Seminar: “The 3 Ecologies Institute – Anarchiving an Alter-University”

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On Thursday, the 18th of May, we have the privilege of welcoming professors Erin Manning (Concordia University) and Brian Massumi (University of Montreal) for a doctoral seminar at the KU Leuven, entitled The 3 Ecologies Institute: Anarchiving an Alter-University. This encounter will take place between 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., at Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte – Room HIW 01.20 (Kardinaal Mercierplein 2 – 3000 Leuven). Registration is not required, though brief notice of your attendance to arne.vanraes@kuleuven.be would be appreciated.
Poster4Erin Manning and Brian Massumi will discuss their development of ‘The 3 Ecologies Institute’ at SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory for thought in motion that explores the active relations between art, philosophy and politics through the matrix of the sensing body in movement.
 
The 3 Ecologies Institute is an experiment in thinking/making, formulated as a speculative proposition for an alter-university. Working with Félix Guattari’s concept of the three ecologies – the conceptual, environmental and social – Manning and Massumi move us to collectively invent what else learning can mean, beyond the model of the neoliberal university.
 
As university education has become increasingly focused on the demands of the job market, its earlier mission as a realm for creative exploration and flexibility of thinking has eroded – a development that has harmed the humanities and social sciences. The 3E Institute aims to provide a dedicated place for creative exploration and free inquiry as values in themselves. It encourages experimental thinking and creative making and supplements a transversal, transdisciplinary milieu to the split between theory and practice that often underlies pedagogical methods and educational institutions. The Institute will further approach its efforts toward collective experimentation, improvisation and reinvention by exploring the possibility of an alter-economy (new forms of ‘commons’, cooperative networking, skill-sharing and crypto-economies), including neurodiverse ways of knowing and the co-habitation of social diversities, and fostering ecological sustainability (including, but not limited to, the environmental).
 
Brian Massumi and Erin Manning will explore this potential through the concept of the anarchive: not the documentation of known past activities, but an ‘anarchic’ research-creation event of collective experience in the making. They look forward to the opportunity of sharing this work and discussing what else learning and living can be in these neoliberal times.
 
Further reading,:
 
Speakers
Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal) and is the founder and co-director of SenseLab. Her activities are situated across art-making, philosophy and activism. Through process philosophy, her writing researches the relations between movement, art, neurodiverse ways of knowing and the political. Her artworks explore conditions of emergent collectivity and more-than human ecologies. Manning’s current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement, and the synesthesia of colour-smell. Her publications include Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minnesota UP, 2007), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (MIT Press, 2009), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2012), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in The Act: Passages in the Ecology of Perception (Minnesota UP, 2014).
 
Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal and co-director of SenseLab. He works on the philosophy of experience, art and media theory and political philosophy. His research participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction. Massumi has translated work by Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Attali into English. He is well-known as a foundational figure of the ‘Affective Turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. His publications include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke UP, 2002), Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (MIT Press, 2011), What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Duke UP, 2014), Politics of Affect (Polity, 2015) and Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke UP, 2015).