/// WEEK 14 /// London Conference of Critical Thought 2014
I will be presenting at this years' London Conference on Critical Thought, to take place on June 27th- 28th at Goldsmith University London.
The strand I will be presenting with, is concerned with "The Human After Anthropocentrism? Life. Matter. Being." organised by Eva Aldea and Danielle Sands.
A brief summary of the strand:
"The rejection of anthropocentrism has become a theoretical commonplace, a prerequisite for new approaches to non-human animal life, for political ecologies and for new materialisms. However, both the understanding and the implications of this rejection differ widely between discourses, and it is unclear whether terms such as post-humanism and anthropodecentrism share a common referent. Despite a seemingly common goal to think outside the human, disciplines such as critical animal studies, ecological and environmental thought, and object-oriented ontology appear unable or unwilling to engage in dialogue.
This stream has two interconnected aims: to invite the exchange of ideas and to encourage a rethinking of the human after anthropocentrism without a return to anthropocentrism. On the one hand, we want to investigate if these separate anti-anthropocentric discourses are actually contradictory or, in fact, congruent, and to explore what fruitful questions may arise from an exchange between them. On the other, we ask how these approaches towards life, matter and being illuminate the human and its philosophical, ethical and political engagements."
Read the short abstract of what I submitted:
— S i l k e n S e l v e s —
Sericulture represents an intricate interplay of environmental conditions (such as light, air, water and plant quality) with people (as equal and mutually constitutive actants), tying them to a systemic alliance. It forms a uniquely resilient, 5000 year old (anthropocentric) human-animal-collaboration, with now far-fetching reach into digitality.
Silk has recently been recognised as material for biomedical applications, such as biodegradable and absorbable sensors to be implanted into the human body, e.g. to monitor diseases and communicating them to the outside, before dissolving gradually and traceless. The material affordances reach beyond its previous known capabilities: the furthered anthropomorphic take on material alteration bridges the organic and inorganic, also conceptually, by compounding it in techno- digital artefacts, forming a consequential gateway into the human body.
Latour would claim this to be an actantial- relational epistemology that rejects a positivist view of such objects being non-relational “in-themselves”. Silken implants, as semiotic techno- artefacts, would demonstrate their action as boundary objects, mediating non-local topology and scale-breaking interconnections – more quasi-objects than neatly joint hybrids of pristine origin. Post- modern principles are in this line of thinking not only reversed – man-made nature vs. societal impact of nature (organic electronics) – but diminished into a planetary-scale of computing with networked matter.
This paper seeks to discuss Latour’s notion of technology “acting from a distance” in dynamic systems by mapping it in relation to silk’s new trajectory. Silken electronics promise to mend the consequences of anthropocentrism with an even more radical and opaque approach to it: Technological inscriptions in materials shift previously comfortable, doxic self-hood into a transient, efficient and alien state of phenomenal space and self-perception – might hyper-anthropocentrism be in fact anthropodecentrism in disguise?