Fresh off the presses, and with the digital ink still wet (or non-existent) on their new website, comes a ridiculously exciting joint Annual Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy, held at Utrecht on 3-5 September and entitled"Philosophy after Nature". While the call for papers remains wide, encompassing "all areas of contemporary European philosophy"), conference organisers are keen for contributions and panels which address the titular theme of the event - "Philosophy after Nature",
"in the sense of being in pursuit of nature's consequences. We invite perspectives on critique, science, ecology, technology and subjectivity as bound up with conceptions of nature and experiments with various positions in contemporary thought."
Confirmed plenary speakers currently include eminent figures Françoise Balibar, Rahel Jaeggi, Mark B. N. Hansen and (most enviably for this reporter) Michel Serres. Abstracts are due by 17 May 2014, which leaves plenty of time to produce presentation and panel proposals. The conference website currently lacks content, but the CFP can be found at the Society for European Philosophy website. Academics, graduate students and independent scholars are all welcome to submit.
"the issues that post-structuralist theory placed on the critical social science agenda have become more vital than ever - be that the concern for the complex and dispersed nature of power and agency; the imbrication of power and economics with knowledge and science; rethinking the relation between equality and difference; the political/contested/changing nature of embodiment, biology and ecology; or the efforts of states and others to establish and exercise power over life itself. We maintain that now is the time, not to reject post-structuralist perspectives, but to reinvigorate and transform those traditions through empirical and political work that is creatively engaged with current problems."
No less ambitiously, the conference promises a thrillingly line-up of excellent keynote speakers - Louise Armoore, William Connolly, Christian Borch, Costas Douzinas, Amade M'charek, Luciana Parisi and AbdouMaliq Simone - which guarantees provocative discussion on the conference topics from diverse academic perspectives within the humanities.
Abstract submission is open until 10 March, with suggested themes raging from biopolitics and religion to necropolitics and authority. Further information can be found on the conference website along with the online abstract submission form.
After a prolonged absence, Ky is back (with profuse apologies) to present the recently announced Luce Irigaray Circle Conference: Topologies of Sexual Difference. Taking place (perhaps quite aptly) in Antipodean Melbourne over three days from 10-12 December 2014, the conference seems particularly positioned so as to engage with Irigaray's work in relation to growing academic interest in posthumanism, new materialisms, sensory studies and critical geographies.
"In order to think and to experience sexual difference, Irigaray suggests that the Western tradition's conception of space and time could be reconsidered. There are at least three senses of topologies we seek to address: as the places in which bodies are and become, as ideal spaces of conceptualization, and as the designation of specific contexts."
Confirmed keynotes include American-based scholars Elizabeth Grosz and Pheng Cheah, with further keynotes to be announced at a later date. The conference intends to embrace a diverse variety of humanities-based disciplines and will include an exhibition of visual art.
Organisers are currently seeking abstracts and exhibition proposals. As an extra incentive for current PhD candidates or recent graduates, the Irigaray Circle is also sponsoring the 6th annual Karen Burke Memorial Prize for the best submitted paper. More information and email contacts can be found at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy.
Birkbeck (University of London) offers
another fantastic two-day event in early October, "A Feeling for Things: A Conversation around the work of Jane Bennett". The evening of 4 October will feature a public lecture by Jane Bennett, some of whose work we have already featured on this blog here and here. This will be followed by a full-day workshop on 5 October. Drawing upon academics from a variety of backgrounds - Eileen Joy, João Florêncio, Jussi Parikka, Nigel Clark, Milla Tiainen, Lisa Baraitser and Michael O’Rourke - the event promises to be both a fascinating conversation between politics and philosophy, and a likely crowd-puller.
The public lecture will offer insight into Bennett's current research. The workshop on 5 October seeks to investigate the possible resonances and feedback between the politics of Bennett's work and a variety of other disciplines:
"This two day event makes the writing of Jane Bennett a vibrant matter for discussion across the fields of philosophy, psychosocial studies, political theory, cultural studies, literary theory, visual theory and performance studies among others. In particular, the focus will be on how Bennett’s explorations of vitalism, anthropocentrism, agency, biopolitics and new materialisms contribute to the emerging and fraught conversations between feminist and queer theory, Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism."
Registration to the workshop on 5 October costs £20 for students and Birkbeck staff, £40 for all other attendees, with attendance at the public lecture mandatory for all workshop participants. Links to registration are provided on the event webpage. The public lecture on 4 October is free but booking is required - registration to this is handled through Eventbrite.
The beautifully evocative (and, indeed, atmospheric) writing offered by Kathleen Stewart's in her article "Atmospheric Attunements", like some half-remembered dream, stays with a reader well beyond the closing of the piece. Stewart describes her article as "a writing and thinking experiment aligned with forms of nonrepresentational theory" and, true to her word, this brief article floats above the academic rigors of heavy theory and citation. Instead, in six snippets of situational reflections, the author submerges into divergent, descriptive topologies which attend to a random, quite personal selection of spaces and times (fictional, anecdotal, poetic, quotidian) becoming intimate and lived.
"I am asking how questions of form, event, viscerality, and circulation open and problematize attention to the ways that forces take form as worlds or dissipate (or get stuck, fester, shelter something ...). How do rhythms and labors of living become encrusted and generative? How do we now describe the activity of sensual world-making, and what kind of theory is being built in this way?"
Buzzing, West Virginia, migraines, homelessness and much more: these fragments of description and rumination bubble to the surface of the text and conglomerate. Carried along by such cases, Stewart probes the possibilities for harnessing practices of writing and critique towards attuning to a proliferation of inhabited worlds in the making, all incommensurable yet equally laden with material and sensory rhythms and atmospherics.
Stewart's open-access article can be found nestled in the extensive online archive of Environment and Planning D,in volume 29(3) of 2011.
Pallas Projects in Dublin city currently contains the collaborative exhibition by artists Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty. The show, aptly coined with the palindrome Rotator, loops around secrets, crypts, water and topographies in a variety of media forms; it explores the lesser-known currents of one of the city's more familiar waterways (the River Poddle), records endless passageways of/in brick, and commemorates the hidden stories of the underground.
The rich textures of Clinton and Moriarty's exhibition - dizzingly wet, mossy and stony - are sensationally enlivened in a recorded "tour" of the exhibition performed by the artists themselves, Michael O'Rourke and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (read by fellow artist John Ryan) on a wintery March evening. Beginning with an introduction by O'Rourke, the tour takes the form of a question-and-answer conversation between the participants inflected by the exhibition works. "Hydrocryptographic", O'Rourke describes Rotator, and the four performers draw upon Serres, Cixous, Derrida, myths of the giant Balor, Blake, T.S. Eliot and a particuarly savvy twenty-questions AI algorithm to trace the damp crevasses of the show within this 45 minute audio recording.
"Rotator is more attuned to the inclinations and glossolalic streaming together of matter. The exhibition is an exercise in diverculvertation as we drift from territories of the infinitesimally small - our selves and bodily matter composed mostly of water - to the infinitely vast - rivers, seas, oceans, the sky, moon and stars."
To mark the initiation of the Anthropocene Project (see the previous post on this blog), the the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin staged a four-day symposium for lectures and dialogues between key thinkers in a variety of fields including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, architecture along with many others. Clustering around five thematic "islands" - "Perspectives", "Times", "Gardens", "Oikos" and "Techné" - the transdisciplinary dialogues and lectures staged (some of which have have been audio or video recorded for posterity) interrogate the concept of the anthropocene.
A preoccupation with identifying the anthropocene (is the anthropocene legal?, beautiful?, a necessity?, etc.) tends to muffle more open-ended discussion in some of these conversations. Nonetheless, the meeting of minds offered by Claire Colebrook and Cary Wolfe on the subject of "Is the Anthropocene...A Doomsday Device?" manages to navigate its potential nihilism with both playfulness and consideration. The keynotes of Elizabeth Povinelli ("Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism") and John Tresch ("Cosmograms, or How to Do Things with Words") offer sometimes beautiful narratives and ruminations.
Dipesh Chakrabarty's bold critique of the anthropocene itself pits the question of and about the anthropocene in challenging detail. Launching his keynote, "History on an Expanded Canvas: The Anthropocene's Invitation", with the delaration that he must "decline the invitation of anthropocene", Chakrabarty underscores the gratuitous magnitude of anthropocene as a conceptual term, while still taking up the narrower (and more graspable) hypotheses of climate change and anthropocenic global warming.
"It has to be one of the profoundest ironies of our modern history that increasing use of such energy should have now transformed our collective image in our own eyes from that of an autonomous, if not sovereign, purposeful agency - from the level of the individual to the level of groups - to that of a force which is defined as the sheer capacity to produce pull or push on an object by interacting [with] it merely as another object."
In January of this year, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin opened a fascinating and ambitious new two-year initiative entitled The Anthropocene Project, which seeks to interrogate the effects stemming from the increasing destabilisation of the definition between man and nature.
Chasing a paradigm shift throughout the the twentieth and into the twenty-first century in the natural sciences, the project situates Paul Jozef Crutzen's coined geological epoch - the "anthropocene", an "age of mankind" - at its centre in order to explore the mutual enfolding of the "human" and "natural" relations.
The opening consisted of a four-day symposium of thinkers, artists, film-makers, scientists and scholars to in conversation over this theme. Recordings of these speakers, which included keynotes by Will Steffen, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, John Tresch and Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as a host of other dialogues, are available online at their website (some of which will be explored in more depth in Part II, posted next week).
Upcoming events include: the Unmenschliche Musk Festival: Compositions by Machines, by Animals and by Accident feom 21-24 February, which brings music production under critical inspection; a film series Anthropocene TV which begins on 22 May and continues until the project ends;"The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside" Conference with accompanying exhibition, from 21-22 June; along with many other events. Further information and multimedia are listed on the HKW website.
"Nature as we know it is a concept that belongs to the past. No longer a force
separate from and ambivalent to human activity, nature is not an obstacle nor a
harmonious other. Humanity forms nature. Humanity and nature are one, embedded
within the recent geological record."
In 2010, Jane Bennett published Vibrant Matter (read the blog post here), a fascinating foray into the agency of things which challenged readers to think beyond the confines of an unquestioned anthropocentric perspective.
If Vibrant Matter proffered the rough layout or skeleton ofsuch a concept, Bennett's talk, "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency", begins a process of enfleshment, building some theoretical muscle on top of that bone. Continuing her project of "thing-power" through a distinctly vital materialist lens, her discussion in this presentation at the Imperial War Museum in London on 3 December 2010 asks the crucial question of what kind of lexicon is available to us to acknowledge and explore the active power of things when language itself tends towards anthropocentrism and instrumentalist positionings.
Propensity, action, trajectory, vital impetus, assemblage - Bennett cycles through a host of possible vocabularies before fixing on the concept of the hoarder. The various attitudes towards objects demonstrated by "extreme" hoarders on the A&E reality television show Hoarders, she argues, gesture towards the intercorporeality of things and humans within the amasser's environment. In such a perception, the self is both porous and aggregate, itself a collection of a vast number of attendant things.
"A vibrant materialist would say that hoarders have exceptionally acute awareness to the extent to which all bodies are intertwined with those in its vicinity. They sense that a variety of 'its' make up a self and that the 'its' possess a vibrancy formerly thought to be unique to organic bodies."
Bennett's talk in London has been archived on the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website and can be streamed or downloaded from here, along with slideshows from her presentation. You can also track the evolution of this project of lexical accretion by listening to or viewing her other talks on the topic at ICI Berlin in May 2011 and at The New School on 13 September 2011.
At the beginning of 2011, Stanford University Press published a new addition to the slowly growing body of translated work by Michel Serres - Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?, translated by Anne Marie Feenberg-Dibon.
Bearing strong resonances with earlier textssuch as The Parasite and Rome: The Book of Foundations, the pamphlet-length Malfeasance marks his turn towards contemporary considerations of the confluence between ecology (particularly the human production/act of pollution) and property. Serres' irreverent remodelling of ecocriticism involves his signature pirouettes back and forward in time and smooth segues between themes of religion, advertising, waste, tenancy, etymology and innumerable others.
Malfeasance demands a reassessment of our proprietary claims and the processes which mark ownership of body, space and soul. While often scathing in his critique, Serres pulls his tract back from the brink of wholesale negativity by proposing (ambiguously) utopian possibilities of freedom in the contradistinguished notions of tenancy, dispossession and "dis-appropriation".
"...pollution comes from measurable residues of the work and transformations related to energy, but fundamentally it emanates from our will to appropriate, our desire to conquer and expand the space of our properties."
A four-page excerpt and the table of contents are available from the first chapter of the text are available from the Stanford University Press website.
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