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‘In-the-Last-Humanity’: François Laruelle @ CSM

laruelle_principles

Just spotted this event on the staff mailing list.

Public Lecture

Professor François Laruelle

‘In-the-Last-Humanity: On the “Speculative” Ecology of Man, Animal and Plant’

June 3, 5pm, 2013

Central Saint Martins

Lecture Theatre E002, Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London.

This is the 3rd in a series of lectures Professor François Laruelle is giving at the London Graduate School, London. This talk is presented with the support of the School of Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts.

Following the lecture there will be a reception and book launch for the translation of Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith and Nicola Rubczak (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Professor Laruelle has taught at both the University of Paris X and the Collège international de philosophie, and is a Visiting Professor at the London Graduate School, Kingston University, London. He is the author of over twenty books, including Philosophies of Difference (trans. 2010), Future Christ (trans. 2010), Principles of Non-Philosophy (trans. 2013), and, most recently, The Concept of Non-Photography (2011) and Anti-Badiou (2011, trans. 2013).

This event is open to members of the public (no reservation required, but come early to get a seat).

For further information, contact Prof John Mullarkey – j.mullarkey@kingston.ac.uk

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Apparently, there is also at talk by Michael Marder on 8 May at UCL where he will be talking about his recent book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. It hasn’t been advertised externally, so I don’t know whether it’s a public event. More information welcome!

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Mutable Matter @ AAG 2013


Image source: Michael C.C. Lin from the forthcoming book Architecture in the Anthropocene: Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, edited by Etienne Turpin (Hong Kong: MAP Office/MAP Books Publishers, 2013)

Next year, I will be participating in an AAG session entitled ‘Re-evaluating the Anthropocene, Resituating ‘Anthropos” (session abstract posted below). The session is organised by  Harlan Morehouse (University of Minnesota) and Elizabeth Johnson (University of Wisconsin). Am very much looking forward to the discussions! Here is my presentation abstract:

We are the World: Ideologies and material representations

For the majority of social theorists, human relations with materiality, the world and the cosmos have been connected to fear and alienation, and to the instrumentalisation of these sentiments to gain political influence. At any moment in history, representations of materiality have been used politically to deny aspects of human/world relations and to undermine productive responses. Current examples include the denial of anthropogenic climate change and, conversely, calls for the abolition of democracy, deemed ‘unable to deal’ with the consequences of future planetary transformations, in favour of more authoritarian structures.
The work of authors such as Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin and Simone Weil acknowledges the importance of thinking at and beyond the planetary scale to counter the instrumentalisation of alienation and the construction of ‘preferred realities’. For these authors, identification with the world and the cosmos has nothing to do with escapism or ‘materialising’ humans, but with warding oneself against being reduced to passive matter by ideologies that deny certain material relations through idealised constructions. For Weil, for instance, to identify with the universe means to cultivate a preoccupation not with tangible materialism, but with an intangible one, focused on thoughts and ‘the perpetual exchange of matter’, in which humans take part.
Bringing together past and present writing on materiality, this paper seeks to highlight the significance of representing human-world relations for constructions of political agency and to propose early and mid-twentieth century conceptualisations of ‘great reality’ as one potential pathway for thinking the human as a geological political agent.

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Call for Papers: Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (Los Angeles, April 9-13, 2013)

Re-evaluating the Anthropocene, Resituating ‘Anthropos’

Organisers: Harlan Morehouse and Elizabeth Johnson.

In 2000, Crutzen and Stoermer gave name to a new geological epoch. The “Anthropocene” demarked a post-Holocene present and future in which human activity was understood to be the dominant agent of change in the global environment (2000). Understandably, such a sweeping claim has been viewed unfavorably within critical geographical and environmental scholarship, generating arguments that Crutzen and Stoermer’s concept only offers a new, albeit negative, story of human’s mastery of the earth’s processes. Nigel Clark (2011), for example, has suggested that the term neglects the presence – and force – of terrestrial processes that exist independently from human relationships. Similar criticisms have emerged from the substantial and diverse literature on more-than-human geographies, which aim to dislodge anthropocentrism by granting nonhuman actors and processes more prominent positions in everyday events as well as the meaning and experience of social, political, and historical change (cf. Latour 2004, Serres 2010, Bennett 2011, Badmington 2000, Braun and Whatmore 2010, Castree et al. 2004).

These perspectives have been instrumental in shaping critical responses to Crutzen and Stoermer’s hyperbolic claims. However, recent work in philosophy and the humanities invites an alternative reading of the “Anthropocene,” one that that is more sympathetic to these critiques and that does not elevate or reinscribe humanity as the principal agent of global environmental change, but rather situates it as one force in a field of material processes (Morton 2012). Further, such a reading would recognize unique states of affairs that signal the “collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (Chakrabarty 2009) – a sentiment paralleling the suggestion that the Anthropocene announces a shift from the human as biological entity to that of humanity as a geological agent. In these sessions we wish to revisit the idea of the Anthropocene in order to work towards a politics capable of responding to the epistemological and ontological challenges posed by 21st century environmental uncertainty. In spite of its originary hyperbole, the idea of the Anthropocene nevertheless compels us to rethink life amongst the myriad and strange mixtures of social, natural, and socio-natural processes, and in doing so come to terms with materialities that far outstrip the relative inconsequentiality of a human experience of space and time. Or, to echo Morton, it inspires us to ‘think big, and maybe even bigger than that’ (2010). Framing questions include, but are not limited to:

• How does the introduction of global, geological humanity as a singular subject challenge, complement, and/or modify discourses of critical environmental thought?

• If we identify the ‘anthropos’ of the Anthropocene with something as ‘massively distributed in space and time’ (Morton 2010), what limitations do we (as individuals) experience? And what are the implications for considering issues of environmental ethics, responsibility, and politics?

• In what ways does the meaning of “human” change in the movement between biological and geological agency?

• How might critical environmental thought acknowledge the crucial role independent terrestrial processes play in the constitution and experience of material realities while acknowledging humanity’s capacity to shape the earth at multiple scales and in numerous ways?

In light of the above, the organizers of this session welcome novel socio-ecological perspectives that critically reflect on the idea of the Anthropocene, examining its impacts on 21st century environmental thought and politics. Please send inquiries / abstracts of no more than 250 words to Harlan Morehouse (more0206@umn.edu) and Elizabeth Johnson (erjohnson9@wisc.edu) by October 5th 2012.

References:
Badmington, N. (2000). Posthumanism. New York, Palgrave.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Braun, B. and S. Whatmore (2010). “The Stuff of Politics: An Introduction.” Political Matter. Minneapolis, MN: U. of Minnesota Press.
Castree, N., C. Nash, et al. (2004). “Mapping posthumanism: an exchange.” Environment and Planning A 36: 1341-1363.
Chakrabarty, D. (2009). “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35(Winter): 197-222.
Clark, N. (2011). Inhuman nature : sociable life on a dynamic planet. Los Angeles ; London, SAGE.
Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E.F. (2000). “The Anthropocene.” IGBP Newsletter 41(17): 17- 18.
Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morton, T. (2012). “On Entering the Anthropocene.” A lecture at the Environmental Humanities Symposium, University of New South Wales, August 23, 2012. Available at http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/08/on-entering-anthropocene-mp3.html
Morton, T. (2010). The ecological thought. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Serres, M. (2010). Biogea. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Press.

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Workshop: Material Studies @ SoundFjord


Image source: Soundfjord

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Am currently working on some radio programmes and sound workshops for my new project. Here is a workshop at the SoundFjord Gallery that sounds rather exciting. Would definitely attend it if I wasn’t making sounds somewhere else at that time. In case you are able to go, here are the details from their website:

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Material Studies is a monthly improvisation workshop lead by Matthisa Kispert, Blanca Regina and Andrew Riley, and on occasion a special guest – past guests have included Ryan Jordan, Iris Garrelfs – first initiated at SOUND//SPACE held at V22 Summer Club from May to July 2012.

Philosophy: “Material Studies is an open-to-all, playful collective exploration of the sounds within matter.

Avant-garde art, be it musically, visually or performance based often appears as somewhat elitist, with a defined hierarchy between those who create the work (the artists) and those experience it (the audience). To people who have not had the fortune of being taught all the codes of the artform, the pieces and the settings in which these are shown can be uncomfortable and alienating.” – The Material Studies Group

The Material Studies project seeks to open these experimental artforms to anyone who wishes to participate in the collective, improvised sonic exploration of various materials and objects, whether by actively working with the objects, passively absorbing the interactions of others or by expressing a response to the sonic exploration through visual or written acts.

The use of traditional instruments, terminology and tools of manipulation will be avoided. Participants will together develop an improvisational language based solely on the sounds that can be teased out of various everyday objects, with each session being themed around a particular material or object.

No expertise or previous experience is required, instead the sessions focus on the communicative potential of collective improvisation, where every participant needs to listen and react to everything that is happening around, where every gesture has an influence on everything else.

The underlying principle of the project is to promote a corrosion of the space between the artist-performer and the contemplator-audience and to promote the idea that we are all valuable as artists regardless of education or class.

Next workshops: SATURDAY 13 October 2012 | SATURDAY 03 November 2012 | 2.30 – 6 pm

£5/£4 concs per workshop
It is essential to RSVP [helen_at_soundfjord.org.uk] | Pay on the door

An example from Material Studies:

Material Studies – Introduction session- from whiteemotion on Vimeo.

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Event Series: New Approaches to the Past: Methodological Innovation in Heritage Research


Image: Rosanna Raymond

Today, the events just keep on coming. This public seminar series at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology may be of interest to some readers. ‘New Approaches to the Past: Methodological Innovation in Heritage Research’ features talks by academics, film-makers, artists and curators. Seminars take place on Wednesdays from 5-7pm in Room 412, UCL Institute of Archaeology (all welcome). This Wednesday, I’ll be going to see Divya Tolia-Kelly‘s talk on ‘Refiguring the geopolitics of the museum cabinet: Doing post-imperial ecologies of nation, art, affect and culture’.

Here is the full programme:

3 October: Memorialising Impulses: Photography, Heritage and a Record of Europe (Elizabeth Edwards, De Montfort University)
10 October: Planet Bethlehem (Leila Sansour, Filmmaker and Chief Executive, Open Bethlehem)
17 October: Counter-Mapping Heritage: Story trekking, mapping ‘attachment’ and understanding the role of mobilities in heritage (Rodney Harrison)
24 October: Homelessness and Heritage: How archaeology can help (Rachael Kiddey, University of York)
31 October: Refiguring the geopolitics of the museum cabinet: Doing post-imperial ecologies of nation, art, affect and culture (Divya Tolia-Kelly, Durham University)
14 November: Innovation in Design, Delivery and Collection Management (Dinah Eastop, University of Southampton)
21 November: Micromuseology: Researching small, independent, single-subject museums (Fiona Candlin, Birkbeck)
28 November: Title to be confirmed (Hilary Powell, UCL Bartlett)
5 December: Historians, People and Brown rats: different roles in making histories (Hilda Kean, Honorary Research Fellow, Ruskin College, Oxford)

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The end of the world – Now ‘prettier’ than ever?

The end of the world has never looked so good – at least that’s how you might feel if you’ve watched the recent string of apocalyptic movies. These films include something for everyone, from the highly stylised (Melancholia) to the ‘realist’ (The Turin Horse), although these distinctions cannot always be clearly made, and there is also the inevitable rom-com option. Exiting the cinema after watching ‘The Turin Horse’, having gone through the ‘Melancholia’ experience just a few days before, my companion joked that Béla Tarr’s film could be described as ‘Melancholia for the 99%’.

What I find interesting about many of these films, which include Another Earth and Seeking a friend for the end of the world, is that they seem to be more about the inner world (collapse of the human psyche) than the ‘outer world’ (collapse of the physical environment). The guiding question for Mike Cahill, the director/co-writer (with Brit Marling) of Another Earth, for instance, is about forgiveness: ‘Who needs to meet themselves the most?’ And how would they react? The only material destruction in the film appears to be that of one character’s body – whose reaction to a possible meeting with himself ends in self-mutilation to rob himself of his sensory perception. In Lars von Trier’s film, the ostensibly most stable, rational character turns out to be the most fragile, and the most fragile, irrational character’s state is revealed to bear the greatest strength.

Amongst all the celebratory and condemning reviews (there does not seem to be anywhere in between) only one article (in the New York Times) seems to touch on this theme. The quote, to me, could have been taken straight from Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on ‘cosmic terror’:

‘There is a grim vindication — and also an obvious, effective existential joke — in Justine’s discovery that her hyperbolic despair may turn out to be rooted in an accurate and objective assessment of the state of the universe’.

One could argue about the differences between the ends for Bakhtin – to embrace chance, death and other disturbing features of the universe as a means of counteracting fear of earthly (political) power – and the ends for von Trier. According to A O Scott’s New York Times review, von Trier’s aim may be to show how the world ‘deserves its awful fate’. Indeed, the director himself comments that he intended to make a very pessimistic film. In an interview he mentions how he watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris in preparation:

‘Tarkovsky constructs all of his films as worlds. And each time, he gives the impression that this world explodes. It’s because of him that I believe in spirits, in phantoms. Do you remember the last plan of Solaris, which included this hallucinatory camera movement? This was really my source of inspiration for the end of Melancholia. I wanted the concluding moment of the film to be the most pessimistic that I’ve ever done, as, as far as I am aware, my films all end too nicely.’

In Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, the human-cosmic relations seem equally present, but they take a much more material dimension. In his book Béla Tarr, Le Temps D’Après, Jacques Rancière notes how The Turin Horse sees ‘cosmic relations’ taking the place of social relations. Instead of human characters putting obstacles in the protagonists’ way, the latter are pushed back to the house by extreme winds or become increasingly paralysed by dwindling resources. The story is centred around the very basics of life: matter and energy. This is not a film about individuals, but about infrastructure and about humans-as-infrastructure, supporting and perpetuating patterns. Béla Tarr sums it up as follows:

‘We are doing very little things, but every day we are doing the same things – you are getting weaker and weaker, you have less and less energy and you are getting older. You cannot live with anything in your life, you can do the same thing but in a different way and unfortunately, you are going down, and I am going down, and everything is going down.’

According to Tarr, this material commonality is also reflected in the casting process, in which the same characteristics are sought for in human, animals and the landscape equally. In fact, Tarr notes how the horse is more important than the human characters.

In terms of their sensory approaches, Tarr’s and von Trier’s films also move in opposite directions. Although they can both be described as beautiful, hypnotic and interested in transmitting the reality in which the characters live, there is a marked difference, which already begins with the different speeds at the films are shot. Tarr uses 30 cuts for 147 minutes to show the slow disintegration of his characters. Von Trier also messes with time, however his inspiration is less realism than surrealism, notably Dali’s soft clocks. In Melancholia, the apocalypse takes place in a spatially and temporally distorted, dream-like state, although this, for him, has not always worked to his aesthetic satisfaction. After previewing the first scenes of the film, von Trier found them too stylised: they looked too much like a perfume advert– ‘but I wanted apocalypse!’ Another inspiration seems to have been opera and its dramatic expressiveness, which, for von Trier consists of the condensation of strong emotion into short intervals of time. Every image was supposed to announce the end of the world.

By contrast, Tarr’s imagery, while also intensely sensually engaging, seeks to underline materiality and the absence of emotion – including the absence of the spiritual. Prompted about this fact, Tarr comments:

‘The god created this fucking shit, what we have. We just wanted to show you how we disappear, and I don’t know who is the god. But if you remember, Nietzsche stated, God is dead.’

Yet this focus on representing materiality does not only seem to be about the non-existence of God, but also about the non-existence of (productive) thinking and doing. The sudden monologue in the middle of the film appears to mark this lack, the impossibility of change. Not only, according to the deliverer of this speech, has there ‘never been and could never be any kind of change here on earth’, but ‘change has indeed taken place’. This change is being described as the dissolution of potentially resistant forces through their self-destruction after the realisation that neither god(s), nor good and bad exist. In Melancholia, the world, too, appears to have been lost already, as embodied in the character of Justine. Even before the planet is destroyed, she ceases to connect to it: food tastes ‘like ash’ and the earth ‘is evil’. The apocalypse comes as a much needed release.

Does this leave us with two unrepentantly hopeless films? Here, Rancière offers some rare optimism: while, in all of Tarr’s films, the characters never manage to break out of established patterns and always end back where they started off, the closure this implies also suggests openness. Not only is there an infinite variety of patterns and ways to explore these patterns, but with every repetition there seems to be room for something more, something that suggests that the ‘closed circle is always open’. As he aptly puts is: even ‘the last morning is still a morning before’.

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TCAUP symposia online: ‘The Geologic Turn’ and ‘Curating Race, Curating Space’

While I’m still working on the next post (and attending the Atlas book launch!), here are the links to presentations from two interesting symposia, hosted and kindly put online by the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning (TCAUP). I witnessed the introductory lecture to the ‘Geologic Turn’ symposium (organised by Etienne Turpin), but unfortunately missed the second half as well as the ‘Curating Race, Curating Space’ event (organised by Milton S F Curry).

Here are the videos in order, by symposium:

The Geologic Turn

Etienne Turpin (Introduction)
Stan Allen ‘Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain’ (Keynote)

IMMANENT HISTORIES
Seth Denizen
Jane Hutton
Amy C. Kulper
Discussion with Meredith Miller

MAKING THE GEOLOGIC NOW
Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth (smudge studio)
Discussion with Rosalyne Sheih

HARD AND SOFT EVIDENCE
D. Graham Burnett
Edward Eigen
Paulo Tavares
Discussion with Rania Ghosn

Curating Race, Curating Space

Milton S F Curry (Introduction)

THEORIZING RACE AND SPACE
Madhu Dubey ‘Racial Geographies of Cyber-Futurism’
Darell W. Fields ‘The Black Architecture Project: Artifacts and Community’
Tobias Wofford‘Framing Culture/Displaying Race: Traditional and Contemporary Art in the First World Festival of Negro Arts’
Discussion with Peter Gilgen and Matthew Biro

REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES
Hansy Better ‘Sites of In-Betweenness’
Amanda Williams
Discussion with Joan Kee and Teman Evans

SITES OF DISCOURSE
Liz Ogbu ‘Design for Social Impact: Linking platforms of advocacy and practice’
Andres Lepik ‘Changing the Paradigms: Social engagement in architecture and the role of exhibitions’
Olympia Kazi
Discussion with Keith Mitnick

Final Discussion with Robert Fishman and Session Moderators

While you’re at it, you should also catch Antoine Picon’s lecture ‘What Can we Learn from Construction? Architecture, Technology and Culture’.

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Design, Design Activism and the Democratic Production of Future Social Natures@AAG 2012


Image: ‘Portable garden’ (Maria Kalathaki as part of ‘Mutation’ project by Angela Last)

The preliminary programme for next year’s AAG came out last week. Am currently trying to get the placement of our ‘Ruinations’ session changed, which seems to have got spread over two days, with the discussion of the papers taking place on the Friday before the presentation of the papers on Sunday… Hopefully this can be fixed! Meanwhile, the other session I am participating in (as a presenter), ‘Design, Design Activism and the Democratic Production of Future Social Natures’, does not seem to have attracted such logistical issues. Am very curious about the content and dynamics of this session. So far, the organisers have sent some e-mails round to encourage participants to exchange reading lists, as well as comments we have come across that struck us as central to the debates this session is engaging with.

What the design activism session seeks to bring into dialogue are two lines of inquiry that have been pursued in (and outside) geography: design as a ‘technological fix’ and design with a different utopian drive: as social movement that offers resistance to design as purely materialist and instrumental. The latter is, for example, being discussed in the Open University’s ‘Stitched Up’ research group, which looks at the ‘politics of generosity, sharing, voluntary simplicity, informal provisioning and craft’ and how ‘these practices can potentially contribute to sustainable futures’. I am particularly curious about this session, because it seems to bring people from different fields together. Having done work around tension between technocratic remediation and resistance from a design background (fashion) first, I encountered quite a different sort of discourse when I moved into geography.

Being interested in the democratisation of ‘innovation’ and questions of materiality and political agency, I also find the second theme of the session intriguing, which talks about ‘materialising’, e.g. about ‘provid[ing] some kind of material substance to a new progressive politics of the environment’. Naturally (excuse the pun), I am a bit concerned about any claims to ‘materialising’, however I think that there are still a number of debates-to-be-had in the design activism field about materiality and agency, which can benefit both from a design and a geography perspective. As it looks, there are going to be three sessions (and perhaps some post-session chats?), so hopefully plenty of opportunity to exchange perspectives!

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