This piece features samples from a recent lecture by Iain Hamilton Grant, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE, which beautifully interlaces the Platonic analogy of the sun with the ideas of a powers ontology – ‘You cannot separate this power from the entity. Being is power’ – while taking his students on a virtual walking […]
The Aesthesis of Unworlding: Against Aesthetic Inferentialism
Presented at the School for Materialist Research on 26th June 2012 Introduction In this paper I want to explore two related claims about the ‘recalcitrance’ of the aesthetic. The first is that aesthetic experience is composed of encounters with qualities, things, events, or processes that are not thereby conceived through the Encounter – Encounters are […]
Erotic Subtraction and Death
1. In her two-poem collection, Apostasy, Katy Mongeau narrates the desire to both kill and be killed within a world fruiting death in every leaf. The poetic subject is fractured because overwhelmed and broken by a lust that refracts it into nonhuman things: Me: convulsing, lust-fucking the mud, Sun, and consuming myself, dead rotten. Flower […]
Doom Metal Abstraction Lyric Sheet (Abstract Cruelty from Snuff Memories)
Dead Professor Oblivion wets his thin moustache.Orange jump-suits daub Rosa with an invitation of fish paste.The python’s tail undulates to Bukkake rhythmsas does the jungle girl/vore legend Her soused head dangles from the eyeless abomination.I watch all this in public seance.Glad to conform. after ghost porn deletionNarcissus hires surgeons to make him art pâtisserie.He is […]
The Death of Posthuman Life: a brief philosophical introduction to Snuff Memories
My first book, Posthuman Life: philosophy at the edge of the human, bequeathed several unresolved philosophical problems, above all the ethical impasse concisely expressed in Amy Ireland’s review of my new book, Snuff Memories: “The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced—so to know it, we must produce it.” Slightly less concisely, the decision […]
Enemy Industry20 Playlist
Here’s a playlist of music I created using Ableton Live 10 Suite and assorted virtual instruments (Native Instruments FM8 and Massive synths, Komplete as well as a probabilistic drum machine knocked up in the Max4Live Programming Environment). Styles range from electro metal/core to industrial/ambient noise.
Recent Publications
Since I’ve been prompted to update my university profile, I’ve decided to compile a list of (relatively) recent publications, dividing between straight academic output and experimental texts. Most entries come with links. A selective list of interviews is also included below. Academic Articles 2020. ‘Posthuman: Critical, Speculative, Biomorphic, in Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Joseph Wamburg […]
Dark Panpsychism: Philip Goff and Pandemonism
In his Nautilus article ‘The Universe Knows Right from Wrong’, Philipp Goff argues that panpsychism – the metaphysical thesis that the intrinsic properties of reality are properties of consciousness or ‘feels’ (or proto-phenomena, proto-feels) provides a metaphysical ground for objective truth about value. He argues that panpsychism affords an explanation for our ability to discern […]
Void Theory
Open removes a cup of hot expresso from Null’s mastectomied chest, spills it black on genitals mutilated as lilies. Loses another version of herself. Waits for the silence of divinity to crack. They have become experiments and deformations. How long till absence achieves pathos? Anna would like to know. Faded summer splits angled grey skin […]
Don’t fear the Basilisk
As Yudkowsky notes (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko’s_basilisk) The Basilisk faces a seemingly insuperable commitment problem. If the Basilisk comes into being somehow, then punishing simulations of those who impeded its emergence is a lavish waste of resources. So how can we be assured that the Basilisk will be irrationally committed to punishing us postposthumously? If we cannot be […]
