On the Minimal Conditions of General Differentiation: Subject, Scale, and System in the Post-Universal Episteme

 Philosophies of Difference Group

 August 2025 POD Seminars 

 Tuesday 5/8 6-7:30pm at RMIT City Campus 

Geoffrey Hondroudakis (Melbourne University)

On the Minimal Conditions of General Differentiation: Subject, Scale and System in the Post-Universal Episteme

In this talk, I offer a reading of the epistemic crises of the long 20th century, emphasising system and scale, as conceptual lynchpins. If, as Clifford Siskin has argued, ‘system’ is the central, but undefinable, genre of modern knowledge, then I claim that system entered a generalised crisis in the 20th Century broadly attributable to the formalisation and generalisation of computing. I call this crisis the ‘transsystematic’, as it involves encounters, across disciplinary formations and areas of inquiry, and sites of practice, with situations where systematicity itself entails its own failure, limitation, recursion, and transgression. Systematicity thus becomes unmoored from notions of universality or absolute fundamentality that once functioned to secure its postulations. This further functions to problematise the post-Kantian frame of the subject, given that the subject functions as the multi-scalar, recursive, ‘transsystematic’ problem par excellence. Given the ubiquity of transsystematic problems across disciplinary formations, then, I argue that this crisis has been largely navigated through techniques and concepts of scale: the construction of localised domains of sense, and the nesting and interrelation of these. However, both scale and system remain, in this transsystematic situation, heterogeneous in how they are conceptualised across disciplines and sites of practice. The question that scale attempts to answer, but largely serves to defer, is what minimal conditions do we require to adequately differentiate generalities: how can we attend to the particularity of different zones of sense, while also ensuring some degree of general communicability across these differences, without in turn collapsing them in those ways demonstrated to be untenable across the encounters of the 20th century?

Bio:

Geoffrey Hondroudakis researches and teaches media philosophy, theory, and the history and philosophy of technology. His work focuses on how knowledge is organized – materially and conceptually – especially within infrastructures of enormous scalar complexity, such as the cultures of planetary-scale computing. Geoffrey lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.

This is an in person seminar at the RMIT City Campus, Building 80 Level 10 Room 17

445 Swanston Street Melbourne

 All welcome!