Session Notes
Opening Question
What is art’s relationship to truth, power, and liberation under conditions of capitalism and technological reproduction?
We gathered for the first time on a blizzard day in January 2025, about half the group joining remotely while others met in person in Brooklyn. The opening note was a hope that this wouldn’t become an isolated study group but rather a space where ideas permeate into our lives: our art, our community activism, the material manifestations of the thoughts we’d be wrestling with. Before diving into logistics, we went around and introduced ourselves, and what emerged was a group of artists, musicians, grief workers, political organizers, engineers-turned-artists, matchmakers, clowns, Butoh dancers, literary critics, disability justice advocates, and philosophers: a people drawn to the same question from many different entry points.
The practical scaffolding came first. We acknowledged that 22 people had initially expressed interest, which would make meaningful dialogue nearly impossible if everyone showed up. Three contingency formats were proposed for overflow: breakout groups that separate and reconvene, a fishbowl structure with an active inner circle and observing outer ring, or a rotating cast system where different cohorts anchor different sessions. But the preference was to let the group self-select, to see who actually commits over time and build around that core. The reading cadence was set at roughly monthly (every three weeks or so), with 120 to 200 pages per session. This felt ambitious but not unreasonable, and we agreed to stay open to adjusting based on the group’s capacity and commitment. The format would be seminar-style dialogue modeled on St. John’s College, where several members of the group had studied. No lectures, no prescribed answers, just collective exploration anchored in the texts.
We walked through norms borrowed from Stringfellow Barr’s “Notes on Dialogue”: this is not a debate, we’re not trying to win; listen to understand rather than to respond; follow the thread of what’s been said rather than waiting to interject your pre-planned point; sit with the discomfort of not knowing; speak to the text rather than purely from opinion. A few additional norms were added: cameras on when possible, muted when not speaking, repeat IRL questions for remote participants, and critically, no phones, no Googling, no AI. The emphasis was that our ability to think is at stake, that we’d rather fumble through questions together using our own flawed human brains than reach for the polished answer that technology provides. The goal is presence, and the cost of someone looking at their phone while another person is having a revelation is too high. There was something almost devotional in the way this was framed, a commitment to keeping the space human.
The intellectual framing came next. Critical theory, we discussed, asks why the Enlightenment’s promise of reason and liberation resulted instead in oppression, subjugation, and abuse. It’s a tradition that emerged from the Frankfurt School in the shadow of fascism, and it interrogates who a given description of the world is serving rather than simply accepting that description as neutral or inevitable. Aesthetics, in this framework, isn’t just about beauty but a site of political struggle. Who gets to make art? Who judges it? What counts as art in the first place? These are questions rooted in power. The syllabus begins with J.F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice as an accessible entry point, then moves backward to lay groundwork with Dewey, forward through the crises of art and reproduction (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer), into late capitalism and the spectacle (Debord, Baudrillard, Jameson), and finally into contemporary thinkers like Byung-Chul Han and Steyerl. The final slot is marked TBD. We’re still searching for a text that offers hope rather than despair, perhaps something rooted in anti-colonialism or disability justice that doesn’t just leave us in a bleak place, maybe Sylvia Wynter.
Jake was asked why he was doing this, why heβd spend unpaid time organizing a study group. To which he responded he was tired of feeling the pressure to frame everything in life around what will make money, tired of trying to escape the prison-planet-as-resort-for-billionaires by becoming one of the billionaire patrons. What he wants is to create the environment he wants to live inside, to be surrounded by people who take seriously their understanding of the world, and who are open to being changed. Openness was named as one of the highest values, and the observation was made that you can’t really get to know yourself unless you’re open. The group, for him, is the intersection of everything he loves most about being alive: getting to know people, allowing change, being impressed upon by bright and creative minds. He views this not as free labor but as receiving the gift of our perspectives, our presence. Then the question turned more specific: why critical theory and aesthetics in particular? He talked about being in New York and seeing art that hurts, art in service to a demon he named Moloch, the deity of money, control, assimilation, the weaponization of consciousness through AI and social media. Critical theory and aesthetics, he said, supply a survival kit against this and other such demons. Aesthetics is a leading indicator of spiritlessness, and it might even be a pre-cognitive way of perceiving the future of truth; critical theory is the telescope, aesthetics is the oasis.
One of us closed the session with a reflection that felt like it came straight from the first reading. Real art is something that comes from the unknown, not just a recombination of old things looked at differently. If we’re artistically in tune, we might be pulling from the future. And if there are multiple pathways into the future, maybe by lining up enough good hearts and minds in a pot together, we can choose the right future, if we’re committed to existing in the unknown together and seeing what arises out of our goodwill and intention. It was the kind of statement that reframed the entire enterprise: not just a reading group, but a small-scale experiment in collective future-making.
