Realism Bites

Speculative Realism

REALISM BITES

Eighth Biannual Graduate Student Conference of the German Program

Department of German and Romance Languages and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University

Realism Bites: Disruptive Realisms in Modernity

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Elisabeth Strowick, Johns Hopkins University

Prof. Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota

November 6- 7, 2015
The Johns Hopkins University

 

All the fissures and rents which are inherent in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor should be disguised by compositional means.

(György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel)

 

The term realism has been associated with multiple artistic practices, styles and movements from nineteenth-century bourgeois realism to socialist realism, surrealism, Italian neorealism, magical realism, and postmodern hyperrealism. Its repetitions and invocations express a commitment to and a struggle for reality, rearticulating the political, social and epistemological functions and meanings of art. As a form of “Darstellung der Wirklichkeit,” it carries the tension of a set of oppositions: the reality that is and the reality that ought to be; an objective and verisimilar reproduction and a poetic constitution of reality; a conventional mode and personal expression of reality.

György Lukács emphasized the necessity for a “critical realism,” one that is determined by a critical perception and mediation of social contradictions, rather than their naïve reproduction. The notion of unity, so important for the Lukácsian concept of ‘critical realism,’ refers not only to the realist novel’s capacity to reveal the totality of social relations, but also to its depiction of the individual’s striving to reach totality as a mode of being. Even though, Lukács considered the novel as the primary form for the critical depiction of the modern conditio humana, the question can be raised whether “critical realism” functions more as an epistemo-critical concept than as a rigid genre definition. Since Lukács, many scholars and artists have called into question his notion of totality and human agency, and contested h is definition of art as a representational medium that reveals a social totality. Should we, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, hold on to a concept of totality, when discussing current “problems of realism?” How do the various forms of realism relate to what Lukács – justifiably or not – has identified as the pseudo-objectivity of Naturalism, on the one hand, and extreme subjectivism, on the other? Can one actualize critical realisms for a critique of representation? And in what way do contemporary reassessments and actualizations of realisms repeat or reverse traditional dichotomies, such as those between idealism and realism, nominalism and realism, realism and modernism?

 

This call for paper invites submissions from a wide variety of disciplines that discuss competing aesthetic strategies. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes.

Please submit abstracts (300-500 words) with your name and affiliation to Esther Edelmann and Christiane Ketteler at realismbitesgermangrads@gmail.com by August 13, 2015.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Realism repeated: Realism after Modernism
• Avant-garde “realities”
• Antinomies and instabilities within classical realisms
• The reception of realisms and its historical conditions
• Realisms, political movements and alliances
• Speculative Realism and the constitution and emergence of objects
• Excessive Realism or new possibilities of perceptions of objects
• Productive realisms or the emergence of new orders
• Realisms (false) friends: Reportage, Travelogue, and Documentary
• The Real and the Reality Principle
• Capitalist Realism and the limits and problems in representing global capitalism and its alternatives
• Theories and Projects of Mapping
• Hyperrealism and the Desert of the Real / The Spectacle of Reality
• Abject Realisms and the abjected within Realism
• Realism and the Dissolutions of boundaries between the arts
• Realism, Nominalism, Idealism, (New) Materialism
• Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism
• Post/Colonial Realisms
• Feminist Realism
• Realism and the Problem of Exemplarity
• “Wirklichkeit als das Wirkende”

 

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cfp-german-graduate-conference-realism-bites-nov-6-7-2015-jhu-baltimore

 

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‘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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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Re-engineering the Future?

Alien Life

RE-ENGINEERING THE FUTURE?

Tate Britain, London

Friday 10 April 2015, 19.30 – 20.30

FREE

All discussions will be held in the Clore Auditorium at Tate Britain 19.30–20.30.

Attendance is free but tickets will be given out on a first-come-first-served basis from 18.00 in the Clore Foyer

Part of the series Speculative Tate

This panel brings together three leading political thinkers, Nina Power, Nick Srnicek (via Skype), Alex Williams and chaired by James Trafford, to consider the ways in which we might think and construct a “future”.

This is surely a task that is an absolute necessity, given, for example, the breakdown of the planetary climate system; increasing wealth disparity, rentier economics; precarity and automation of labour; state bailouts. But at the same time, the future itself seems almost impossible, with the ultimate channeling of thought and action under the axiom of Capitalist Realism: there is no alternative.

The issue raises further concerns regarding “whose” future is under construction? We may rightly ask, for example, if anything can be retrieved from the narrative of “progress” given its alliance with Modernism and Neo-liberalism. On the other hand, the relinquishment of “progress” by the left has arguably left us in a political bind, wherein we have little way of constructing an alternative form of modernisation in a context where increasingly the transformation and automation of labour requires us to think precisely this.

The panel will discuss: Post-work society, automation and Universal Basic Income; How or if it is possible to “think” the future in a democratic way; Whether or not it is possible to restructure the left along the lines of a radical form of modernisation.

Biographies

Nina Power is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton and Tutor in Critical Writing in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art. She has written widely on European philosophy and politics.

Nick Srnicek is a political theorist. He is the author of Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics and the forthcoming Inventing the Future: Folk Politics and the Struggle for Postcapitalism (Verso 2015) (both with Alex Williams), and Postcapitalist Technologies (Polity 2016).

Alex Williams is a political theorist, working on the relationship between social complexity and political hegemony. With Nick Srnicek he is the author of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics and the forthcoming Inventing the Future (Verso 2015).

See: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/talks-and-lectures/re-engineering-future

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‘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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

 

Housing: Critical Futures

Modernism

HOUSING: CRITICAL FUTURES

Housing – Critical Futures – an international program of conferences and events is launched for 2015-16.

AN OPEN CALL for two Inaugural Events:

CONFERENCE – OPEN CALL: http://architecturemps.com/housing-critical-perspective/

08-09 April 2015

FILM SCREENINGS & DEBATE: http://architecturemps.com/h-cfl-filmdebate/

10 January 2015

EVENTS involve:
Patrick Keiler. Independent Filmmaker. Dilapidated Dwelling – film screening.
Avi Friedman. Architect / Housing Specialist. TBC. McGill University, Canada.
Loretta Lees. Human Geographer. University of Leicester
Luciana Berger, MP. Shadow Minister for Public Health, UK.

PRESENTATION Options:
1. Conference Presentations (20 minutes)
2. Written Papers (3,000 words for e-book; 5,000 for journal publication and print) *
3. Alternatives – Pecha Kucha talks; short film screenings; photographic essays etc.
4. In-person and virtual presentations (via Skype, etc.) are welcome.

CONFERENCE Key Dates:
12 December 2014: Abstract Submissions
20 December 2014: Abstract Feedback
20 March 2015: Full Paper Submissions (where applicable)
08-09 April 2015. Conference

OVERALL PROGRAM: http://architecturemps.com/housing-critical-futures/

 

**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

Art in the Age of Real Abstraction

Aesthetics

ART IN THE AGE OF REAL ABSTRACTION

Call for Papers | ‘Art in the Age of Real Abstraction’ | Deadline: 12 December 2013

Historic iterations of abstraction in the visual arts have traditionally been associated with terms such as the non-representational, the non-figurative, and the immaterial, in opposition to a loosely defined concept of realism. In the post-war period, however, both realism and abstraction became unstable concepts, deployed to refer to a range of diverse practices, from Nouveau Réalisme to Art Informel to Abstract Expressionism. This conference invites papers that rethink the relation between realism and abstraction in the period between 1970 and the contemporary moment. Of particular concern are the impacts of two intersecting events: the advent of Neoliberalism and the dismantling of Modernism in art history.

‘Art in the Age of Real Abstraction’ seeks to investigate contemporary forms of abstraction through the analysis of different modes of representation, affectivity and performativity, drawing lines of continuity and addressing points of ambiguity between post-war abstraction and contemporary iterations. In recent critical discourse reification has been described as both a process of abstraction and as a figural process. On this view ‘Real Abstraction’ might be understood as the becoming-concrete of the abstract. As such ‘Real Abstraction’ calls for a rethinking of what the terms realism, figuration and abstraction might mean today.

We welcome papers that address the critical stakes of abstraction in the visual arts as a representational economy and as an aesthetic strategy, a way of inhabiting the contradictions produced by capital, and as a means of generating meaning, memory and historical experience.

We encourage academics, researchers and artists to submit papers on the following issues and debates (amongst others):

* post-70s reconfigurations of abstraction

* the artwork and the commodity form

* feminist interventions in the history of abstraction

* abstraction and historic experience

* the intersection of realism and abstraction

* artwork as theory, artwork as historiography

****EXTENDED DEADLINE****

Speakers should be prepared to present papers for 20 min followed by a discussion.

Please send 300 word abstracts by December 12th to:

Rye Dag Holmboe: rye.holmboe.09@ucl. ac.uk

Andrew Witt: andrew.witt.09@ucl.ac.uk

The conference will be held on April 12th, 2014

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/art- history/staff-research/call_ for_papers

**END**

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Paris, Capitalism and Modernity Seminar

North Atlantic Oscillation

PARIS, CAPITALISM AND MODERNITY SEMINAR

We are currently soliciting paper proposals for our seminar titled “Paris, Capitalism and Modernity in France from the 17th through the 19th centuries” at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2014 Annual Conference, New York University, New York City, NY, March 20-23, 2014. The conference theme is “Capitals.”

We have space for up to twelve participants in our seminar. Proposals of up to 250 words should be submitted by midnight, Thursday November 1, 2013, at the following link:  http://www.acla.org/submit/.

Please ensure you select our seminar in the drop-down list.

Our seminar theme is the history and representation of capital, capitalism and/or the French capital as a economic center in French modernity, defined in economic terms by the rise of a society dominated by market institutions in a period from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. The full description of our seminar can be found below, and at the following link: http://acla.org/acla2014/paris-capitalism-and-modernity-in-france-from-the-17th-through-the-19th-centuries/

Please also do not hesitate to contact us personally if you are interested.

Best wishes,
Andrew Billing (abilling@macalester.edu) and Juliette Cherbuliez (cherbuli@umn.edu).

Seminar Title: Paris, Capitalism and Modernity in France from the 17th through the 19th centuries

The theme of this seminar is the history and representation of capital, capitalism and/or the French capital as a economic center in French modernity, defined in economic terms by the rise of a society dominated by market institutions in a period from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Participants are invited to take as points of departure Walter Benjamin’s famous nomination of Paris as the “capital of the nineteenth century” in view of its phantasmagoric celebration of market society and commodity fetishism, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s well-known description in “La Nouvelle Héloïse” of the French capital as “the city in the world in which fortunes are most unequal, and in which reign at the same time the most sumptuous elegance and the most deplorable misery.” Both Rousseau and Benjamin identify a Paris simultaneously exemplary and exceptional as a site for the concentration of wealth and economic power and the display of commodification and inequality. Our panel will explore or contest this and other specificities of Paris and French capitalism in modernity.

We welcome proposals that engage with literary and aesthetic representations of capital, capitalism and/or the French capital, e.g. Molière, Rousseau, Mercier, and Balzac; with French economic thought as elaborated in diverse modes throughout this period from the physiocrats through Fourier, Saint-Simon, Bastiat and Proudhon; and with the contestation of capital and capitalism during the Revolution, the Commune and other significant historical moments. Panelists are also encouraged to explore economic relations and exchange between Paris and France’s colonies during this period.

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cfp-acla-seminar-on-paris-capitalism-and-modernity

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Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

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

Remembering the Impossible Tomorrow: Italian Political Thought and the Recent Crisis in Capitalism

Capitalism IS Crisis

REMEMBERING THE IMPOSSIBLE TOMORROW: ITALIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE RECENT CRISIS IN CAPITALISM

Call for Papers
Remembering the Impossible Tomorrow: Italian Political Thought and the Recent Crisis in Capitalism
The British Society for Phenomenology 2013 Annual Conference
5th- 7th April, 2013
St Hilda’s College Oxford

During Marx’s time radical thought was formed from a convergence of three sources: German philosophy, English economics, and French politics. In the introduction to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996) Michael Hardt argued that these tides had shifted, with radical movements drawing from French philosophy, US economics, and Italian politics. More recently, Matteo Pasquinelli has argued that ‘Italian theory’ has attained an academic hegemony comparable to that held by French philosophy in the 1980s.

But despite the proliferation of analysis and organizing drawing from and inspired by the history of autonomous politics in Italy, where are these voices today? In 2012, if you listened to the mainstream politicians and economic experts and no-one else, you would hardly know that there was any financial crisis in 2008. You might have a faint recollection that for a brief moment alternative voices were heard in the media, but now it as if nothing at all had happened. The waters that once had parted have now engulfed us again. It is the same voices articulating the same tired ideas as the whole of Europe slides into the nightmare of austerity, despite the fact they do not appear to have any relation to reality, and even those who speak them seem exhausted and worn out.

For some time now, many of us have noticed that there have been different voices, and they began speaking many years before 2008 warning us of an impending disaster. These voices were coming from Italy. Perhaps because of their own experience, the radical Italian thinkers never believed the logic of the market could solve its own problems or that life and capital were one and the same. Our hope is to draw from this history as well as listen to some of the new generation of Italian political thinkers, to share their ideas, offer an alternative diagnosis of the present, and perhaps even a suggestion of what different future might look like.

Confirmed Speakers:
Franco Barchiesi
Franco ‘Bifo’ Beradi
Federico Chicchi
Paolo Do
Silvia Federici
Dario Gentili

Please send an abstract of approx 500 words to Lars Iyer (lars.iyer@newcastle.ac.uk) by 24th September 2012.

The BSP conference does not have parallel sessions. As a consequence, there are only two places available for papers drawn from the Call for Papers.

 

**END**

 

‘Stagnant’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

‘The Lamb’ by William Blake – set to music by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3VloKBvZc

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

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

Eleventh Annual Meeting of the International Social Theory Consortium

Socrates

ELEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL THEORY CONSORTIUM

CALL FOR PAPERS
17-20 May, 2012 — Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida

THEORY AND POLITICS: BETWEEN THE GLOBALIZATION OF MODERNITY AND STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM AND CHANGE

The conference will focus on the tensions between two dimensions of social theory: as an academic discourse with analytical intent, and as a form of political action. In particular, our goal is to highlight 
the position of social theory between:
– Theory construction—as a social-scientific practice that is both normatively oriented and historically self-reflexive, i.e. willing and able to recognize its embeddedness in the social process; and
– Progressive politics—as it is inspired by the prospect of qualitative social change, and thus, oriented toward the transformation of the object of social theory.

In order to do so effectively, social theorists need to avoid detached, unengaged, ‘un-dialectical’ conceptions of our responsibility as confined to observation, along with forms of activism that lack reflexivity and awareness of the mediated nature of modern social life—as a result constituting political practice without theory. While social practice without theory is blind, social theory without practice is hollow.  Yet when and how does social practice truly require input from social theory? As Hegel’s employment of the image of the Owl of Minerva suggests, whose flight begins at dusk, does theory have a tendency to arrive on the scene too late…when the work of revolution-nary change already has been completed? Is it not that theories are becoming outdated due to revolutionary change? Then again, is such critical self-constraint itself overly hasty? Is social theory not in fact capable of providing a robust normative standard to evaluate the status and progress of revolutions and social change? Should it not aspire to critically accompany or reflect on social and historical change? If the relation between theory and politics is an open one, how do we need to reconfigure the relation between (social) theory and (progressive) action, especially after the financial crash of 2008 and following the Arab Spring? Are recent developments within the Western world indicators for another democratic Spring? Are claims and movements for economic justice and accountability, as they currently are being articulated in the US, in Europe, in Israel, and word-wide, signs of a new revolutionary spirit and indicators of a new cosmopolitan public sphere? Or could they be the opposite—symptoms of the decline of such center-pieces of modernity as democracy and individual autonomy? After all, the Arab Spring may not lead to greater democracy, but a resurgence of Islam. At the same time, theorists like Colin Crouch and John Keane warn that we may be going through the terminal phase of western democracy, whose inability to confront 21st-century challenges is becoming ever more apparent.

The conference poses such questions, in the framework of the overarching query about the relation between theory and politics—as provocative, open, challenging inspirations for a most diverse set of 
possible inquiries:
– Theoretical and meta-theoretical essays about theory and politics are as much part of this as cultural and critical inquiries into contexts of political action and agency;
– New developments fusing theoretical traditions are as much welcome as are works that analyze the conflicting interstices between concrete local actions and the larger theoretical and symbolic underpinnings of these movements;
– Works on the grounds of normative commitments are as much needed as empirical/discursive deconstructions of existing imaginaries and socio-political beliefs and assumptions.

Papers are invited that speak to the topic from:
– Classical & contemporary social theory: working with our inheritance
– Methodology of Critical Theory
– Literary methods and Social Theory
– The interpretive tradition, depth hermeneutics & analysis
– The performative aspects of public life
– Media power and image magic
– Psychoanalytic method and social theory
– Phenomenology, hermeneutics, and critical hermeneutics
– Epistemologies and philosophies of knowledge today
– Asian philosophies and methods
– Socrates, Plato, and working with the Greeks today
– Political anthropology and reflexive historical sociology

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Mel Barber – Convener Associate Professor of Sociology, Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida
Harry F. Dahms Sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (hdahms@utk.edu)
Kieran Keohane, Sociology, University College, Cork, Ireland (k.keohane@ucc.ie)
Bert Koegler, Philosophy, University of North Florida, Jacksonville (hkoegler@unf.edu)

Please submit abstracts by March 1, 2012 to Mel Barber at:  mbarber265@aol.com

Web-site:  http://www.cas.usf.edu/socialtheory/data/istcpaper.pdf

 

**END**

 

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

 

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a new song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Riot, Revolt, Revolution

Marxism and Culture

RIOT, REVOLT, REVOLUTION

CAPPE
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics
University of Brighton, UK

7th International Interdisciplinary Conference
RIOT, REVOLT, REVOLUTION
Wednesday 5th – Friday 7th September 2012

Call for Papers

It is very rare for societies or institutions to change unless they are confronted by specific forms of resistance. This conference investigates those moments of historical change when existing orders are put into question. In particular, it seeks to challenge us to rethink ways in which we might understand resistance and asks us to read the past in order to inform the present through a focus on riot, revolt and revolution, and on the interplay between them.

Papers which address these themes from any discipline are welcome.

Suggested topics might include:

Modernism and post-modernism in the arts
What is revolution?
The French Revolution
20th-century revolutions
The neo-liberal revolution
Occupy Wall Street
Resistance today
Civil War
The politics of riot
Ethics of revolt
Resistance to change
Burke or Kant?
The limits of reform
Challenges to capitalism
Neo-liberal economics
Financial crisis: a real opportunity?
Postcolonial politics
Discourses of Resistance
Languages of Resistance

We anticipate that these and related issues will be of interest to people working in, among other areas, philosophy, political theory, politics, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, the arts, history, government and law.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed by 6th January 2012, at the latest, to Nicola Clewer, nc95@brighton.ac.uk.

The conference fee is £210. This includes refreshments, lunch on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and a buffet dinner on the Thursday evening.

There are a limited number of places available for graduate students and for people who have no institutional affiliation at the reduced price of £105. Please indicate if you wish to be considered for one of these places when sending your abstract; or contact Nicola Clewer at nc95@brighton.ac.uk as soon as possible.

Please note: the conference fee does not include accommodation and, unfortunately, we are unable to offer travel grants or other forms of financial assistance. A limited amount of reasonably priced student halls of residence accommodation is available on a first come first served basis.

For further information about the centre please see the CAPPE: www.brighton.ac.uk/CAPPE OR http://www.brighton.ac.uk/CAPPE

For further information about the conference and updates: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/riot or http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/riot

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

The Age of Nixon

Richard Nixon

THE AGE OF NIXON

Professor Carl Freedman

Book publication date: January 2012
“I believe the second half of the twentieth century will be known as The Age of Nixon” [Robert Dole, at Nixon’s funeral].

In the age of the Tea Party, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry, not to mention Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, Nixon seems hair-raisingly left-wing by current Republican Party standards: and yet, he laid the groundwork for much of the Republican right wing today.

Carl Freedman picks up the mantle of Garry Wills, David Frost and other political commentators to reassess Nixon’s profound psychic connections with the American people and his influence on many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political biography but a study of cultural power: a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values.  

Future generations have several ways in which to learn about Nixon the man, Nixon the politician and Nixon the myth; these include John Adams’ 1987 opera Nixon in China, Oliver Stone’s 1995 movie Nixon and Garry Wills’ 1970 biography Nixon Agonistes. It is nearly 40 years since the events which led to Nixon’s downfall. The release of his secret grand jury testimony was ordered in July, 36 years after the Watergate trial itself. The Age of Nixon is timely. It is a new kind of book, for both academic and general readers, applying Marxist cultural theory and psychoanalysis to the study of American electoral politics.

Richard Nixon was real, for all that he seems like a fictional character concocted in the course of some strange literary collaboration between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and J. G. Ballard. Carl Freedman’s compelling book takes the full measure of Nixon the man, Nixon the media image, Nixon the myth, and even Nixon the ideal type, the quintessential expression, and the most capacious representative of the political and economic system under which we continue to live today.                                                                                                                                                       

Steven Shaviro, author of CONNECTED, WITHOUT CRITERIA, and POST-CINEMATIC AFFECT

“Professor Carl Freedman writes on modern thought and culture: most notably Marxist critical theory, science fiction, film, and US electoral politics.  Previous titles include Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture (2002). He was born in North Carolina and received his higher education at the University of North Carolina, Oxford University, and Yale University.  He has taught at Yale, at Wesleyan University (Connecticut), and, since 1984, at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge), where he is Professor of English.

To order books in UK: tradeorders@orcabookservices.co.uk   /   01235 465521
To order books in US: customercare@nbnbooks.com  /   1 800 462 6420
http://www.o-books.net http://www.zero-books.net http://www.circle-books.net

You may also be interested in other titles in the Zero Books imprint

Capitalist Realism [978-184-694-317-1] 2009 £7.99 $14.95 by Mark Fisher is a modern analysis, illuminated by contemporary references from the worlds of film, literature and art, of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.

Militant Modernism [978-184694-176-4 £9.99 $19.95 2009] by Owen Hatherley argues for a Modernism of everyday life, defending modernism in design, film and architecture.

The Meaning of David Cameron  [978-184694-456-7 £6.99 $12.95] by Richard Seymour widens the debate beyond televised debates, party manifestos, campaign trail propaganda and media coverage, and asks whether Cameron is the cipher of the social forces he represents.

Meat Market: female flesh under capitalism [978-1-84694-521-2 £6.99 $12.95 April 2011 Zero Books] by activist Laurie Penny is a feminist dissection of women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism, whereby women are both consumers and consumed. This is a suitably provocative treatise from the voice of student protest and Penny Red columnist.

Around the Outsider: Essays presented to Colin Wilson on the occasion of his 80th birthday  [978-1-84694-668-4 £15.99 May 2011 O-Books] by Colin Stanley is a collection of essays in honour of former ‘Angry Young Man’, the English philosopher/author Colin Wilson, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

A Year on the Sauce [978-1-84694-529-8 10.99  19.95 2011] by Brendan Montague is a limited edition collection of stories from the most edgy radical news blog in the UK.

The Politics of Down Syndrome [978-1-84694-613-4 £9.99 $14.95 85pp Sept 2011 Zero] by The Book Depository MD Kieron Smith is a call for people to think again about what it means to be inclusive, why we’re hung up on the idea of intelligence and how an inclusive society is a better society.

The Message [978-1-84694-879-4 £9.99 $16.95 Zero Sep 2011] by Tariq Goddard is a topical literary thriller set in a fictional African state in the grip of civil war. Are 21st Century Empire Builders preparing for another go at Africa, 100 years after the Heart of Darkness? See the parallels with the real civil war going on in Libya. This book is being reviewed by Kirsty Wark and guests on BBC 2’s Review Show this month.

Another coming next year is
Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media [978-1-84694-976-0 £9.99 $14.95Jan 2012 Zero] by Stephen Harper attacks the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, and updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

Review copies and more information is available.

Best wishes
Catherine Harris
John Hunt Publishing Sales & Marketing
Laurel House SO24 9JH England T: 07879483708
http://www.zero-books.net

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Higher Education in the Liquid Modern Era

Higher Education Crisis

HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE LIQUID MODERN ERA

 BSA Regional Postgraduate Day School Event 2011

Higher Education in the Liquid Modern Era: Swirling Down the Drain?

The Bauman Institute, University of Leeds, Friday 9 September, 2011

Last remaining places! Book now: http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/postgrad.htm

The metaphor of liquidity is used in Zygmunt Bauman’s work to represent the loss of security felt as more the ‘solid’ institutions and ‘traditional’ patterns of social relations of modernity break down/dissolve in the contemporary world. A striking example of this can be found to exist in the situation facing contemporary participants – students, teachers and researchers – in higher education (HE), especially those working in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

The ‘traditional’ pursuits of academia are being increasingly undermined by changes which are aimed at subordinating free enquiry to the shifting demands of the marketplace. The proposed changes to HE funding outlined by the current UK coalition government seem likely to further exacerbate the tendency towards instrumentalism in HE, while simultaneously destabilizing employment in both the knowledge and the culture industries in the UK for many years to come.

In light of these recent proposals, and the likely assault on non-STEM subjects that will ensue, we feel that it would be productive to consider as postgraduate students the likely landscape which we are about to enter. We aim to do this by drawing on Bauman, who has written and recently lectured on the role of sociologists and higher education in contemporary society (‘Education in Liquid Modernity’, 2005; Sociology – Whence and Whither?: Speech from the Bauman Institute Launch Conference, 2010), as well as others, in order to produce a written statement in defence of social science.

Whilst this will be a collaborative effort, with input predominantly from sociology postgraduates, we envisage inviting a small number of postgraduates and academics from other disciplines to contribute their ideas and efforts. Through this, we suggest that a more comprehensive understanding of the common problems facing those across the social sciences, at different stages in their academic lives, can help us to produce a justification of sociology’s continuing value and importance beyond narrow, mechanistic definitions of ‘impact’.

The aim of the event is to provide a space for postgraduate social scientists to engage in critical reflection on the proposed changes to higher education funding in the UK and their implications for our so-called ‘knowledge’ society, particularly through drawing on the insights provided in the work of Zygmunt Bauman on the insecurities and uncertainties of life in liquid modern times.

The event will consist of a mix of papers from postgraduate students, three keynote speakers, panel discussion, and collaborative workshop sessions. Postgraduate students will receive first preference for places.

Registration fees: BSA Members: Free Non-members: £25

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

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Radical Foucault Expanded! An International Conference

Richard Alpert

RADICAL FOUCAULT EXPANDED! AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

September 8th – 9th, Universityof East London(Docklands Campus)
Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London
http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/?p=591

Following the  superb international response to our initial call for papers, we have decided to expand the  event into a two-day conference. This has opened up a very limited amount of space for further contributions. Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited, to arrive no later than Sunday May 8th 201.

The publication of Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-84 in English will be complete in April 2011 and his first Collège de France lecture course, La Volunté de Savoir will be published for the first time in February. The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London is holding a an international conference which will re-assess Foucault’s contribution to radical thought and the application of his ideas to contemporary politics. What does it mean to draw on Foucault as a resource for radical politics, and how are we to understand the politics which implicitly informs his work?

Many commentators today would seem to claim Foucault as  the theorist of a politics which eschews all utopian ambition in favour of a certain governmental pragmatism, while others would claim him for a rigorous but ultimately rather simple libertarianism: can either of these positions ever be adequate to the radicalism of Foucault’s  analyses? Does it matter?

What is the significance of Foucault’s ideas of ‘governmentality’ and ‘biopolitics’ in understanding his later oeuvre and its implications; do either of these terms deserve to carry the weight attributed to them by some commentators? What is the ongoing relevance of Foucault’s account of disciplinarity: is, it, as Lazzarato has claimed, a historical category no longer fully applicable to contemporary forms of power?

How can Foucauldian ideas be brought bear on the analysis of austerity politics? Is there a role for Foucault’s ideas in formulating effective resistance to the increasing erosion of civil liberties that operates both within countries and across state boundaries? Can the notion of bio-power account for contemporary forms of racism? How can Foucauldian epistemology enable an understanding of the biopolitics of contemporary scientific discourse?

Confirmed Keynotes:
Stuart Elden, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University.
Mark Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex University.

Subjects may include, but are not limited to:
Foucauldian thought and contemporary subjectivation
Foucault and other thinkers
Governmentality and everyday life
Strategic discourses of war and terror
New technologies of the self
Foucault and new forms of resistance
Heterotopias  now and in the future
Foucault and the erosion of the state
Disciplinary society and the society of control
Foucault, British politics and the ‘big society’
Foucault, post-Fordism and post-democracy

Email abstracts to Jeremy Gilbert (j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk) and Debra Benita Shaw (d.shaw@uel.ac.uk)

Registration will cost £110.00 per delegate (including lunch, not including accommodation or dinner) for both days. A day-rate of 65.00 will be available, but delegates will be strongly encouraged to attend on both days, and the organisers cannot promise to accommodate requests to present on a particular day.

—END—

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

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Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory

Dialectics

DIALECTICAL PASSIONS: NEGATION IN POSTWAR ART THEORY

NEW BOOK:
Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press, 2010)
Cloth, 320 pages, 15 halftones
ISBN: 978-0-231-14938-9
$50.00 / £34.50 – Promo Code for 30% discount: ‘DAYDI’ on orders via:
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14938-9/dialectical-passions

Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of “critical postmodernism” and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions.

Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory.

Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects—and with it critical distance— and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo. Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980s art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.

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