Noetics Without a Mind

Noesis is not to be confused with cognition. One should also avoid conflating cognition with re-cognition, the stale affirmation of sameness or a repetition devoid of any heterogeneity. On the contrary, noetics share a common root with noema that literally translates as meaning or, broader still, as sense. However, sense does not come ready-made. Its production is inevitably embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and affective. The transdisciplinary volume Noetics without a Mind (NWM) will expand the 4EA approach of noesis by addition of a crucial technological dimension.

A NWM account of generalised noetics addresses sense-making processes that are enabled and constrained by the organisation of bodies, assemblages, and material milieus, including more-than-human others and technical objects onto which thought, memory, and desires become increasingly offloaded. The psychic (personal) and social (collective) individuation are inseparable from technical evolution. By embracing the concept of technicity NWM assumes a reciprocity in the individuation of humans, technology, and their affective environment. The concomitant process of transindividuation fosters an ecological apprehension that is neither logo-centric nor inter-individual. This evolution ‘by means other than life’ calls for speculations on non-apodictic pedagogies that focus on sensibility and its potential for drastic affective pre-individual amplifications. A knowledge of the sensible and a sensible form of knowledge, are thus central questions of the volume.

Addressing the complex socio-techno-environmental dimension of noesis under the current climate, social and urban challenges calls for a transdisciplinary approach. To this aim, NWM seeks contributions that engage with sense-making processes in the individuation of humans, technologies, and their affective environments. We particularly welcome contributions with transversal angles that problematise the very production of sense in all its heterogeneous potentials for transindividuation: What transductive relations exist in the entanglements between technology, affects and the production of our (offloaded) memories and desires?; How do they determine the sensible apprehension of our life and the life of our milieus?; How can they be expressed, besides the canonical, occidental, ocularcentric and annotational fixations of generic sciences?; Which new senses are needed to address the complexity of the present?; How do we sense (collectively and therefore technologically) the effects of our actions? As Gregory Bateson would have it, how can we sense differently in order to think differently?

NWM welcomes thinkers who dare to cross disciplinary borders: from affect and affordance theories to architecture, art and cultural studies, from philosophy and philosophy of technology to (digital) media studies, from feminist theories to film theory, from social sciences to literature. Hoping to avoid a representational ‘mind’ taking over while also allowing for multiple synaptic connections between the volume’s contributions, we invite short academic thought pieces (up to 2500 words, bibliography and notes included) in the form of printable semiotic material (including case studies, cartographies, genealogies, object biographies, ethnologues, poems, etc.).

• Authors are asked to submit their full contributions before 30 April 2023;
• Word limit is 2500 words, bibliography and notes included.
• All authors should include a 100-word bioblurb alongside their submissions;
• We kindly ask authors to follow the Chicago Manual of Style;
• Authors are responsible for securing permission for images and copyrighted materials;
• For correspondence, please contact the editors at ecologiesofarchitecture@gmail.com
• Noetics without a Mind will be published in Spring 2024.