Ray Brassier
Iain Hamilton Grant
Graham Harman
Quentin Meillassoux

Friday 24th April 2009

UWE Bristol, St Matthias Campus UK

Further Information

Contact: Iain.Grant@uwe.ac.uk

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Collapse V : The Copernican Imperative is here at last. We received shipment yesterday, and we hope to mail out all advance orders and subscription copies on Monday. For all those who ordered in advance, our thanks once again for your support and for your patience while we prepared this remarkable new volume.

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EARTH MOVES
Launch Party for Collapse V 'The Copernican Imperative'
at Urbanomic Studio, Falmouth
Featuring
Hedluv + Passman
Oddstep Deployment Unit
Timothy Crowley
video by Brendan Byrne

Free Entry
Saturday 31st January

Featuring four in-depth interviews along with numerous absorbing essays and new work by three major contemporary artists, this impressive 587-page volume manages the unlikely feat of continuing Collapse's tendency to expand with each subsequent publication!

Thanks to our friends at Athenaeum Press we hope to have copies of the new volume mailed out by the end of January.

To all those awaiting Volume V, and especially those who have pre-ordered the volume, thanks for your patience, which shall be rewarded...

Guest editor Damian Veal's Introduction is now available on the downloads page. We are also grateful to readers able to download, print, and display a flyer for the new volume.

Editor Robin Mackay is speaking at Edinburgh's National Gallery of Modern Art on January 5, on Charles Avery's exhibition 'The Islanders': more details

Collapse Volume V: The Copernican Imperative includes contributions from: Julian Barbour, Nick Bostrom, Gabriel Catren, Milan Cirkovic, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Nigel Cooke, Alberto Gualandi, Iain Hamilton Grant, Paul Humphreys, Immanuel Kant, James Ladyman, Thomas Metzinger, Carlo Rovelli, Martin Schönfeld, Conrad Shawcross, Keith Tyson and Damian Veal.

Copernicanism tore asunder the fit between the world and man's organs: the congruence between reality and visibility.
- Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World

In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo proclaimed, through his mouthpiece Salviati, that he could 'never sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen' of those early advocates of Copernicanism who, 'through sheer force of intellect' - that is, without even the benefit of a telescope to confirm the theory observationally - 'had done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to the contrary'.

Since Galileo published his work in 1632, recognition of the deeply counterintuitive nature of scientific findings has become virtually commonplace, and the 'explanatory gap' between the 'manifest' and 'scientific' images of reality has long been a central concern for philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists alike. In this volume of Collapse, we bring together samples of the most intellectually challenging contemporary work devoted to exploring the philosophical implications of 'Copernicanism' from a variety of overlapping and complementary standpoints.

As in previous volumes, the involvement in Collapse V of several major contemporary artists alongside groundbreaking philosophers and prominent scientists is designed to open up new perspectives and new directions for thinking outside disciplinary constraints. From multiple philosophical and artistic perspectives, and from scientific fields as diverse as theoretical physics and cosmology, biology, mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and astrobiology, the volume addresses the issues of the 'deanthropomorphisation' of reality initiated by the Copernican Revolution, the relation between scientific and philosophical (Kantian) 'Copernicanism', and the enduring gulf between the spontaneous image of the world bequeathed to us by evolution and that revealed by the physical sciences in the wake of Copernicus.

With several of the contributions in interview form, Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative will be an accessible and thought-provoking volume exemplifying that characteristic blend of speculative audacity and scientifically informed insight which has always been the hallmark of 'Copernicanism'.

Contents of Volume V will be as follows (some details subject to alteration):

In Anaximander's Legacy, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (co-founder of Loop Quantum Gravity and author of Quantum Gravity) charts the historical dynamics of science's ever more radical overturning of the commonsense image of the world from Anaximander through Copernicus to the 'unfinished revolution' of twentieth-century physics - a revolution which, suggests Rovelli, challenges us to find a way of understanding the world in the absence of the familiar stage of space and time.

Rovelli's question 'Can we think the world without time?' is one which has preoccupied renegade theoretical physicist and historian of science Julian Barbour (author of Absolute or Relative Motion? and The End of Time) for the best part of five decades. In our interview The View From Nowhen we discuss the nature of his radical rethinking of the foundations of physics, his arguments for the non-existence of time and change, and the influence his ideas have exerted on contemporary quantum gravity research from outside the halls of academe.

In his contribution to the volume, Turner Prize winning artist Keith Tyson - well known for his intricate and provocative artistic displacements and extrapolations of scientific ideas - presents a Random Sampler from a Blocktime Animation.

In our interview with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (authors of dozens of ground-breaking popular science books, including their co-authored works The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and What Does A Martian look Like?), we discuss with them the continuing collaboration between mathematician and biologist; the key conceptual innovations of their co-authored works; their trenchant criticisms of what they see as the overly conservative and unimaginative nature of contemporary astrobiology; and their positive programme for a new science of alien life, beyond astrobiology, which they call Xenoscience.

In Sailing the Archipelago, cosmologist and astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic provides a sophisticated defence of anthropic reasoning (understood in terms of 'observation selection effects') against the charges brought against it by the likes of Cohen and Stewart as part of an ambitious project of laying the 'philosophical groundworks' of the nascent science of astrobiology.

In Where Are They?, philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom (Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy) revisits Fermi's Paradox, employing probabilistic 'anthropic' reasoning to motivate the conclusion that, far from being a cause for celebration, the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would in fact augur very badly for the future of the human race.

In his (2006) motion-sculpture Binary Star artist Conrad Shawcross gestured beyond Copernicanism, suggesting that life in a solar system where there is 'no such thing as one' would disturb fundamental epistemological assumptions. In a presentation of the various Models and Objects of Thought constructed by Shawcross over the last decade, Shawcross with editor Robin Mackay investigates the relationship between his work and the philosophical trope of Copernicanism, and previews his latest work Chord, to be unveiled in 2009.

In an interview charting the journey from Copernicanism to Enlightenment 2.0, Thomas Metzinger (philosopher of neuroscience, author of Being No One) discusses his 'self-model theory of subjectivity', the potential social and cultural ramifications of the findings of contemporary neuroscience, and responds to criticisms of his radical eliminativist position with regard to the existence of 'selves'.

In his Thinking Outside the Brain, philosopher Paul Humphreys (author of Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method) proposes that computational science is fast displacing humans from the centre of the epistemological universe, speculates on the possibility of a 'science without humans', and presents his proposals for a radically non-anthropocentric empiricism.

The paintings of Nigel Cooke present a meticulously conceived landscape of painting. His contribution in the form of a series of paintings, Thinker Dejecta, suggests a kinship between his figure of the vagrant painter at the end of painting, with the dejected thinker forever displaced from the centre.

In our fourth and final interview, Who's Afraid of Scientism?, James Ladyman (philosopher of science, co-author of Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised) discusses the forlornness of contemporary analytic metaphysics and the prospects for a radically naturalised metaphysics which would fully take on board the most counterintuitive findings of contemporary physics, finally dispensing with the habitual ontology of 'little things and microbangings' which continues to hold sway in contemporary 'pseudo-naturalist philosophy'.

In his The Phoenix of Nature, Martin Schönfeld (artist and philosopher of nature, author of The Philosophy of the Young Kant) presents us with a vivid picture of Immanuel Kant profoundly at odds with the recent popular characterisation of him as a conservative, anti-Copernican thinker, via a stimulating exploration of his early cosmology. Here we are presented a radically anti-anthropocentric, anti-Christian, naturalist, speculatively audacious Kant who pushes 'Copernicanism' to its limits; who abolishes the hand of God from, and introduces a history and evolution into, the Newtonian cosmos; and who as early as 1755 strongly anticipates the fundaments of what became the Standard Model of modern cosmology only in the 1930s.

To accompany his piece Schönfeld also contributes a new translation of Immanuel Kant's Concerning Creation in the Total Extent of its Infinity in Both Space and Time, an extended excerpt from his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens in which this astonishingly prescient cosmology of 'island universes' and the birth and death of 'worlds' is most magnificently and perfervidly portrayed.

Tackling the great philosophical 'Copernican Revolution' head-on, Iain Hamilton Grant (philosopher, author of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling) examines Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism: The Antinomies of Transcendental Naturalism.

In A Throw of the Quantum Dice Will Never Overturn the Copernican Revolution, Gabriel Catren (Director of the project 'Savoir et Système' at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris) presents what he calls a 'speculative overcoming' of recent influential quasi-Kantian interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rather than being limited to a mathematical account of the correlations between 'observed' systems and their 'observers', or pointing to the inherent 'transcendental' limits of physical knowledge, Catren argues that quantum mechanics furnishes a complete and realistic description of the intrinsic properties of physical systems, an ontology which exemplifies the Copernican deanthropomorphisation of nature.

In Errancies of the Human: French Philosophies of Nature and the Overturning of the Copernican Revolution, Alberto Gualandi (philosopher, author of Deleuze and Le problème de la vérité scientifique dans la philosophie française contemporain) indicates the features common to certain speculative philosophies of nature in 1960s France and problems facing current evolutionary biologists.

Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative
January 2009
Ed. D. Veal
Assoc. Eds R. Mackay, R. Brassier.
587 pp
Limited Edition 1000 Numbered Copies
ISBN 978-0-9553087-4-1
£9.99

The Norwegian philosophy journal Filosofisk Supplement features in its latest issue a review of Collapse IV: Concept-Horror by Jonas Jervell Indregard. The review is entitled Dødelig Gift - Which, since Jonas tells us 'gift' can mean both 'married' and 'poison' in Norwegian, describes Collapse as a lethal or deadly marriage (with reference to Reza Negarestani's Collase IV text The Corpse Bride), or a lethal poison...

And for italophone VJ theorists, a review by the same author of VJAM Theory, grandly titled Teorie in Movimento, appears here, in Digicult's Digimag 39

Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology
Rudi Visker

ESSAYS
Beyond Resistance: a response to Zizek's critique of Foucault's subject of freedom
Aurelia Armstrong

Alain Badiou: Problematics and the Different Senses of Being in Being and Event
Sean Bowden

Eugen Fink and the Question of the World
Stuart Elden

Between Rupture and Repetition: Intervention and Evental Recurrence in the Thought of Alain Badiou
Hollis Phelps

REVIEWS

Jeff Malpas, Heidegger's Topology
Miguel de Beistigui

Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (eds.) Transcendental Heidegger
Ingo Farin

Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge
Sam Rocha

EPISODE: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media

A one-day conference at Tate Britain

Friday 28th November 2008 10.00 - 1800

Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1A

£35 (£25 concessions), booking recommended

Includes drinks reception at the launch of the new book:

'Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media', published by Artwords Press.

For tickets call 020 7887 8888

or visit: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/symposia/

-----------------------------

Media-culture is an undeniable force in our lives. Its pervasive and pleasurable power has primarily been located in discourses on 'spectacle' and the persistent connections between technology and power in democracy. But when artworks can be seen to share the same experiential field as media-culture, both using and producing a media-culture, the question of how our experiences of it constitute the political is now imperative. How do media-culture and artworks, and the spaces they inhabit, produce and reform the naturalised and assumed realities of everyday praxis?
The research group Curating Video present a one-day conference on Friday 28th November 2008 at Tate Britain inviting nine speakers from the fields of visual arts, art history, cultural studies, media studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural studies to explore a new matrix of issues that have become crucial to the understanding of the affect of mediated images in our lives. Rethinking the power of fact that images generate, this conference seeks to put forth new dialogues, strategies and propositions to explore what is
now at stake for a politics of the mediated image.

Speakers include:

Bridget Crone, Director, Media Art Bath;

Dr. Graham Harman, Associate Professor, Dept. of Philosophy,
American University in Cairo, Egypt;

Professor Ahuvia Kahane, Director, Arts & Humanities Research
Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London;

Dr. Sharon Kivland, artist & Reader in Fine Art, Sheffield
Hallam University;

Professor Norman Klein, California Institute of Arts, Los Angeles, USA;

Dr. Suhail
Malik, Critical Studies Course Leader for Postgraduate Fine Art in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths,
University of London;

Dr. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Film Curator, Musée national d'Art Moderne, Centre
Georges-Pompidou, Paris;

Dr. Uriel Orlow, artist & AHRC research fellowship in Creative Arts at the
University of Westminster;

Dr. Johanna Sumiala, Lecturer at the Department of Communication,
University of Helsinki, Finland.


Throughout the day, three panels will each be chaired by Dr. Amanda Beech, Dr. Jaspar Joseph Lester, and
Matthew Poole.

The new issue of Umelec is now available, including an article 'Unfolding the Middle-East' by Collapse editor Robin Mackay on the work of Kristen Alvanson (see Collapse II and IV).

More information and ordering here

Full contents:

YES OR NO Ivan Mečl
IT'S ABOUT ILLUMINATION, STUPID -THE POLITICS OF ART IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA Damira Arsenijevic
POST-WAR DREAMS FROM SARAJEVO (Interview with Šejla Kamerić) Michal Koleček
Q: AGAINST THE CURRENT Lenka Vítková
STELLA MARIS KW
XYZ - ALL THAT'S IMPORTANT ...IS WITHIN YOUR REACH Daniel Grun
OUT Ivan Mečl
THC REVIEW AND THE CONDEMNED PAST Ivan Mečl
COUCH POTATO BY TRADE Viki Shock
SOLITAIRES AND THE CULTURAL PERIPHERY Josef Jindrák
POET'S GRAVE-DIGGER Andrej Bažant
WAR WITH PUTTI S.d.Ch
GENIUS OF MEDIOCRITY S.d.Ch
6 x STRIP Unseen
SECOND CULTURE IN AMERICA Ivan Mečl, Milan Kohout
ENGRAVED SNAPSHOT: JITKA MIKULICOVA William Hollister
ZUZANA VANSOVá Zuzana Vansová
PUNKS NOT DEAD Tony Ozuna
A PLACE IN FRONT OF THE PICTURE: MARIA LASSNIG Lenka Vítková
UNFOLDING THE MIDDLE EAST: KRISTEN ALVANSON'S NONAD Robin Mackay
REGULATIONS Jarmila Šubrtová
HOW DOES CREATIVE EDUCATION LOOK, CHILDREN? Katarína Galajdová, Dagmar Fuxová
ARTISTIC EDUCATION IN MEXICO; BETWEEN DISREGARD AND SUBORDINATION Hector Villarreal
TAKAO KIMURA Spunk Seipel
UTOPIAS UNDER HERITAGE PROTECTION HANSAVIERTEL DISTRICT OF BERLIN Tomas Ullman
HYBRIDRAUM - SEVEN DIRECTIONS FOR THE CITY OF TODAY Folke Köbberling, Martin Kaltwasser
FULLNESS, PLURALITY, AND INNER FREEDOM (Interview with Jirí Pribáň) Ivan Mečl,
CULTURE CHOKES; ART LIBERATES ART'S DEFENSE AGAINST THE PUBLIC'S FURIES Jirí Pribáň
VISION OF A CZECH CULTURAL APOCALYPSE IN TWO ACTS Ivan Mečl
EGON'S PROPHECY Milan Kozelka
THE VYŠEHRAD SÉANCE OR THE SECRET JOURNEY OF K. H. MáCHA AND V. HANKA S.d.Ch