The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought (ICCT) is an independent forum for intellectual and artistic study and experimentation, devoted to the speculative and critical exploration of potentials in the fissures of the planetary present.
ICCT is born of the attempt to cultivate a mode of working together that is grounded in criticality and mutuality: simultaneously questioning the assumptions that underpin our knowledges and forms of thought, and elaborating a shared desire to enable ideas (in all their forms and orientations) to pass between us, to enable us to be present to one another otherwise. At the heart of ICCT’s work, in other words, lies a commitment to the idea that thought is lived as a practice of sociality whose job is not capturing the world but unsettling it— making visible the cracks in the edifice of the present and assembling the tools to navigate them by other means, in radically different directions.
Emerging amidst the hollowing out of critical institutions and the deserted landscapes of the imagination, ICCT is a space for thinking in common, for elaborating thought as a shared praxis of collective unsettling. It is an interstitial space rather than an institution. It operates less as a fixed entity than as an ongoing ensemble, an evolving field of relations shaped by the encounters it generates. Through online and in-person gatherings, published texts, visual works, and an array of other activities and modes of expression in constant transformation, ICCT provides an infrastructure for instituting thinking as a critical practice of collective inquiry.
What guides our activities is the possibility of elaborating contemporary critical thought not as a quest for mastery or a search for the right theory but as a shared practice of listening, of lingering with difficulty, of refusing the temptations of the easy answer and the stifling protocols of the disciplinary, of moving with the thought-provoking lures and discomforts of what evades totality and resists finality. We nurture the inchoate, the unfinished, the imaginative and the speculative in order to explore questions and movements that probe the boundaries of what appears to be settled, holding spaces where dissonances can flourish without having to devolve into consensus or cohesion, where the questions around which we gather can be shared and reverberate without being pressed into resolution or quashed in the demand for immediate utility.
At the ICCT, ideas are not products to be consumed but invitations to engage, to assemble, to experiment, to expand our collective imaginations and transform our modes of sociality— to think, live, and act otherwise in a world that demands the otherwise.