Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“I didn’t put it this way at the time but now I will emphasize that “anthropomorphics” was also meant to foreground the artificiality of the human, from the beginning—we were always already imitating the center that was itself nothing more than a vectorization of our converging desires turned back at us through a prohibition. This was a way of distancing myself from GA’s or any humanism and insisting on the historicity of the human. Still, while I, on occasion, “proclaimed” the new science of anthropomorphics I rarely returned to it, settling instead on the more disciplinary sounding “center study” to label what I was doing. This is because anthropomorphics is a widely used word with a whole range of associations—even a children’s novel series—that I was tentative about having to “answer” for in ways that might complicate the inquiries I wanted to advance. But some recent reading, some of it quite proximate to the Antikythera project, has buoyed my sense of the usability of the concept. First of all, Lambos Malafouris, in his How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, following up on the notion of the “extended mind,” i.e., the thesis that thinking takes place not only in the brain or even in the whole body but across the entire expanse of the world in which we participate (a thesis with which I am familiar and with which my insistence on a kind of exhaustive performativity is in agreement) insists that anthropomorphism, i.e., the projection of human qualities onto non-human realities is not merely “natural” (but “illusory”) but necessary and a critical part of thinking and knowing the world.”

— Adam Katz, Anthropomorphics · Sep 30, 2025 · Bouvard Substack