With his recent book from Urbanomic, Object Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes, philosopher Peter Wolfendale examines trends in continental philosophy which seek to overturn a correlationist consensus, and directly access a metaphysical realism once more. Wolfendale engages a broad-ranging knowledge of the history Western philosophical thought, from Deleuze to Quine, to examine and critique this turn, arguing for the priority of a methodological epistemology if we are to have any hope of recovering a metaphysical stance worth advocating. Following Kant, Wolfendale’s Transcendental Realism proceeds from a fundamental deontology to revive the constructive trajectory of truth in the formal structure of the real, rationally and systematically engaging both the demands of thought and the world upon philosophy.

In this seminar Peter Wolfendale will present his approach to conducting metaphysics in the the 21st century, providing an overview of what we can recover from the development of philosophy and where we can go in the future. Responding to Wolfendale’s presentation will be artist/theorist Amanda Beech, philosopher Daniel Sacilotto, and philosopher Ben Woodard. Moderated by artist and writer Joshua Johnson.

Mercer Union presented ‘What Can Art Do for Post-capitalism’ with Fixing the Future co-organizer Suhail Malik and political theorist Nick Srnicek as a part of their fORUM critical conversation series:

“Left Accelerationism proposes that a viable and socially-just succession to capitalism can be established by repurposing the advanced social and technical processes of today’s capitalist development. It argues that the task is more specific than regular claims to find routes out of or against capitalism, usually by turning to small-scale, furtive, or retrogressive alternatives to capitalist domination (organized through discourses of ‘resistance,’ for example), all of which are common enough in today’s ‘critical’ art. The task of Left Accelerationism is, rather, to advance post-capitalism.

In their talk Malik and Srnicek will address whether and how art can contribute to making a post-capitalist future. In particular, what demands does Left Accelerationism make on art (or should it make on art), and why is the currently prevalent mode of contemporary art not even capable of contributing to the construction of post-capitalism?”

Fixing the Future presents this video of the talk courtesy of Mercer Union.

Sunday, November 23, 1:00PM-3:00PM
BNLMNTL 2014: Future Summit
@ Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920 Rue Baile
Montréal, QC H3H 2S6

Our Future Summit panel  for the BNLMNTL 2014 will focus on cities as vast inhuman systems, complex beyond our casual powers of perception. We assert that what is needed is not the far-off vision of some city in the sky, nor a nostalgic return to the peasant idyll, but a way to connect the immanent life of the city-dweller with the abstract forces which govern her everyday possibilities. We will use this as a point of departure, asking the panel to address questions about how major cities now function, examine the forces that shape them as linked nodes of global capitalism, consider the transition from the ideals of the modernist city to their current reality, and speculate on possibilities of how they could function given these realities and their potential for repurposing.

Panel participants are Marie-Pier Boucher, Keller Easterling and FtF organizers Joshua Johnson and Keith Tilford. The panel will be moderated by Diann Bauer. In keeping with FtF’s overall mission, the aim of the panel is to examine the current conditions of urbanism and speculate constructively on how best to proceed into the future.

Note: This will be a live only event.

Monday, September 29, 2014 2:00PM EST

In this session Ray Brassier, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams will talk about the overlap between their philosophical and political concerns despite their differences in disciplinary focus. The aim of the conversation will be to address the interfusions of philosophical rationalism and a 21st century political economy. The discussion will be moderated by Diann Bauer, followed by questions and comments by the other organizers of the Fixing the Future platform in addition to  those watching live. This session will not be archived as a video but will be transcribed and posted on our website at a later date. 

Live comments and questions will be monitored during the feed. You may comment in these spaces on Facebook, Google+, and Youtube.

Tuesday August 5, 2014, 6PM EST
Streaming online and live @
Whitebox Art Center
329 Broome Street New York, NY 10002

An uncanny timeliness opened an unexpected connection between global contemporary art and geopolitics this month when, following the escalation of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, a planned exhibition of works from and about the Arab world opened at New York’s New Museum. Not only is the exhibition the biggest of its kind but, in addition to works from Palestinian artists throughout the show, the fifth floor of the museum houses a separately curated presentation of art and archival materials about and from Palestine.

It’s merely a truism to respond to this happenstance with the well-known quote by Walter Benjamin, that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” However, investigating the subtleties of Benjamin’s link between civilization and barbarism seems especially pertinent to these coincidental exposures of the politics of the Arab world in that the operating logics of both Israel’s Operation Protective Edge and New Museum’s Here and Elsewhere each in their own way contend with the form and content of the anticolonial resistance that has historically provided the Raison d’être for so much of Arab art, specifically contemporary art from Palestine.

In this conversation organized by Mohammad Salemy, Ariella Azoulay, Joseph Audeh, Judith Rodenbeck, Alex Shams, and Myriam Vanneschi will discuss what connections can be made between seemingly unrelated categories of military and museum as well as war and art.

The Middle East continues to be a primary site for the blood-drenched transformations of our planetary geopolitical system and is now also taking a leading role in the emergence of a global contemporary art. The discussion will consider whether the coincidental exposure of geopolitical violence in the Middle East and art from the region to audiences in the global north can help us understand the future of Palestine and the place of production and distribution of contemporary art in the future.

Live comments and questions will be monitored during the feed. You may comment in these spaces on Facebook, Google+, and Youtube.

Tuesday July 29th, 2014, 2PM EST

If a guiding question in developing Fixing the Future’s platform has been “how to act according to the 21st century?”, it has been motivated by a recognition that what inhibits such action is the mediation of our present by abstract powers embedded within capitalism that also manipulate and control futures. While a primary concern for us is the reorientation of art away from such mediations as they operate through the staged indeterminations of contemporary art, the conditions of the contemporary might themselves be figured as a site of confinement or series of traps whose generic reiteration of illusionary autonomies, false affordances, and liberal freedoms carries consequences for any domain of thought and action.

In this seminar, strategist Benedict Singleton will present alongside two of Fixing the Future’s organizers, Suhail Malik and Keith Tilford, to consider what methods, strategies, tactics, and logics might be adequate to the task of defeating the very logics that structurally determine our present and the imperative to take leave of contemporary conditions.

Live comments and questions will be monitored during the feed. You may comment in these spaces on Facebook, Google+, and Youtube.

Thursday June 26th, 2014, 3PM EST

Diann Bauer and Amanda Beech in conversation, moderated by Joshua Johnson. In this seminar, the two artists will discuss the significance of language and concepts in their respective practices. More broadly, the talk will focus on the importance of conceptual criteria for art, the deficits of Contemporary Art’s conceptual positions, and the implications of rationalist and accelerationist thought for the future of art.

Live comments and questions will be monitored during the feed. You may comment in these spaces on Facebook, Google+, or Youtube.

Thursday, June 5th, 2014, 12PM EST

An hour long conversation between Anthony Paul Smith and Peter Wolfendale, moderated by Deneb Kozikoski, addressing various political and philosophical positions formed in the intellectual community in relation to new rationalist thought and the #Accelerate Manifesto. The participants will discuss the emancipatory potential of this new constellation of positions, in terms of their relation to the concepts of freedom and oppression.