The image that conjures the weird for me, above and beyond all others, is the rift in reality. The tear in the space time continuum that swallows the Starship Enterprise. The wardrobe that opens to the land of Narnia.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Understanding phenomena and facticity, creating an art-object for subjects within constellations of agential-realism.

There are two absolutes we can never attain. One is freedom and the other is authenticity. These have simultaneously been promised as absolutes; logos, hegemonic since the commodification of identity made it less of a thing, more of an attitude. If this is the case, how is it possible that, in the apparently end-times of socialism – where we are reckoned to feel that there is no option but to comply with hyper-resilient networks – the futurity of being a free and authentic subject still applies as an ideal?

If these ‘absolutes’ are unattainable, contingently emerging abstracts, why is the best art that which fluxes desperately in a carry-on struggle to reach both?

Speculative Realism: What are the key texts I need to read. I am interested in Speculative Realism (SR) (and Speculative Materialism (SM)) as attempts to overcome 'Philosophies of access' (those which privilege the human being over other entities; anthropocentrism).

Also, any texts that cover...

• How do SR and SM overlap/not overlap with object-oriented philosophy (OO)?
• How do SM and OO relate to post-humanism and anti-humanism?

Thanks

Speculative Realism reading list

Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my attempt to address what I see as the fundamental issue facing contemporary philosophy: how does human experience fit into the world described by science? Contemporary philosophers can be sorted into two basic camps: in the first, there are those who want to explain science in terms of human experience; in the second, there are those who want to explain human experience in terms of science. The former argue that science cannot explain human experience because there’s something about it that will always resist scientific explanation. The latter maintain that the explanation of experience will require us to revise both our understanding of it and our relationship to it

The Known Unknowns is a scheduled cycle of continuous readings running parallel to Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, an evening organised by Maria Fusco and Book Works at Whitechapel Gallery.

The festival reflects on the materialisation and dematerialisation of art writing through six newly commissioned works by Adam Chodzko, Ruth Ewan, Babak Ghazi, Beatrice Gibson, Nathaniel Mellors and Gail Pickering.

The aim of The Known Unknowns is to gather an interesting number of contributors to publicly read extracts or entire sections of their own texts.

The fluidity and the continuity of the act of reading-aloud will unveil a focus on both the singular texts and the whole reading as a unique entity.

This constant balance between singularity and plurality will also produce an interesting tension with the six commissioned intervention happening around the Whitechapel Gallery.

The Known Unknowns

21 November 2009 - Whitechapel Gallery

First Section (6.30-7.30)

Intro

• Neil Chapman

• Jeremy Akerman

• Ruth Beale

• Katrina Palmer

• Clare Gasson

• Hilary Koob-Sassen

• Nick Thurston

Second Section (7.45-8.45)

• Laure Prouvost

• Jamie Shovlin

• Reto Pulfer

• Ruth Höflich

• Daniel Rourke

• Sally O’Reilly

Third Section (9-10)

• Anna Barham

• Matt&Ross

• NaoKo TakaHashi

• Brighid Lowe

• antepress

• Stewart Home

Directed by Philippe Molins - Although honors came late in life to Jorge Luis Borges, his unique worldview had begun to emerge even as a child. This program examines the life and literary career of the charismatic Argentine writer, as well as the thematic, symbolic, and mythological underpinnings of his works. Archival interviews with Borges; his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges; his second wife, Maria Kodama; and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares provide insights into the private Borges, while readings from “The Mirrors,” “Dreamtigers,” “The Plot,” “The South,” “The Aleph,” and other landmarks of Latin American fiction demonstrate his virtuosity as a transformer of experiences.