José Antonio Magalhães

José Antonio Magalhães is a juridico-metaphysical theorist, writer, and educator. Their research focuses on the concept of world-orders, reconstructing modern legal theory (Hans Kelsen, Evgeny Pashukanis, Carl Schmitt) through contemporary humanities and social sciences, such as speculative realism, the ontological turn in anthropology, and the philosophy of technology with a particular focus on technological and ecological transformations.

They received their PhD in Legal Theory from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), with a thesis that investigated platforms and artificial intelligence from a juridico-metaphysical perspective, in 2021. They have since held a postdoctoral fellowship at the same institution to research relations between law, territory and ecology under the supervision of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro from 2022-24, and a research fellowship at ICI Berlin under the focus ‘Scale’ from 2024-26. Recent publications include ‘Platforms as Law: A Speculative Theory of Coded, Interfacial and Environmental Norms’ and ‘Index and nomos: A juridico-political contribution to speculative realism’.

Deriving from the ICI Focus ‘Scale’, which interfaced Promethean engineering and Gaian bricolage as approaches to planetary technology, ‘Local minima’ asks a narrower question: What would a Gaian/bricoleur alternative consist of in contrast to the currently dominant Promethean/engineer approach to AI development? It frames the theoretical problem by starting with Reza Negarestani’s Hegelian theory of AI in Intelligence and Spirit and asking what changes if we substitute Davi Kopenawa’s minuscule, multiple, luminous, dancing forest spirits, known as xapiri, for Negarestani’s Geist.

This project seeks to construct a non-totalizable and non-anthropocentric concept of intelligence, in which post-human machines, human collectives, and nonhuman ecologies all form the web of planetary mind. To this end, it draws on cosmotechnical perspectivism found in Indigenous thought as well as the ontological turn in anthropology, and combines them with theories of the diversity of mind, including Maturana and Varela’s concept of coextensivity of life and intelligence; Bateson’s ecology of mind; Minsky’s society of mind; Godfrey-Smith’s exploration of non-human mental diversity; Levin’s work on basal cognition and bioelectric collective intelligence; multiple studies of fungal networks and plant/forest intelligence, and mixture-of-agents and federated approaches to AI development.

This project seeks to offer a counter-colonial approach to planetary-scale technology on the basis of metaphysical perspectivism. It frames the problem in terms of Yuk Hui’s work on cosmotechnics and does so in such a way that the cosmotechnical problem appears as a tension between scales: the large scale of globalized technology and the small scale of non-modern cosmotechnics. It then seeks an alternative to Hui’s approach to this problem through his dialogue with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which suggests the possibility of a cosmotechnical perspectivism influenced by Amazonian metaphysics.

In a second movement, a perspectivist approach to the problem of scales is sought through the opposing conceptual characters of Terran bricoleurs, who give and follow examples, and Inhuman engineers, who make and apply models. Those appear prima facie as associated with small/local and large/global scales respectively, though this automatic association is precisely what will be put into question. The project introduces the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the diagram as a form of mediation between Inhuman models and Terran examples, aiming to produce a trans-scalar heuristic that neither relies on the modern unidirectional conception of scale-ordering, nor becomes stuck on impotent or reactionary versions of horizontalist localism.