The apocalypse was slow, a science of rumour,

just like in one of those McCarthyite B-movies

and not at all as depicted in the Book of Revelation

or similar sources. A stench on the horizon,

it appeared, initially, as a glob of chicken fat

you couldn’t dislodge from the back of your throat

no matter how much coughing and eructation.

Several months later came a heaving at the door

which when opened unleashed an avalanche

of discarded birthday cards and RSVPs.

A lake of bad cheques sluiced from beneath the bed,

islands of crusty socks buried your parents

who’d been sitting on the couch for weeks among

magazine cuttings, last month’s football pools,

completed sudokus, profaned betting slips,

missing jigsaw puzzle pieces, electric blanket boxes

and religious statues carved from blocks of soap.

Illicit receipts flurried from the u-bend

and snowed the landing. Houseflies that had snuffed it

in the plastic chandeliers of rented mobile homes

fell in a black hail. Pork fat, old margarine,

every iota of filth liquefied into unguents

and emerged unstoppable from gutters

to anoint passers-by, rendering them with

an attention to detail worthy of Pompeii.

A terracotta army lined the street before the job centre,

a Byzantine frieze of office temps

crept at elemental pace across the sky.

A Sahara of pencil shavings and biscuit crumbs

crystallised into exotic mineral formations

like fractal swirls building to infinity

as Gothic mezzanines of cigarette ends

and disposable nappies towered in the high streets

and we lived momentarily, but it might as well

have been forever in their shadow.

 

Hyperstitions of Oil

Oil is the lubricant of universal history, it streams across the surface of the earth feeding petropolitical networks of money, power and technology. This is why Negarestani defines oil as a great map of the world: ‘the cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity narrates the dynamics of planetary events. Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on earth’. Oil is the ultimate ‘hyperstitional’ entity, hyperstition being defined as the capacity of desire to give thoughts, beliefs etc. an effective reality (as with self-fulfilling prophecy). Just as Deleuze and Guattari define all history in terms of one universal vanishing point, one absolute limit or Outside towards which all territories are led, the universal history of oil leads us to the smooth space of the desert. All idols and ideologies topple and are swallowed in the sand. American capitalist and militant Islamic warmachines alike are drawn towards the deserts of the Middle East in pursuit of the Omega Point.

This universal history narrated by oil is profoundly of our time, and no less universal for that. Universal history is only made possible at a point or threshold ushered in by capitalism. But instead of being a confrontation between social classes, as Marx believed, this point is where the earth confronts itself, takes itself as object, and thus becomes separate from itself, ungrounded and deterritorialised. Oil is our ultimate Logos. In it, we live, move and have our being, it mediates our relation to the earth-as-totality. But it also fuels our basest, most pathological desires (consumerism, war).

The classic theory of fossil fuel as decomposed organic matter, secreted in the ancient ‘mega-graveyards’ of sedimentary basins, is underwritten by the capitalist logic of scarcity, which Deleuze and Guattari describe in terms of their famous critique of desire-as-lack:

‘[lack] creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied’ (Anti-Oedipus).

Oil is a finite resource mediating our relation to the earth through a cost/benefit economics that follows this logic of desire-as-lack. What better means of governing desire has contemporary capitalism found than so-called ethical or green consumerism, by which one consumes in the midst of the threat of not being allowed to consume? All systems of power and authority, Deleuze and Guattari argue, are based on double binds which place on us simultaneous but mutually exclusive injunctions. That’s how familial control works. As Bateson showed, the expression of unconditional love is premised on all sorts of implicit demands and calculations. The more society is oedipalised, the more it becomes a virtual family. We are told to enjoy ourselves, to consume unconditionally, but also to conserve energy, think of the dwindling oil supplies. What better figure of desire-as-lack is there than the terrifying spectre of ‘peak oil’, which hovers over us like a judgment of God? Negarestani observes that fossil fuel is ‘a typical Freudian oedipal case’, the earth’s own Oedipus complex, the manner in which it relates to itself as a totalitarian whole.

The judgment of the earth occurs in the suffocating heat of stratigraphic pressure: ‘petroleum inevitably “wells up” through the God-complex deposited in the strata’. Oil, in this sense, is the result of the earth’s paranoiac self-repression or divine frenzy for wholeness (nothing must escape the double pincer of stratification). But strata, no matter how densely layered, always involve, by their very definition, ‘in-between’ spaces that invoke a non-stratified (chaotic, unformed) Outside. The earth composes itself out of this chaos, but also passes judgment on itself, deifies itself, via the strata: ‘Stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation. And the strata constitute the Judgment of God.’ (A Thousand Plateaus). But how could stratification proceed, how could a Whole express itself as divided, without letting the outside in, without giving up its mania for wholeness? These are the gaps from which petroleum seeps. In this sense, Negarestani turns Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of holes or vacuoles into a principle of anti-authoritarian propagation inextricable from the system of authority itself:

‘paranoid cultures and their establishments always leave security leaks, they breed more holes and more solids than anyone; but these latter, far from augmenting or purging the solidus leave it as a corpse necrotized by heavy scarring (a fibroproliferative mess) … hole … solid … hole … solid … solid … hole … hole … hole … de-faced; it is left as the corpse of solidus, ready to decay and turn into mess’.

Resisting Solar Capitalism

Negarestani sees the submission of the earth to the sun as an economic, ethical and political problem that cannot be solved as long as we restrict the definition of life to the domain of the surface biosphere. The sun is pure onanistic self-indulgence, a pure exorbitance that keeps the Outside out. The sun is the source of life, but also incinerating, immolating, destructive. As such, the source of life is non-life, what supports the organism is the dominion of its finitude. Surface dwellers are slaves to death as well as to the sun. This is why Negarestani calls the relationship between the earth and the sun ‘simultaneously vitalistic and necrocratic’ (‘Solar Inferno and Earthbound Abyss’).

This solar capitalist union of vitalism and necrocracy is embodied in fossil fuels. But what if oil were not the product of organic degradation but something else entirely? Negarestani points to Thomas Gold’s ‘deep hot biosphere’ theory which argues that microbial life, independent of solar energy, is widespread deep beneath the surface of the earth, and that oil is itself an inorganic secretion from the very depths of the earth’s core providing energy for these subterranean life forms. This would explain the presence of biological material in petroleum, and thus the hydrocarbons of oil and petroleum would not have to be biological in origin, but a secretion from somewhere deep in the earth itself. Negarestani etymologically connects the Avestan word ‘drujaskan’ with oil and petroleum. Historian Philippe Gignoux writes that ‘drujaskan’ means ‘house of falsehood’, the feminine noun ‘druj’ meaning to blacken, deceive or obscure, and is defined as ‘the bottom of darkness where the chief demon [of hell] resides’. This is what Land named Cthelll:

‘the interior third of terrestrial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, mega-molecule and pressure-cooker beyond imagination. It’s hotter than the surface off the sun down there, three thousand clicks below the crust, and all that thermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsubjective memory of the outside, running the plate-tectonic machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamics of silicate magma flux, bathing the whole system in electromagnetic fields as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. Cthell is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma howl of the earth’ (Fanged Noumena).

Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia narrates a history of the earth from the position of its subterranea. This is not a chronology: chronological time is a surface phenomenon, but events find their meaning in a rising-to-the-surface. Equating life with the surface biosphere is an unfortunate consequence of solar despotism:

‘A complex of hole agencies and obscure surfaces unground the earth and turn it to the ultimate zone of emergence and uprising against its own passive planetdom. Once freed from its solar slavery, the earth can rise against the onanistic self-indulgence of the Sun and its solar capitalism … (44)

Cylconopedia is a history of planetary emergence, the rising-to-the-surface of things, which is also an uprising of the earth itself. The time of emergence is not chronology: ‘things leak into each other according to a logic that does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time’ (49). But it becomes possible to tell a history through these leakages, which seep up through holes, cracks and fissures and corrode the consistency of the ground. This dualism of surface and ground is one for surface dwellers only. When thought attempts to think the ground as such it must bore holes in it, so that the ground ceases to support us, crumbles away into multiplicity. The earth rises up against wholeness, totality. Axelos writes that for Greek thought

‘the world, the totality of everything that is in becoming, remains One: Physis illuminated by Logos, Logos animating the language and thought of mortals. … Man is a being of physis … The men of Hellas know how to face the threat of nonbeing, of a nothingness which as threat does exist. Now and then they dare find words for it, without for all that inquiring into the power of nothingness itself and questioning the foundation of being’ (Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx 9).

The Christian tradition marks the first great movement of ungrounding, because in it man has his being in Logos, and the One as ground is created ex nihilo. Through the subordination of Nature to Spirit, the nothingness, the void, is allowed in, and the unground enters by way of depth. If the Christian tradition kept the unground locked up in hell, modern thought unleashes demons that tear at Logos and dissolve forms. As Land remarks, Kant built philosophical dungeons but the screams of torture victims were still able to reach the palaces of reason (Fanged Noumena 141). Once the ground becomes an object thought it no longer functions to ground but to unground. But this catastrophe presages a liberation, new mode of differentiation, a freedom from the restraint of empirical distinctions according to ground vs. figure. Empirical distinctions are subordinate to and dependent on a primary difference in which the ground distinguishes itself autonomously as unground. Deleuze writes:

‘instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. … It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground. … The Platonists used to say that the not-One distinguished itself from the One, but not the converse, since the One does not flee that which flees it; and at the other pole, form distinguishes itself from matter or from the ground, but not the converse, since distinction itself is a form.’ (Difference and Repetition, 28).

‘Void excludes solid,’ writes Negarestani, similarly, ‘but solid must include void to architectonically survive. Solid needs void to engineer its composition’ (44). All space is an accommodation to holes, cracks and fissures, and it is through such spaces that life worms. Solidus wants to compose, but to do so it must sacrifice some of its consolidation. In order to survive, solidus must accept the void, it must accommodate itself to the void’s contaminating presence:

‘It is through survival (the incapacity of the solid to reject the void) that solid participates in ungrounding itself. By correcting its consolidating processes, the solid sells its integrity (soul) to the abyssal convolutions inspired by the void, through which the pathological survival of the solid becomes the most basic factor in its irreversible lysis and degeneration.’ (44)

Degeneration is the price solidus pays to free itself from stasis in which it is locked as pure consistency or uncomposed consolidation. The principle of emergence or differentiation is vermicular, vermiform, denoting the sinuous movement of worms or nematodes that engineer boreholes, burrows and crawl-spaces in order to compose individual solids out of pure solidus. Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘holey space itself communicates with smooth space and striated space’ (ATP 415). The hole-borers are both deep and superficial, passing through sedentary and nomadic spaces, they are paranoid-fascist and schizo-revolutionary.

The first lesson of planetary thought is that the earth is dislocated, non-identical with itself, ‘the planetary is not the same thing as the world’ writes Deleuze (Desert Islands 157). But if planetary thought is a rupture or break, and this break is ‘in time’, then the time marked by this break must be, in Peguy’s sense, ‘in eternity’: ‘an eternal foundation does not exclude the need to begin anew’ (Temporal and Eternal, 91). Beginning anew in eternity, this is how to compose a historiography of the New Earth:

‘can the Unground — where the hegemonic wholeness of the Earth is incapacitated — still be called Earth? And then, according to what chronological current, based on what calendar, according to what gradient of becoming, which point of reference addressed by space-time coordinates, can it be mapped as the New Earth? For the Unground is a shadow outside of time and space.’ (Cyclonopedia 43)

Negarestani is concerned with tracing this single history of temporal break and eternal continuity. The American-led resource wars in Mesopotamia provide Cyclonopedia with its immediate historical milieu, but Negarestani’s historiography is based firmly in the geological eternities embodied in oil. Today’s petropolitical war machines ride the slick of oil, which lubricates their cutting edges, but the war machines themselves can be seen as merely the parts by which oil engineers its escape from the depths. Oil and petroleum thus narrate a sort of subterranean emergence of the unground, a new form of writing that Negarestani will call ‘demonogrammatic’: ‘Oil, with its poromechanical zones of emergence in economy, geopolitics and culture, mocks the Divine’s chronological Time with the utmost irony and obscenity.’ (58)

Deleuze says that planetary thought as logos has a corresponding pathos suggesting an affective mode of ‘disarray, disequilibrium, indifference … which is bitter, but joyful by dint of a particular strangeness’ (158). This is similar to what Heidegger was getting at when he said that philosophy is dominated by a feeling of homesickness (Heimweh). But what needs to be emphasised is the feeling of being unilaterally out of place, errant, wandering or estranged without being alienated, without wanting to ‘return’ anywhere. Nick Land’s concept of geotrauma expresses this pathos of planetary thought by conceiving of how the terrestrial biosphere ‘emerges as an escape, an immense spasm of deterritorialisation’. This is a pathos, a literal suffering, a ‘planetary trauma’, or ‘geotrauma’ (Fanged Noumena 335). Land refers us to the Cairns-Smith hypothesis which argues that organic life began on earth through a ‘takeover’ by genetic material of the processes by which clay crystals self-replicate. Organic life, in this sense, is a usurpation of an inorganic process that subsequently dispenses with its inorganic scaffolding once it has figured out how to reproduce itself. The earth engineers an escape, from the ground to the surface. ‘Life’ is nothing other than this engineering. Land writes:

‘as the solar system condensed, the rate and magnitude of [meteoritic] collisions steadily declined, and the terrestrial surface cooled … During the ensuing – Archaen – epoch the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogenous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation’ (Fanged Noumena 498).

The buried energy of the core seeks an escape, cracking open the surface. If the biological organism is an expression of this process then it is also perilously susceptible to it. Freud described psychic trauma as a puncturing of the barrier between interior and exterior world formed by the ego. Desire is nothing other than the process by which the barrier is traversed, and the replication technology serving it revolutionised accordingly. All desire – the thirst for oil, war, religious salvation – needs to understood according to what Negarestani calls ‘the demonogrammatical decoding of the Earth’s body’ (18).

In the second instalment of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011), Adam Curtis appears somewhat dismissive of contemporary ecological thinking, taking a broad swipe, as he does, at the all-too-liberal basis of its concepts. On closer inspection, however, he supplies a call to think again, one that would encourage a less naive, less complacent approach to environmentalism; one welcome indeed for those working to re-assert the necessity of ideology critique for ecocriticism. If in his earlier series, The Century of the Self (2002), Curtis insisted that we historicise our notions of self-hood, tracking the ways in which twentieth-century consumerism and our culture of individuality grew apace, he here implies that our grasp of the nonhuman biome is no less constrained by a pernicious form of techno-narcissism. Threatening hazy notions of natural equilibrium or ‘steady state’ economics, Curtis suggests that our capitalist interpretation of the non- or pre-cultural world runs far deeper than might ordinarily be supposed, identifying and ousting the deeply ideological and totalising tendencies of much environmental ‘holism’.

Entitled ‘The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts’, the second episode of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace redresses a number of ecological ‘givens’, contesting and at times entirely overturning such seemingly wishful notions as autopoiesis (or the ‘self-organisation’ of natural systems) and the biosphere as a self-regulating and balanced ‘machine’ with which humanity merely needs to synchronise. The extent to which the Odum brothers, whose Fundamentals of Ecology (1953) was so key to the formation of ecology as a science in the mid-twentieth century, drew upon mechanical and electrical models in the development of their thesis, underwrites Curtis’ initial analyses of the basis of eco-systemic awareness under capitalist ideology. Coming to appear as little more than the reductive fantasies of nascent technophiles, Curtis seems to cast such hypotheses as largely disobliging, chiefly because they did not meet with thorough testing, which proves a salient point, given the extent to which they have come to permeate so indelibly the eco-cultural imaginary. Yet it is the degree to which they took their part in inspiring the very desire for the bureaucratic management of post-industrial society, for a conservative notion of ‘sustainability’, rather than for any revolutionary overturning of capitalist instrumentalism per se, that might concern us here.

Exploring the equally influential research of cybernetic theorist Jay Forrester, Curtis shows how he was employed by the techno-cratic think tank The Club of Rome during the 1960s-70s. Forrester’s research famously led him in The Limits to Growth (1972) to predict a total ecological collapse in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Curtis shows how whilst Forrester’s cybernetic systems analyses of the human relationship to the biome – its interconnected ‘feedback loops’ – supply a useful means of grasping the complexities of the eco-cultural dynamic, they nevertheless loan themselves all too readily to the scientific streamlining of capitalist productivity, to precisely the ‘sustainable’, eco-liberal ideology that the work of the Odum brothers proved so symptomatic of. We might then acknowledge the diversionary basis of much ecological debate away from any proper critique of capitalist ideology and its technological manifestations on the basis of a purportedly ‘a-political’, scientifically-’neutral’ imperative.

In short, Curtis bids us to think again about that which might appear ‘obvious’ about the difficulties of our environmentalist epoch. In line with this already provocative approach, we might invoke Heidegger directly rather than the cultural criticism of Adorno or Marcuse, or a philosopher whose relationship to ‘eco-critique’, to thinking about nature and desire under late capitalism, is not entirely unproblematic. In declaring that ‘we are not yet thinking’, however, Heidegger (and after him Deleuze) echoed Nietzsche’s call to affirm the power of thought as an event of pure difference. Beyond normative modes of ideology critique, therefore, we might instead strive to activate a very particular ‘culture of learning’, one honouring of an unflinching relationship to the unconscious of thought, to the violence and pathic ‘activity’ of the very ‘will to truth’ that conditions our attitudes and values, most particularly where the putative ‘neutrality’ of the sciences is concerned. To reproach ‘common sense’ in this way – and to which the sciences contribute substantially – is to enable a ‘noological’ consideration of the place of ecology as a science in ecocritical value-formation, demystifying our ultimately ‘reactive’ relationship to the more-than-human world, or that which has come to be figured as the ‘biome’, and in a manner that might exceed normative forms of ideology critique. We might then reconsider how the ecological sciences remain unacknowledged as symptoms of the very crisis they would seek to overcome.

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn”t say anything against the Machine.”

“Why not?”

“One mustn’t.”

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other.

“I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

– E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”.

Adam Curtis’s new series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, looks at the impact of computer technology on our understanding of politics and society. Here’s my reading of the first film in the series.

Curtis’s essential thesis is that the emergence of the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley – the so-called “Californian ideology” – is the effect of a new distribution of power, a new means of control, and not a form of liberation. The liberationist view of the internet is, in fact, an ideological mystification, in plain old Marxist terms. Curtis focuses on the intersection of two figures, Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan, who first met in the 50s. Curtis’s film shows, very effectively, how Rand’s extreme form of free market liberalism and the utopianism of Silicon Valley intersect in the economic policies pursued by Greenspan in the 90s, when new forms of computer modelling made possible unprecedented ways of calculating, and hedging against, risk. The effect of this was to increase short term speculative venture capital by the banks and the shadow banking industry, leading to the disastrous property bubbles in the Asian Tiger economies.

What Curtis describes, via Greenspan, Rand and Silicon Valley utopianism, is a shift in political control, stemming from a new distribution of capital. Both Randian individualism and techno-utopianism, in which people engage with one another directly, without the need for the intervention of state power or politicians, are symptoms, ideological mystifications, of this new distribution. The Californian ideology envisaged a world in which hierarchical, disciplinary power systems (i.e. the state) would be dissolved in favour of dispersed networks in which power would emerge from the ground up, from the people.

A short detour into Deleuze and Guattari is necessary here. In A Thousand Plateaus, they describe the shift from “machinic enslavement” to “processes of subjectification”. Think of the kind of state apparatus required to build the pyramids. This is what Lewis Mumford called a “megamachine”, an impersonal, authoritarian machine in which people, literally, are the components. But this system of power is replaced, in modernity, by what D+G call “subjectification”. This happens when political control is delegated more and more to relations of interpersonal dependency, e.g. the family. Within this domain of social subjection we tend to believe that we have escaped the dominion of the impersonal machine, so that we can finally engage with one another as human beings. We control the machines, we are no longer enslaved by them: “the human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved by the machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 457).

Curtis mentions a very interesting piece written by a woman called Carmen Hermosillo, who used to post on message boards in the 90s under the username “humdog”. One day in 1994 she posted a message explaining that she was leaving the online world and why. I quote her here at some length:

“it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality. some people write about cyberspace as though it were a 60′s utopia. in reality, this is not true. major online services, like compuserv and america online, regularly guide and censor discourse. … i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment.” (http://alphavilleherald.com/2004/05/introducing_hum.html)

This is interesting because it suggests that the internet is not simply a new means of control, but a new means of extracting surplus value from the workers/users. Industrial capital used the factory to do this, but there is a limit to how much value you can squeeze and out of people in that way, because people can only engage in productive labour for a part of their waking life. With post-industrial capital, the means of extraction are no longer restricted to the workplace, but have, with the help of computers, migrated to those spheres not traditionally associated with production: leisure time, consumption, activities associated with the reproduction of labour power.

Now, Curtis points to something very interesting in this regard. He says that, following Greenspan’s innovations at the Fed, economic figures began to suggest an anomaly: while profits were going up, productivity was staying the same. In other words, we can see the beginnings of a crisis of accumulation which eventually came to be expressed in the financial crash of 2008. What accumulation means, in Marxist terms, is that profits are re-invested into the means of production (the factory, machines) so as to generate more profits through increased production. But financial capital sidesteps production, it makes money directly out of money, through speculation.

Does this mean that it also manages to sidestep the extraction of surplus value from workers? Of course not. As Marx said, living labour is the sole source of value. What has happened – and I’m straying from Curtis here – is that the site of surplus value has migrated from the traditionally productive sphere to the spheres of leisure and reproduction. Christian Marazzi gives the example of Ikea furniture, which you have to assemble yourself at home. Is this process of assembling work or leisure? Andre Gorz’s classic book Critique of Economic Reason ties in nicely with Curtis’s thesis here, in that it maintains that surplus value must increasingly come from non-productive sources because productive labour is being performed more and more by computerised machines. Many aspects of the online constitute these new means for the extraction of surplus value, new forms of capital accumulation beyond the traditional industrial sphere. An example is how software companies release early versions of their software to be tested by users. Once again, is this testing a form of unpaid work, leisure or what?

Thus, with the rise of computers, we find that the ideological justifications for systems of explicit political dominance are finally exhausted. The ensuing ideological reflex produces the anti-state fantasies of self-organisation found in Rand and the exponents of the Californian ideology. But these are mere symptoms of a new form of political control, occurring through subtle processes of subjection rather than through overt enslavement. The system of control is no less technological, of course, and we are still components in a machine, but our engagement with that system produces in us a sense of personal freedom of expression and self realisation of the kind Hermosillo describes.

Keynote speakers:

The Romantic Research Group at the University of Western Ontario is pleased to host “Romanticism & Evolution,” an international conference to be held May 12–14 2011 at Windermere Manor, located a short distance from the main university campus in London, Ontario. The conference program will feature internationally recognized keynote speakers, six thematic seminars conducted by prominent specialists in the field, as well as special and regular panels.

• Gillian Beer (Cambridge University)
• Tilottama Rajan (University of Western Ontario)
• Robert J. Richards (University of Chicago)

Background:

Though Romanticism is often imagined as the “age of revolution,” recent criticism has seen renewed interest in the general theme of “Romantic Evolution,” including the resurgence of such topics as organicism, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy. The objective of “Romanticism & Evolution” is to defamiliarize prevailing notions of evolution by tracing their origins to literary and scientific discourses of the transitional period 1775-1850, a time that witnessed the genesis of the modern idea of “literature” alongside the emergence of specialized disciplines, such as geology, biology, physiology, chemistry, psychology, and anthropology. Disenchanted with mechanistic science and Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism also introduced a new organic image of the world, which displaced the older atomistic and static idea of nature with one that was dynamic and evolutionary. However, whether the organic mode of explanation replaced the mechanical philosophy as a radically incommensurable paradigm, or whether both coexisted in creative tension during and beyond the Romantic period, remains a matter for debate.

Revisiting important events and developments in the history of evolution prior to the publication of The Origin of Species, “Romanticism & Evolution” will focus critical attention on earlier, less recognized theories of change and transformation emerging in the cultural, literary, philosophical, and scientific debates of the Romantic period. Instead of searching through eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science for “forerunners” to the Darwinian revolution, this conference aims to explore British and European Romanticism’s liminal position between the classical idea of an immutable “great chain of being” and the rise of modern discourses of historiography.

Paper topics include:

• Collections, Museums, Gardens, Cabinets, and Natural History
• Philosophies of Nature and Romantic Biology
• Aesthetics and Poetics in light of Evolution
• Literatures of Revolution, Evolution and Romantic Science
• Romantic Ecology and Ecocriticism
• The Pantheism Crisis, Naturphilosophie and the Romanticization of Spinoza
• Colonialism, Imperialism, and Travel Narratives
• Theories of the earth and the rise of the science of geology
• Morality, Ethics, Affect, and the Scottish Enlightenment
• Disaster, Catastrophe, and Natural Revolution
• Romantic Vitalism, Organicism and Emergent Evolution
• Theories of Preformationism, Epigenesis and Descent
• Discourses of Sensibility, Excitability, Irritability
• Sex, Gender, and Reproduction
• Romantic Theologies, Creationism, and Intelligent Design
• Genealogy, Archaeology, and Contemporary Theories of Change
• Universal History, Cosmology, Natural Law, and Universal Peace
• Germs, Disease, Illness, and Contagion
• Theories of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity
• Romantic Animals, Mutation, and Monstrosity

The deadline for the submission of abstracts has passed. The conference program can be found here.

For further information, e-mail romanticism@uwo.ca

New Climes: Critical Theory, Environmentalism, and Climate Change
University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, June 13th 2011

Confirmed plenary speakers:
Ian Buchanan (Cardiff University)
Claire Colebrook (Penn State University)
Timothy Morton (UC-Davis)

Climate change is an unprecedented crisis in human history. It is marked by necessary scientific imprecision and met by public confusion and controversy. Discerning climate change involves intricate scientific problems, and responding demands complex cultural strategies, spanning global, historically unprecedented action. Even as scientists, politicians, activists, and publics have struggled to respond, climate change has also begun to provoke cultural innovation and political audacity. Correspondingly, then, this cultural phenomenon of climate change might require a re-adjustment of critical approaches and methods.

Climate change asks of cultural critics and theorists nothing more nor less than a re-evaluation of ourselves. In a day-long symposium, we will explore the relationship between climate change and critical theory. How do critical concepts like power, ideology, mediation, capital, colonialism, gender, oppression, society, and construction help us to understand the challenges presented by climate change? Does the current crisis wrought by anthropocentric climate change challenge or affirm the assumptions that underpin cultural critical theory—and to what extent? Can we respond—and, if so, how—through now established critical modes, such as those signalled by deconstruction, post-structuralism, genre theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and science studies, or those practised under the rubrics of, among others, Agamben, Badiou, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Latour and Žižek? Or does climate change demand a new kind of theory?

We invite proposals for papers that address any aspect of the relationship between critical theory and climate change. Proposals should be 200 words long, for presentations of 30 minutes. Please email proposals to the co-organisers, Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra (a.g.johns-putra@exeter.ac.uk) and Dr. Adam Trexler (a.trexler@exeter.ac.uk), by 31st March 2011. We will be seeking to publish symposium proceedings, to be edited by Adeline Johns-Putra, and Adam Trexler.

Unruly Creatures: The Art and Politics of the Animal
Natural History Museum, London, UK, June 14, 2011
Admission Free

The London Graduate School is holding a one-day conference at the Natural History Museum on June 14 2011 entitled ‘Unruly Creatures: The Art and Politics of the Animal’. Its purpose is to analyse and discuss the numerous ways in which animals have been used in contemporary art and the humanities, the political and philosophical implications of this use, and, especially, the manner in which animals have also resisted such employment. With examples taken from philosophy, fine art, and recent films by Phillip Warnell and Vinciane Despret, we will examine whether there is an art, politics, and thinking that is peculiarly ‘animal’.

The speakers for the event are:

Cary Wolfe (Rice University)
Steve Baker (University of Central Lancashire)
Vinciane Despret (l’Université de Liège/l’Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Phillip Warnell (Kingston University)

The conference, run in association with the Centre for Arts and Humanities Research at the NHM, will have free admission, though all delegates must pre-register.

For further information contact: Prof John Mullarkey in Film and Television Studies at j.mullarkey@kingston.ac.uk

Dark Materialism

12 January 2011 – London, UK

This symposium draws on recent paradigms in contemporary philosophy, physics and critical theory. It assembles unique and multidisciplinary reflections on the idea of darkness in its relation to matter in diverse locations, namely: physics, astronomy, ecology, mysticism, speculative realism, psychoanalysis and literature. As a conceptual framework, dark materialism engages with matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance beyond the topographies of ‘base materialism’ and at the very edges of forms of thought where the objects, things, Things and no-things on which it depended exert their independence. Darkness, in matter, energy, ecology and life itself, in black holes in the universe and in the mind, emerges as baseless and founding, exterior and interior at once. It leaves thought in the void, enabling disruptions and speculative realignments of diverse concepts and the real itself, reshaping not only the world of ideas but also the very order of things.

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

29 June–1 July 2012 – Liverpool Hope University, UK

Keynote Speakers to include Catherine Malabou, Iain Hamilton Grant and Levi Bryant

‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.’

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008)

Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism’, the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.

This conference invites proposals which critically consider this speculative turn in philosophy and its implications for thinking about religion. To what ‘end’ is speculation leading? Does it simply announce the closure of religion and its subordination to a philosophy of the absolute, nature or the ‘All’? Can it open new lines for a philosophy of religion which is not wedded to the Kantian horizon? Is speculation itself open to Kierkegaardian critique as yet another move to position and reduce ethical and religious claims, sacrificing the future on the altar of abstract possibility? Does renewed attention to the canon of speculative idealism offer a way beyond the impasse between relativism and dogmatism?

The organisers welcome proposals which examine the roots and extensity of recent speculative thinking, and which critically consider its impact – direct and indirect – on philosophy of religion. Relevant thinkers and themes might include Quentin Meillassoux on God and the absolute, Alain Badiou’s ontology, Catherine Malabou on Hegel and plasticity, Francois Laruelle’s ‘future Christ’, Iain Hamilton Grant on Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and the thinking of the All, Ray Brassier’s nihilism, the impact of object-oriented ontologies on theology and metaphysics. However, we are particularly looking for contributions which creatively use or depart from the speculative turn to offer original insights into the nature and content of the field.

Abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute papers to shakess@hope.ac.uk or haynesp@hope.ac.uk by end of February 2012.