-The plastic foldable chairs have very soft, bendy back supports and you can't really lean into them. You have to sort of hover, exerting only gentle pressure.
-I'm suburnt from walking the length of Manhattan yesterday. One side of my face is pink, verging on red. I feel like people are looking at me going, 'Who let that pink guy in here?'
-There are three introductions to the talk.
-Also, we thought it would be nice to walk over Williamsburg Bridge to get here, but now I am sweaty and the room is warm and I'm not cooling down.
-Negarestani is wearing a lapel mic but it must be hidden behind his collar because it sounds like he is underwater.
-There's a heavyset middle aged guy in front of me with slicked back hair and what for some reason I'm thinking of as a "sports jacket" even though I don't know what that is. He leans hard back in his bendy chair and puts his arm round the back of the chair next to him.
-Negarestani says, 'What it means to take something as true and what it means to make something true.'
-Negarestani says something about philosophy driving a wedge between mind and the world, but I'm not sure if he is talking historically, and if so, when was the mind ever fully in the world. When was the body ever fully in the world? Come to think of it, when was the world ever fully the world? (Though I'm not disagreeing that the task of philosophy is to find knowledge through alienation, I'm just querying the idea that alienation is unique to mind/humans/subjects whatever, and that it "happened" at some point in history.)
-Guy in the "sports jacket" has taken off his "sports jacket" to reveal a tan turtle neck.
-Negarestani breaks off from reading his paper, looks up at the audience, says, 'This is important', then carries on reading his paper.
-Negarestani says, 'What should we do to count as something?'
-Negarestani says, 'Mind has a history.'
-Negarestani says, 'True to the game' and some young guys behind me snigger and say, 'Yeah' in a fake deep voice.
-OK, hold on I think I have an idea of what he's saying - I think he is saying that to have a mind is to conceive of the mind as artificial or able to create artefacts, and that this conception of mind is historical, rather than natural.
-And this understanding sees mind as a project (historical) not an object (natural).
-Negarestani concludes and people start to rustle. He drinks from his glass of water and says, 'Part 2'. The rustling stops.
-Negarestani says, 'Knowledge should be suspicious of what it already knows.' 'To know is to preserve and mitigate ignorance.'
-Not many people taking notes. I'm wondering how you'd get through a lecture like this without having something else to do.
-Negarestani says, 'What knowledge needs to get rid of is the idea of uniqueness - the uniqueness of the world, the uniqueness of the mind.'
-The air conditioner comes on which is noisy but doesn't do much. The room is ever so slightly cooler, but perhaps a little damper.
-A bell goes off somewhere in the building and Negarestani looks up at the door and then continues.
-OK, another thing I'm getting - deep scepticism is central to this conception of knowledge/mind because you can only know the mind by looking at the world, and only understand the world by looking at the mind but actually by the time I wrote that I wasn't sure why.
-Negarestani says, 'Part three. Strategy one.'
-It's weird to conceive of a historical/historicised mind in such a detailed manner and then throw in the term, 'genuine freedom' as though it doesn't need explaining.
-Negarestani says something about dialectical materialism, fatalism and techno-singularity all maintaining an impoverished idea of history.
-Negarestani says something derogatory about Marxism and the guy in the "sport jacket"/turtle neck laughs and looks around.
-This impoverished version of history is unipathic, which I guess means it can only see one line from the past extending into the future.
-Nick Land (techno-capital-singularity) and Quentin Meillasoux (erm, dunno - some messianism maybe? Didn't hear him properly...) both make this mistake about what history is.
-Negarestani says, 'Real change is always a disruption or an eruption.'
-Negarestani says, 'Philosophy has a solution for this' but I didn't hear the problem.
-Negarestani says, 'A history that sees itself as one moment inevitably following another is not a history but a nature.'
-When listening to something I don't fully understand, I flip between finding it hard to follow and hearing it as a series of tautologies. Like, somehow is seems at once too complex to make sense, and too obvious to have meaning.
-Someone gets someone a glass of water, then someone offers someone a banana, then someone opens a window, then someone from the front row gets up and leaves the room.
-Someone asks a question and suddenly they are speaking about free jazz.
-Negarestani says, 'Rational compulsion', 'Rigorous psychosis.'
-And then like three questions later, someone else is asking about free jazz. Is this a thing in American philosophy lectures?
-A few questions later the second free jazz guy brings out a tape player and starts playing a weird slowed down sample, maybe recorded from the lecture itself. It seems kind of disrespectful considering we just sat through his jazz question.
-At the end of long lectures with extended Q & A sessions I feel a horror at the power and mutability of language.
-The last question is about Marxism and I'm worried that the questioner is going to be "that Marxist guy" and we're going to be here for ever.
-Some people have left, a few people are leaning over in their chairs, much of the audience have their coats and/or bags in their laps, one person has their face in their hands.