The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a third event in a serial experiment around our theme HERD, convened by Kari Lancaster, Marsha Rosengarten, and Nele Jensen.
Led by an eclectic range of thinkers, and provoked by selected readings, each session in this series will experiment with the concept’s many permutations, to rethink Herd as /Species, as /The Masses, as/Atmospherics, as /Population, as Kin, and more. Join us as we spin out in many directions, thinking with the figure of the herd to grapple not only with transformative global changes affecting health, but also, more broadly, to experiment with new ways of thinking amidst the here-and-now of our present planetary condition.
On 21 May, Molly McPhee and Nerea Calvillo Gonzalez will lead a discussion of HERD/Atmospherics.
In this session, the figure of the herd emerges as an atmospheric condition, formed through diffusions and suffusions, putrefactions and pollutions, that bind bodies into shared conditions of exposure. We frame the herd as an environmental and affective formation governed through air: as perceptions of toxicity and miasmas of corruption become arbiters of infrastructures of herd indexing, of confinement and neglect, we examine how forms of collectivity are materially produced through atmospheric management.
We are interested in sensing herd de/compositions through co-exposures that modulate proximity and permeability between bodies, in which air becomes a medium of discipline and harm while simultaneously invoking logics of protection. Yet, in attending to air as a site of both governance and relation, how might a full-lunged aspiration of what is fetid and deliquescent of decay, what is queer of pollution, ally the herd to new forms of resistance from within these entanglements? We will explore herd as a field of contested coexistence in which new forms of collective life might be sensed and enacted.
Pre-readings to stimulate reflection for the session will be forwarded to those who register.
