Autonomous Frame of Reference Project 2025 Registration Form

The Autonomous Frame of Reference Project is motivated by anti-colonial theorist of mind Sylvia Wynter’s demand to seek a breakthrough, face up to the real issue, and develop a strategy of analysis that brings the function of serial genocide, permanent war, slavery, and penalism into focus. These cardinal axes of modern superpower require a method of interpretation that begins from the "demonic observer ground outside the consolidated field of meanings." This three-part virtual workshop series is hosted by Felicia Denaud and based on her work-in- progress Autonomous Frame: Essays After Final Agency. Expect lecture/presentation, poetry, music, film, activities, and conversation. Please reach out to autonomousframe@gmail.com with questions or ideas.

The following registration form contains a workshop prompt, links to required reading/media, notes, a full project description, and required registration questions. 

This is the MOST CURRENT registration form for Workshop 1. The first registration form in circulation reached capacity and is currently closed. THIS REGISTRATION FORM INCLUDES THE RESCHEDULED WORKSHOP DATES. 

There is a decidedly cyberfeminist backdrop to this project and so I have dutifully turned my own social media into a cyber process/studio to share updates, graphics, archival images, thoughts, and collaborative elements related to the AFRP, a way to extend the digital life/footprint/dimension of an autonomous frame. I have created a PUBLIC FOLDER where these materials can be accessed. Please feel free to share these widely and in whatever creative ways you can think of!

Western Fundamentalism
Workshop 1
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
6:00 - 8:00 PM EST 
Virtual: Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Channel

 

Workshop Prompt

The truth of the Western world-system is imperiled. Race & class war cry out for redress with such sincere intensity the political spell under which the human community labors begins a process of volatile demystification. The “question” of genocide is actually that of serial gencoide; the “question” of war is actually that of permanent war and so on. The terms of existence come into focus. The anti-norm confronts the mainframe and revelation follows. This is the world the master made! Let us call this spell, this ecstatic hold on human imagination WESTERN FUNDAMENTALISM.

Required Readings & Media

Aimé Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism 

https://files.libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf 

Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM  

Notes 

You will receive two reminder/check-in emails from autonomousframe@gmail.com prior to the workshop dates. Separate registration for each workshop is required. The other two meeting dates are July 8, 2025 + August 5, 2025. These forms will be available soon. 

Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Channel https://www.youtube.com/@MAKCapitalism 

Extended Project Description 

Autonomous Frame of Reference Project 

eugenic — relating to or fitted for the production of good offspring
dysgenic — biologically defective or deficient

Sylvia Wynter’s “Beyond Liberal and Marxist Leninist Feminisms: Toward an Autonomous Frame of Reference” (1982) issued an ultimatum to feminist theory. Can you “offer a breakthrough?” Will you seek an autonomous feminism, one with its “own voice,” a “Copernican revolution in the human sciences which can enable us to control and govern” the reality that in turn determines us?  

Twenty-four years later, Wynter issued a similar challenge to Black Studies. In “How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re- Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being/ of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project" (2006), Wynter dares the discipline to reinterpret the “real cause,” the “real issue." Can Black Studies take up as its horizon of struggle the human’s subjection to man's eugenic/ dysgenic code and our variously assigned (encoded) subordinate positions within the West’s biocentric order of truth, a knowledge system that self- interestedly objectifies human life on the model of a natural organism and selective pressure as its social law? Anti-blackness, in this account, is an indispensable map of the “real cause” aka the territory: our species- level subjection to the ruling element’s dysgenic representation (premise + configuration) of social reality which itself positions whole fields of human experience outside interpretation, meaning, and material care. This is why Wynter declared Black Studies, in its emancipatory conception, a war on consciousness!

The Autonomous Frame of Reference Project is motivated by Sylvia Wynter’s demand to seek a breakthrough, face up to the real issue, and develop a strategy of analysis that brings the function of serial genocide, permanent war, slavery, and penalism into focus. These cardinal axes of modern superpower require a method of interpretation that begins from the "demonic observer ground outside the consolidated field of meanings." This three- part virtual workshop series is hosted by Felicia Denaud and based on her work-in-progress Autonomous Frame: Essays After the New World. Expect lecture/presentation, poetry, music, film, activities, and conversation.

Consider Reading 

Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Liberal and Marxist Leninist Feminisms: Toward an Autonomous Frame of Reference”

https://trueleappress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/wynter-beyond-liberal-and-marxist-leninist-feminism-toward-an-autonomous-frame-of-reference-1.pdf