Holes Into the Future: Xenopoetics and Thinking Beyond the Human

<p>The term ‘xenopoetics’ first appears in Kristen Alvanson’s preface to <em>Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials</em>—a mind-bending work of theory-fiction attributed to the Iranian philosopher, Reza Negarestani. In her preface, Alvanson describes xenopoetics as ‘[having] something to do with composing out of distorted materials’. It produces works in which ‘lines are pseudonymously or anonymously quoted, one scene leaks from the future to the past, an object evades chronological sequences, a number turns into a cipher [and] everything looms as an accentuated clue around which all subjects aimlessly orbit, leading to an eclipsed riddle whose duty is not to enlighten but to make blind’. For Alvanson, xenopoetics is a form of communication that is inseparable from unknowing: the undoing of knowledge and knowability is the fundamental condition of xenopoetic creativity. This is reflected in the Greek term xenos from which the prefix xeno- is derived. ‘Xenos’ denotes a ‘stranger’—an unknown entity that arrives from the outside—but also a ‘guest’—someone or something that must be accommodated and welcomed inside. Elsewhere, queer magician Rebekah Sheldon writes ‘[e]tymologically, xeno- is trans. As graft, cut, intrusion, or excession, xeno names the movement between, and the moving entity. It is the foreign and the foreigner, the unexpected outside, the unlike offspring, the other within, the eruption of another meaning’. Setting out from these invocations of strangeness, anonymity, pseudonymity, holes, leaks, ciphers, transitions, intrusions, excesses, unknowability and temporal anomaly, this workshop will introduce ‘xenopoetics’ as both a philosophical concept and a creative methodology. Its goal is to foster ways of thinking about the human subject which remove it from a position of self-assured creative centrality, and to show how paying attention to the agency of nonhuman, inhuman, and more-than-human forces connects with and perpetuates an important feminist legacy.</p>