Format: on Shaninka campus and online
Language: Russian, English
Moderators: Mikhail Fedorchenko (EUSPb alumnus, independent researcher), Maria Maximova (EUSPb alumnus, independent researcher)

The modern «‎turn to matter» in philosophy and anthropology is not just the intellectual bravado of the new materialists and their allies. In an age when thinking about the Earth is seeping into the political imagination and intelligent machines are questioning the «‎animateability» of human creativity, a reconsideration of the relations of life and matter, human and nonhuman, biological and machine brings to the surface the material agency of non-totally-human things: viruses, territories, AI, the Earth, atoms. In short, things that fall out of the slender ranks of humanist thought.

Matter, understood beyond vitalism and mechanicism, grows its little legs, takes a travel bag in its tentacles, and sets off on an adventure: from Descartes, who tried to prove that animals are nothing but highly complex machines and Bergson, who fetishized the vitality of matter («‎Life, we said, transcends the boundaries of expediency as well as of other categories. It is essentially a stream rushing through matter and extracting what it can from it»), to Jane Bennett, who dis-identifies materiality with the figure of substance within the affects of pulsating matter and Yuk Hui, who, armed with a Simondonian reading of the general forms of matter's interconnectedness, shows that the organicist reading of cybernetics is reductionist, reducing the all-pervasive character of living matter to deterministic feedback vortices whose dualities must be overcome («‎cybernetics is, perhaps, the actual expression of the Absolute»).

Following the explorer of the new materialism, Jane Bennett, we aim to bring to light what usually remains in the shadows: the material agency or efficacy of nonhuman or non-totally-human things. Bennett's basic ideas correlate in many ways with Deleuze and Guattari's idea that matter is a flux in continuous variation. In «A Thousand Plateaus», they argue that one should follow the flow of matter rather than impose any form on it. To follow the flow is to wander, just as the metallurgist«‎re-melts and reuses the matter to which she gives form-slip.»

Bennett's position is close to that of another researcher, Nancy Tuana, who introduces the concept of viscous porosity. Viscous porosity is a state between fluidity and hardness, which implies some resistance to shape change, maintaining, despite interpenetrations, contradictions.
Both Bennett and Tuana seek to dispel the ontologically binary oppositions between natural and human, organic and inorganic, and animate and inanimate. But there remains, as Bennett says, fidelity to the Deleuzian postulate: «‎ontologically unified, formally distinct». The emphasis is primarily on the intermediate state of interpenetration, where, upon closer examination, it becomes problematic to draw clear boundaries between the natural and the man-made, the natural and the technical.

As the main framework for the conference, participants and attendees are invited to turn to transdisciplinary studies of matter and materiality emerging at the intersection of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences to problematize the relationship between the living and the nonliving, to actualize the similarity (or difference) between these categories, its philosophical, xeno- and anthropological registers: life as such, territories, environments, theological concepts of existence. We propose to look at the vital, technical, new-materialist, political aspects of the living and non-living as conditions of encoding and decoding of being, at what new types of relations with non-human actors can be discovered from the one or the many, as opposed to the perspective that reproduces life and non-life as objects of binary exploitation, oppression of the living by the non-living, sacralization of hierarchies and control of life.

One of the main objectives of our section is to ask what is the difference between an ecosystem and a political system? What are the similarities between a living matter and a political actor? Are material entities members of human communities? What can different types of materialities tell us about the materiality of our own (political) environments and bodies? How will the democratization and inclusion of such not-too-human environments work? Finally, what interdisciplinary frame does research on the boundaries of the living and material: theological, technological, corporeal, as well as concerning the boundaries of art and/or natural science?