The Aesthesis of Unworlding: Against Aesthetic Inferentialism

David Roden (Open University (UK))

The School of Materialist Research is proud to present its (free) promotional seminars for the month of June, 2021. David Roden will present his lecture: “The Aesthesis of Unworlding: Against Aesthetic Inferentialism” on June 26, 2021 at 18:30 CET, as part of a cluster entitled “Aesthetics and the Architectures of Novelty.” This seminar will consider the limits of a post/inhumanist aesthetics which views aesthetic cognition as a dynamic set of rule governed symbolic and world-building practices (on analogy with inferentialism in semantics). Roden will argue that such accounts overstate the constitutive power of rules while failing to offer an ontology that can explain the dynamics of symbolic change that it presupposes. In response, he aims to to show that an adequate aesthetics must include an ontology of the encounter which grounds and disturbs (or ungrounds) the coherence of aesthetic practice.

David Roden’s research has addressed the relationship between deconstruction and analytic philosophy, philosophical naturalism, the metaphysics of sound and posthumanism. His monograph Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (New York, 2014) explores the ethical and epistemological ramifications of Speculative Posthumanism: the thesis that there could be agents originating in human social-technical systems that become posthuman as a result of some technological alteration of their powers. His current work considers posthumanist theories of agency and their implications for aesthetics and philosophical method. Roden also writes experimental fiction and concept horror works. His experimental novella Snuff Memories is published by Schism Press (2021). He teaches at the Open University, U.K.

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is an informal graduate and post-doc level program that offers seminars and workshops that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics. SMR is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Wien and the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven that functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection the Social Sciences and Humanities and the STEM sciences. Two more institutions from Europe are expected to join the platform in the upcoming months. The Spring and Summer Sessions are offered for free and open to the public serving as promotional events that illustrate the programmatic commitment and style of work offered by the School for Materialist Research. Some of the confirmed speakers in the Spring/Summer series of seminars include: Paul Cockshott, Greg Michaelson, Ray Brassier, Anne-Françoise Schmid, John Ó Maoilearca, Giuseppe Longo, Agon Hamza, Adam Nocek, Katerina Kolozova, Vera Buhlman, Iris van der Tuin and many many more.