Seminar 69 // 3, 4, 5 May 2018 // London
Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 2-5 May 2018
Wednesday 2 May 2-6pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
MRes seminar
Irit Rogoff
Thursday 3 May 11am-5pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
11am – 1.30pm Morning session
MRes presentation: Ainslie Roddick
Discussion Chair: Stefan Nowotny
How do you start a process that builds relations of care without fixed commitments, thinking difference without separability? In what sense could we think of this as an ethics? Could we think of ethics as establishing a place of articulation that would respond to the problematic of care?
My research project asks: how do we care? What does it mean to care and who do ‘we’ care for? Looking towards a civic change in the way care operates, my project theorises care as a problem for thought, whilst trying to imagine how we can wrest care “away from surveillance and the state” since, “the state also wants to imagine care but that care is the foot on your neck.” (Christina Sharpe quoted in 'What Exceeds the Hold?: An Interview with Christina Sharpe with Selamawit Terrefe'. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Issue 29, 2016)
My presentation will map the research process so far, working towards finding a relational ethics of care that is not produced by, or productive of, separate human identities.
1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch
2.30 – 5pm Afternoon session
Irit Rogoff on exhaustion
Readings:
- Gilles Deleuze, The Exhausted, 1995: 152-155.
- Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, 2005: Introduction.
Friday 4 May 11am-5.30pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
11am – 1.30pm Morning session
MRes presentation: Eloy Palazon
Discussion Chair: Irit
The Porno-human Capital. Sex and Image in the Era of the Financialized Self.
In what respect sex and the images that represent it, reveal themselves to be a mode of production, reproduction and representation of finance capital? This would be the substantive question of my proposal. If some feminists of the 70s contended that the personal is political, nowadays, when finance capital promises a way to develop the self, we can say that the personal is economic. Advertising, instagram/snapchat, mainstream pornographic images, dating apps, … are the points of departure of what I will define as the porno-human capital, a new way to speculate with the self, the image of the self and the bodies, as well as a new understanding of the relationship among these concepts. As a final case of study I will focus on the gay community, and particularly, on chemsex.
Readings:
- Michel Feher, 'Self Appreciation - or the Aspirations of Human Capital’
- Paul Preciado, ‘Pornpower'
1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch
2.30 – 5pm Afternoon session
Thinking the Psychic
Stefan Nowotny
In the context of discussions around mental health but also of contemporary economies ‘putting the soul work’, it seems important to reconsider the notion of the psychic in its relation to both the corporeal and ‘external’ forces. To this end, I would like to discuss Catherine Malabou’s critical engagement with Freud’s theoretical construction of the psychic, as specifically elaborated in the chapter ‘What Is a Psychic Event?’ from her 2007 book The New Wounded.
Saturday 5 May 12-4pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
Reading Group
Stefan Nowotny
‘On the Concept of History’, written in 1940 before his attempt to flee the Nazi invasion of France, is Walter Benjamin’s last work and a dense crystallisation of Benjamin’s historical thinking. Comprising eighteen theses and two appendices, the text not only offers an incisive critique of the notion of progress and the methodology of historicism, but also a call to politicised historical thinking.
Please familiarise yourselves with the whole text, though we will only be reading theses VII and VIII (pp. 391–392) – sentence by sentence.