The Anthropocene

>ect explores why philosophers are compelled to understand the social reality of which philosophy is a part.

"To really distinguish the ideal and the real is to understand how they are distinguished in practice, and not in thought - in what we do, and not in what we represent ourselves as doing."

"A philosophy that doesn't try to understand social reality - that doesn't try to understand its own connection to a world that wasn't created to be philosophisable - is not being done seriously."

Music

"I'm into CB" by The Fall
"I Sexoualiki Polyrrythmia Kai Ta Tria Paidia (Instrumental)" by Manos Hadjidakis (Sweet Movie Soundtrack) 


Artwork

"Lineare Komposition (Linear Composition)" by Ljubow Popowa

>ect 9 In Conversation with Ray Brassier

Author, Publisher, and Art Critic Chris Kraus joins hosts Eric Newman, Kate Wolf, and Medaya Ocher to talk about her new collection, Social Practices; which is described as "Essays on and around art and art practices" by Semiotexte, the legendary radical imprint where Chris has been a driving force since the '90s. What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about the role of art and art criticism in contemporary society; with detours into the recent cultural history of LA, the back-story to her novel I Love Dick, and the importance of good old fashioned description when your beat is radical creativity beyond your comfort zone.
Also, Kwame Anthony Appiah, who chaired this year's Man Booker Prize, returns to recommend the book that won fiction's most prestigious award, Milkman by Northern Irish author Anna Burns.

Chris Kraus' Social Practice

In this first episode of 2020, we acknowledge the significant scholarly and theoretical development currently taking shape in the sociology of sport specifically and the humanities and social sciences in general. An increasing number of critical sport scholars are embracing theoretical discourses we can collectively associate with “New Materialism”, scholarship seeking to destabilize Anthropocentric notions of human subjectivity and relate humans with nonhuman and environmental actants in the contemporary context of rapid technological change and global late capitalism. New Materialism complicates the influential foundations laid by decades of historical and cultural materialist inquiry, as well as the twentieth-century “linguistic turn”, in which feminist, critical race, postcolonial and poststructural scholars emphasized the social constructed-ness of categories like gender and race and the role of discourse in contexts of identity formation. Equipped with this insight from the linguistic turn, sociologists, cultural theorists, historians, geographers, and other critical scholars are returning their focus to “matter” and are trying to better understand human life in relation to technology, animals, and other environmental and non-human “actants” in a way that does not privilege the human subject.

Thus, we dedicate the first episode of 2020 to the question of New Materialism and how New Materialist theories can productively extend the critical study of sport, physical culture and the active body in new and excited ways. We speak with Drs. Joshua Newman, Holly Thorpe, and David Andrews, three prominent and influential figures in the sociology of sport field who recently edited a volume of New Materialist scholarship, culminating the new book Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body: Materialisms, Technologies, Ecologies. The editors discuss New Materialist inquiry and how the theoretical development can lead to more nuanced takes on the role of sport and the moving body in our present era of climate change and late capitalism. We then speak with Dr. Marianne Clark, a chapter author in the book, to gain a better understand of what exactly is New Materialist sport scholarship and what kind of research may be generated by the New Materialist turn.

Ep 14 - New Materialism and the Active Body

Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission.&nbsp; 

A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi's work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research and “techno-sensual” artistic exploration, Yi is opening new discourse in the realms of cognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, introducing concepts of the sensorial ecology of intelligence, the machine microbiome, machine ecosystems, and “biologized” machines. Maintaining a practice focused on co-subjectivity, Yi’s projects include collaborations with engineers, robots, synthetic and microbiologists, computer scientists, perfumers, ant and bacterial colonies, algae, tempura-fried flowers, and snails.&nbsp; 

Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City. Her recent solo exhibitions include Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. Yi’s work was also featured in the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Yi has screened her film, The Flavor Genome, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, 2017. In 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize for outstanding achievement in contemporary art. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery and 47 Canal, New York.&nbsp; Yi's Hyundai Commission at Tate’s Turbine Hall is scheduled to open in October 2020. It will be curated by Mark Godfrey, senior curator; Petra Schmidt, production manager; and Carly Whitefield, assistant curator.

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Anicka Yi on nonhuman ecologies and embodied machines

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The Los Angeles Review of Books magazine was created in part as a response to the disappearance of the traditional newspaper book review supplement, and, with it, the art of lively, intelligent long-form writing on recent publications in every genre, ranging from fiction to politics. The Los Angeles Review of Books seeks to revive and reinvent the book review for the internet age, and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.

Chris Kraus' Social Practice

LA Review of Books