"Fallible Compu” with Toni Navarro and Alberto Vallejo

Reason was central to the arguments of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Leibniz to Spinoza and Pascal, who enshrined it as the ultimate basis of knowledge in contrast to other traditions like empiricism, which focused more on sensory experience. However, its reputation has suffered over the last century: irrationalism denied the power of reason, embracing a chaotic, unknowable world and asserting the immediacy of life; critical theory pointed out the essential union between rationality and dominance given its instrumentalist tendency; postmodernism discredited reason as simply one more example of metanarrative; and finally, feminist and postcolonial studies warned us that its purported universality conceals gender, race and class biases.

Responses to these critiques are being formulated from different fields today. One is speculative realism, whose neorationalist branch—committed to the early 20th-century computational turn—sustains that reason is not what we think it is, and we must therefore change “our intuitive notion of what it means to think, break with the ways we rationalise what we are, and shatter our illusions about what is reasonable to believe”. Another is xenofeminism, which calls for a rationalist feminism (and a feminist rationalism) because “arguing that reason is an inherently patriarchal enterprise is conceding defeat before the battle begins”. Working from these and other theories, we will attempt to address the following questions:

Is reason reasonable? What role does the non-computable play in algorithmic thought processes? Can art reprogram thought by infecting it like a virus? How do new technologies transform our way of reasoning? Can we talk about a specifically feminine rationality or the artificialisation of intelligence as feminisation?

Toni Navarro graduated from the University of Barcelona with a degree in Philosophy and writes about gender theory, digital culture and contemporary thought. He regularly contributes to different media outlets with articles and translations of Jean Baudrillard, Franco “Bifo” Berardi and other authors. He has also worked with art collectives at institutions such as Sala d’Art Jove, MNAC and La Capella and supervises artists’ projects in the SAC-FiC residency programme. His primary field of interest lies at the intersection between technology and emancipatory politics, especially with regard to ideas such as accelerationism and xenofeminism, the theme that has been the focus of his recent work. He recently reviewed Helen Hester’s book Xenofeminism and wrote the prologue to the Spanish edition, published by Caja Negra in 2018.

Alberto Vallejo has a BA in Art History of the Complutense University of Madrid and an MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently the curator of Yaby, an exhibition venue in Madrid, and editor of the AH Journal.