(In)formalizing the Outside: Sex, Void, Mathematics

Aug 14-17 2015

Laboria Cuboniks in PAF, France, for a seminar. August 14-17, 2015, St. Emre, France.

Taint your horizons and decentralize thought by putting into question where philosophy happens. At PAF, philosophers transit between conceptual practices and situations to embody reason through an abundance of ruses, by amplifying the capacity to think alongside two or more incompatible perspectives at once. With the choice to go against itself and deepen the rifts of eroding neoliberal institutions, philosophy must discover and explore the dynamics of new conceptual terrain, fractalizing void across a multitude of scales. Following on from last year’s rigorous week, with exceptional thinkers like Mark Fisher, Lucca Fraser, Amy Ireland, Nick Land, Reza Negarestani, Inigo Wilkins, & Peter Wolfendale, this year's summer university will bring together practitioners and thinkers from contemporary fields of research in sexuality and gender studies, non-classical logic and mathematics, and next-wave cybernetics, in order for new contaminations to occur. The event will orient around two vectors. First, an examination of the conceptual histories of sex and cybernetics, suggesting a new thinking of libidinal politics. Second, a reopening of the question of formalization and contemporary mathematical philosophy. FEMINISM The anonymous, international collective Laboria Cuboniks will workshop their recent manifesto Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (available here: http://laboriacuboniks.net/) to expand and depart from the goals of cyber- and technofeminism, abstracting conceptual frameworks that cut across the material and virtual interdependencies of sex, erotics and technoscience, in what they call an affirmative epistemological alienation qua embodied reason – terminology they will bring to the boil in the workshops. Using hyperstitional effects to cause theoretical/temporal frictions, they will investigate: the mechanistic logic of uncomputability in erotics and pleasure; the feedback dynamics or nonlinear processing in the concrete/abstract bind (without privileging one form over the other); and technoscientific innovations, in body modification and in domestic deterritorialization.