécile Malaspina—have brilliantly elaborated each concept on its own, I argue that they can only be properly situated through each other. In order to do this, I combine computational and information theory, philosophy, media and cultural theory, as well as political economy with concrete domains where compression and noise articulate the phenomenological stakes for aesthetics today.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2021
This is a proof, co-authored with Dylan Vaughan, of an extended critical review of Arjen Kleinher... more This is a proof, co-authored with Dylan Vaughan, of an extended critical review of Arjen Kleinherenbrink's Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism, forthcoming in Deleuze and Guattari Studies (2021). Please cite the published version when it appears.
Open Philosophy, 2018
This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Log... more This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), out of which the whole of the TLP can be re-read. Inspired by, though not dependent on, the themes of virtuality and singularity found in Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism' (presented as a Wittgensteinian 'immaculate conception'), Wittgenstein's concept of 'logical space' is here complexly related to the paradoxes of the 'metaphysical subject' and 'solipsism,' within which the strictures of sense are defined, and through which the logico-pictorial scaffolding of the TLP precipitates its own systematic dissolution. It shows how nonsense envelopes not only not idle chatter, and metaphysical confusion, but sense itself.
Chiasma: A Site for Thought, 2020
This is an introduction to Chiasma: A Site for Thought Issue 6, "±Disenchantment." Alongside intr... more This is an introduction to Chiasma: A Site for Thought Issue 6, "±Disenchantment." Alongside introducing the issue's theme and contributions, it attempts to problematize the relationship between the distinctly modern affect of disenchantment and the construction of forms of life in contemporary capitalist societies.
Chiasma: A Site For Thought, 2019
This is the editor's introduction for Chiasma's fifth issue, entitled "To Be a Body?," on the the... more This is the editor's introduction for Chiasma's fifth issue, entitled "To Be a Body?," on the theme of embodiment.
XPNDR, 2015
This 'white paper' polemically addresses current contemporary art institutions as these relate to... more This 'white paper' polemically addresses current contemporary art institutions as these relate to the artworks they house, making use of the case study of the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and their slogan, "Question Everything". It confronts the crisis of critique and value which is situated between artworks and their position in the institution.
WOPOZI, 2012
This is a short theory fiction exploring the Deleuzian conception of the event from the point of ... more This is a short theory fiction exploring the Deleuzian conception of the event from the point of view of the encounter. Please find the published version at https://www.wopozi.com/cerulean .
Conference Presentations by M. Curtis Allen
University Arts Association of Canada Annual Conference (UAAC), 2022
If appropriation art finds its earliest incarnation in the readymade with Duchamp's Fountain (191... more If appropriation art finds its earliest incarnation in the readymade with Duchamp's Fountain (1917), responding—as Stiegler (2017) notes—to the serialized production of mass industrial manufacturing in the first half of the twentieth century, then appropriation enters into a new ‘post-industrial,’ financial phase in the work of Marcel Broodthaers. In 1972, Broodthaers produced an exhibition entitled, Tractatus Logico–Catalogicus (L’Art ou l’art de vendre). This exhibition included as its centerpiece a large-scale, single page, screen-print reproduction of a catalogue from his own earlier exhibition of 1970 (the prosaically titled L’Exposition à la galerie). The new print was positioned upside-down and in negative, sharing the title of the new exhibition. For this presentation, I argue that Broodthaers is engaging in a form of self-appropriation, one which deliberately plays on the recursive logic of reproduction and language in order to mirror the way in which the formalism of the financial derivatives market derives ‘value’ not the from the goods of the real economy but solely from speculation on the volatility of price differentials. Just as the derivatives hoist themselves from their material base in order to generate greater profits from the second-order dynamics of price, so too Broodthaers sardonically offers its reflection in the volatilization of aesthetic value determined by the second-order exhibition value of the catalogue, substituting itself for the primary cult value of the sensuous art object. As his own title suggests, he thereby interrogates the economic logic at work in contemporary art production—appropriation art in particular. In order to elaborate this reading, we will bring work on appropriation art together with the sociology of contemporary art alongside theories of aesthetic value and financial capital (using Sturtevant, Hito Steyerl, Bernard Stiegler, Arjun Appadurai, Jon Roffe, Elie Ayache, AA Cavia, and others).
This presentation relates ideas in contemporary political economy (real subsumption) and ideas in... more This presentation relates ideas in contemporary political economy (real subsumption) and ideas in the philosophy of biology (generative entrenchment) to the crisis in value of the contemporary visual arts. It attempts to provide a partial, speculative solution to the crisis by investigating what genuine aesthetic criteria might look like today, ones which don't fall back on the monetary value of an artwork in determining its ultimate historical worthiness or institutional legitimacy. In so doing, the relationship between modes of perception and the structural parameters of institutions becomes a focal point when looking past the present coordinates of contemporary art production, aesthetics and criticism.
Theses/Dissertations by M. Curtis Allen
Ph.D. Dissertation, Theory and Criticism, Western University, 2023
This work makes a contribution to a theory of the general conditions by which—via language and si... more This work makes a contribution to a theory of the general conditions by which—via language and sign use—the intelligible structure of the content of thought comes about and changes, which in turn affects our collective practices, affordances, and causal powers—in short, our doings. It is argued that this latter point is the reality of the intelligible and the only possible test of metaphysical realism. Through this it develops a ‘metaphysics of modernism’ by constructing a concept of sense derived from the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilles Deleuze, among others. After elaborating the framework of sense, it looks to its emergence out of social embeddedness through a concept of common sense, understood aesthetically in terms of the construction of forms of life. There it investigates the relation between sense and value-form in Marx, aesthetic judgment in the work of Kant, the relationship between aesthetics and language-use in the late Wittgenstein, and the political aesthetics of contemporary art and media. Finally, this work indicates the limit of common sense in a concept of nonsense, taken as the intercession of the absolute within language and thought, which in turn points to the conditions for the contingent, ampliative capacity of thinking as the essential activity of reasoning, i.e. the organon of the new. In this final part, it focuses on the writings of Samuel Beckett, whose work is incessantly concerned with the liminal space of thought and language encountering their own transcendental humiliation as the indicative affect of the subject of modernity.
This thesis undertakes a comparative study of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgens... more This thesis undertakes a comparative study of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgenstein to elaborate three related problems in what in Deleuze calls, ‘transcendental empiricism’. The first chapter deals with the problematic of the dimension of sense in language, and culminates in a concept of the event. The second details the immanence of stupidity within thought and culminates in a practice of showing through silence. The third investigates the consequences of aesthetics for the theory of Ideas, and culminates in the concepts of ‘late intuition’ and of a form of life. Each argues for a new way of broaching the subject of realism.
Working Papers/Studies by M. Curtis Allen
Several important accounts of a renewed vision of rationality have emerged in recent philosophy. ... more Several important accounts of a renewed vision of rationality have emerged in recent philosophy. Many of these have their origins in the synthetic character of Kant's work in The Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason, but they also typically (sometimes uncritically) inherit the divisions, relations, and hierarchies between the faculties of mind from the Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason. To bring critical attention to the sway the Kantian doctrine of the faculties has over our current understanding of rationality, the nature of reason in Kant is here investigated in The Critique of Judgment, with special attention to the role which aesthetics plays in the human engendering of reason. Our contention is that aesthetics provides us with a continuity thesis between natural and normative vocabularies, in such a way as to be strictly irreducible to either. Through this, the inferentialist picture of rationality can be made to naturalize and aestheticize the grounds of reason, while pushing toward still-speculative dimensions of species, mind, and aesthetic experience.
This paper investigations the relationship between philosophy of language and metaphysics, throug... more This paper investigations the relationship between philosophy of language and metaphysics, through the concepts of 'sense' and 'event', in early Wittgenstein and early Deleuze. It attempts to shed light on persistent difficulties of reading in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (for example, the interpretation of nonsense) as well as to elucidate common misunderstandings of Deleuze's concept of the event in relation to his general philosophical project and in relation to other uses of the concept in philosophy (Davidson, Badiou). In doing so, it hopes to articulate a substantial point of convergence between these otherwise disparate thinkers.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2021
This is the MS of an extended critical review of Arjen Kleinherenbrink's Against Continuity: Gill... more This is the MS of an extended critical review of Arjen Kleinherenbrink's Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism, forthcoming in Deleuze and Guattari Studies (2021). Please cite the published version when it appears.
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Papers by M. Curtis Allen
As Galloway and LaRivière (2017) have noted—everything is compressed, from the logic of digital computers to our attention spans. Yet, if compression designates the essence of experience today, it is precisely in response to a complementary concept of noise. Noise is the lived affect of our material conditions which cannot be made significant to us: not only the literal acoustic noise of late modernity (the waste-product of technologies which hang over perceptual spaces like smog hangs over cities) but, perhaps more critically, compression emerges to cope with a new, properly “cognitive complexity” embodied in the unprecedented entanglement and mediation of social relations through the technical/computational unfolding of the value-form of capital. Such complexity—lying beyond the grasp of any human individual—is logistically offloaded onto the nootechnical exteriorizations associated with, for instance, AI algorithms. On the other hand, it is individuated in experience as noise. Because such noise is perceptually intractable, compression becomes the necessary shape of our aesthesis, one that rigorously flattens the available modalities of experience/value—yet giving birth to new forms of abstraction, perception, and thought.
While several thinkers—notably, Jason LaRivière and Cécile Malaspina—have brilliantly elaborated each concept on its own, I argue that they can only be properly situated through each other. In order to do this, I combine computational and information theory, philosophy, media and cultural theory, as well as political economy with concrete domains where compression and noise articulate the phenomenological stakes for aesthetics today.
Conference Presentations by M. Curtis Allen
Theses/Dissertations by M. Curtis Allen
Working Papers/Studies by M. Curtis Allen
As Galloway and LaRivière (2017) have noted—everything is compressed, from the logic of digital computers to our attention spans. Yet, if compression designates the essence of experience today, it is precisely in response to a complementary concept of noise. Noise is the lived affect of our material conditions which cannot be made significant to us: not only the literal acoustic noise of late modernity (the waste-product of technologies which hang over perceptual spaces like smog hangs over cities) but, perhaps more critically, compression emerges to cope with a new, properly “cognitive complexity” embodied in the unprecedented entanglement and mediation of social relations through the technical/computational unfolding of the value-form of capital. Such complexity—lying beyond the grasp of any human individual—is logistically offloaded onto the nootechnical exteriorizations associated with, for instance, AI algorithms. On the other hand, it is individuated in experience as noise. Because such noise is perceptually intractable, compression becomes the necessary shape of our aesthesis, one that rigorously flattens the available modalities of experience/value—yet giving birth to new forms of abstraction, perception, and thought.
While several thinkers—notably, Jason LaRivière and Cécile Malaspina—have brilliantly elaborated each concept on its own, I argue that they can only be properly situated through each other. In order to do this, I combine computational and information theory, philosophy, media and cultural theory, as well as political economy with concrete domains where compression and noise articulate the phenomenological stakes for aesthetics today.