Seminar 81 // 29, 30 April, 1, 2 May 2020 // London

|

Advanced Practices (Curatorial/Knowledge) Seminar, 29 April – 1 May 2020

|

Wednesday 29 April, 1 - 3 pm

Location: link to online seminar TBA

MRes in Curatorial/Knowledge seminar

Irit Rogoff

This seminar will be addressing ’Singularity’ and will do so through Peter Hallward’s book Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. The main focus is on a singularity driven reading of post colonial discourse with readings from Glissant and Mohammed Dib.

Reading:

- Peter Hallward, ‘Introduction’ in Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester University Press, 2001.

Thursday 30 April, 11 am - 1 pm

Location: https://meet.jit.si/AdvancedPracticesV

Bodies, relations, contagions

Bridget Crone and Adnan Madani

Extending our focus on metabolism and bodily systems, in this session we will consider how we might think about / through the relations between bodies at this moment in time. Do we need to reconsider the terms through which we understand the body and its relation to other bodies at a moment in which notions of modulation, transmission, connectivity and inter-connectivity, fluidity and movement carry with them the potential for threat? Or, alternatively, perhaps can we rehabilitate these terms to understand touch without skin, presence without immediacy, and being together without contact so that ideas of interconnectivity itself might be repurposed for these strange times. 

Readings:

- Neimanis, A., “Embodying Water: Feminist Phenomenology for Posthuman Worlds”, in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. pp. 27-64.

- Massumi, Brian, “Keywords for Affect” in The Power at the End of the Economy, Duke University Press, 2015.

Friday 1 May, 11am - 1 pm

Location: https://meet.jit.si/AdvancedPracticesV

Maleficent ecologies

Bridget Crone and Adnan Madani

In this session we will discuss continue our discussion of metabolism and concepts such as waste, contagion and immunity as they have been used to develop an expanded field of general ecology, and explore their relevance (or irrelevance) to the present crisis.

We will think of a relation to “nature” as simulacrum and as experiment through Baudrillard’s 1992 essay “Maleficent Ecology”. What might lie behind the very idea of a relation between man and nature, what is the meaning of any desire for a renewed “natural contract” (in Michel Serres’ phrase), and what might this desire expose of the workings of contemporary technocapitalism? Ultimately, for Baudrillard these are questions of value, and we will explore his critique of ecological thought. 

We will also look at Bruce Clarke’s text on planetary immunity in the collection “General Ecology”, which gives a broad account of how notions of immunity and immunopolitics have come to be central to contemporary ecological philosophy. 

Readings:

- Baudrillard, J. “Maleficent Ecology” in The Illusion of the End, Stanford University Press, 1994.

- Clarke, B. “Planetary immunity: Biopolitics, Gaia theory, the holobiont, and the systems counterculture” in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.