Participants
- Hélène Cazes: “Lucy in the Sky with Descartes: We doubt, therefore we are”
- Iman Fadaei: “the metaPhysical tRap: aI and the mOdern fRame of ethicS”
- Anthony Gavin: “What Is It Like to Be a Bacterium?”
- David Gifford: “Plasmodial Slime Racing”
- Loumille Métros: “Incontinental Philosophy, I: A (G)nosology”
- Valerie Salez : “You wont believe this to be true…”
- Edith Skeard: “Avoiding Pain with Warm Regards (Pariah’s Guide to Social Intelligence)”
- Mark Zion: “Standing Under a Bad Sign: But Who are ‘We’?”
HÉLÈNE CAZES, “Lucy in the Sky with Descartes: We doubt, therefore we are”
Unable to Understand Intelligence, or Intuition, following the path of the two mysterious anterior closed vowels U and I, half-prefixes which determine sounds and modalities, I find myself listening to the cUI cUI of French speaking birds, itself a homophonic cry recalling the French QI, Intellectual Quotient, and the Pea and I, we fall under the spell of pipes, fifes, ululations, negations, Impossibilities, Utopias, a whole future of Idiot and Useful misunderstandings.
The first one would be to define the contenant by its content: to use (if use is the right word) intelligence in order to define intelligence. One cannot use logic to assert logic, one cannot think the thought of thinking, etc. (Thank you Bertram). Where to go then? I did not feel up to rewrite logic or epistemology. I thought you would do it, anyway. Prudently, I’ll avoid Usefulness, Uselessness, Usual, Unusual and the whole family (same problem: the nose are created in order to support glasses. Also, see Loumille Metros. And there will be other occasions.), I’d rather do my habitual trick. Intelligence is a fake friend, a misleading cognate luring French speakers (I am not paranoid, ask Émile). English speakers do not resort to the French meaning, although it is first in the Oxford English Dictionary, as the ‘faculty of understanding, intellect’. I’ll quote the Oxford American (to please my anti-colonial friends): and reveal the second meaning, which secretly prevails, focus on the We.
After a brief French lesson with the Pea, on the meanings of cogitation, raison, raisonnement, pensée, and more preceisely on the phrase ‘secret de Polichinelle’, I’ll share with you some picturesque market scenes featuring unkempt Socrates insisting garrulously on not knowing, and Aristophanes selling clouds as philosophy, all this among baskets of apples, an aptly seasonal metaphora, for which we are indebted to Descartes. The great René, confining himself to his stove room, has asked our very question and demonstrated that the answer will be another question. Pins, needles, eggs, he thinks that to think is to revoke in doubt. That thoughts, events, certainties, perceptions can be fabricated, or deformed, or deceiving. And that the thought itself cannot vouch for the worth of its processes or products. We can be wrong. Unknowingly. We cannot know. We loiter along there, with our thoughts, our doubts, and our apples. Try and assert anything, and you need to acknowledge that there could enter an evil genius, or a trickster God, or simply the possibility we could be dreaming.
But now, U, I, unissons nos intuitions, comes the moment, the paradoxical, improbable, glorious, epic moment: I don’t know, therefore I am! I am tricked, therefore I am! I am mistaken, therefore I am! Let’s get lost together and make some dialectic. Reason is a dance, not a production assembly line yielding formatted thoughts. (For these, see the Artificial Incompetence which aims to deprive you of errors, research, cogitations…) Reason does not dispossess the mind, does not short-circuit learning and creating, does not flatten nor grind down ideas until there remains only the uneventful line of amnesia and ignorance. Reason and doubt associate with knowledge, epistemology, bibliography, tradition, and Selfhood! It sounds like a dream. Descartes calls it ‘penser’. Which we could translate as ‘Intelligence’.
Reading: René Descartes, Méditations Métaphysiques (the first days, https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Meditations.pdf) et Discours de la méthode (Part IV, https://ia801906.us.archive.org/17/items/rmcg0001/Descartes-Discourse-a1.pdf ) Links direct you to English translations. Wikisource holds the original French texts.
Hélène and the Pea have been travelling together for four years, living a life of delightful dangers, secret adventures, and character reformation. They regularly produce themselves in shows where they pretend to be academics or vegetables. Truth is, no one, not even themselves, knows who they are, what they are to each other, where they are, or where they are going. Are they dreaming together that they are Hélène and the Pea? Who is who? Will they ever wake up? Maybe they are just mistakes. The Pea, or whomever whatever they are, mistaking Hélène for a Princess, while she mistakes them for a Pea and in turn, fancies herself for a Princess, while they facy themselves as a Pea. And so on. Dizzying. A very complete CV is available on demand but, now, what is a past life? Can memory be riddled with forgeries?
IMAN FADAEI, “the metaPhysical tRap: aI and the mOdern fRame of ethicS”
How do/should we question AI ethically, or better to say, ethics-wise? Here, I try to probe an irony at the heart of contemporary research in this regard: a tendency to reproduce the very metaphysical frame that gave rise to AI, in questioning the ethics of it, through appeals to accuracy, objectivity, and impartiality. The problem, obviously, is not ethics itself, but the familiar, ontologically detached mode of inquiry that conceals its own partialities and assumptions, presenting its prior(s) as priori(s)! Moving through the distinction between propositional judgment and truth, and drawing on Nikism, the talk invites us to consider how critical inquiry might escape the very constructions it ought to question, and ultimately offers a normative account of how such inquiry ought to proceed otherwise. At the end, though, the talk turns back to itself, leaving us with a serious question of ethicality at the verge of real and unreal!
iman fadaei: I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology and CSPT at the University of Victoria, and an enthusiastic educator teaching at UVic, UBC, and RRU. Since 2021, I have lived and worked as a guest on the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) peoples, where I pursue my doctoral research on the technological condition of Being, seeking to unravel the epochality of the human self and its growing ancillarity in the wake of Artificial Intelligence, from which I do not consider myself an exception! My work is increasingly informed by decolonial studies, allowing me to conceptualize techno-colonialism as the particular history of universality and, simultaneously, the universal condition of particularity.
ANTHONY GAVIN, “What Is It Like to Be a Bacterium?”
Astrophysicists and exobiologists have long searched for signs of alien intelligence beyond Earth. Yet such efforts raise a prior question: would we recognize an alien intelligence if we encountered one? This paper argues that we need not travel to distant planetary systems to confront this problem. The human body hosts trillions of microorganisms whose forms of existence challenge familiar assumptions about consciousness, memory, and subjectivity. Taking Thomas Nagel’s famous question, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), as a point of departure, I ask a more provocative question: what is it like to be a bacterium?
Against Nagel’s skepticism regarding our ability to access radically nonhuman experience, I argue that phenomenology offers conceptual resources for approaching bacterial subjectivity. Drawing first upon Edmund Husserl’s account of internal time-consciousness, I examine the constitutive roles of retention and protention in the formation of the living-present. I then turn to Jacques Derrida, who argues that these temporal structures must account not only for the organization of experience, but also for its genesis. On Derrida’s view, subjectivity is supervenient upon archival traces that anticipate possible futures.
This framework is brought into dialogue with contemporary microbiology through an analysis of bacterial immunities—specifically, the CRISPR-Cas immune system. By incorporating fragments of phage DNA into their own genomes, bacteria preserve traces of prior encounters that orient future responses to infection. Rather than treating these traces as evidence of an already constituted bacterial subjectivity, I argue with Derrida that they participate in the temporal genesis of subjectivity itself. To meet bacterial subjectivity halfway through Derrida’s account of trace is thus simultaneously to deconstruct human subjectivity. The strangeness of bacterial subjectivity thus unsettles human exceptionalism, opening onto a posthumanist perspective in which subjectivity emerges through networks of temporal traces that exceed the human from the very beginning.
Anthony James Gavin is an Interdisciplinary PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria, in the Cultural, Social and Political Thought program, with supervision in Philosophy and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures. He is also a Philosophy instructor at Camosun College. Scientists say he is mostly made of bacteria, but Anthony has so far been unsuccessful at bridging communication. Sometimes Anthony lies awake at night wondering if his thoughts are his own or the bacteria’s. “Surely I wrote this bio myself,” Anthony thinks, yet the residue of skin-surface-dwelling bacteria remains on the keyboard even after Anthony has stopped typing.
DAVID GIFFORD, “Plasmodial Slime Racing“
Abstract: All manner of sports fans and plasmodial slime fanciers are dared to be amazed as two competitors of Physarum polycephalum (also famously known by the French moniker ‘le blob’) race through a set labyrinth to the finish line… without a brain. May the best slime win!
David Gifford makes Rube Goldberg Machines in his backyard and performs magic shows for birthday parties by appointment. He is currently investigating the colour experiments of Goethe.
LOUMILLE MÉTROS, “Incontinental Philosophy, I: A (G)nosology”
Statues lose their noses first. Cleopatra would know. In Peter Greenaway’s Belly of an Architect, a man chisels the noses off great artworks, only to play with them on a chessboard. But real noses can be excised too: for adultery, as Bisclavret’s wife learned, and for treason, as Justinian II learned before returning to his throne with a golden prosthesis. The nose leads, politically, sexually, philosophically. Aristotle couldn’t define snubness without one.
Smell, though, is Satan’s most potent sense: his judgment. Imagine a Rawlsian hell, with Martha Nussbaum presiding over an infinite trial, yet a decisionist one: three witnesses for every transgression, the collective good forever compromised. Now imagine an AI trained in that courtroom.
The nose also drips and needs picking. It’s a leaky container. If the oceans define the continent, then the land is incontinental. Diogenes, the least contained of philosophers, lived in a jar, and told a rich man he’d only be happy once his servant wiped his nose for him, when he’d lost the use of his hands. What becomes of Understanding Intelligence (UI) when the user interface (UI) wipes our noses for us? What might an uncontained and uncontainable philosophy look like? We start, (g)nosologically, with the nose.
Loumille Métros has a very long nose, which is also the nose of a robber’s dog.
VALERIE SALEZ, “You wont believe this to be true. But that’s no matter to me. Because its real. It happened. In front of my face (substance free). More then once. Because the other side is real. Believe or not. I don’t (they don’t) need science or research or reports to prove its existence. Because its/they are bigger then such things. Bigger then you, me, everything. Believe it or not.”
Description: Stories from my mouth.
Valerie Salez in an anti-disciplinary artist who swings between a solo practice and social art practice. Her solo works dive into the unconscious realms of dreams, myths and rituals. Valerie’s socially engaged projects involve communities of people all over the world, focusing on the politics of identity, culture, and ecological land and water issues. She grew up and has lived most of her life in Canada’s northern territory, Yukon, on the traditional lands of various nations which include, Tlingit, Tr’ondek Hwech’in, and Kwanlin Dun. Her works have been included in major galleries across Canada and at significant events such as The Cultural Olympiad of Vancouver 2010 and Northern Scene (Ottawa). Valerie’s work can be found in private and institution collections such as the Canada Council Art Bank and Nova Scotia Art Bank. In 2017, in partnership with Yukon Arts Center, she received a Canada Council for the Arts New Chapter grant and produced and contributed to a Yukon-wide First Nations project titled To Talk With Others, which toured Western Canada.
EDITH SKEARD, “Avoiding Pain with Warm Regards (Pariah’s Guide to Social Intelligence)“
Performance Piece – Duration: 10 Minutes
A playful/serious piece about fitting in, playing along, avoiding the outside – tracing the shape of social territories, degrees of familiarity, A.I. generated emails, pocket managers, project management, human resources, and polite urgencies.
Edith Skeard is an artist, composer, and researcher from Treaties 4 and 6 in Saskatchewan, currently situated on unceded lekwungen territory and within the academic in-between. They are interested in temporary and laden architectures (like exhibition sites), ethics/privacy/oblivion/attention, and thinking through sound and space.
They completed their MFA at the University of Victoria (Digital Media) and their BAhons (Philosophy) and BFA (Printmaking) at the University of Regina. They continue to not excell at choosing a lane.
MARK ZION, “Standing Under a Bad Sign: But Who are ‘We’?”
An exploration of ‘intelligence’ warrants a preliminary inquiry into our ontological and political conditions of (im)possibility. What does it mean to raise this question at Fall of Theory?
Mark Zion leads the Lost Causa reading group and was a co-organiser of the Summer of Theory (2023, 2025) and Fall of Theory (2024, 2025). A former Torts and Green Legal Theory instructor, he understands the needless challenges that precariat conditions pose to those who love ‘theory’ (thought) and/or teaching. He holds a Phd in Law and Society. An anti-credentialist antinomian, he has become allergic to the artificial intelligence of the corporate university (embodied also by some of its self-styled dissidents). He is grateful for the few remaining unsafe spaces—spaces where thought has at least a chance to occur—that cannot be institutionalized and are never determined in advance.