snakes & ladders: a radical matter poetics - when materialism is no longer enough
5th June 3pm Lightfoot Room, Old Divinity School, St John's College
Johnny invites you to take part in a sumptuous, sometimes wild, sometimes uncanny discussion on the now. It has emerged from a wider physical manifestation of a small but persistent worry, one that began to circulate with the onset of cybernetics or perhaps even earlier, with the 1942 Manhattan project. Or perhaps even a little earlier when Maxwell’s 1865 equation marking out a new kind of time – bending the future and the past to situate the present – prompted an entire re-imagining of the role of energy, speed, mass and with it, an entire re-imaging of the materiality of the world as we now know it. Maybe it even began before the beginning of the worry, say, in 60BC when Lucretius the poet-philosopher, danced into the very concept of matter, the materialisation of movement itself – as ‘ontological swerve’, a plurally-flexed grounding choreography so tempestuous, so delicious, so erotically raw that whole swathes of time, memory, rhythm, beat come alive as though on fire! Such was (and remains) the power of this ancient knowledge system, so innocently filed under the name ‘matter’.
Turning to our small, but not insignificant, worry: what if the entirely respectable world of Metaphysics, and, more precisely, those dialectical frameworks that privilege ‘materialism’ as a (or even the) key to understanding, challenging and/or changing our contemporary now – no longer can attend to today’s forms of agency – say black, feminist, queer, trans; What if it turns out that materialism in all its finery, is still unable to account for why the rise of populist fascisms in some places but not others or the importance of inventing (and implementing) different collective assemblages – say new democratic imaginaries, ethics and responsibilities. Like putting a big foot in a little shoe, what if all these so-called ‘contemporary now’ problems were simply relegated as ‘exceptions’ to the usual universalist rules of a materialist framework – wholly incapable of addressing new kinds machine-human-interspecies co-evolutions, new forms of war (guerrilla/bot/drone) and new, oddly cathected instances of intelligence (artificial, distributed, surveilled).
Come join the discussion, started by a few poets, contemporary philosophers, artists, djs, blues-jazz poets, computer engineers, the common octopus, independent film makers, physicists, metal workers, gamers, mycelium, architects, , and a few polymorphic beasts – to inhabit a different kind of matter – as bridge, as wake, as frottage, as an emergent flow, an intensity and circulation.
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Prof Johnny Golding
Johnny Golding is a philosopher/poet. Born in New York, lives and works in London. Studied at the Universities of Toronto and Cambridge. When times were dark and haunted, Johnny built a house. Likes the company of wild mustangs, big boned cats and, more recently, sentient beings of the 8-legged variety. Holds the chair as Professor of Philosophy and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art (London)t, is PI on two Artificial Intelligence Design labs with Hong Kong Polytechnic, head of the proto-Centre in Radical Matter at the School of Humanities, RCA. Golding’s take on art, philosophy and the wild sciences has been given strong support over many years by FwF PEEK (Austria) / Angewandte, University of the Applied Arts Vienna. Has a particular penchant for free jazz, Memphis blues, ska, and jellyroll (but not necessarily in that order).