talks unbound

A lecture by Mark Fisher on Nick Land, Jean Francois Lyotard and Anti-vitalism.

Mark Fisher - Anti - Vital


Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

In this lecture and discussion group, Robin Mackay will talk about orientation and futurity in the context of accelerationism, with particular references to Ray Brassier's essay Prometheanism and its Critics.

Robin Mackay is a philosopher and editor and publisher of Collapse Journal of Philosophical Research and Development. His work addresses contingency and hyper chaos. He has written about, interviewed, translated and published the key thinkers associated with speculative realism and non-philosophy.

Robin Mackay - Orientation, Acceleration, Futurity

On this week’s show Aaron Bastani and James Butler discuss automation, value, the secular crisis and the society of work.

The Beach Beneath The Crisis. In Conversation With McKenzie Wark

54321… Radical Philosophy Conference 2015 - Opening
with Bernd Scherer (Director, Haus der Kulturen der Welt) and Peter Osborne (Radical Philosophy)

54321... Radical Philosophy Conference - Acceleration & the New 
with David Cunningham, Frank Engster, Nina Power
Chair: Peter Osborne

What is the current state of philosophical debates about alternatives to the present? The British journal Radical Philsophy, founded in 1972 as "a journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy", holds periodic conferences to reflect on the situation. For the first time, the Radical Philosophy Conference takes place in Germany and discusses topics such as Acceleration & the New, Artistic Strike, Secrecy & Surveillance, Queer Theory & Geopolitics, Pedagogization, Philosophy of the Essay-Film, Animalities, On Organization.

54321… Radical Philosophy Conference 2015 - Opening and Acceleration & the New

Imagine taking a step forward, then a step to the right, & then a step back – where are you now? Do you have to reason for this, & how ‘far’ can you go? How are diagrammatic reasoning and representation different? Are diagrams for domains that can be represented spatially? Are mental images an internal perceptual representation shared by both internal and external inputs? Do (explicit) symbols make cognition possible? Is our cognitive architecture multi-modal? Can the blind use diagrams? How do we know what is extraneous in diagrams? Are diagrams often socially constructed? Do shapes lie somewhere between speech and scripts? Can a child learn to ‘read’ spontaneously? Are scripts arbitrary? However, are diagrams always homomorphic with ‘reality’? Are there links between the evolutions of geometry, logic, & diagrams? Can we make a diagram of ‘yesterday’? Or ‘not raining’? Can the absence of non-existent objects be represented? What if diagrams didn’t ‘exist’? Does language mimic diagrams? Would diagrams be significantly more used for proofs in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from artificial intelligence & cognitive science (Prof. B. Chandrasekaran, ex-The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio), philosophy of logic (Prof. Lopamudra Choudhury, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), & psychology (Prof. Prakash Padakannaya, University of Mysore, Mysore). Listen in...

#TCOD (The Constraints Of Diagrams) --- SynTalk

How might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation, Ken Wark starts with his own experience writing Gamer Theory as a ‘networked book’, mediating between Plato, WordPress, and World of Warcraft. This was an experiment in which critical media approaches were made to confront the computer game as an historically specific form, the form perhaps of our times. It was also an attempt to create online tools for a specifically critical mode of collaborative writing, at some remove from the argumentative and consensus style of the blog and wiki respectively. A third dimension to the experiment explored the relation of the gift of writing, of time, of attention, to the commodified form of the book. What can be learned from the results of this experiment? How can media studies be both in and of the emergent media forms, and yet retain a creative and critical distance from them? It is in its difference from what it studies that media studies begins to find the intellectual resources to respond adequately to the extraordinary world of media, in all its historical and anthropological depth and breadth.

McKenzie Wark is chair of Culture & Media and associate dean of Eugene Lang College, and an associate professor of critical studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard UP, 2007) and various other things.

McKenzie Wark, "From Gamer Theory to Critical Practice"

f(q) = Is soil a definitive sign of life? (#TCAFG)

SynTalk is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective.