8/12/2019 TheMatterOfContradiction_WarAgainstTheSun

1/1

In the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in thePhilippines injected sulfate particles into the stratosphere,shading the earth and cooling the air by .c. It has beensuggested that one of the best strategies against global

warming would be to mimic the effect of such an eruption.Planes and artillery equipped with particle cannons wouldsend aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect solar rays,

thus protecting us from the adverse rise in temperature.Geoengineering and other such acts of solar managementconstitute a desperate attempt to use technological andscientific advancements for the ongoing exploitation ofnatural resources by an expanding capitalist economy.Such an operation is an attempt to shield the human fromthe reality of a radically indifferent world.

If the project of the Enlightenment was to ensure themastery of man via an emancipation from nature thenthe capacity to control and exploit natural resources hasonly led to an amplification of the damaging effects of

contingent material forces. Te more we attempt to manageand extract energy from the material world, the larger therepercussions in the form of entropic degradation. In itsattempt to mitigate the consequences of previous actions,the geo-engineered solar shield indicates a critical phasein the intrinsic feedback effect that has accelerated sincethe Enlightenment. Tis war against the sun is a battle ofReason against its own effects.

In the last iteration of our ongoing symposia project,Te Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object, heldin Limousin in September , we argued that art hasbeen historically positioned as a similar shield againstthe trauma of scientific reason and a radically decentredhuman. Placed as the dialectical other of reason, artthus became a space for reflexivity where the inherentlimitations of human knowledge had to be revealed andexperienced as such. If, in the history of thought, therehave been a series of traumatic scientific revolutions asindexed by Copernicus and Darwin, then art has beenresponsible, in part, for the registering but subsequentrehabilitation of this trauma through its positing of thehuman as central and dominant in the relation betweenthe artwork and the viewer. It is our aim with this event,Te Matter of Contradiction: War against the sun, to think

through arts immunological status, and to reformulate itsrelation to the project of reason.

Tis renewed engagement in the project of reason wouldbe neither an arrogant claiming of the rights to plundermaterial resources in the name of a subject-centred logic,nor a reactionary call for a reversal to authenticity, butan absolute conception of the real within which theanthropic concern is radically de-centred and subsequentlyreoriented. While previous conceptions of rationality

were formulated in opposition to aesthetics, politics orethics, the present situation demands an epistemologicallyflattened mode of reasoning where arts problematicrelation to the real has to be rethought.

Te Matter of Contradictionis a series of seminars initiatedby Sam Basu, Fabien Giraud, Ida Soulard and om revatt.Tis third event, Te Matter of Contradiction: War againstthe sun, is organised in collaboration with Inigo Wilkins.

Informations - http://lamatiere.tumblr.com/Contact - thematterofcontradiction@gmail.com

Te Matter of Contradiction

War against the sun

Seminar and workshop, March - , David Roberts Art Foundation, London.