The Non-Trivial Goat!

Two events with Reza Negarestani:

http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2012/10/upcoming_nyc_ev.html

I will be in New York City for two upcoming events on November 15 and 18. The first one, a live collaboration with Florian Hecker. More of an abstract performance aimed at creating a synesthesiac experience of philosophy than a traditional philosophy lecture, The Non-trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal is a topological fable on the universalist philosophy of navigation and synthesis narrated in the style of Beckett. The first event also serves as an oblique introduction to the second event Abducting the Outside: Modernity and the Culture of Acceleration which will be a lecture focused on the possibility of a genuinely modern philosophy of the inhuman in the wake of an accelerated and disenthralled system of knowledge. 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.

Details and press release as follows:

Event 1: 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

Locations: 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:

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

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.

Center for Humanities Seminar & Events

For more information about the Speculative Realism seminar and events:
http://centerforthehumanities.org/

And here is the page for And Another Thing, which opens on September 14th (6:00pm):

http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/and-another-thing

Speculative NYC updated

Thanks to Punctum Books for this lovely, complete schedule:

http://punctumbooks.com/blog/update-speculative-september-nyc/

The opening for this event is currently buried in the full schedule for OOOIII, but wanted to draw your attention to it:

AND ANOTHER THING
September 14 – October 29, 2011 (Opening is at 6:00pm, after the conference)
Co-curated by Katherine Behar and Emmy Mikelson

The James Gallery
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue

And Another Thing looks at artworks that share the concerns of Speculative Realism or Object-Oriented Ontology, specifically the concept of non-anthropocentrism. We are chronicling how artists use thingness to eschew the human subject’s privilege. The works range from nano art to installation, and span from Minimalism and Body Art from the 1970s, to contemporary positions. Some explore relationships between objects, cutting the human subject out of the loop. Others dismember the anthro position to create a distributed subject, rendered as an object amongst objects, ultimately providing a critique of the subject/object hierarchy.

The exhibition will provide a platform for interdisciplinary exchange between art, architecture, philosophy, political science and neuroscience. With the Center for the Humanities, we are working to organize a series of three related panel discussions to coincide with the exhibition, and to tease out some of its themes.

www.gc.cuny.edu/events/art_gallery.htm

Speculative NYC!

Both Graham Harman and Ben Woodard have put up this schedule and we’re excited that the Graduate Center is hosting several of the events.

9/8/2011 – Graham Harman @ TPSNY – “New Paths from Husserl to Heidegger”

9/9/2011 – Graham Harman @ NYU – “What Causes Space”

9/14/2011 – Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Steven Shaviro @ The New School – An updated schedule is here.

9/14/2011- “And Another Thing”- James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 6:00-8:00pm

Eileen Joy is also speaking on this date @ TPSNY on SR and Literature.

9/15/2011 – Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman.”@ CUNY Grad Center – “Speculative Realism: A Conversation with Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman.” This event is organized and moderated by Patricia Clough. Skylight Room (9th Floor) 6:00pm

9/16/2011 – Various Speakers  @ CUNY Grad Center – “Speculative Medievalisms 2″ Patricia will be Graham’s respondent.

9/17/2011 – Ben Woodard @ TPSNY – “Complicitous Continuums – The Horrors of the Cosmicist Earth”

Timothy Morton at The New School

The Brief for a Symposium with Clive Dilnot, Timothy Morton, Karen Pinkus, Allan Stoekl, Cameron Tonkinwise, Damian White

Friday, April 8th; 10:30am-3pm

Klein Conference Room, A510
66 West 12th, New York, 10011

http://tiny.cc/oz99b

Upcoming Talks

Tim Morton at The New School, April 8th: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-school-seminar-april-8.html

**

Isabelle Stengers at The Graduate Center, April 9th: Cosmopolitics
http://www.wix.com/cunygc/cosmopolitics

**
François Laruelle and Non-Philosophy Symposium
Wednesday, April 6 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street
New York, NY

‘Non-philosophy’ designates the new response, in a manner rendered
possible and grounded, to that which must be called the ‘labyrinth of
philosophy.’

Tobias Huber (Editor, Urbanomic/Sequence Press): ‘Non-Philosophy and
the Axiomatization of Philosophy’
Alexander Galloway (NYU): ‘Laruelle, or The Secret’
Dustin McWherter (PhD, Middlesex University, London): ‘Non-Philosophy
and the Kantian Legacy’
Robin Mackay (Director, Urbanomic): ‘The Combustion of Human
Spontaneity: Non-Philosophy as Ultra-Althusserian’
Anthony Paul Smith (University of Nottingham): ‘What does religion
have to do with a science of philosophy?’

François Laruelle will be in attendance for a Q&A with the
participants and the audience.

***

François Laruelle – The Concept of Non-Photography: Thursday, April 7 ·  7:00pm  –  10:00pm

Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street
New York, NY

Introduction by Robin Mackay
Reading by François Laruelle

Of what do these essays speak? Of photography in the flesh – but not
the flesh of the photographer. Myriads of negatives tell of the world,
speaking in clichés among themselves, constituting a vast
conversation, filling a photosphere that is located nowhere. But one
single photo is enough to express a real that all photographers aspire
one day to capture, without ever quite… succeeding in doing so. Even
so, this real lingers on the negatives’ surface, at once lived and
imperceptible. Photographs are the thousand flat facets of an
ungraspable identity that only shines – and at times faintly – through
something else. What more is there to a photo than a curious and
prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret.

– From Introduction, ‘The Concept of Non-Photography’

‘The Concept of Non-Photography’ develops a rigorous new thinking of
the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy and art, and
introduces the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle’s
‘non-philosophy.’

This objectivity so radical that it is perhaps no longer an
alienation; so horizontal that it loses all intentionality; this
thought so blind that it sees perfectly clearly in itself; this
semblance so extended that it is no longer an imitation, a tracing, an
emanation, a ‘representation’ of what is photographed.

 

Meeting Tuesday March 22

We will meet this Tuesday at 6:30 at the Graduate Center 6th Floor. We are reading Whitehead See you all there Patricia

Meeting on March 15th

We’re meeting again on Tuesday, March 15th at 6:00 in the sociology dept. We’ll be reading Process and Reality:  Chapters 1 and 2 of Part I and Chapter 2 of Part II.

 

March 1st at 6:00pm

Hi all:

We’re meeting this Tuesday in the sociology department. We’ll discuss After Finitude (chapter one), Stengers, and Grant (in the Speculative Turn.)

See you then,

K.

on Grant and Harman

on Grant’s response in The Speculative Turn doctorzamalek | February 19, 2011 at 12:41 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/ptgFj-4pR

I’m afraid there will be little choice in coming weeks on this blog but to shift somewhat awkwardly between Middle East revolution and philosophy-related posts. Everything feels pretty trivial after seeing the Bahrainis gun down a perfectly peaceful march, but there are also people coming here craving philosophy posts. I’ll alternate as tastefully as the situation allows. Please bear with me as I also cheer on the Arab people in ridding themselves of dictatorships one by one. (And not just the Arab people: I hope Iran is coming up too, though brutality there has worked in a way that it didn’t work in Tunisia and Egypt.)

Anyway, most of you know that Iain Hamilton Grant has an interesting response to my article in The Speculative Turn. I felt like writing a response to his response, but on further reflection it seemed more fair to let him have the last word (just as I had the last word against Steven Shaviro in the same volume).

I’ll probably deal with Grant’s response somewhere in Treatise on Objects, but I’ll give the quickie response here.

Grant says that I’m defending a multiple-substance model against Giordano Bruno’s single-substance model. In response he calls both of these “depth models.” In short, he’s trying to claim that I’m actually closer to Bruno than he is, since Bruno and I both agree about substance and merely disagree about how many of them there are. By contrast, Grant says, he defends a model of “anteriority,” meaning a productive power deeper than any actual thing.

I agree that Grant’s model is one of anteriority. But I disagree that this allows him to avoid falling into a Brunonian position. the problem with Grant’s anteriority is that it falls into the usual “both heterogeneous and continuous” trap that haunts all philosophies of the pre-individual, which are really just “have your cake and eat it too” ontologies.

In other words, Grant thinks that there is a productive force that turns into individuals only when it meets with “retardations.” But either the productive force is a single lump, or it has multiple regions. If the former, then Grant concedes my point that he resembles Bruno. If the latter, then Grant is a sort of object-oriented ontologist in spite of himself. There is no “third way” between these extremes, often though it has been tried.

Stated differently, when Grant says that Bruno’s philosophy is of “one substance” and then Grant denies that he believes in substance and therefore doesn’t resemble Bruno, I view this as a verbal trick (not an intentional one; Iain doesn’t do that). My charge isn’t that Grant and Bruno are philosophers of one substance (though Bruno is); my charge is that they are philosophers of the one. And Grant never addresses this charge as far as I recall.

That still leaves the further question as to whether anteriority is needed. People often make this sort of claim against me. They say that there must be a “conatus” in the things that allows them to change. To this I say no, because conatus is just a vis dormitiva: “objects change by means of a changing faculty.” Latour saw this more clearly than anyone in his early writings, though in recent years he has inexplicably raised the Conatus banner aloft.

If you think the identity of objects all the way through to the end, you find yourself unable to bail out at the last minute by arbitrarily positing a magical faculty of change. And this is why I reject Grant’s view that there must be some anterior productive force lying behind any given object. Every object has a genetic history, sure, but not all aspects of that history are preserved; besides which, that history is one of the conjunction and disjunction of other objects, not of a “productive anteriority.”