Aesthetics After Finitude

Introduction Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland This is a paradoxical book. And deliberately so. To invoke an ‘aesthetics after initude’ is to call up a problem of intimidating scale and gravity. It opens onto questions of the post-human, the inhuman and the outright nonhuman. It problematizes theories of perception and phenomenality in artistic practice and in the reception of the works it produces. It attempts to ask how it might be possible have an aesthetics without the subject that has traditionally theorized, practiced and legitimated it. But problems are the friends of philosophers and artists alike. Perhaps, at times, this is the sole thing they share. To begin with a solution is to risk positing an ideology and not a project. In February of 2015, we posed this problem to a heterogeneous group of sonic, artistic, and poetic practitioners as a means of consolidating the work we had begun several years earlier as part of the ‘Aesthetics After Finitude’ research network, a group based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It seemed to us that art and art criticism were having trouble digesting the demands placed on them—not only by the elorescence of new philosophies of realism and materialism that has characterized the opening decades of the twenty-irst century, but also because philosophy was threatening to colonize this space without art, leaving it behind in its preference for science and mathematics. ‘If the question of a speculative aesthetics has largely been neglected by philosophy’, we suggested, ‘it is because art has not yet posed it with a suiciently diicult problem’.1 This book brings together the work of the diverse group of philosophers, writers, sound and visual artists—spanning six countries and four continents—who contributed to the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in February 2015, and thereby represents a constructively transdisciplinary and cosmopolitan range of approaches to that challenge. While we don’t think we have solved the problem of an art without the human, or an aesthetics after initude, we are conident that the texts that make up this volume confront its dificulty with the intelligence, creativity and dedication such a project demands. 1. Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland, ‘AAF 2015: Call for Papers and Works’, Aesthetics After Finitude, Web: http://aestheticsafterinitude.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/aaf-2015-call-for-papersand-work.html, 13th May, 2014. 7

8 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland Above all, they demonstrate a collective desire to insert art back into the space of non-anthropocentric modalities of thought, and work through the subsequent provocations for metaphysical discourse. The thought of initude has been the mainstay of Western philosophy for three centuries, culminating at the end of the twentieth century in irresolvable proclamations of cultural indeterminacy and the ininite digressions of the linguistic turn. Yet, faced with the rapidly changing terrain of early twenty-irst century scientiic and technological developments and their correlative upheavals in the domain of the social, the reign of initude seems to have inally found an objective limit. Pitted against these new problems and possibilities, traditional philosophical apparatuses can be disabling rather than enabling. The irony of creating work in the Anthropocene is this: just as our species has dominated the development of conditions of life on earth, so too has it been displaced from a privileged position within it. If humanity is now something to be constructed rather than imposed, how can we energize and repurpose aesthetics beyond the ontological and epistemological limitations of human initude? Traditionally, aesthetics has been attached to phenomenal experience, and above all to the singularly human apprehension and appreciation of beauty. Indeed, aesthetics as a subject of enquiry seems inextricably bound to experience and afect, precisely the domains in which human cognition is rendered inite. What, then, do we mean by the strange formulation of an ‘aesthetics after initude’? At irst, this notion seems entirely counter-intuitive. Should we not seek to retain our phenomenal existence as it is, creating art focused not on dehumanization, or even the liquidation of ‘human’ modes of being, but instead on their sanctity? Should the task of art not be conservational (if not conservative)? It is the premise of this anthology that the time for such comforting aesthetic husbandry has now passed. The identiication of the Anthropocene (an act of naming which intuits an end), the new social and political paradigms of inance capitalism, and the unprecedented cultural, technological and ecological pressures of life on today’s earth (and perhaps, even of it) leave traditional afective and representational economies of art wanting. The demands placed upon aesthetics by the contemporary situation are varied. To take one particularly notable example, the last thirty years have seen a groundbreaking exposure of our neural ‘selves’. The advent of fMRI and new theories of consciousness and decision-making have stripped the humanist aura from the subject of perception and interpretation.2 Novel scientiic images of the thinking and feeling self confound aesthetic theory precisely by uprooting the model of the ‘self’ that legitimates it. How does aesthetics—the domain of thinking perception, the beautiful, the afecting—account for itself in an age where scanners can produce apparently literal images of perception, trace the inluences of events below the threshold of conscious apprehension and, indeed, manipulate neural activity without 2. The work of Thomas Metzinger has been particularly signiicant in bringing neuroscientiic advances to the humanities disciplines. Metzinger’s theories of the self as virtual, rather than something that is or something that we have, are crucial to any comprehension of a human subject that is neuroscientiically valid rather than simply experientially ratiied. See, for instance, Metzinger’s seminal work Being No One, Boston, MIT Press, 2004.

Introduction 9 the need for phenomenal stimulation? What happens when perception can see itself? Simultaneous with this shift in neuro-afective technologies is an equally unprecedented cognitive demand: the advent of our recognition of climate change or ecological catastrophe. Conceptually grasping such a large-scale and distributed change in geophysical dynamics makes unprecedented demands on human perception because such changes rarely provide local or visible instantiations.3 The phenomenon whereby a major event is not experientially available to us is not unique to climate change. This structure is replicated today in the torsions of inancial capitalism, a source of major economic crisis and a domain so rapid and complex that it now operates in excess of perceptual traction— even for those whose job it is to understand it. 4 Although climate science, neuroscience and contemporary theories of the market seem to be radically disconnected domains, they all participate in a broad shift in the possibilities and problematics of perceptive technologies, introducing novel cognitive, environmental and biopolitical circumstances that an aesthetics bound to the human subject has trouble accounting for. The problem that comes into focus here is one of scale. There is a fundamental mismatch between our spontaneous apprehension of reality and the scientiic data that contradicts this experience. We can either continue to veer towards ignorance or we can create new ways to grapple with these complexities.5 Art has a lot to ofer this situation. As well as being formulated in response to the urgency of the human situation at the beginning of the twenty-irst century, these pressures arise alongside the recent and profound shift in contemporary philosophy attributed to thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, François Laruelle and Reza Negarestani, among others.6 The work of these thinkers is pertinent to the 3. For example, how do we comprehend what Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’: a thing ‘that is massively distributed in space and time relative to humans’? Morton’s lattened vision of aesthetic experience develops hyperobjects as constructions or aggregates that have no speciic locality, are inter-objective and are widely distributed. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects Minneapolis, Minnesota Press, 2013, p. 1. 4. See Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, 2010. The aesthetic and ontological implications of high frequency trading and algorithmic capitalism are addressed by Laura Lotti in this volume, see Enter the Black Box: Aesthetic Speculations in the General Economy of Being. 5. The recent emergence of the discipline of agnotology, which studies the deliberate manufacture of ignorance, is a good example of a disciplinary response to this increase in both complexity and vulnerability manufactured by the new challenges presented by neuroscience, climate science and the emergence of inance capitalism. Agnotology is briely discussed in Laura Lotti’s paper in this volume, see note 4. 6. Importantly, the way for such thought has been one paved by feminist thinkers (notably those connected to the materialist and techno-feminist movements of the late twentieth-century) such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and Sadie Plant. For a discussion of both the pioneering claims and limitations of these thinkers in relation to realist and materialist conceptions of art, see Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey and Suhail Malik’s introduction to Realism, Materialism, Art, Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, Suhail Malik (eds.), Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2015, pp. 23-25. More recently, Catherine Malabou has been a forerunner in suturing naturalist theories of brain plasticity to feminist politics in a way that straddles late twentieth century continental philosophy’s investment in deconstruction and twenty-irst century neuroscience, see (for example) Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference, trans. Carolyn Shread, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2011. Meanwhile, a younger generation of feminist thinkers

10 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland problems raised above in their divestment of the primacy of critical and subject-bound dimensions in philosophical thought, instead giving full weight to rigorous speculative and pragmatic modalities of exploration and experimentation. The phrase ‘aesthetics after initude’ is a reference to—and reiguring of— the title of one of the key catalytic philosophical works of the early 21st century: Quentin Meillassoux’s extended essay Aprés la finitude or, After Finitude.7 This essay emerged from a wider philosophical project in which Meillassoux develops a concept of the absolute in order to construct the basis for a realist and materialist philosophy. Meillassoux argues that philosophy has been impaired by the idea that there is an inescapable correlation between thought and experience, perhaps the most powerful presupposition in Western philosophy since Kant. Meillassoux’s term, ‘correlationism’, describes a traditional tenet of modern thought that claims we can only access the world through the distorting lens of experience. The ‘correlationist’ maintains that reason and thought are bounded by the experiential, and thus any noetic hold on the noumenal is inevitably a contradiction. Meillassoux seeks to construct a habitable space within that contradiction by following its own logic: at once denying a naive purchase on the real whilst also formalizing an escape route ‘out of’ the phenomenal bind. After Finitude begins with an appeal to rehabilitate primary and secondary qualities. A secondary quality, following Meillassoux’s account, is a sensation that we derive from an object, i.e. we burn when we touch ire. A primary quality is an attribute of an object: for example, its colour. For post-Kantian philosophy, this distinction breaks down almost immediately when we realize that colour, an attribute of the object that is supposed to be independent of our perception or its efect on us, is in fact entirely dependent on the capacities inherent to the unique structures that conigure and circumscribe human sense perception. Meillassoux, however, wants to restore the possibility of the primary quality, which severs the idiosyncratic afordances of human perception from that which we know exists. This issue of primary and secondary qualities can be igured as representative of the entire philosophical consensus of ‘correlationism’. For Meillassoux, ‘what decisively discredited the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is the very idea of such a distinction: i.e. the assumption that the “subjectivation” of sensible properties (the emphasis on their essential link to the presence of a subject) could be restricted to the object’s sensible determinations, rather than extended to all its conceivable properties’.8 are responding in their own ways to the challenges outlined above. Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea’s Manifesto for the Gynecene proposes an ‘expanded’ and ‘inhuman’ humanism, compatible with both ‘machinic desires and existing forms of life’, while Laboria Cuboniks hijacks the formal abstractions of category theory to outline a plan for the construction of a ‘transmodern’ universalist politics, founded on the anti-naturalist insights of queer theory and transfeminism in Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. Both appear (in German translation) in Dea Ex Machina, Helen Hester and Armen Avenessian (eds.), Berlin, Merve, 2015, and online (in English): Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea, Manifesto for the Gynecene, http://ininitexpansion.net/gynecene.pdf, January 2015; Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/, June 2015. 7. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, London, Continuum, 2008. 8. Ibid., p. 2.

Introduction 11 One of the ways in which Meillassoux will return to primary qualities is to reassert a renewed form of the Cartesian thesis that ‘all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself.’9 He then goes to great lengths to show how a statement such as this is impossible to accept in the current philosophical milieu; a milieu dedicated to the primacy of the subject: ‘We cannot represent the “in itself” without it becoming “for us”, or as Hegel put it, we cannot “creep up on the object from behind” …’.10 Meillassoux’s strategy is exemplary in its attempt to confront Kant on epistemological terms. After all, this was the Critique of Pure Reason’s brilliant maneouvre—to transfer the dispute between dogmatic rationalism and empirical scepticism onto epistemological terrain, a context (inspired by the latter) in which Kant could then reconstruct a philosophical position capable of satisfying the demands of a new critical methodology. Consequently, the legacy of initude is irst and foremost an epistemological problem and—no matter how enthusiastically one wants to hurtle into ‘speculative’ terrain—it does no good to forget that one of the most important objectives of the irst Critique was to purge philosophy of spurious metaphysical constructions that cannot furnish a proper epistemological foundation for whatever it is they claim. By engaging Kant’s legacy on its own terms and attacking it at its strongest point, Meillassoux’s ‘speculative materialism’ discovers an epistemological loophole that opens onto the real. The path it locates between the ‘for us’ and the ‘in itself’, or the phenomenal and the real, is necessarily one cleaved by knowledge. Importantly, for Meillassoux, speculative activity is constituted by a ‘non-correlational mode of knowing’, which does not necessarily infer a metaphysical standpoint.11 In fact, he deliberately keeps metaphysics and speculation separate, deining the ‘factial’ (the absolute facticity of the correlation—the fact that there might be an ‘in itself’ diferent from the ‘for us’ and that this ‘might’ refers to a real ‘in itself’) as ‘the very arena for speculation that excludes all metaphysics’ in accordance with the precision that metaphysics either posits a necessary entity or relies on the principle of suicient reason to access the absolute.12 Thus, for the speculative materialist, the speculative act is buoyed up by the absolute possibility that any theory entertained about the ‘in itself’ is potentially absolutely true, while the correlationist ‘is incapable of disqualifying any hypothesis about the nature of the absolute’.13 Mounted, thus, from the epistemological foundation that Meillassoux has carefully and painstakingly laid (via the deduction of factiality—and ultimately ‘hyperchaos’), the speculative act attains an unprecedented level of gravity. 9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Ibid., p. 4. 11. Ibid., p. 119, italics added. 12. Ibid., p. 128. ‘Factiality’ is the principle of unreason: ‘everything in the world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason’. Alternatively put, factiality is the fact that ‘[e]verything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this is not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.’ Ibid., p. 53. 13. Ibid., p. 65.

12 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland At the end of After Finitude, Meillassoux evokes Kant’s declaration that his critique of reason equates to a Copernican revolution in thought. ‘Yet this is where we encounter a rather disconcerting paradox …: when philosophers refer to the revolution in thought instituted by Kant as “the Copernican revolution”, they refer to a revolution whose meaning is the exact opposite of the one we have just identified’, this latter being that of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who—against reigning theological models of the time—discovered the fact of the earth’s revolution around the sun.14 In light of this decentralization of the human subject’s place in the universe by science, Meillassoux argues that Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ is in many ways a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’. For, at the precise moment that modern science was trying to give us knowledge about ‘the nature of a world without us’ in which ‘the truth or falsity of physical law is not established with regard to our own existence’, Kant returned humans to the centre of epistemology. Against Kant, Meillassoux holds fast to the original ‘Copernico-Galilean event’ which ‘institutes the idea of a mathematical knowledge of nature’.15 Outside of Meillassoux’s own employment of the metaphor, the famous Copernican shift—away from the geocentric model of the universe and the privileged place of humanity within it, to a much less forgiving cosmic viewpoint—can be understood as a parallel event to the recent developments in neuroscience, the possibility of ecological catastrophe, and the era of algorithmic capitalism mentioned above. Furthermore, just as the most signiicant astronomical revolution of early modernity did not unleash some radical potential of human thought but rather restricted it (bufering the human subject from the world by a rousing philosophical investment in phenomenal being), the ‘deracinating efect’ (to borrow a favourite phrase of Negarestani’s) of these new developments threatens to turn us further inwards, back towards the safety and familiarity of hermeneutics, the unquestioned valuation of subjective perception, and a return to the discourse of authenticity.16 Speculative philosophy counters this by seeking once again to go ‘beyond initude’ (in Meillassoux’s words)—to reigure the relation between phenomena, the human subject, and the cosmos that delivered those Copernican truths in the irst place. Meillassoux is not the only philosopher to attempt to recalibrate our conception of the relationship between the real and the phenomenal without ultimately falling back into the human. Over the last decade, several schools of ‘speculation’ have emerged under the various banners of ‘non-philosophy,’ ‘speculative realism,’ ‘object oriented philosophy,’ ‘accelerationism’ and ‘new rationalism’. The 2007 Speculative Realism conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, was a key event in this history, bringing Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux together to sound out novel conig14. Ibid., p. 114. 15. Ibid., p. 124. 16. Recent works notable for their rejection of authenticity as a viable locus for political and social action are Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, London, Verso, 2015 and Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/, June 2015.

Introduction 13 urations of the real. The nomenclature of ‘speculative realism’ has become increasingly obsolescent as each of these philosophers has gone on to develop the role played by realism in their individual projects, yet the initial impetus to go ‘beyond the correlation’ remains. Grant’s revision of Schellingian Naturphilosophie presents a realism that spans both nature and the domain of Ideas (with nature as primary but co-productive with the thought it thinks through). Grant seeks to understand human thought as the latest product in an asymmetrical, generative, naturalist epistemology. One that can never turn back to capture the conditions of its own production, and therefore, is always necessarily incomplete. Grant understands this epistemological rift as a motor for a form of natural-physical speculation that can only move forwards in time, away from the question-mark of its ground. Epistemology is thus retained in Grant’s thought, but under very speciic temporal conditions. Just as nature ‘mountains’ or ‘rivers’ or ‘planetizes’, ‘nature thinks’— what we discover in thinking nature, is that nature is thinking us.17 This activates, as Ben Woodard has put it, a productive ‘relation between speculation and the sciences, between postulates of creative thinking and speculative practices’.18 Grant suggests that this timely re-elaboration of Schelling’s transcendental naturalism operates as an alternative to the static transcendental structure proposed by Kant, and that, if the importance of Schelling’s work has been neglected, it is due to a mix of inaccurate criticism and the formidable bulk of the writings he produced. This may, as Woodard points out, invite accusations of ‘occultism’ from the Kantian critic who would prefer to maintain an inherent ontological separation between the human (marked by the capacity for reason) and nature. But such accusations, Woodard continues, can be countered by the equally virulent claim that the ‘very division of the thinker and the thought is just as occult and ungrounded as [Schellingian] hyperconnectivity’.19 What Grant’s Schelling provides, then, is a transcendental structure that immanentizes thinker and thought, explaining thought in terms of its natural constitution. This amounts to a denial of exhaustive interiority. As Grant has written: ‘The Idea is external to the thought that has it, the thought is external to the thinker that has it, the thinker is external to the nature that produces both the thinker and the thought of the Idea’.20 All are diferent strata of a productive nature, coordinated via a sheaf of exteriorities, and animated by contingencies on all levels. What this leaves us with is a vision of nature that is ungroundable and irreducible to its aggregated parts. Graham Harman, famous for developing an ‘object oriented philosophy’ (OOP) that refuses the centrality of human consciousness, has perhaps strayed 17. Iain Hamilton Grant, ‘Speculative Realism’, Collapse III, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2007, p. 344. 18. Ben Woodard, ‘Ultraviolet’ in Prismatic Ecolog y: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jefrey Jerome Cohen, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, pp. 252-269. 19. Ibid. p. 255. 20. Iain Hamilton Grant, ‘Speculative Realism’, Collapse III, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2007, p. 339. It is important to note that the notion of ‘externality’ here is meant to describe the condition of something raised to a new level, rather than something made foreign.

14 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland furthest from the original premise of overcoming correlationism.21 Like correlationism, object oriented philosophy begins with an airmation of an epistemological limit: we can never know the reality of the objects we encounter. In a fashion similar to Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, object oriented philosophy then radicalizes the correlationist position, but where speculative materialism pushes initude into a positive epistemological premise (‘hyperchaos’), object oriented philosophy extends initude beyond the bounds of the human to bestow it naively upon everything.22 This extension of the negativity of initude cannot occur without mobilizing a series of spurious metaphysical assertions. Namely, that nonhuman objects encounter other objects as sensual objects (following a consummately human model), and that all objects have a real, transcendent core that withdraws from access. Rather than presenting a means by which this failure of knowledge might be overcome, however, object oriented philosophy relocates the initude of the human subject to the object (or from the real object to the sensual object that it relates to with sincerity, in Harman’s schema) where it becomes an essential property, and thereby switches an epistemological assertion for a metaphysical, ontological one. For Harman, what begins as a negative epistemological claim about the human subject becomes a positive, though untenable, metaphysical claim about the object. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Harman’s philosophy for those working in art and aesthetics has been his claim that, for OOP, aesthetics is ‘irst philosophy’.23 This is sustained by his concept of ‘allure’, an ‘aesthetic’ rather than epistemological mode of access. As a means of apprehension of the real, allure operates akin to Heidegger’s broken hammer (in accordance with the model outlined in Harman’s realist reading of the tool-analysis).24 In order to apprehend something of an object’s real core, one must experience the detachment of its real, uniied essence from its phenomenal accidents. When it surprises us by coming to pieces in our hands, something that exceeds the hammer’s phenomenal presence makes itself apparent speciically by not being explicable in terms of the object’s phenomenal instantiation. Allure is thus a modality of failure: in failing to capture the real, allusion forces it to separate from certain sensual qualities, purportedly generating a momentary negative image of the uniied, real object. Thus, allure rises up to replace knowledge as the exemplary instrument of realist discovery. The claim that all objects relate sensually liberates aesthetics from the human-world relation and allows it to exist as a potential modality for all object relations. Furthermore, following Harman, because the real resides at the heart of every object and necessarily withdraws from access, allure furnishes the sole means of communion between real objects; it is the 21. See, for example, Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphyics: Phenomenolog y and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago, Open Court, 2005 and The Quadruple Object. Winchester, Zero Books, 2011. 22. As Peter Wolfendale has put it in his recent book on Harman, ‘properly understood, Harman’s work should be seen not as a critique of correlationism, but a consolidation of its central tenets.’ Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2015, p. 6. Italics added. 23. For an AAF critique of this position, see ‘Ontology for Ontology’s Sake’, http://aestheticsafterinitude.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/ontology-for-ontologys-sake-object.html, April 2013. 24. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago, Open Court, 2002.

Introduction 15 singular occasion in which real objects might ‘touch without touching’. Aesthetics, then, not only absorbs epistemology, but in a way that has been very seriously problematized by recent criticism, it absorbs causality as well, leading Harman dangerously close the dogmatic metaphysics he so energetically disavows.25 Object oriented philosophy has, for understandable reasons, been taken up with great enthusiasm by the art world, ultimately giving artists and other practitioners a ‘philosophical’ explanation of something they had been doing all along: interrogating the being of the ‘stuf’ they work with, and relishing the impossibility of resolving art into any deinite discursive trajectory. Whether or not object oriented philosophy will eventually proceed to push art and aesthetics beyond the established orthodoxies of the art world remains an open question, one upon which its value as a problematic thought and therefore an enduring philosophy, ultimately rests. Ray Brassier’s work on nihilism and philosophical realism seeks to reinstate ‘the coruscating potency’ of reason as an ‘invigorating vector of intellectual discovery rather than a calamitous diminishment’ of the human being in an indifferent world.26 Brassier is the philosopher who has distanced himself most vehemently from what is—or was—called ‘speculative realism’, yet his work stands as one of the most powerful cases for a reassertion of a philosophy that goes beyond the creation of meaningfulness in or for human existence; Brassier indeed develops a philosophy of the meaninglessness of the human. His best-known work, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, concludes with the claim that ‘it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction’.27 This allows Brassier to re-vision philosophy as an ‘organon of extinction,’ developing the very task of thought in a speculative register by enabling it to think that which it is not, or, more speciically, to place thought ‘after initude’.28 This move also allows us to think that which goes beyond empiricism; ‘extinction,’ Brassier reminds us, ‘is real yet not empirical’.29 Similar themes can be located in the work of Reza Negarestani, whose current philosophical project seeks to sever the umbilical cord between thought and empirical method. Acknowledging the complexly bounded nature of conceptual creativity, Negarestani exhorts us to ‘recognize speculative thought as a particular navigational scheme corresponding to schemata of a Universe that explicitly express its contingency, bottomless continuity, invisible layers and alternative passages or conceive the meaninglessness of the free sign, the unbound modality of the eternal and the in-divisibility of 0 qua nothing of nature for thought’.30 The navigational scheme activates a space in which thought can be unshackled from empiricism, opening passages to futures otherwise foreclosed by a situation that sees thought as receptive rather than enactive. For art, this entails an 25. Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2015, esp. pp. 97-105. 26. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007, p. xi. 27. Ibid., p. 238. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. ‘Reza Negarestani, ‘Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone’ in Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, Eugene Thacker (eds), Leper Creativity; Cyclonopedia Symposium, Punctum Books, New York, 2012, p. 290.

16 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland understanding of the creative act as part of an ongoing, open-ended and emancipatory labour of abstraction, for which art’s self-transformation—in complex unity with other modes of thought and practice—is key. Taking its model from contemporary mathematics, this ‘labour of abstraction’ describes a conceptual movement between local and global contexts, and the dynamic, reciprocal modiication of thought and matter set in motion by it.31 Because thought and matter must be held to the intrinsic demands and constraints of one another, subjective intentionality and objective stubbornness—taken independently—no longer constitute a suicient explanation for the paths a vector of exploration will take. Instead, thought must be deployed to destabilize matter, and matter must be understood to destabilize thought in a synthetic process of ‘diferential-integration’.32 This process is ‘emancipative’ because it incrementally liberates thought from both external causes (such as material determination) and any teleological exigency that threatens to restrict it in advance. Thus, art participates in a pragmatic dialectics of turbulence that cannot be isolated from broader political, scientiic and cultural concerns bound up, for Negarestani, with the emancipation of the human qua ‘inhuman’.33 One of the most interesting aspects of these particular lines of ‘speculative’ thought is their commitment to non-academic modes of writing. An investment in the conceptual possibilities of science iction, horror and pulp iction is common to all the thinkers cited above, and can—at least in case of Brassier, Grant and Negarestani—be traced back to the work of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and its wild blend of philosophy, iction, science, occultism and sonic experimentalism. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or Ccru, was active at the University of Warwick during the mid nineteen-nineties and relected the uncompromisingly experimental approach of its founders, Sadie Plant and Nick Land. Plant is best known for her cyberfeminist writings, usually taking the form of feminist reconigurations of technological histories and presented in a consummately nonlinear fashion, wise to the novel formal exigencies of the nineties internet and hypertext.34 Although her work has been accused of techno-utopianism or even a total disavowal of the material, Plant always espoused a rigorous materialism, one that took the virtuality of cyberspace seriously and attempted to understand the complex nature of the loops that fed embodied female existence into the anarchic and disembodied space of the web.35 Evoking an imminent shift in agential structures corroborated by the technological de31. For a sketch of the mathematical models Negarestani seeks to operationalize as epistemological modes of exploration, see Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, trans. Zachary Luke Fraser, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2012, and Guerino Mazzola, The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory and Performance, Basel, Birkhäuser, 2002. 32. Reza Negarestani, Torture Concrete, New York, Sequence Press, 2014, p. 4. 33. On Negarestani and Brassier’s current philosophical projects in relation to art practice, see Simon O’Sullivan, Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis, in this volume. 34. Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones, New York, Doubleday, 1997. 35. See Plant’s much overlooked essays, Sadie Plant, ‘The Future Looms: Weaving Woman and Cybernetics’, Body Society, vol. 1, no. 3-4, November 1995, pp. 45-64 and Sadie Plant, ‘On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations’ in David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (eds.), The Cybercultures Reader, London, Routeledge, 2000, pp. 325-336.

Introduction 17 velopments of the time, Plant’s works looked forward to an emancipatory future that would empower women, queers and anybody (or thing, for that matter) traditionally sidelined by the Western notion of what counted as ‘human’. Nick Land, Plant’s co-conspirator during the years of the Ccru (and indeed, throughout much of the nineteen-nineties), has made a name for himself as academia’s unassimilable part. His unorthodox approach to philosophy, always conceiving of it as a multiplicitous, experimental and practical pursuit, culminating in some of the strangest lectures, conference papers and intellectual and political experiments of the last two decades, has ensured his near-total efacement from histories of institutional thought, and an almost mythological place in pop histories of the time.36 The incandescent energy of his deliberately cryptic texts often leads to supericial, although impassioned, responses to his work. This is, perhaps, at the cost of a deeper examination of the consequences of his philosophy, one that contains the germ of many of the strains of speculative thought pursued by the thinkers surveyed in this introduction, as well as those—at one or two generations’ remove—contained in this book.37 In Land’s philosophy, Kant’s model of experience appears as the product of a pathological compulsion to control thought’s relation to its anarchic outside, with synthetic a priori judgement as the prototype for what would come to be known in the idiolect of Land’s experimental iction as the ‘Human Security System’.38 Auto-prophesying the eventual payof of his heterodox way of ‘doing’ academia, Land opens ‘Spirit and Teeth’, an essay bearing the polemical subtitle ‘A Preliminary Post-Mortem’, by referring to an outmoded Hegelian Geist as nothing more than ‘parody or nostalgia’, a development that has been ‘traicked to the edge of worthlessness’ by Hegel’s successors, ‘before inally succumbing to an irreparable marginalization by the scientiic advances of experimental and behavioural psychology, neurology, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, cybernetics, artiicial intelligence, until it becomes a sentimentalism, a vague peripheralized metaphor, a joke.’39 At its core, Kantianism enervates the noumenal by stabilizing it in advance through the consistency of its relation to the human subject. Radical exteriority proves troublesome for phenomenology because it can only be examined in this repressed form: its utter indiference is always already reconigured as human-correlated diference. True openness to alterity appears only in the lineaments of death, a folding of the exterior 36. Simon Reynolds, ‘Renegade Academia: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’ (unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999), Energy Flash, http://energylashbysimonreynolds.blogspot. sg/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html, 3rd November, 2003. 37. See Marc Couroux, ‘Xenochronic Dispatches from the Domain of the Phonoegregore’; Adam Hulbert ‘Folding the Soundscape: A Speculative ad hoc Account of Synthes/is Plateaux in relation to Actual Control’; Simon O’Sullivan ‘Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis’, Chris Shambaugh ‘The Emergence of Hyperstition’, and Amy Ireland ‘Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde’ in this volume. 38. Nick Land, ‘Meltdown,’ in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (eds.), Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011, 443. Elsewhere, Land refers to Kant’s critical philosophy as ‘the most elaborate it of panic in the history of the Earth.’ Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 2. 39. Nick Land, ‘Spirit and Teeth: A Preliminary Post-Mortem’, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (eds.), Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011, p. 175.

18 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland back into the interior, the inscription of an irrecuperable excess into the system which must expel it in order to persist. 40 Like Meillassoux, Land sees Kantian critique as modernity’s founding anxiety (a pre-apprehension of capitalist synthesis), but where Meillassoux deploys a reinvigorated philosophical rationalism against philosophical irrationality, Land actuates his critique of critique beyond the frontiers of both philosophy and the transcendental human subject, returning during the night to smuggle heterogeneous matter over their borders. 41 ‘To repeat Kantianism’ he writes ‘is to perpetuate the exacerbative displacement of critique, but to exceed it is to cross the line which divides representation from the real, and thus to depart both from philosophy and from the world that has expelled it into its isolation. Critique is a matter of boundaries… It is inherent to critique that a terrain of unthinkability is delineated, or that limits are set to the exercise of theoretical endeavour’. 42 Whatever it is that lies beyond the jurisdiction of the Human Security System, something other than philosophy will be required to make contact with it. This willingness to move beyond the domain of legitimate philosophical expression arises from a shared desire (inherent to the thought of the real) to speak from or with the outside, as well as being indicative of a more general drive to collapse theory into practice. This connection has been developed more recently by Eugene Thacker in his Horror of Philosophy trilogy, in Negarestani’s crypto-ictive text Cyclonopedia, Jussi Parrika’s The Anthrobscene, and Benjamin Bratton’s Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution. 43 The essays in this volume approach the question of an aesthetics after initude with a variety of diferent concerns. The ‘post-empirical’ world imagined in the philosophies detailed above is also about new power structures. Laura Lotti’s essay considers neoliberalism as a regime that secures and distributes power via aesthetic means. By investigating the aesthetic operations of neoliberal hegemony, Lotti elucidates several hypotheses for what it means to make ‘sense’ of power today. Other essays approach what we take to be the companion phenomenon to this age of iscal crisis: climate change and the advent of the Anthropocene. Three essays deal directly with speculative approaches to the environment. Prudence Gibson delves into the puncturing possibilities of a ictional and hyper-objective ly. She enacts environmental adaptation and sustainability by writing alongside French artist Herbert Duprat’s caddisly artworks, and as 40. See Nick Land, ‘Teleoplexy’ in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Robin Mackay and Armen Avenessian (eds.), Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2014, pp. 509-520. 41. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (London, Routledge, 1992) p. 27. In his later work Land would hand critique over to an a-subjective, materialist technics that is ‘increasingly thinking about itself’, invoking the dissolution of theory into the pure practicality of self-generating matter as a means of subverting the distinctions between cognitive representation and ictional speculation, as well as human and machinic agencies. 42. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (London, Routledge, 1992) pp. 5-6. 43. Eugene Thacker, Horror of Philosophy vols.1-3 (In the Dust of this Planet, Starry Speculative Corpse, Tentacles Longer than Night), Winchester, Zero Books, 2011-2015; Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, Melbourne, re.press, 2008; Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, and Benjamin H. Bratton, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution, Berlin, Sternberg, 2015.

Introduction 19 an encounter between theory and iction. Douglas Kahn’s chapter is a heliological examination of the geologic, and the ascendancy of the geological during the Anthropocene, whilst urging us to keep carbon in the ground. His reinterpretation of the Icarus myth, ‘Reverse Icarus’, tells the provocative story of the burning earth. In ‘Picture that Cyclone’ Stephen Muecke considers the bugarrigarra vision of a cyclone. For Muecke, the bugarrigarra (‘the Dreaming’) renders the cyclone both a ‘strange-attractor’ and a ‘hyperobject’, providing a model by which to rupture the ‘zone of exclusion’ around Nature characteristic of modern thought. As Muecke has written elsewhere, a speculative aesthetics opens up a deinition and ield of practice for art that protects the autonomy of the artwork: ‘The point of a speculative aesthetic is that space is opened up for artworks to engage with even more force than before. Engage with what or with whom? With the viewer, certainly. With the art institutions, certainly… with politics, even with the sciences… But without reducing art in each case to something else: to a human emotion, to making a living or a reputation, to a political necessity or a scientiic truth’. 44 Thomas Sutherland’s essay tackles this problem directly, addressing the philosophical tradition that views art as secondary to the a priori, in terms of the seemingly contradictory philosophical ‘use’ of art to illustrate that very a priori. Sutherland develops a rigorous account of Laruelle’s non-standard aesthetics, showing how it ofers a way out of these traditional aesthetic stalemates. Alongside these examinations of the economic and ecological implications for aesthetics, four essays consider ‘aesthetics after initude’ in relation to narrative, poetics and signiication more broadly. Baylee Brits investigates a theory of ‘generic literature’ in terms of theories of ininity and totality. Her essay looks at the way that the generic sign—a concept developed in Meillassoux and Badiou’s work—can be found in narrative iction. A generic literature is the form of a literary aesthetics that is ‘after initude.’ Christian Gelder considers the relationship between mathematics and poetry through Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Ses purs ongles’, arguing that sound remains poetry’s minimal condition, even when it is dealing with ‘nothing’, in contrast to Cantorian mathematics. Tessa Laird unscrambles the nested vagina of the chaotic mother goddess Tiamat in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, focusing on the preface by Kristen Alvanson. She charts the trope of the colour pink as a feminine gnosis throughout this text and as lipstick, matching sweaters, nail polish and lowers in related ilm, sci-i and video art. Amy Ireland’s contribution dramatizes the limits of human modes of representation, drawing creative production out of its restricted domain within the arts and applying it to the cosmos itself. Alien cities, parables about rats, Italian futurism, the steam engine and the cybernetics of Nick Land and Michel Serres come together in the construction of a receiver for signals transmitting from outside. Hyperstition and sonic theory iniltrate further chapters, converging in experimental approaches to categories of knowledge and experience. Chris Sham44. Prudence Gibson, The Carpentry of Speculative Things, UNSW Sydney 2012, n.p.

20 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland baugh, faced with the problem of elaborating the concept of hyperstition, presents us instead with an enigmatic document, skating through strange temporal loopholes to demonstrate hyperstition in the only way truly appropriate to the concept itself—via the apocryphal intensiication of coincidences. Marc Couroux and Adam Hulbert’s texts conspire with each other, extending this trajectory in the direction of sound studies, deploying the concept of hyperstition to explore modes of resistance, co-optation, and reconiguration of the phono-affective control structures inherent in late capitalism. In ‘The Nuclear Sonic: Listening to Millennial Matter’ Lendl Barcelos seeks a way to ‘sonically interrogate’ zones of exclusion created by nuclear catastrophes. Barcelos initially looks at work by Jacob Kirkegaard and Peter Cusack to elucidate a form of ‘nuclear sonic investigation’, before turning to analyse sound works of exceptionally long duration by Jem Finer and John Cage. Barcelos’ preliminary questions and speculations on ‘millenial matter’ open up the possibility of nuclear listening or listening radioactively. Finally, Simon O’Sullivan’s essay surveys the strengths and weaknesses of Accelerationism and Prometheanism in relation to art practice and subjectivation, focusing on diferent forms of ‘ictioning’—from the afrofuturist mythologies of Sun Ra and the assemblages of Mike Kelley to the hyperstitional practices of the Ccru—and inds them wanting. In response to what he perceives as a dearth of libidinal content and an adequate theory of the subject, O’Sullivan proposes the practice of mythotechnesis, a form of collective experimental and synthetic modelling that operates on a diagonal between rational and afective modes of apprehension in order to generate unforseen and unknowable possibilities in the midst of the given and the known. The varied and fractious ‘new realisms’ and ‘new materialisms’ explored at the beginning of this introduction have inevitably stultiied into camps divided by allegiances to one or another thinker. The volume that we present here has no such allegiance, and does not seek to present or develop a single line or type of thought. Indeed, we attempt to move past the groups and disputes of this decade of speculation to present cutting edge work that exceeds the parameters of what is now an entrenched ‘scene’. Equally, these essays are not beholden to the original ‘anti-Kantian’ requirement that characterised germinal speculative thought. Rather, the essays in this volume present diferent positions on speculation and participate in diferent readings of Kant and the tradition of critique, appropriate to a rapidly transforming constellation of ideas and practices liberated from the strictures of factional idelity.