Conference: Philosophy after Nature, 3-5 September, Utrecht

 

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.

Article: Maria-Daniella Dick and Robbie McLaughlan, "The Desire Network"

 

With Twitter hitting Wall Street hard yesterday and bouncing twice as high as any rubber ball stuffed with money, it seems appropriate to showcase one of the newer contributions to CTheory's Theory Beyond the Codes: Maria-Daniella Dick and Robbie McLaughlan's "The Desire Network". Casting their eye on Facebook, the authors conduct an intelligent theoretical and political examination of the Zuckerberg effect, which has "largely passed without any thorough critical analysis" through the same academy that saw its inception and disseminated it.

 

While perhaps touting the flag of rhizomatic relations, Dick and McLaughlan argue that in fact this angel of social networking phenomena not only represents but constitutes the ideology of a kind of liberal democracy predicated on the reshaping of desire as a process of perpetual production and, consequently, on a mutated capitalistic machine.

"...the truly revolutionary aspect of social networking is not how knowledge has become privatised, but the revolution that it has instigated in the way in which being now functions within this era of cyber-entrepreneurialism; this ontological shift effects, we argue, a correlative mutation in the function of desire which, in turn, effects a mutation in capitalism."

A "neurotic" portrait of Facebook's workings includes an analysis of David Fincher's 2010 film The Social Network, a quick cameo of Sean Duffy, and (more substantially) a compelling description of Facebook's enactment of the endless deferral of the real. What the authors somewhat chillingly conclude in their psychoanalytic sketch is a model in which "desire becomes its own network", endlessly producing without object or exit.

 

"The Desire Network" is available online at ctheory.net. While there, take some time to check out their new offerings, including Jussi Parikka's interesting "Dust and Exhaustion: The Labor of Media Materialism".

Conference: A Feeling for Things - Jane Bennett, 4-5 October, London



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.

Conference: Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, 14-15 February 2013, New York

The Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has banded together with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies to organise the Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, set to take place on 14-15 February 2013. Featuring Karen Barad as a keynote speaker and focussing on "feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by he materialist turn", this event has positioned itself perfectly for platforming the newest developments in material feminism and other current research that cuts across the fields of science and feminism.

With the mounting interest in Barad's work, this conference will no doubt feature not only Barad's own most curent work but will also spotlight some of the ways in which her contributions (particularly on agential realism) have been taken up within other fields and areas. The organisers are currently seeking extended 1000 word abstracts, due by 1 November 2012. Topics range from reflections on the turn towards materialism to reflections on the political implications of neo-materialism for feminism and the relation of matter to the social, with a range of other issues in-between.

CUNY appears ready and willing to provide a space for new academic research in materialism, with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies having for the last year busied itself with a fascinating series of seminars and events revolving around the theme of "embodiment" in interdisciplinary science-humanities engagements (more details of which can be found at their website). Bodies in Movement will be looking out for recordings that might be produced from this event for those of us not fortunate enough to be able to attend.

Recorded Lecture: Catherine Malabou, "Continental Philosophy and the Brain: Towards a Critical Neuroscience"

In this inaugural lecture presented by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy on 2 February 2012 in London, Catherine Malabou asks whether it is possible to constitute the brain as an object for non-cognitivist, "continental" strands of study. Malabou cleverly revives Michel Foucault's often superficially read essay "What is Enlightenment?" (or "What is Critique?") in order to argue that critique may allow us to bridge the often discordant discourses of neuroscience and continental philosophy.

This is a dialogue which Malabou quite literally realises in a staged conversation between Foucault-the-continental-philosopher and Thomas-Metzinger-the-German-cognititian, in which both carefully interrogate the statement: "You are your synapses". While elements of their discussion would appear to spill into an argumentational "battlefield", Malabou suggests that neurobiology, philosophy and critique can be repositioned creatively (rather than combatitively) through the concept of neuroplasticity. The consonance that can be found here, she argues, transgresses both the neurobiological and the continental traditions; rather, it requires us to invent a new experimental and challenging form of philosophical enquiry.

"The term 'plasticity' ... is what allows us to mediate (according to me) the conflict between cognitivism and philosophy. We see paradoxically that if neurotransparency causes the illusion of subjectivity and reveals that we are no one, neuroplasticity - which is intimately linked with neurotransparency - on the contrary situates the brain as the core of our individual experiences and identity. We may be no one, but this impersonality is plastic, which means that this absence of subjectivity is paradoxically malleable, fashionable, so that each of us is each no one in our own way."

Recorded Lecture: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Feeling Stone"

"Stone hurts," Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his opening address entitled "Feeling Stone" for the Hearts and Stones collaboratory hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, Australia in July 2011. His keynote ruminates with anecdotal openness on the possibilities of the radical readjustment to our entrenched anthropomorphicism which may occur in the encounter between stone and flesh.

Cohen describes the relation he seeks as a collaboratory of "experimenting, working and living together" between the agency of stone and the excitation of humans, in which the meeting with rock can destabilise a human-centric narrative of existence and give way to different, creative rethinking of ecologies, landscapes, texts and art. In the process of this reconceptualisation, he subtly weaves together the actor network theory of Bruno Latour with Graham Harman and Tim Morton's work on object oriented ontology and echoes of Jane Bennett's vibrant materialism (the last of which he engages with directly in the final section of his lecture) along with a liberal dose of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

The recording of his lecture is available online, along with an image capture file of Cohen's accompanying slideshow.

"Stone as monument is stone in movement, and by 'movement', I mean 'motion' that brings about connection that is desire, affect. But the question arises, where does that motion originate – from the human hands that perhaps fashion the monument, or from the stone itself?"

Article: Eugene Thacker, "Cryptobiologies"

Peculiarly tucked away in volume 6 (2006) of the little Spanish e-journal Artnodes lies the article "Cryptobiologies" by Eugene Thacker. Nestled inconspicuously between various Spanish-language commentaries relating to the theme of "Organicities", this teasingly brief rumination dwells on the now-quotidian nature of various biotechnologies, "biodefensive" strategies and the uncertain humanity-animality distinction.

Within six pages, Thacker's text provides a discursive inquiry into the enduring reaction of unease towards the affective dimensions of contagion. It ranges from a linguistic analysis of the US position on infectious disease to medieval practices of biological warfare. And while a small section suggests a re-encoding of Heidegger's notion of Angst towards a notion of "existential biology", it is the Deleuzian and Bataillean engagement underpinning Thacker's obscurely named "Cryptobiologies" (for the word never appears in the body of the text, which perhaps indicates how we are to receive the word) that both enables and enlivens his vivid mapping of these biological politics.

"...to ask what it would be like to be a pack, a swarm, a flock - this is the question of animality ... a question not of species, genus and organism, but of topologies or patterns that effortlessly cut across species. The threshold of our understanding is not between human and animal, but rather between humanity and animality."

Article: Reza Negarestani, "Differential Cruelty"

Reza Negarestani's critical reading of Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition fastens upon the dependent associations of cruelty and determination suggested within the first chapter of Deleuze's text. From here, Negarestani explodes its implications in order to ambitiously exalt in a philosophy of cruelty that remobilises ontology itself within a new reading: that of differential cruelty.

Negarestani proposes by way of a radical Deleuzean reading that the science of ontology is the essence of a philosophy of cruelty. "Cruelty" here refers not to an instrumental form acting as a unidirectional vehicle to the positive determination of being; but rather, as plays of multiple, interrelated sets of cruelty to which determination is fundamentally and problematically bound. Explicating this philosophy from Difference and Repetition as transition from Deleuze's early work "Coldness and Cruelty", Negarestani concludes with the tantalising implication of a different ethical register "wherein the problem is not determiend by its solution or conditions but by its capacity to generate fields of the problematic".

"Deleuze's philosophy of difference is, first of all, a universal ethics in so far as it demonstrates that difference or determination as such qua cruelty creates a field of the problematic for which solutions (correlation with the beyond or a meta-level) remobilize the problem rather than terminate it. ... The philosophy of cruelty ... is capable of seeing ontology as a differential or non-unitary field of cruelty pregnant with the problematic and, therefore, capturing ontology through syntheses between sadistic and masochistic reasons, or between being out of the void and being through the void."

Read Negarestani's article in volume 14(3) of Angelaki, journal of the theoretical humanities (2009).