Michel Foucault: Der Mut zur Wahrheit (1984): The 9th Technology of Otherness (a certain kind of debt)

Classical metaphysics requires a concept of the ethical that belies or erases certain forms of truth-telling, often pulling the ethical in the direction of more sterilized forms of reason and rationality in order to invoke its universal applicability as a kind of ‘one-size-fits-all’ for any person, place, time, or thing. In so doing, not only does this tend to diminish or expunge the sensuous, carnal encounters of body and spirit, it pre-figures certain forms of courage, care and imagination so that the very core of what it means to make a community alive, responsive, and creative remains stuck in the old classical canons of thought and practice. In this way, the beliefs and ‘truths’ that tend to be reproduced serve only to strengthen the status quo’s status – somewhat of a problem if that status quo’s status is also mired in misogynist, homophobic, ethnic and/or racially divisive traditions. The 9th Technology of Otherness, building upon Foucault’s Courage of Truth, the last lecture series before his untimely death, seeks to show how an ethics drawn along the sensuous modalities (as Foucault positions them) of courage (parrhēsia) and curiosity (zētēsis), creates a certain form of community, a certain kind of self, and with it, a certain kind of debt. It is precisely this debt that Socrates reminds Crito ‘not to forget to remember to pay’ to Asclepius, and to do so with the now quite infamous gift of the bird-cock

The Assassination of Time (or the birth of zeta-physics)

The Assassination of Time re-thinks the relation of singularity and dimension to the question of the Chronos/TIme. In so doing, it offers a different trajectory to the restaging of method and epistemology to metaphysics as a leap out of Hegelian dialectics and the Heideggarian dwelling via Nietzsche's madman prophetic verses and Einstein's infamous equation. The piece originally was delivered at the Digital Arts Week in Zurich as Invited speaker; it was then reworked and staged with musical composition by S. Kennedy in Berlin, New York, Wisconsin and LA and recorded as an album release (Feb 6, 2010

Conversion on the road to Damascus: minority report (1)

Incisive and concentrated aphoristic journey from Hegelian dialectics through the Heideggerian turn, via Nietzsche's 'The Madman' and Godel's uncertainty principles, restaging the political and with it, aesthetics, after Einstein's infamous intervention. Further interrupted by Deleuze & Guattari, the question is thus raised: when is something installed as 'fascistic'? and when can it be otherwise? As Golding states, 'it's a delicate game we are playing, after all'

Fractal Philosophy: Attunement as the Task of Art

Moving the logic of senses to its next incarnation: as a fractal philosophy, the condition of art practice/production is re-staged as a post-metaphysical, and with it, a post-postmodern aesthetic. This chapter introduces the view that the plane of immanence [0] + the refrain [1], no longer contextualise a uni-versal, but rather establish the multiversal - assemblages that, when taken together, form a picture of what it means/is to be without lapsing into Hegelian frameworks or other forms of representational thinking. It is a form of listening, an erotic attunement - the very task of art

Ana-Materialism & the Pineal Eye: Becoming Mouth-Breast Visual Arts in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction

Ana-materialism & the Pineal Eye provides a landmark interpretation of materialism, representation and the image using the Cartesian conceit of a pineal gland and its voracious sexually embedded appetites. Developing the argument via Georges Bataille’s re-invention of the pineal gland as an allseeing, all devouring, (pineal) eye, Johnny Golding borrows this move to envision a different analytic approach to digital forms of ‘matter’ and artificial forms of ‘life’. From her critical engagement with Bataille, Giles Deleuze and Judith Butler, Golding shows why the tools provided by these modern, contemporary and postmodern approaches to philosophy, image, the body, indeed representation cannot fully explore, let alone develop these new forms of reality/ies except by retreating into traditional binary divides between male and female, good and evil, mother/child and so forth. Anamaterialism and the Pineal Eye introduces a much needed understanding to oddly cathected sensualities, multiversal realities, digital imaginaries with no weight, no volume, no spatiality, but ‘somehow’ making sense, and with it, creating matter, ethics, art

The 9th Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt

Classical metaphysics requires a concept of the ethical that belies or erases certain forms of truth-telling, often pulling the ethical in the direction of more sterilized forms of reason and rationality in order to invoke its universal applicability as a kind of ‘one-size-fits-all’ for any person, place, time, or thing. In so doing, not only does this tend to diminish or expunge the sensuous, carnal encounters of body and spirit, it pre-figures certain forms of courage, care and imagination so that the very core of what it means to make a community alive, responsive, and creative remains stuck in the old classical canons of thought and practice. In this way, the beliefs and ‘truths’ that tend to be reproduced serve only to strengthen the status quo’s status – somewhat of a problem if that status quo’s status is also mired in misogynist, homophobic, ethnic and/or racially divisive traditions. The 9th Technology of Otherness, building upon Foucault’s Courage of Truth, the last lecture series before his untimely death, seeks to show how an ethics drawn along the sensuous modalities (as Foucault positions them) of courage (parrhēsia) and curiosity (zētēsis), creates a certain form of community, a certain kind of self, and with it, a certain kind of debt. It is precisely this debt that Socrates reminds Crito ‘not to forget to remember to pay’ to Asclepius, and to do so with the now quite infamous gift of the bird-cock

The Assassination of Time (or the Birth of zeta physics)

The Assassination of Time re-thinks the relation of singularity and dimension to the question of the Chronos/TIme. In so doing, it offers a different trajectory to the restaging of method and epistemology to metaphysics as a leap out of Hegelian dialectics and the Heideggarian dwelling via Nietzsche's madman prophetic verses and Einstein's infamous equation. The piece originally was delivered at the Digital Arts Week in Zurich as Invited speaker; it was then reworked and staged with musical composition by S. Kennedy in Berlin, New York, Wisconsin and LA and recorded as an album release (Feb 6, 2010)

Ecce Homo Sexual: Ontology and Eros in the Age of Incompleteness and Entanglement

Nietzsche’s iconic Ecce Homo: (How one becomes what one is) maps out the answer by taking the reader on a kind of magical mystery tour ruminating between the paradox. With chapter headings such as ‘Why I am so Wise’ or ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ or ‘Why I am Destiny’, one begins to breathe in the method, the madness, the sheer intelligence of it all. Whatever else may be being said in that text and his others, one thing is certain: a sustained, crucial, well-directed attack on metaphysics – as idealism, dialectical logic, universalism, identity politics, morality and a whole host of other paradigmatic strictures – is necessarily, urgently, launched. Scroll forward more than 100 years since, and, coupled with the profound advances in socio-cultural norms from civil rights to feminism to gender equality, and beyond, as well as the profound advances in physics, from quantum to Higgs Boson; in mathematics from recursive algorithm to fractal imaginaries; in technology and new media (in fact, all media) from the photography to the digital, from the computer to robotics, from the gun to the stealth bomber – it almost beggars belief that at least in the aesthetic-politico-philosophic arena, one finds a steady crawl, and most recently, more of a electrified sprint, back to metaphysics ‘as a whole’, and more worrying still, to the speculative idealism of Hegel and co. For reasons not entirely clear, there has been a massive group hug toward metaphysics: whether at the level of retrieving it via a return to Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via Heidegger (onto-theo-logic metaphysics) or retrieving it via Hegel (speculative idealism) or retrieving metaphysics via the newest old version: speculative realism. This chapter sets out to examine critically those approaches and to see how they fare once the erotic, the sensual, and indeed, the networked algorithmic age, is brought to bear. May have to dust off copies of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy along the way

The Radical Matter Lab

This 'Radical Matter Lab' was a pilot pedagogical experiment to help MA students begin to understand the relation between contemporary philosophy, fine art and the 'wild sciences' (AI, robotics, meta-mathematics). Several labs took place at the RCA 2017-2018, with over 57K viewing on YouTube

Come Again? (Rude Girl, meditation number 2,785)

Invited artist/poet on the occasion of the 100 years of suffrage for women in Austria, this was a performative poetic read at the Austrian Cultural institute amidst an extended exhibition (sculpture, painting, video, photography, sound works). The piece was read in the virtual dark, save for a light on the grand piano. Earlier version "Anatomy Lesson: An Open Letter to Sigmund Freud (in Friendship) held at the Freud Museum as part of the Solitary Pleasures conference (April 2019). In this poetic, the Rude Girl letter was read aloud to the piano, the latter of which was standing in for Sigmund Freud. Sold out