The Reading Agency Lecture 2015: Russell Brand

Russell Brand

THE READING AGENCY LECTURE 2014: RUSSELL BRAND

Russell Brand to give The Reading Agency Lecture

Russell Brand will deliver The Reading Agency Lecture on 25 November 2014, 7.00-8.00pm.

See: http://readingagency.org.uk/news/media/russell-brand-to-give-the-reading-agency-lecture.html

The Reading Agency Lecture will take place in The Logan Hall at the Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

You can buy tickets for the lecture from Eventbrite.

Tickets are priced at £20 and £10 for concessions (under 24s).

The lecture was initiated by The Reading Agency in 2012. It aims to provide a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about the future of reading in the UK.

Russell Brand will deliver ‘a manifesto on reading’ which will be in part personal, sharing his own experience of books and reading while growing up in the UK; and it will be in part as a public figure, sharing his views on the status of reading and storytelling in our national culture and why reading is important for young people – especially boys – in the UK today.

Russell Brand says:

“Writing is the most intimate medium. Right there in the brain, in the swamp of fear and desire. I like splashing about in there, stirring up sediment, doing the breaststroke. In this lecture I will try and drag this metaphor out for an hour.”

Further information: http://readingagency.org.uk/adults/get-involved/002-events/russell-brand-a-manifesto-on-reading.html

‘The Bookseller’: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/russell-brand-give-reading-agency-lecture

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

Organization and Collaboration Practices in the Arts

Aesthetics

ORGANIZATION AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES IN THE ARTS

Call for Papers: Organization & Collaborative Practices in the Arts
Organizers: Mark Banks (University of Leicester), Mandy Earley
(University of Leicester), Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Essex / Autonomedia)

As a part of the 9th Critical Management Studies Conference, 8-10 July 2015, University of Leicester
Theme: Is there an alternative? Management after critique

Artists work in groups. This is a primary fact of artistic production. Collective work is an a priori, a reality of creative life. At nearly every moment artists are working together in one way or another and
under many different arrangements. Without the others no one can succeed. Artists’ groups have helped them to survive in a capitalist system which values art primarily as branded commodity, and in which agents seek to accumulate art as cheaply as possible. The history of artists’ collaborations describes a flow of both resistant and protective cultural formations that moves through time. These contingent practices change shape according to the necessities of artists’ lives – maximizing their chances to live cheaply with time to work on their art, and to escape alienated labour, first in the industrial shop, and now in the service and information industry.

The social organization of artistic production is generally considered to be extraneous to the forms of art. Indeed, the analysis of each has come to concern different scholarly disciplines, with formal criticism at one end, and the sociology of art – and increasingly arts administration and management of creative production – at the other. The questions of artistic collectivity and collaboration per se cuts across disciplinary lines. Different adaptations of the collaborative practice within artistic production have diverse outcomes, generating institutions, programs and works of art, as they have ever done.

Artists’ work within groups in the fine arts is very different than work within most businesses, and even most cultural institutions. While the results may seem the same – exhibitions, installations, spectacles,
publications, recordings, films, designed objects and architecture – the processes of self-organized collective work proceed from different premises and toward different goals. The organizational structure of artistic work in groups has not been much studied.

This conference stream invites contributes that engage analytically with the questions of collectivity and collaboration among artists. A materialist point of view on the question might find that collaboration among cultural workers is contingent, circumstantial, and practical – an outgrowth of cultural economies and a necessary condition of many kinds of cultural work. Working collectively is about making a living. But modalities of collaboration are also a prime concern of those who want
to remake the world, to join the great issues of the day, and to find a reason to work at all.

Please send proposals / abstracts of up to 500 words to Stevphen Shukaitis (sshuka@essex.ac.uk) by 31 January 2015. Papers selected for the panel will receive confirmation by 15 February 2015.

Please note that there will be a registration fee for the conference (the amount of which has not been confirmed yet), although there is a reduced rate for PhD students.

More information about the overall conference can be found here: http://www2.le.ac.uk/conference/cms15

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

Romantic Remains

Philosophy and Romanticism

ROMANTIC REMAINS

 

MICHAEL NICHOLSON (CHAIR)

SPECIAL SESSION – NASSR 2015

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism

 

Remain(s):

To be left behind after the removal, use, or destruction of some part, number, or quantity.

To continue in the same place or with the same person; to abide, to stay.

The survivors of a war, battle, or other destructive event.

A relic of some obsolete custom or practice; a surviving trait or characteristic.

A part or the parts of a person’s body after death; a corpse.

The literary works or fragments (esp. the unpublished ones) left by an author after death

[OED]

 

Romantic culture’s most familiar rhetorics of revolution are progressive, teleological, messianic, and apocalyptic. Building upon the etymology of the term “remain(s)” as a term that denotes survival and persistence as much as death and decay, “Romantic Remains” will consider the whole range of “remain(s)” in relation to “rights” (political, cultural, literary, scientific, environmental, corporeal, and otherwise). This panel will therefore theorize the era’s less critically prominent forms of protest such as stasis, resistance, delay, disappearance, survival, and/or endurance. In a moment whose most prominent poetic works, embodied individual lives, and grand political narratives focus on vigor, life, growth, evolution, and development — Wordsworth’s “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” Barbauld’s “Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible,” and Shelley’s “Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory”—who or what gets left behind? What radical possibilities lie on the other side of Romanticism’s forward thinkingforms of enthusiasm, passion, utopianism, and optimism?

As the necessary consequence of works such as Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Volney’s Ruins, Romantic critics have always taken an interest in Europe’s physical remains. Yet in our present moment of environmental catastrophe and ruin, a diverse array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars have drawn new attention to the possibilities and anxieties of contingent, biodegradable, unhurried, and uncertain forms of existence and aesthetics: Kevis Goodman and Jonathan Sachs (slow time), Jonathan Bate and James C. McKusick (Romantic ecology and green writing), Paul Fry (ontological radicalism), Anahid Nersessian (nescience), Anne-Lise François (recessive agency), Timothy Morton (dark ecology), and Jacques Khalip (anonymity and dispossession). In its focus on natural rhythms, formal omissions, and vanishing acts rather than developmental narratives or confident subjects, this panel will turn toward a critique of the idea that Romanticism always proceeds though rapid movement and productive presence. With this end in mind, we will study the period’s conservationist energies in the realms of ontology, politics, and aesthetics—how the positions of remaining behind, moving slowly, and entirely disappearing often allowed Romantic writers to contest the excesses of an increasingly accelerating age focused on imperial expansion, economic development, and sociocultural improvement.

Papers may consider “Romantic Remains” in relation to a wide range of formal, historical, theoretical, and critical concerns, that might include:

–necromanticism / material remains: corpses, ruins, relics, residues, wastes, wrecks, dust, rubble, and debris

–formal remains: elegies, epitaphs, scraps, elisions, gaps, fragments, caesurae, ellipses, and repetitions

–biological / natural processes: decomposition, defilement, deterioration, erosion, putrefaction, and decay

–the poetics of nostalgia / memory and ephemerality / forgetting

–outmoded, suspended, superseded, and left over genres, modes, and personae

–spatial remains: localism, dispossession, immovability, and immobility

–temporal remains: anachronism, haunting, and gradualism

–textual / authorial negotiations of invisibility, abjection, anonymity, disappearance, obscurity, and reanimation

–memorialization and categories of identity such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability

–biodegradable / sustainable aesthetics

–scientific and antiquarian analyses of extinction, rebirth, evolution, and survival

–the ruins of Romantic criticism and theory / the remains of Romantic literary history / the afterlives of Romantic writing

 

General Call for Papers: http://nassr2015.wordpress.com/cfp/

Special Sessions Call for Papers: http://nassr2015.wordpress.com/sessions/

 

GENERAL CALL FOR PAPERS:

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NSSR)

The 23rd Annual NASSR Conference Winnipeg, Manitoba, August 13-16, 2015

Sponsored by University of Manitoba and The University of Winnipeg, NASSR 2015 will meet at the historic Fort Garry Hotel near The Forks in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, from August 13 to 16, 2015.

The theme of the conference is “Romanticism & Rights,” broadly construed to include:

• Human Rights (racial, indigenous, economic; right to freedom and autonomy [slavery])
• Animal Rights; Natural Rights, Nature’s rights (the environment)
• Sexual Rights (alternative genders, women’s rights, procreative rights)
• Author or Authorial Rights (intellectual property, copyright)
• State/Sovereign Rights
• Children’s Rights
• Right to be heard; Freedom of Speech
• The Right to Philosophy / Thinking
• Right to Religion
• Rights and Wrongs
• The Right to Die
• What is left of Rights?

For information on the 2015 NASSR call for papers, including special sessions, click on the “Call for Papers” menu item above.
Conference Co-Chairs:
Michelle Faubert, University of Manitoba
Peter Melville, The University of Winnipeg

Conference Committee:
Linda Dietrick, The University of Winnipeg
Murray Evans, The University of Winnipeg
Joshua D. Lambier, Western University
Dana Medoro, University of Manitoba
Pam Perkins, University of Manitoba
Kathryn Ready, The University of Winnipeg
Armelle St. Martin, University of Manitoba
Contact NASSR 2015: nassr15@umanitoba.ca

NASSR Main Website: http://publish.uwo.ca/~nassr/

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

 

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

Marx, Justice and Alienation

Karl Marx

MARX, JUSTICE AND ALIENATION

A SPECIAL CALL FOR PAPERS

New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

In spite of its clear and distinguished pedigree in European political philosophy and theology, the concept of alienation is now associated, almost exclusively, with Marxian critical theory and analysis. Yet, even within the orbit of Marxian thought the meaning and function of the concept of alienation has not always had a comfortable or stable position. Pointing to polysemic and intermittent use in the Paris Manuscripts, and the absence of explicit formation in Capital, Louis Althusser advised discarding alienation like other “old philosophical themes” (Althusser 1967.) Granted, there is a degree to which Marx’s own deployment of alienation has several different conceptions and connotations, but the Grundrisse and other textual sources provide evidence that alienation, its semantic elasticity notwithstanding, remained central to Marx’s political economic analysis and his theory of history, even while it appeared to ‘go underground’, so to speak, in his late thought.

Part of the confusion around this concept arises from the fact that Marx appears to use alienation as a kind of normative foundation, one which informs his various critiques. A central historical rendering tends to describe workers’ inability to fully realize their inner life in capitalist society outside of market forces, hence they are separated from their “species being.” Adopted from Feuerbach, and initially developed in the Paris Manuscripts, Marx tends to understand species-being as comprising the distinctive features of human being which when expressed facilitate the conditions for human life to flourish. The ability to freely make and create is central to this conception. But under capitalism the majority of people are unable to exercise their capabilities. In this respect, alienation is a normative assessment of the conditions of life and the potential possibility to fulfill necessary elements of them themselves. One can see residue elements of this sentiment in the language in and around the ideas associated with dignity, humanity, and human flourishing.

In terms of the analysis of capitalist social relations, Marx’s conception of alienation is narrower and is applied to studies of exploitation in the labour process. Alienation in this respect refers to how workers are separated or estranged, from their products. As a social system, capitalism is structurally dependent upon separating workers from their products and therefore requires dominating means to force workers to comply in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Thus separation implies subordination. Additionally, there is a reconstructed rendering of alienation wherein Marx’s concept of alienation can be reduced to “the notion that people create the structures that dominate them” (Postone and Brennan 2009, 316). Herein, alienation is a process by which persons are co-opted to reproduce their subordinate conditions.

While the idea of alienation has never quite disappeared from popular and scholarly consciousness, in recent years the impetus to understand these structures seems more urgent than it did only a decade ago. Indeed, when Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber argue that, for many, “crisis is the new normal” (Panitch, Albo, and Chibber 2012, ix), they articulate the conditions under which people both struggle to eke out the means of existence and make sense of the world today as well as the structural constraints which rigorously intercede and perpetuate social misery.

Increasingly, capitalism is at the center of critical attention. This is evidenced by the fact that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which details he inequalities generated under capitalism (hardly a revelation), seems to struck a chord in the popular press, so to speak. So to have Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have-Nots and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality. Unfortunately, these analyses, while detailing economic developments more broadly, are silent on issues of labor, working conditions, and the prospects for people to cultivate their inner life under contemporary capitalism. For this reason, alienation still nevertheless provides a useful focus to explore contemporary social thought. There is a need for old philosophical themes.

This special issue of New Proposals seeks to collect and showcase scholarship primarily concerned with using, refining, or deploying the concept of alienation. Given the diverse expressions of alienation we invite contributions that explore the historical, analytical, and practical underpinnings of the concept, its contemporary fate, and speculations on the trajectory of this idea.

 

Recommended Length:

Peer-Reviewed academic articles: 4’000-6’000 words.

Shorter comments and arguments: 1’500- 2’500 words

Please send queries and expressions of interest (including title, a 200 word abstract, a brief outline of the argument, affiliation, and contact details) via email to the co-editors.

Scott Timcke – snt2@sfu.ca

Graham MacKenzie – gsmacken@sfu.ca

 

Details at: http://newproposals.blogspot.ca/2014/09/old-philosophical-themes-marx-justice.html

‘New Proposals’: http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/newproposals/index

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

 

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman