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Prometheanism and Rationalism
// Deontologistics
Here is the video for my talk 'Prometheanism and Rationalism', which was given at Goldsmiths courtesy of Simon O'Sullivan and the Visual Cultures department in May. The same talk was given the previous week at the Dutch Art Institute's Prometheanism 2.0 event, organised by Bassam El Baroni, alongside Patricia Reed, Yuk Hui, and Inigo Wilkins. The video for the DAI version is available here. However, as is often the case, I think the second version is better.
Here is the abstract:
The aim of this talk is to articulate and defend the connection between contemporary forms of prometheanism and rationalism. It will begin by defining prometheanism through its opposition to political liberalism and normative naturalism, as developed by the projects of left-accelerationism and xenofeminism. It will then show how the success of these oppositions is premised upon philosophical rationalism, insofar as it supplies the needed accounts of positive freedom and normative autonomy, and articulate the problems faced by alternatives to liberalism and naturalism that reject these conceptual resources. The remainder of the talk will be devoted to elaborating the account of rational agency through which these concepts should be understood. Positively, it will aim to explain what reason is, giving a minimalistic picture of the capacities its exercise involves. Negatively, it will aim to explain what reason is not, addressing some common objections to rationalism based on misunderstanding its relation to affect, embodiment, collectivity, and other issues.I'm quite pleased with the talk overall. For those who would like to read the first half, it is available in written form here. If you're having difficult reading the slides, they're available here. It's also worth pointing out that this makes a good companion to my paper 'The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens' (video), whose analysis of myth it borrows. Furthermore, the explanation of contemporary rationalism at the end has been developed substantially in my work on Computational Kantianism, which I'll be sharing here eventually.
Finally, it's worth noting that my positive thoughts on what is now more properly called Left-Accelerationism (L#A) haven't been widely available till now. This is despite the fact that I organised the second Accelerationism Workshop at Goldsmiths, was involved in putting together #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationism Reader, and, weirdly, that my tumblr response to Malcom Harris's confused review of the reader – 'So, Accelerationism, what's all that about?' – which does it's best to diagnose the usual errors in usage and explain the left/right distinction, is the first reference on the accelerationism wikipedia page. This talk doesn't cover everything I have to say about the matter, and there's still some controversy about whether the term is salvageable, given the aforementioned confusions, but it's nice to have something people can refer to.
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