[FOPA 2025] Day 3

** Please note the ticket price includes booking fee and GST

Some notes on this years program...

The so-called crisis in education is over, we are simply moving on... and so we asked those participating to respond to a nominal orientation this year: 

“Institutional Drift, Value at the Threshold.”

How the program has taken shape is a credit to those involved in the para-academic sphere.

We will have subtle and nuanced connections between the various sessions. There are however, a number of stand-out thematics across the program:

• Onto-politics, sovereignty, occupation and liberation

• Technics, datasets, AI and imagination

• Education, the university and para-academia

• Economics and value

• Literature, poetry and criticism

Day 3: Sunday, 14 December Presentations

10.00am Dan Ross - The Immense Regression and the Politics of Locality
For Bernard Stiegler, the question of technology is really the question of externalised memory, and externalised memory insofar as it makes possible education, knowledge, belief and dreams. For him, the crisis in education, in educational institutions, and in institutions more generally, is a result of new developments in the technics of memory, knowledge and dreaming. He did not live to see the rise of so-called artificial intelligence chatbots and their ilk, but with his penultimate book, The Immense Regression, just published in English translation, he gave us tools with which to understand this crisis, and to seek a path beyond this immense regression. We are living through a moment when two tendencies seem to be colliding and mutually reinforcing each other: the rise of so-called artificial intelligence, and the fall into a regressive age. Together, we might see this as the advent of unprecedented levels of artificial stupidity. And madness. What do these tendencies have to do with each other? What does the work of the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler have to tell us about this question? And at a time of rising nationalism, xenophobia and related phenomena, what role does locality have in any future politics?

12.15pm Jon Roffe & James Culham - Gen AI and Imagination
Three Associationist Problems in Artificial Intelligence (James Culham)

Large Language Models, being purely empirical and linguistic, make implicit use of David Hume's contiguity principle of association with its attendant presumptions and problems. Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson provide means to critique LLMs and assess their potential usefulness in general, and scope for creativity specifically.

Imagination Dead Imagine (Jon Roffe)

Despite the widespread association of the term intelligence for the deployment of large language models, they are rather instances of an externalised function of the imagination. Roffe will discuss the nature of the imagination (drawing on Hume and Kant in particular) to diminish the nature and functioning of both the imagination and so-called intelligence. This will be done in favour of sensation and creation.

02.00pm Machine Listening  (James Parker, Sean Dockray, Joel Stern) & Connal Parsley - How to read a dataset (notes towards a LARP)
In this session, Machine Listening and Connal Parsley, we will attempt to read and misread a dataset together. The dataset in question, the PTC-SemEval20 corpus, was compiled to train machine learning systems to detect “propaganda” in news articles. It comprises hundreds of texts, each annotated against fourteen alleged propaganda techniques. How do we read something as clunky as a dataset? Especially one that claims to detect propaganda? What might it reveal about the propaganda of machine learning itself? How can we read with and against the compliance theatre of corporate dataset auditing? What kind of institution, or para-institution, might sustain such practices of critical, aesthetic, and speculative reading? This workshop forms part of our ongoing research toward a “Dataset LARP,” a live action role-play in which participants collaboratively design and perform an alternative dataset audit. Here, role-playing becomes a way of inhabiting and interrogating the positions that datasets assume: Who gets to read? Who gets to annotate? Who is rendered legible? Who isn’t? And who writes the future prefigured by the dataset?

04.45pm Brian Massumi - The Para-Institutional Imperative
There is more to the social field than the public reign of institutions and the private realm from which they stand apart. “Institution” is here taken in the broadest sense as a normative, rule-bound set of iterative operations that structure a field of possible action distributed across an interlocking system of agential roles. Institutions capture actions and energies from their associated milieu to feed their operations. But there are always leakages or escapes, or simply affordances that are not perceivable, and so not digestible, by institutional logics. There are modes of organisation that perceive differently, and value differently, which are not institutional per se, but are not simply anti-institutional, nor fall, by contrast, into the private realm. These transitional or boundary-area modes of organization may be called “para-institutional.” The talk will attempt to construct a robust concept of the para-institutional, reflecting on issues surrounding utility and valuation and situating the para-institutional in relation to an expanded notion of gesture.