The Philosophy & Art Collaboratory (PAC) is dedicated to uncovering the effects of the hermeneutical modern and postmodern Western modes of inquiry cast in discourses on philosophy, knowledge, culture, and art. We explore the non-hermeneutical narrative that modernity presupposes the currency of premodernity, and/or that postmodernism is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant, a "closed future" and an "ever-open past," resulting in the broadening present simultaneities.
Learning, thinking, and laboring should be nothing other than the practice of shifting a life situation from a discordant condition to a harmonious one, so that this practice is practically mediated by actual experience of presence, i.e., the simultaneity of the nondistinctive form of presence /absence, and material, spatial, and bodily effects of things and events. We therefore focus on a complementary approach of vigorously conceptual work from the perspective of French post-structuralism with American literary criticism, intercultural philosophy, and material culture studies, and disciplined participation in Antiquity, Art, and Meditation Practices. Our quest concerns the understanding of ordinary life and its relations to philosophy, knowledge, culture, art, and the ways in which these relations may be rebuilt into a form of fieldwork in Philosophy and Art.