Marxism in Culture

MARXISM IN CULTURE: PROGRAMME FOR SUMMER TERM 2010

Friday 30 April
No End & No Beginning: Pop, Periodization, Problems c. 1989
Joshua Clover (University of California, Davis)

Friday 14 May
Symposium on Frederic Jameson Matthew Beaumont (University College London), Gail Day (Leeds University), Nina Power (Roehampton University), and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths)This seminar starts at the earlier time of 4.00pm

Friday 28 May
Photography in May ‘68
Antigoni Memou (University of East London)

Friday 11 June
Marx, Hegel and the 'Truth Claims' of Critical Realist Photography: A Political-Aesthetic Reading of the initial chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
Simon Constantine

All seminars start at 5.30pm, and are held in the Wolfson Room (unless otherwise indicated) at the Institute of Historical Research in Senate House, Malet St, London. The seminar closes at 7.30pm and retires to the bar.

Organisers: Matthew Beaumont, Warren Carter, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Maggie Gray, Owen Hatherley, Andrew Hemingway, Esther Leslie, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou, Nina Power, Pete Smith, & Alberto Toscano.

For further information, contact Andrew Hemingway, at:a.hemingway[at]ucl.ac.uk or Esther Leslie at: e.leslie[at]bbk.ac.uk

Is Resistance Really Futile? Event

Is Resistance Really Futile?
A Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy Event
One Day Workshop, 10-5pm, Tuesday March 9th, 2010
University of Leicester School of Management
522 Ken Edwards Building, University of Leicester
http://www.le.ac.uk/ulsm/research/cppe/

How are we to understand resistance in these increasingly financialised times? What, if anything, does the resisting subject look like today? These questions never go away. Within business and management studies, they seem to take on a special meaning. So is resistance to be located within revolutionary action alone? Or is it instead something which is always all around us? Is resistance inseparable from pathos? Or is there something about it which lends itself towards detached scrutiny? This workshop aims to analyse a variety of theories of resistance insofar as they have been used to make sense of the realities of the modern workplace. Presentations throughout the day will take a variety of conceptual and practical perspectives upon the question of resistance whilst the concluding roundtable will attempt to establish common strands of analysis.

Workshop Programme

10-10.30 Registration and Coffee

10.30-10.45 Welcome from the Organizers

10.45-12.15 Session 1
Nikos Karfakis and George Kokkinidis – Re-thinking cynicism: Kynical parrhesia in contemporary workplaces
Ozan N. Alakavuklar – Is it possible to justify resistance?
Nceku Nyathi – Anticolonialism and organising for resistance and change

12:30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3 Session 2
Robert Cluley – On the Irresistibility of Resistance
Stevphen Shukaitis – Run This Town; or, Cultural Workers Throw Down Yr Tools, the Metropolis is on Strike
Martin Parker – Reflections and alternatives

3-3.30 Coffee

3.30-4.45 Roundtable Discussion – Moderator: Simon Lilley

4.45-5.00 Concluding Remarks & Farewell

Registration and Contact
Registration is free but places are severely limited. Please book early to avoid disappointment. For further information, please contact the workshop organisers, Ozan N. Alakavuklar ona3@le.ac.uk and Stephen Dunne sd142@le.ac.uk. We look forward to seeing you

With thanks to HM/Sebastian Budgen, two new important sites:

The first is Décalages, a new journal dedicted to the work of Althusser and his circle.

The second is a new web page Research on Money and Finance.

Structure to Rhizome Conference

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHYMIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY

From Structure to Rhizome

Transdisciplinarity in French thought, 1945 to the present: histories, concepts, constructions

Cine Lumière, The French Institute 17 Queensberry Place, London, SW7 2DTtel. 020 7073 1350
16 & 17 April 2010

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the ‘great books’ of postwar French theory transformed study in the humanities in the Anglophone world. These books were all, in one way or another, transdisciplinary in character. Yet their reception has primarily taken place in an array of specific disciplinary contexts, isolated from a broader understanding of the intellectual dynamics, forms, significance and innovative potential of transdisciplinarity itself. This conference aims to redress this situation. Each speaker will reflect on the transdisciplinary functioning of a single concept in French thought since 1945, with respect to a founding text, a particular thinker or a school of thought.

Programme
Friday 16 April
9.30
Registration
10.00
Peter Osborne, Introduction:Transdisciplinarity
10.20
Etienne Balibar, Structure
11.40
Stella Sandford, Sex
12.50
Lunch break
13.45
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, Science
14.55
Patrick Guyomard, Object a
16.05
Tea/Coffee­­
16.20
Tom Conley, Writing
17.30
Drinks Reception

Saturday 17 April
9.30
Registration
10.00
Alain de Libera, Subject
11.15
François Cusset, Theory
12.30
Lunchbreak
13.30
Michèle Riot-Sarcey, History
14.45
Andrew Barry, Network
16.00
Tea/Coffee
16.15
Éric Alliez, Rhizome
17.30
Close

£45 / £20 students (free to members of the CRMEP, but booking is essential)
Advance registration: please write to Tom Eyers

Cheques should be made payable to ‘ Middlesex University’. Send to: Prof. Peter Osborne, CRMEP, Middlesex University, Trent Park campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ, United Kingdom.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures at Roehampton

With thanks to IT

Spring Term 2010
Public Lectures
All Welcome
Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths College, London) ‘Fanaticism & the Enlightenment’
Tuesday Feb 16th 6 - 7.30 pm Duchesne Building Room 102

Graham McFee (California/Brighton) 'Wittgenstein, Philosophy & the Performing Arts'
Tuesday Mar 9th 6 - 7.30 pmDuchesne Building Room 001

James Wilson (University College London) 'John Stuart Mill & the Public Regulation of Health'
Tuesday Mar 16th 6 - 7.30 pmDuchesne Building Room 101

Michael Burns (Dundee University) 'Kierkegaard for the 21st Century'
Tuesday Mar 23rd 6 - 7.30 pmDuchesne Building Room 102

All enquiries: Dr Raj Sehgal, Philosophy Programme r.sehgal[at]roehampton.ac.uk
Directions to Roehampton can be found here

Real Objects or Material Subjects?

‘Real Objects or Material Subjects’

Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee
March 27-28, 2010

SCHEDULE
Saturday
11am-12pm: registration

12pm-12:15pm: Introductory Remarks

12:15pm-1:30pm: James Williams (Dundee) “Contemplating Pebbles”

1:30pm-2:30pm: Lunch

2:30pm-4:00pm: Nathan Coombs (Royal Holloway, University of London) Platonism and Realism: Badiou contra Harman

Sid Littlefield (Georgia College & State University): Inflationary and Deflationary Metaphysics

Mike Olson (Villanova University) On the Dogmatic Limitations and Speculative Resources of Transcendental Idealism

4:30pm-6:00pm: Graham Harman (American University, Cairo) “I Am Also of the Opinion that Materialism Must Be Destroyed”

Sunday
10:00am-10:15am: Introductory Remarks

10:15am-11:30am: Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico) “‘Naturalism or anti-naturalism? No, thanks–both are worse!’: Science, Materialism, and Slavoj Zizek.”

11:45am-1:15pm:
Austin Smidt (Nottingham) The Beyond In Our Midst: Sartre’s Robust Materialism as a Root of Revolution

Tom Eyers (Middlesex) Lacanian Materialism and the Question of the Real

Colby Dickinson (KU Leuven) Materialism as pantheistic animality: Giorgio Agamben and the silence of transcendence

1:15pm-2:00pm: Lunch Break

2:00pm-3:00pm:
John Van Houdt (KU Leuven): The Necessity of Contingency or Contingent Necessity? Meillassoux, Hegel, and the Logic of Modal Necessity

Paul Ennis (University College Dublin) Phenomenology and the Ancestral

3:15pm-4:30pm: Peter Hallward (CRMEP, Middlesex) “Self-Emancipation between Hegel and Marx”

4:30pm-5:00pm: Closing Discussion

Registration is ESSENTIAL, please email mykeburns@gmail.com with Name/Address/Institutional Affiliation/Email Address by March 1st.
Cost is 10 pounds unwaged/ 20 pounds waged. Checks can be made out to Michael Burns and sent to:

Michael Burns, Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK
Details on travel/accommodation will be posted shortly.

Double Header - Friday 12th February

nubureaucracy and capitalist realism
Friday, 12th February 20102-4pm Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths

Neoliberalism presents itself as the enemy of bureaucracy, the destroyer of the nanny state and the eliminator of red tape. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (Zer0 books, 2009) argues that, contrary to this widely accepted story, bureaucracy has proliferated under neoliberalism. Far from decreasing, bureaucracy has changed form, spreading all the more insidiously in its newly decentralised mode. This 'nu-bureaucracy' is often carried out by workers themselves, now induced into being their own auditors. Capitalist Realism aims to challenge the successful ideological doublethink in which workers' experience of increasing bureaucratisation co-exists with the idea that bureaucracy belongs to a 'Stalinist' past. This symposium will explore nu-bureaucracy and other related concepts developed in Capitalist Realism, such as 'business ontology' and 'market Stalinism'. How has nu-bureaucracy affected education and public services, and how can it be resisted? What implications might the attack on nu-bureaucracy have for a renewed anti-capitalism?

Respondent, Alberto Toscano, Department of Sociology

All welcome.

Friday 12th of February, 5.00-8.00 RHB 137

Screening of Queimada (1969) by Gillo Pontercorvo, followed by a conversation between Alberto Toscano, Peter Hallward and Benjamin Noys about the film, Fanon and the Haitian revolution.