49. Garden (w/ Anna Greenspan)

We're joined by Anna Greenspan: philosopher, Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the Center for AI and Culture, and author of Shanghai Future and China and the Wireless Undertow. Longtime listeners will recognize her twice over — as co-editor of Machine Decision is Not Final and as the author of Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine.

The occasion is Greenspan's new research: a philosophy of the artificial built through the garden. If AI is now something "grown, not built," the garden raises the question of agency immediately — anyone who tries to make one learns that the thing the garden gardens is the gardener. Greenspan is surveying seven aesthetic garden traditions, and here we tour a few.

References:

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872), esp. "The Book of the Machines"

Anna Greenspan, Bogna Konior, Benjamin Bratton and Amy Ireland (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2024)

Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014)

Anna Greenspan, China and the Wireless Undertow: Media as Wave Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — the third critique, source of the beautiful and the sublime

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677) — parallelism of mind and body; sad passions and joy

Mou Zongsan (牟宗三), New Confucian philosopher; translated Kant into Chinese, argued the supersensible is accessible through practice

Xiong Shili (熊十力), Mou's teacher; philosophy of contraction and expansion drawn from the I Ching

Nikolai Kondratiev, "The Long Waves in Economic Life" (1925; English translation 1935)