This peer-reviewed essay is an intervention into the emerging field of 'Speculative Realism', which has links to the field of Speculative Aesthetics. The work is essentially an attempt to develop a theory of perception that is not at odds with the scientific worldview. In this respect, the dominant views of aesthetic perception are critiqued in favour of neurophilosophical views stemming from Thomas Metzinger. In order to position myself, I go on to analyse the fiction of Thomas Ligotti to develop the (...) idea of a non-human-centric phenomenal experience. This work operates within several philosophical contexts: one is the debate between phenomenology and scientific realism, of which the developing field of Speculative Realism is a part, and upon which the journal Collapse has been incredibly influential; a further context is that of transcendental materialism; another is that of the relationship between literature and philosophy. The article marks a departure within these fields by suggesting that recent developments in cognitive science can be understood not through a naïve scientism or a kind of brute materialism, but only through understanding the transcendental ramifications to the phenomenal experience of the human. (shrink)

This paper discusses allegorical procedures in two films by Ken Jacobs - Blonde Cobra and Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. Starting with Craig Owens’ notion of allegorical interpretation as disinterment, this paper proposes that we read Jacobs’ work as an allegorical examination of an exhumed filmic body. This exhumation acts as a double interruption: fragmenting the previous narrative and then stopping up the continuum of perceptual experience through the accumulation of these gathered fragments. Looking at the various interruptions in Jacobs’ (...) films, this paper will focus on those procedures that foreground the allegorical disintegration of the symbol and dwell upon the ruination of representation. (shrink)

Martin Arnold’s film pièce touchée takes possession of a pre-existing film and applies a strategy of re-counting frames through duplication and re-ordering. The sequential progression of the multiplied frames is metaphorically re-counted as the film is run backwards and forwards. As Arnold describes it: ‘I start with frame x, go forward to frame x+1 and then from x+1 back again through x to x-1.’ From the original’s order of 1–2–3 with pièce touchée we arrive at a new count, something like (...) 1–2–1–0. This paper will argue that there are three modes of love present in this filmic recount. First, the normative love presented in the original’s scene, a husband returning home to a wife. The second love is that of the identification with an ideal image, an ambivalent scene of narcissism and aggressivity: what Jacques Lacan terms ‘hainamoration’. Such a condition is demonstrated through Arnold’s re-arrangement, which lingers over the filmic body whilst doing violence to its narrative unity. The final form of love under discussion will be what Alain Badiou terms ‘the scene of the Two’: a disjunctive scene that refuses the fusional ideal, posing love as a shared investigation of the universe. (shrink)

In response to the significant increase of judgment and judgmentalism in contemporary film and television, 'A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television' investigates the evolving connections between the aesthetics and ethics of judgment. The volume ultimately contemplates whether we should, and can, do without judgment, questions that are just the beginning of a much-needed re-examination. The individual contributions of the collection all work towards a very specific focus on judgment that is unprecedented in its transdisciplinary composition and contemporary relevance. (...) By exploring examples of entertainment that aim to instigate judgment, 'A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television' advances the as yet underdeveloped area of research into television and philosophy. (shrink)

This peer-reviewed paper investigates the dominant underlying approach to aesthetic experience and conscious experience more generally – that is, a neo-Kantian phenomenological approach. In essence, I argue that such approaches are based on a petitio principii in relation to what I call the 'principle of appearing qua appearing' – a principle that, I suggest, underlies the dominant approach to aesthetic perception. So, the ramifications of this argument are that we ought to question the dominance of the phenomenological approach to experience, (...) and reassess our concepts of the aesthetic mode of perception in this light. The paper makes a specific contribution to knowledge in this field in that it identifies a weakness in the dominant arguments relevant to our understanding of conscious experience, and clears the path for views of conscious experience that emerge in cognitive science. The paper has been delivered at a number of major conferences, and is used as a course text at the American University of Berlin. (shrink)

This paper provides both a solution and a problem for the account of compositionality in Christopher Peacocke’s modest inferentialism. The immediate issue facing Peacocke’s account is that it looks as if compositionality can only be understood at the level of semantics, which is difficult to reconcile with inferentialism. Here, following up a brief suggestion by Peacocke, I provide a formal framework wherein compositionality occurs the level of the determining relation between inference and semantics. This, in turn provides a “test” for (...) compositionality, which, problematically, Peacocke’s natural deduction framework for classical logic can not meet. To finish, I briefly outline an alternative, bilateralist, framework for modest inferentialism, for which compositionality holds. (shrink)

In [5], Béziau provides a means by which Gentzen’s sequent calculus can be combined with the general semantic theory of bivaluations. In doing so, according to Béziau, it is possible to construe the abstract “core” of logics in general, where logical syntax and semantics are “two sides of the same coin”. The central suggestion there is that, by way of a modification of the notion of maximal consistency, it is possible to prove the soundness and completeness for any normal logic. (...) However, the reduction to bivaluation may be a side effect of the architecture of ordinary sequents, which is both overly restrictive, and entails certain expressive restrictions over the language. This paper provides an expansion of Béziau’s completeness results for logics, by showing that there is a natural extension of that line of thinking to n-sided sequent constructions. Through analogical techniques to Béziau’s construction, it is possible, in this setting, to construct abstract soundness and completeness results for n-valued logics. (shrink)

Edited by James Trafford, Robin Mackay, and Luke Pendrell. Documenting a roundtable on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics, this discussion ranges from contemporary art's relation to the aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design.

What happens when art practices meet a time of economic crisis? Why work? In posing these questions this book investigates positions between art, play and the refusal to work. It offers propositions and provocations as it reconsiders art as work. Francis Summers is an artist and lives in London. He teaches at UCA Rochester and is a member of the collectively organised artist-run gallery Five Years. He is committed to questioning relations between appropriation and enjoyment.

This paper examines the current interest in ‘art activism’, and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political. As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As (...) Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics ‘real’ social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences. Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as ‘an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest’ : a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience, the camp involved a residential ascetic ‘training programme’ followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk’s arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a ‘thymotic economy’. However, Sloterdijk’s re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of ‘rage’ which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, ‘non-symbolic’ rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment, the second issue raised is the formative role of ‘curating’ acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how ‘events’ of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy which conceals the formative ‘rage’ of disobedience. (shrink)

Introduction to commissioned, edited special double volume of Journal of Visual Arts. 4 (2+3) It introduces, contextualises and analyses contributions to the Third international and interdisicplinary Theors Confernece organised by Dr Nicholas Davey and Dr. Kerstin Mey and held at the University of Dundee in 2001.