The Introduction to my book Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude, published on University of Minnesota Press, May 2018:... more
The Introduction to my book Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude, published on University of Minnesota Press, May 2018: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neurotechnology-End-Finitude-Posthumanities-Book-ebook/dp/B07DGR3ZQ2/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1547569478&sr=8-3&keywords=neurotechnology
Research Interests:
A daring, original work of philosophical speculation, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude mounts a sustained investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible... more
A daring, original work of philosophical speculation, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude mounts a sustained investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible experience and envisages what such a transition would look like. Focusing on emergent neurotechnologies, which establish a direct channel of communication between brain and machine, Michael Haworth argues that such technologies intervene at the border between interiority and exteriority, offering the promise of immediacy and the possibility of the mind directly affecting the outside world or even other minds.
Through detailed, targeted readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others. He pursues these questions across four distinct but interrelated spheres: the act of artistic creation and the potential for a technologically enabled coincidence of idea and object; the possibility of humanity achieving the infinite creativity that Kant attributed only to God; the relationship between the psyche and the external world in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology; and the viability and impact of techno-telepathic communication.
"Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude is a highly original and profound scholarly inquiry into the impact of technology on our understanding of art and of communication more generally. Michael Haworth is one of the most talented young researchers working in the humanities today."
—Alexander García Düttmann, Universität der Künste, Berlin
Through detailed, targeted readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others. He pursues these questions across four distinct but interrelated spheres: the act of artistic creation and the potential for a technologically enabled coincidence of idea and object; the possibility of humanity achieving the infinite creativity that Kant attributed only to God; the relationship between the psyche and the external world in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology; and the viability and impact of techno-telepathic communication.
"Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude is a highly original and profound scholarly inquiry into the impact of technology on our understanding of art and of communication more generally. Michael Haworth is one of the most talented young researchers working in the humanities today."
—Alexander García Düttmann, Universität der Künste, Berlin
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This article reconsiders Stiegler’s account of the emergence of the human species in light of research in the field of transgenerational epigenetics. Stiegler traces this emergence to the appearance of technical artefacts allowing for the... more
This article reconsiders Stiegler’s account of the emergence of the human species in light of research in the field of transgenerational epigenetics. Stiegler traces this emergence to the appearance of technical artefacts allowing for the intergenerational transmission of acquired memory that would otherwise die along with the organism. This is taken to constitute a rupture in the history of life. The argument that I develop critiques Stiegler’s account at two levels: On the empirical level I argue that emerging neo-Lamarckian developments in the life sciences pose a challenge to the terms in which the specificity of the human is outlined and the notion of the rupture with life that its emergence constitutes. On the logico-transcendental level, I contend that in its account of the rupture, Stiegler’s narrative repeats the logic of the ‘dual origin’ that he ascribes to Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan in their respective accounts of the origin of the genus Anthropos.
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Taking as its jumping off point recent attempts in the sciences of the mind to facilitate direct brain-to-brain (telepathic) communication, this article considers the challenges such a development poses to the phenomenology of... more
Taking as its jumping off point recent attempts in the sciences of the mind to facilitate direct brain-to-brain (telepathic) communication, this article considers the challenges such a development poses to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This is examined initially through recourse to Husserl's description of the encounter with the other in the Cartesian Meditations, Levinas’ rival account in Totality and Infinity, and Derrida's contribution to this dialogue in the essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. All three turn around the problem of how the externality and otherness that constitutes the other qua other can be presented to the I while being maintained in its very externality and otherness. The paper asks whether the prospect of fully realised telepathic communication would overcome intersubjective distance by offering a direct insight into the other's phenomenological interior, and how such a relation is to be conceived using the terms outlined in the above trio of texts. Finally, through appealing to Derrida's enigmatic essay ‘Telepathy’ and offering a close reading of his late concept of teleiopoesis we will overturn the phenomenological terms in which the discussion has so far been framed while arriving at a form of telepathy that is not reducible to the simple communication of a message between an active sender and a passive recipient, but which simultaneously maintains the distance between the actors involved. Teleiopoesis undermines the stable identity of the terms I and other and consequently the very concept of intersubjectivity is put into question.
Free link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/nDdzgUhdbvnfIwKCXpfU/full
Free link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/nDdzgUhdbvnfIwKCXpfU/full
Research Interests:
This essay examines the concept of genius in the work of Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Kant and argues that, despite Derrida’s arguments to the contrary, there is significant space for convergence between the two accounts. This convergence... more
This essay examines the concept of genius in the work of Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Kant and argues that, despite Derrida’s arguments to the contrary, there is significant space for convergence between the two accounts. This convergence is sought in the complex, paradoxical relationship between the invention of the new and the contextual conditions, or ‘rules’, from which any work of genius must depart but without which no work of genius would be possible. It is my argument that Kant evades the true consequences of his own thought and escapes into a naturalist metaphysics. Only Derrida reveals the aporetic logic at the heart of genius but he fails to recognise the continuity between his own argument and that of his 18th-century predecessor. Derrida’s genius, so I contend, is Kant’s genius pushed to the limit and with all transcendental guarantees removed.
© British Society of Aesthetics 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
© British Society of Aesthetics 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
Research Interests:
The name of Carl Gustav Jung tends not to be associated with a concern for philosophical realism, seen, as he is, as one of the worst apologists for obscurantism, mysticism and spiritualism of the modern age. Yet the thesis I try to... more
The name of Carl Gustav Jung tends not to be associated with a concern for philosophical realism, seen, as he is, as one of the worst apologists for obscurantism, mysticism and spiritualism of the modern age. Yet the thesis I try to defend here is that Jung’s work can be read as an elaborate attempt to escape the ‘correlationist circle’ and the impasse of finitude every bit as rigorous and compelling as that undertaken by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude. This argument I propose to advance via a reading of that work of his which is considered perhaps the least defensible in terms of philosophical or scientific realism, namely the short treatise entitled Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. It is here that the monist or ‘psychoid’ ontology underpinning all of Jung’s psychological work on the archetypes of the collective unconscious is given its most extensive treatment. This, I will argue, rather than being a pre-critical metaphysical curio is a remarkably sophisticated philosophical concept, consistent with Kant’s transcendental conditions while transgressing them from within in order to undermine the gap of finitude between thought and being.
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A contribution to University of Minnesota Press blog introducing some of the themes of my book Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude:
http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2018/06/from-amazons-dash-button-to-google.html
http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2018/06/from-amazons-dash-button-to-google.html
Research Interests:
In the essay ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’, Derrida outlines the paradoxical relation between invention, qua invention of the new, and the ‘statutory context’ which provides the conditions for its emergence. No invention can occur... more
In the essay ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’, Derrida outlines the paradoxical relation between invention, qua invention of the new, and the ‘statutory context’ which provides the conditions for its emergence. No invention can occur outside of a contextual framework governed by a more-or-less explicit set of rules and conventions, and yet no invention can have been programmable or predictable within this context. As such it must suspend and retroactively modify that which will have made it possible. This constitutes an aporia, where the inventor must – at once – work with and without the guidance of rules. Classically, the motif of genius has been invoked as a means of evading this aporia: genius obfuscates the problem by appealing to a mystificatory natural or divine agency. However, my argument in this paper is that, rather than being the solution to the aporia, genius in fact names the aporetic structure as such. I will show, through appealing to Ann Jefferson’s 2015 book Genius in France, that this structure is evidenced in the polyvalence of the word genius itself, where among its (apparently unconnected) significations are: genius of the language, genius loci, genius of the nation as well as the more conventional sense of exceptional creative ability. Typically this has been seen as evidence of its incoherence but what Jefferson’s study allows us to see is that it designates a dynamic structure, where collective genius (of language, place, etc.) provides the conditions for individual genius, which in turn transforms that collective context in what Bernard Stiegler (following Simondon) would call a ‘transductive’ relation. Finally, I will demonstrate that all of this is consistent with Derrida’s own account of genius in the late text Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, where the question of genius is mapped on the structure of the gift.
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The 7th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, will offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who... more
The 7th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, will offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with critical traditions and concerns. Central to the vision of the conference is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchal, and accessible event that makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emerging academics, fostering new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and collaboration.
The conference is divided into thematic streams, each coordinated by different researchers and with separate calls for papers, included in this document. We welcome paper proposals that respond to the particular streams below. In addition, papers may be proposed as part of a general stream, i.e. with no specific stream in mind. Spanning a range of broad themes, these streams provide the impetus for new points of dialogue.
• Art and Automation
• Capital, Event and Agency (1968-2018)
• Disruptions, Interventions and Liminalities: Critical Performative Pedagogies
• Infrastructure, “infrapolitics” and experimentation
• Politics of/in the Anthropocene
• Resistant Bodies. On resistance and its corporeal challenges
• Taking Positions
• The Politics of Truth
• Thinking Affect and Postcoloniality Together
• Time, Cities, Bodies
• Writing to Think
Please send paper/presentation proposals with the relevant stream indicated in the subject line to paper-subs@londoncritical.org. Submissions should be no more than 250 words and should be received by Monday, 26th March 2018.
The conference is divided into thematic streams, each coordinated by different researchers and with separate calls for papers, included in this document. We welcome paper proposals that respond to the particular streams below. In addition, papers may be proposed as part of a general stream, i.e. with no specific stream in mind. Spanning a range of broad themes, these streams provide the impetus for new points of dialogue.
• Art and Automation
• Capital, Event and Agency (1968-2018)
• Disruptions, Interventions and Liminalities: Critical Performative Pedagogies
• Infrastructure, “infrapolitics” and experimentation
• Politics of/in the Anthropocene
• Resistant Bodies. On resistance and its corporeal challenges
• Taking Positions
• The Politics of Truth
• Thinking Affect and Postcoloniality Together
• Time, Cities, Bodies
• Writing to Think
Please send paper/presentation proposals with the relevant stream indicated in the subject line to paper-subs@londoncritical.org. Submissions should be no more than 250 words and should be received by Monday, 26th March 2018.
Research Interests:
The Return of Actor-Network Theory: During the last ten years there has been an unexpected resurgence of interest in the body of literature-cum-methodological toolkit known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and primarily associated with... more
The Return of Actor-Network Theory:
During the last ten years there has been an unexpected resurgence of interest in the body of literature-cum-methodological toolkit known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and primarily associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. A cross-disciplinary revival, it encompasses philosophy and media theory (the new materialisms, ‘thing theory’, and the Object-Oriented Philosophy of Graham Harman and his adherents), the digital humanities (the rise of digital methods for tracing networks in social science research), and the history and sociology of art (through the recent work on networks of human and nonhuman actors in avant-garde genres), amongst other disciplines. But this development is an intriguing one, not least because it was declared as early as the late 1990s that ANT was defunct, and that the name should be discarded. For example, in an essay called ‘On recalling ANT’, Latour announced that there were four ‘nails in the coffin’ for actor-network theory: ‘the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!’
Some aspects of this resurgence are simple enough to comprehend. Arriving just ahead of the World Wide Web, ANT would anticipate the vogue for thinking in terms of ‘networks’ as opposed to bordered entities such as ‘nation’, ‘institution’, and ‘society’, even if its own understanding of the concept was different to the topological webs of data it now seems to invoke. Similarly, its controversial injunction to afford agency to human and non-human actors alike, accepting no a priori asymmetry between them, can be seen as an important antecedent to the renewed turn towards materiality and the corresponding critique of anthropocentrism that has been gestating for some time in the humanities. But ANT has been criticised for its philosophical naïveté, its underdeveloped account of power, and its presentism, amongst other things. The time seems ripe to review the merits and limitations of ANT inside of this renewed context, asking whether its takeup in philosophy, media theory, and history of art reinvigorates ANT or repeats its perceived failings.
This stream invites papers that
a) Consider the contemporary currency of ANT as methodological practice:
• Issues of translation: what frictions/novelties emerge when ANT is ‘applied’ outside of the Science and Technology Studies field in which it was originally developed?
• Digital methods and ANT: the World Wide Web as a medium to locate and analyse networks: e.g. political controversies, social networks, art genres and movements etc.
b) Critically engage with the legacy and philosophical presuppositions of ANT:
• Empiricity and the place of the transcendental in ANT.
• The mutation of ANT into Object-Oriented Ontology: Graham Harman as a reader of Latour.
• ANT and ‘posthumanism’, or the critique of anthropocentrism: is there room for the subject in ANT?
• The relationship between ANT and other important accounts of technological mediation, such as Derrida’s concept of originary technicity - recently taken up and expanded by Bernard Stiegler and David Wills.
• Latour’s critique of modernity and the nature-culture / subject-object dichotomy, plus its relationship to earlier (dialectical, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist) analyses.
During the last ten years there has been an unexpected resurgence of interest in the body of literature-cum-methodological toolkit known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and primarily associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. A cross-disciplinary revival, it encompasses philosophy and media theory (the new materialisms, ‘thing theory’, and the Object-Oriented Philosophy of Graham Harman and his adherents), the digital humanities (the rise of digital methods for tracing networks in social science research), and the history and sociology of art (through the recent work on networks of human and nonhuman actors in avant-garde genres), amongst other disciplines. But this development is an intriguing one, not least because it was declared as early as the late 1990s that ANT was defunct, and that the name should be discarded. For example, in an essay called ‘On recalling ANT’, Latour announced that there were four ‘nails in the coffin’ for actor-network theory: ‘the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!’
Some aspects of this resurgence are simple enough to comprehend. Arriving just ahead of the World Wide Web, ANT would anticipate the vogue for thinking in terms of ‘networks’ as opposed to bordered entities such as ‘nation’, ‘institution’, and ‘society’, even if its own understanding of the concept was different to the topological webs of data it now seems to invoke. Similarly, its controversial injunction to afford agency to human and non-human actors alike, accepting no a priori asymmetry between them, can be seen as an important antecedent to the renewed turn towards materiality and the corresponding critique of anthropocentrism that has been gestating for some time in the humanities. But ANT has been criticised for its philosophical naïveté, its underdeveloped account of power, and its presentism, amongst other things. The time seems ripe to review the merits and limitations of ANT inside of this renewed context, asking whether its takeup in philosophy, media theory, and history of art reinvigorates ANT or repeats its perceived failings.
This stream invites papers that
a) Consider the contemporary currency of ANT as methodological practice:
• Issues of translation: what frictions/novelties emerge when ANT is ‘applied’ outside of the Science and Technology Studies field in which it was originally developed?
• Digital methods and ANT: the World Wide Web as a medium to locate and analyse networks: e.g. political controversies, social networks, art genres and movements etc.
b) Critically engage with the legacy and philosophical presuppositions of ANT:
• Empiricity and the place of the transcendental in ANT.
• The mutation of ANT into Object-Oriented Ontology: Graham Harman as a reader of Latour.
• ANT and ‘posthumanism’, or the critique of anthropocentrism: is there room for the subject in ANT?
• The relationship between ANT and other important accounts of technological mediation, such as Derrida’s concept of originary technicity - recently taken up and expanded by Bernard Stiegler and David Wills.
• Latour’s critique of modernity and the nature-culture / subject-object dichotomy, plus its relationship to earlier (dialectical, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist) analyses.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Musicology, Philosophy of Technology, Cultural Sociology, and 16 moreMaterial Culture Studies, Posthumanism, Actor Network Theory, Computer Networks, Cultural Musicology, Critical Posthumanism, Materiality (Anthropology), Bruno Latour, Object Oriented Ontology, Actor-Network-Theory, Databases, Software, Actor-Network Theory, Graham Harman, Post-Humanism, and Science and Technology Studies
London Conference in Critical Thought 2015
University College London, 26th & 27th June
University College London, 26th & 27th June