BIO
A.T. Kingsmith is a PhD Candidate in the department of political science at York University, Toronto, Canada, where he specializes in political theory and international relations. He also currently serves as the deputy editor for the Journal of Critical Interdisciplinary Studies. Adam’s dissertation, tentatively entitled ‘The Political Life of Information,’ develops a new Deleuzian cartography in order to map the co-constitutive processes of informational assemblages and social transformation. Adam is also working on a manifesto of theatrical absurdity, a federally funded project exploring the deployment of humour as a site of re-radical politics within social movements, and a manuscript for a short book on hypocrisy as a form of existential praxis.
TITLE
"A Metamaterialist Manifesto"
ABSTRACT
In resisting the intertextual idealism of identity politics, which reduces the political down to a mere practice of representation, this Metamaterialist Manifesto introduces the posthuman concept of metamaterialism—materials engineered to have properties not found in ‘nature’—as a new materialistic push through the dialectic of discursive totalities by stimulating a reconsideration of the status of the material as an active, politically significant assemblage of posthuman forces in its own right. No longer can we take the material to be an inert and lifeless substance the anthropocene acts upon to create forms and patterns. By taking seriously metamaterials, this project aims to fold in the anthropomorphic distinctions between discourse and materiality, between human and non-human, in order to articulate a liminal state of materiality as self-organisation, form, and posthuman pattern. As it is immanent to itself, this Metamaterialist Manifesto asserts agency in a posthuman epistemology of ontological anarchy.
