Aesthetics After Finitude Anamnesis Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and re- collection of what has been lost, forgotten, or effaced. It is therefore a matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis. a re.press series Aesthetics After Finitude Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland, editors re.press Melbourne 2016 re.press PO Box 40, Prahran, 3181, Melbourne, Australia http://www.re-press.org © the individual contributors and re.press 2016 This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a creative commons license which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form whatso- ever and that you in no way alter, transform or build on the work outside of its use in normal aca- demic scholarship without express permission of the author (or their executors) and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. For more information see the details of the creative commons licence at this website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Title: Aesthetics after finitude / Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland, editors. ISBN: 9780980819793 (paperback) Series: Anamnesis Subjects: Aesthetics. Finite, The. Philosophy. Essays. Other Creators/Contributors: Brits, Baylee, editor. Gibson, Prue, editor. Ireland, Amy, editor. Dewey Number: 111.6 Designed and Typeset by A&R This book is produced sustainably using plantation timber, and printed in the destination market reduc- ing wastage and excess transport. Contents Introduction 7 Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland 1 Xenochronic Dispatches from the Domain of the Phonoegregore 23 Marc Couroux 2 Art Theory/Fiction as Hyper Fly 39 Prudence Gibson 3 Art, Philosophy, and Non-standard Aesthetics 53 Thomas Sutherland 4 The Nuclear Sonic: Listening to Millennial Matter 71 Lendl Barcelos 5 Geology Without Geologists 89 Douglas Kahn 6 Folding the Soundscape :: An ad hoc Account of Synthes\is 99 Adam Hulbert 7 Transfinite Fiction and the case of Jorge Luis Borges 111 Baylee Brits 8 Picture that Cyclone 127 Stephen Muecke 9 Enter the Black Box: Aesthetic Speculations in the General Economy of Being 139 Laura Lotti 5 6 After Finitude 10 The Murmur of Nothing: Mallarmé and Mathematics 157 Christian R. Gelder 11 Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis 171 Simon O’Sullivan 12 Pink Data: Tiamaterialism and the Female Gnosis of Desire 191 Tessa Laird 13 The Emergence of Hyperstition 203 Chris Shambaugh (and Maudlin Cortex) ‘The Krakatoan Chimera’ 204 Chaim Horowitz 14 Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde 217 Amy Ireland After After Finitude: An Afterword 229 Justin Clemens Editors 237 Contributors 239 Introduction Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, Amy Ireland This is a paradoxical book. And deliberately so. To invoke an ‘aesthetics after finitude’ 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 prob- lematizes 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 son- ic, 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 net- work, 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 de- mands placed on them—not only by the efflorescence of new philosophies of re- alism and materialism that has characterized the opening decades of the twen- ty-first century, but also because philosophy was threatening to colonize this space without art, leaving it behind in its preference for science and mathemat- ics. ‘If the question of a speculative aesthetics has largely been neglected by phi- losophy’, we suggested, ‘it is because art has not yet posed it with a sufficient- ly difficult 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 fini- tude, we are confident that the texts that make up this volume confront its dif- ficulty 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’, Aesthet- ics After Finitude, Web: http://aestheticsafterfinitude.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/aaf-2015-call-for-papers- and-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 finitude 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 infinite digressions of the lin- guistic turn. Yet, faced with the rapidly changing terrain of early twenty-first century scientific and technological developments and their correlative upheav- als in the domain of the social, the reign of finitude seems to have finally found an objective limit. Pitted against these new problems and possibilities, tradition- al 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 finitude? Traditionally, aesthetics has been attached to phenomenal experience, and above all to the singularly human apprehension and appreciation of beauty. In- deed, aesthetics as a subject of enquiry seems inextricably bound to experience and affect, precisely the domains in which human cognition is rendered finite. What, then, do we mean by the strange formulation of an ‘aesthetics after fini- tude’? At first, this notion seems entirely counter-intuitive. Should we not seek to retain our phenomenal existence as it is, creating art focused not on dehuman- ization, 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 hus- bandry has now passed. The identification of the Anthropocene (an act of nam- ing which intuits an end), the new social and political paradigms of finance cap- italism, and the unprecedented cultural, technological and ecological pressures of life on today’s earth (and perhaps, even off it) leave traditional affective and representational economies of art wanting. The demands placed upon aesthet- ics by the contemporary situation are varied. To take one particularly notable example, the last thirty years have seen a groundbreaking exposure of our neu- ral ‘selves’. The advent of fMRI and new theories of consciousness and deci- sion-making have stripped the humanist aura from the subject of perception and interpretation.2 Novel scientific 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 affecting—account for itself in an age where scanners can produce apparent- ly literal images of perception, trace the influences of events below the thresh- old of conscious apprehension and, indeed, manipulate neural activity without 2. The work of Thomas Metzinger has been particularly significant in bringing neuroscientific ad- vances 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 neurosci- entifically valid rather than simply experientially ratified. 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-affective technologies is an equal- ly unprecedented cognitive demand: the advent of our recognition of climate change or ecological catastrophe. Conceptually