#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics

McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, and The Beach Beneath the Street) has been kind enough to send us his detailed response to the “#Accelerate” piece which has been circulating around the internet. Since the aim of that original piece was, in part, to polemically intervene in a number of contemporary debates in the UK and US left, it’s been encouraging to see both critical and supportive responses to the vision it set out. Wark’s response here forms a significant and comprehensive commentary on that vision.

It should be emphasised though that “#Accelerate” was written in manifesto form, which means it was presented with the rhetorical force of declarative certainty. Yet while we are confident in the broad strokes of this approach, the specifics are open to debate and we’ve only begun to think through the issues involved. The idea of the manifesto was, first, to initiate and generate conversations about the longest term viewpoint on left politics at a profound moment of crisis. It was meant as a provocation that would raise questions, broach some neglected topics, and put certain key themes on the table. The manifesto was, second, intended to put forth what we believe to be a unique set of possible answers – ones that will hopefully generate further research. Yet, we are not trying to create a new doctrine, nor to determine in advance what must be an experimental process involving the creativity of mass politics. The emphasis, both here and in the manifesto, is on experimentation beyond traditional leftist tactics, in order to discover what works in practice.

Wark’s response is available here. And you can find the original manifesto here.

Symposium: Schelling and Naturphilosophie

Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy

Duquesne University

Dept. of Philosophy

Pittsburgh, PA

Call for Applications

 We are pleased to announce the Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy, held at Duquesne University.  Details for the program are as follows:

Schelling and Naturphilosophie

August 5 – 9, 2013

(Optional Participants’ Conference, August 3-4)

“What then is that secret bond which couples our mind to Nature, or that hidden organ through which Nature speaks to our mind or our mind to Nature?” (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature)

“The concept of nature does not entail that there should also be an intelligence that is aware of it. Nature, it seems, would exist, even if there were nothing that was aware of it. Hence the problem can also be formulated thus: how does intelligence come to be added to nature, or how does nature come to be presented?” (System of Transcendental Idealism)

Seminar Leaders:

Prof. Iain Hamilton Grant (University of the West of England, Bristol)

Prof. Jason Wirth (Seattle University)

CFP – MACRO, Rome, April, 2013

Call for Papers – MACRO, Rome, April, 2013

Call for Papers
Joan of Art Towards a Free Education
Conference April 13th 2013
MACRO, Via Nizza, Rome, Italy

In collaboration with Nomas Foundation, European Alternatives

Hypothesis: Freedom in an unfree society can only be feigned. Such a feigning is by definition an artistic act. In a post-political age art bears a social responsibility.

The aim of the project ‘Joan of Art: Towards a Free Education System’ is to deliver a free education system, starting from the very basis of what education is: The sharing of information. In the first stages the very notion of education will be explored so that a new system can be delivered which recognises the value of knowledge sharing between peers and across disciplines. Finally a free accredited system will be set up in such a way that it can be delivered from anywhere in the world, growing and changing organically as it disperses via accessible communication platforms. In this way it is intended to break the monopoly that the State-Business model has over education.

Abducting the Outside: Modernity and The Culture of Acceleration

REZA NEGARESTANI

Abducting the Outside: Modernity and The Culture of Acceleration

A lecture by Reza Negarestani focused on the possibility of a genuinely modern philosophy of the inhuman in the wake of a disenthralled system of knowledge as an accelerated navigation of concept-spaces. The lecture is drawn on the works of Giuseppe Longo, Lorenzo Magnani, Gilles Chatelet and Alain Berthoz in cognitive sciences, mathematics especially the recent geometrical turn and physics accompanied with introductory commentaries on the exciting works of Gabriel Catren on anarchic constructivism and Benedict Singleton on metis intelligence and a cunning understanding of reason.

Sunday, November 18th, 7:30PM
Miguel Abreu Gallery, 36 Orchard Street, New York

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REZA NEGARESTANI & FLORIAN HECKER

The Non-Trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal:
A Topological Fable on Navigation and Synthesis

Date: Thursday, November 15th, 2012
Time: 7:30 PM

Location: Abrons’ Playhouse, 466 Grand Street, New York (at Pitt Street)

Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other. Chimerization, a recent work by Florian Hecker, uses psychoacoustics to compose such creatures from readings of a libretto penned by philosopher and novelist, Reza Negarestani.

Expanding on this work, Hecker and Negarestani come together in a live experiment – less a collaboration between philosophy and sound than a synthesis of the two. In this abstract performance, recalling Artaud’s theatre of cruelty as much as Beckett’s minimalist narratives, the participating elements will be chimerized through their mutual immersion in the abyss of the universal, and thereby revealed, in turn, as nothing other than local guises of this abyssal continuum.

The performance opens (Part 1: Descent) with a theory-fiction-mathematics manifesto that introduces the dramatis personae and abruptly drops the goat of philosophy into the abyss. This prologue of a mangled philo-fiction or ‘philosophy on acid’ is followed (Part 2: Navigation) by a performative gluing of philosophy and sound in which the auditors become the goats, each completing the chimera according to their localization and navigation of the space. In the final movement (Part 3: Alienation) this personal experience of local synthesis is replaced by an estranging immersion into the impersonal experience of the global, synthetic environment as the intensifying, sonic chimerization moves beyond the sphere of the knowable.

An exercise in deregulation of the senses, this unique performance brings together two ambitious thinkers and practitioners in an experimental surgery that opens up their respective fields onto unexplored grounds.

Doors open at 7pm. Seating is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

For more information please contact Sequence Press, located within:

Issue Project Room’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. 

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Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester), New York, NY 10002
Tel 212.995.1774 • post@sequencepress.com

Navigating Neoliberalism: Political Aesthetics in an Age of Crisis

For those who are interested, here’s a copy of my talk I gave last weekend on the technological sublime, machine perception, and cybernetic communism. Held in the beautiful Treignac area at The Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object event, it was a lot of fun and filled with some fascinating discussions. It also marked the first time all three of the editors of The Speculative Turn had met in physical form (at last I finally met Levi, who’s as generous and fun in person as I’d expected.) Many thanks to the Treignac Projet for inviting me and organizing the event. Check out more of their work here.

The Matter of Contradiction / Ungrounding the Object

Ungrounding the Object

More information available here.

The Matter of Contradiction/Ungrounding the Object is the second event in a series of four focusing on the relationships between art and new forms of contemporary philosophy. The first event, Art Without Aesthetics, held in Rosascape, Paris, in December 2011, introduced the series, attending to questions of the artwork beyond anthropocentrism. This second event, Ungrounding the Object focuses its attention on the renewal of the object as conceived outside of human access and the shattering of the ‘space of critique’. It attempts to understand how art, philosophy, mathematics, geology and physics can collide, not just as procedure of transdisciplinarity but through the intersection of their independent dynamics and collusion of their materials. Articulated as the disruption or collapsing of the ground on which we stand, we claimungrounding is a cognitive and material process of evisceration. To this end, the correlation between thought and the object should be revised. We wish to explore the impact of objective reality within the realm of art practice, contending that we must understand the capacity of the (art)object to unground through its contingent materiality.

Ungrounding the Object is split in two parts. From Saturday 1^st to Friday the 7^th, Treignac Projet will host a private workshop (fully booked!) with a group of 15 participants. On the weekend of 8^th and 9^th September, Le Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière will host a two-day conference addressing the issues raised during the workshop.

List of speakers / 8th-9th of September 

Bertrand Prévost
Graham Harman
Gabriel Catren
Levi Bryant
Nick Srnicek
Patricia Falguières
Paul J. Ennis
Reza Negarestani (via skype)
Tim Morton

Call for Participation – Joan of Art: Towards a Free Education System

Call for Participation – Committee To Discuss Project

Joan of Art: Towards a Free Education System

Hypothesis: Freedom in an unfree society can only be feigned. Such a feigning is by definition an artistic act. In a post-political age art bears a social responsibility.

‘Joan of Art: Towards a Conceptual Militancy’ is currently being written by Mike Watson (PhD in Philosophy, Goldsmiths College, MA Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy) for UK publisher ZerO Books (Mark Fisher, Nina Power, et al.). The book proposes that we evade the unfreedom of the societal whole by establishing a network of social initiatives delivered from galleries and art institutions.

The aim of the project ‘Joan of Art: Towards a Free Education System’ is to deliver a free education system, starting from the very basis of what education is: The sharing of information. In the first stages the very notion of education will be explored so that a new system can be delivered which recognises the value of sharing knowledge between peers and across disciplines. Finally a free accredited system will be set up in such a way that it ca be delivered from anywhere in the world, growing and changing organically as it disperses via accessible communication platforms.

An initial research period will bring together artists, academics, activists, lawyers and a range of professionals working across diverse disciplines in order to examine the very roots of our education system. By retaining some areas of the system we have all grown with, and changing others, new technologies will be employed in order to deliver a mode of learning which equips the user with the ability to ask relevant questions.

The passing of the political age suggests that politics was not the only way of managing the world. By setting up an education system as ‘art’ we seek new possibilities that are as yet unimagined.

The Committee

A committee meeting will be held in November to discuss what education is and what it ought to be. The committee seeks artists and academics with experience in the areas of social art, political art, education to put forward one page to be discussed with a view to shaping the above project. Travel to Rome, accomodation and a stipend will be paid for a period of 2-3 nights.

Email enquiries to: mike.r.watson@gmail.com

Materialism and World Politics

20-22 October, 2012
LSE, London, UK

Registration is now open here for anyone who wants to attend.

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Scheduled Speakers:

Keynote: The ontology of global politics
William Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)

Opening Panel: What does materialism mean for world politics today?
John Protevi (Louisiana State University)
More TBC

Closing Panel: Agency and structure in a complex world
Colin Wight (University of Sydney)
Erika Cudworth (University of East London)
Stephen Hobden (University of East London)
Diana Coole (Birkbeck, University of London)

ANT/STS Workshop keynote:
Andrew Barry (University of Oxford)

ANT/STS Workshop roundtable:
Iver Neumann (LSE)
Mats Fridlund (University of Gothenburg)
Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)
More TBC

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The annual conference for volume 41 of Millennium: Journal of International Studies will take place on 20-22 October, 2012 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This includes 2 days of panels and keynotes on the weekend, and a special Monday workshop on actor-network theory (ANT), science and technology studies (STS), and alternative methodologies. Space for the latter is limited though, so let Millennium know of your interest in attending it as soon as possible.

The theme of this year’s conference is on the topic of materialism in world politics. In contrast to the dominant discourses of neorealism, neoliberalism and constructivism, the materialist position asks critical questions about rational actors, agency in a physical world, the role of affect in decision-making, the biopolitical shaping of bodies, the perils and promises of material technology, the resurgence of historical materialism, and the looming environmental catastrophe. A large number of critical writers in International Relations have been discussing these topics for some time, yet the common materialist basis to them has gone unacknowledged. The purpose of this conference will be to solidify this important shift and to push its critical edges further. Against the disembodied understanding of International Relations put forth by mainstream theories, this conference will recognize the significance of material factors for world politics.

Thinking the Absolute

Thinking the Absolute: Speculation, Philosophy and the End of Religion

June 29th – July 1st 2012

Liverpool Hope University, UK

An international conference of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion

Registration is open, but the old link has expired with a change in the university’s website. Just go to http://www.hope.ac.uk/acpr/ and click on ‘Events’ for the registration form and conference poster.

Keynotes include: Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant. Unfortunately, Catherine Malabou has had to withdraw, but her place as a keynote will be taken by François Laruelle. Laruelle’s work is becoming more widely known in the English speaking world after a number of recent translations of important works of his, including Philosophies of Difference, trans. Rocco Gangle (Continuum, 2010) and Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy , trans. Anthony Paul Smith (Continuum, 2010). His practice of non-philosophy offers a rigorous, original and subversive path of thought. We are delighted and hugely honoured to be able to welcome him to Hope.

For further information contact Steven Shakespeare (shakess@hope.ac.uk) or Patrice Haynes (haynesp@hope.ac.uk)

CFP: Ontological Anarché: Beyond Materialism and Idealism

CFP: Ontological Anarché: Beyond Materialism and Idealism
A Special Issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies

Edited by Jason Adams and Duane Rousselle

www.anarchist-developments.org

Radical theory has always been beset by the question of ontology, albeit to varying degrees and under differing conditions. In recent years, in particular, political metaphysics has returned with force: the rise of Deleuze-influenced “new materalism”, along with post-/non-Deleuzean speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, all bear testament to this. In this same period, anarchism has returned as a major influence on social movements and critical scholarship alike. What then, are some of the potential resonances between these currents, particularly given that anarchism has so often been understood/misunderstood as a fundamentally idealist philosophy?

Is it the case, as Marx famously held in The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy, that anarchism fails to account for the full complexity of the ontological? Is there a lack of concern for instance, with the actual circumstances that would make social transformation possible? Is anarchism a theory for which materiality is “distorted in the imagination of the egoist”, inevitably producing a subject “for whom everything occurs in the imagination?” Should “Sancho” (Max Stirner), for instance, have “descended from the realm of speculation into the realm of reality”?

Or is the opposition of materialism and idealism itself a barrier to a higher, more powerful convergence, as recent anarchist/anarchistic thinkers from Hakim Bey to Reiner Schürmann have argued? This special issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies considers these questions in dialogue with new materialism, speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, in order to seek new points of departure. We are interested in papers that open up a space for these and other questions to be pursued.

Papers need not be tied to any particular tradition of thought (i.e., post-anarchism, speculative realism, or the anarchist tradition). We welcome creative, speculative, provocative, and risky para-academic research. If your current research relates to these topics, we encourage you to submit a proposal or a paper. We also welcome multi-media contributions.

Articles may be of varying length, submitted to Jason Adams: jason.adams@williams.edu, cc to Duane.Rousselle@egs.edu

The deadline for final submission is October 1st, 2012.