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Sasha Langford: "An Atmosphere of Certain Uncertainty": Knowledge, Embodiment, and Ecology in Thick Time

March 25, 2019

Anthropocene discourse over the past decade has often framed global warming as a form of "certain uncertainty" that demands new empirical and speculative methodologies in order to be properly known. In this talk, I consider the "certain uncertainty" of climate science and ecological theory in relation to postcolonial and psychoanalytic accounts of embodiment that situate the body as an ambivalent site of knowledge. Accepting climate change as a process with roots in colonial history, I ask how concepts such as "weathering," "atmosphere," and "acclimatization" may blur the boundaries between social and meteorological forms of bodily duress. In doing so, I propose that thinking "certain uncertainty" as a mode of resilient embodiment to environmental conditions may serve to further politicize contemporary ecological theory.

Sasha J. Langford is an independent scholar, composer, and musician. Her recent research has considered the visual discourse of the Anthropocene, the placenta as a site of Marxist critique, and the symbolic role of the fee in psychoanalytic practice. Other recent work includes the 2017 essay and hybrid-writing collection Ephemeral Institutions, and performances at the International Noise Conference in Miami, FL; the Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation in Brooklyn, NY; and the Lines of Flight Festival of Experimental Music in Dunedin, New Zealand. She currently teaches media history and theory at Columbia College.

Nermin Gogalic in conversation with Jerry Zaslove:

Transition and Identity in the Post-Yugoslav Environment

March 18, 2019

What was then seen as "The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama was actually the beginning of a long lasting catastrophe for many of us living in the former Yugoslavia. The turmoil of political transition, which in our case coincided with a civil war, brought upon a state of unrest and confusion.

What happened with identity in the midst of such radical changes? What strategies and techniques were employed to dismantle the pre-existing identity once it was deemed inadequate by those in the position of power, and what was offered instead?

This conversation will attempt to create a narrative that will inspect these questions within a specific geo-political period. It will attempt to show what happens to both common and individual identity, as well as that of the city. In doing so we will rely mostly on intimate personal recollection and reflections provided with the privilege of both geographical and temporal distance.

Nermin Gogalic is a Vancouver based writer from Rijeka (Croatia) with a special interest in identity politics and the city. He is currently a student in Graduate Liberal Studies at Simon Fraser University.

SFU Professor Emeritus Jerry Zaslove is a teacher and writer who studied Comparative Literature at Western Reserve University and the University of Washington. Since 1965 at Simon Fraser University he has taught Literature and Humanities, influenced but not limited by the traditions of the relationship of social radicalisms and the arts, the worlds of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. He is the Founding Director of the Institute for the Humanities and has published numerous essays and monographs on the subjects he loves and teaches. Currently Simons Fellow in Graduate Liberal Studies. A volume of his collected essays Untimely Passages: Dossiers from the Other Shore, 1965–2015 is in preparation.

Christine Kim: Brutalist Imaginary - North Korea through a Minor Transpacific Lens

March 11, 2019

For audiences located in the West, and perhaps beyond, North Korea is a dystopic spectacle that appears ludicrous, terrifying, and tragic. This effect is created through periodic media coverage, films, memoirs, and other cultural representations that fashion North Korea as a cultural fantasy of the inhuman for the West. In this talk, I examine the film The Interview as well as the security concerns surrounding Sony Pictures in order to reflect upon perceptions of North Korea. Given that the film was shot in British Columbia, it also offers a useful opportunity to reflect upon Canada’s position in relation to North Korea and, more specifically, as part of what might be called a ‘minor transpacific’ in order to map the minor histories and cultural flows that connect locations in the Asia Pacific region. This paper takes a minor transpacific as a perspective and a methodology to complicate how North Korea invokes the Cold War for local audiences and to ask what is at stake in popular tendencies to write North Korea in terms that are simultaneously fascinating and horrifying.

Christine Kim is an Associate Professor in the English department at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, diaspora studies, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). She has contributed chapters to essay collections on Asian Canadian literature and theatre and published articles in Interventions, Mosaic, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Journal of Intercultural Studies. Christine is co-director of SFU’s Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Currently she is working on a SSHRC funded book-length project on representations of North Korea, cultural fantasies, and Cold War legacies.

March 4th, 2019 - 7pm

Geoff Mann: Permanent Emergency

The effort to understand contemporary sovereignty (“rulership”) might best be pursued not through Schmitt’s influential characterization of sovereignty as inaugurated in the decision on the exception, but by concentrating on necessity. If, as has been said for a century, we are in a “permanent state of emergency”, the exception loses its critical grip. If the “exception” becomes the rule, what does the sovereign decide? Necessity points to a conception of sovereignty—which we might describe as the determination of the distribution of the burdens of life—able to help us grapple with crucial challenges to the modern state. The problems associated with accelerating climate change and inequality, for example, are no longer “exceptional”, but so unexceptional as to be paradigmatic of the current conjuncture. For the state, the problem is not the decisive act in the declaration of a state of emergency. Instead, the present calamity demands daily, almost mundane answers to the question of the distribution of life’s burdens. As the management of “permanent emergency” becomes more central to state function, the “exception” proves an increasingly inadequate conceptual tool. This gives new meaning to the “tragic” understanding of politics in liberal political theory and political economy.

Geoff Mann is a professor and undergraduate programs chair in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, where he also directs the Centre for Global Political Economy. His most recent books are In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (Verso, 2017) and Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, co-authored with Joel Wainwright (Verso, 2018).

March 19th - Hilda Fernandez - Will a Cyborg Steal My Jouissance? Unconscious Labour and the Enjoying Body of the Virtual.

Jouissance, understood as a sort of pleasurable pain, expressing an excessive tension of psychical nature, coded in the body, consumptive, and inaccessible to the symbolic order, is a universal characteristic of the human subject as bestowed by psychoanalysis. Based on the premise that jouissance and the body share interrelated yet separate spaces, as the latter is always displaced in an imagined other, in this talk I approach the virtual enjoyment dominating our current times to inquire the interrelation between the body, the unconscious labour and jouissance.

I will engage with Alfie Bown’s report on videogames “The Playstation Dreamworld” (2017), Jon Raffman’s recent work “Dream Journal” (2017) and some examples from HBO TV Series “Western World” (2016) and Netflix’s “Black Mirror” (2011-2017) to read the unconscious labour, firstly, as an investment in the virtual space, via our dreams, fantasies and even symptoms (techno-addiction). And secondly, this same unconscious labour it is the subject’s jouissance-ingrained production, and as such, it involves an undecidable and paradoxical loss and a gain (surplus jouissance), which I aim to locate it with regards to the body (individual and social).

With the concept of surplus enjoyment, which Lacan assumes to be parallel to surplus value, I argue that the enjoyment of the subject, via its disembodiment in the virtual space, has resulted in a larger social disembodiment which Tomsic explains as a “self fetishisation” of capitalism. I try to articulate it as a radical shift in subjectivity, where the temporal spatial conditions of embodiment are ever more reliant on mediation and where the lack is unbearable, unless the proliferating world of virtual images mediates it.

At the dawn of artificial intelligence and the consolidation of virtual spaces, what relation can be thought between our bodies, the unconscious labour power and our enjoyment? Will our enjoying bodies, the last frontier of our imaginary property, turn out to be stolen goods by a cyborg in servitude of wealth accumulation of big data corporations who have algorithmically manufactured our desires?

Hilda Fernandez was born and raised in Mexico City, receiving her MA in Clinical Psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She also holds an MA in Spanish Literature from the University of British Columbia (UBC) 
She has more than 20 years of training in Lacanian psychoanalysis and practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy in Vancouver, Canada. She co-founded the Lacan Salon in 2007 and currently serves as its president. She is an academic associate with the SFU Institute for the Humanities and is currently engaged in a PhD Program in the Department of Human Geography at Simon Fraser University (SFU), where she is conducting research on discursive spaces of trauma - collective and individual- and the institution.

The Vancouver Institute of Social Research takes place on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples; the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

 March 5th - Lee Su-Feh - Wrestling for Autonomy: choreographic gestures

How do I know my body and its pleasures are mine when they have developed under oppressive systems? If our conscious sense of self is a social construct, how do we discern between our autonomous self and our socially-obligated or machine-mediated self?

Lee Su-Feh will discuss how these questions drive her work and practice as a choreographer and teacher; and how they show up in her current work Dance Machine.

Dance Machine will be performed at the Anvil Centre the week following, March 16-18, 2-8pm

Lee Su-Feh is a choreographer, performer, dramaturge and teacher born and raised in Malaysia, where she studied with teachers who strove to find a contemporary Asian expression out of the remnants of colonialism and dislocated traditions. In addition to dance and theatre, Su-Feh has studied and practiced Chinese martial arts for more than 30 years. Since arriving in Vancouver in 1988, she has created a body of work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. In 1995, she co-founded battery opera performance with David McIntosh. Her current project, Dance Machine, premiered at the Festival Trans-Amériques in Montreal June 2017 and is currently touring across Canada. Su-Feh is an Associate Teacher of the Fitzmaurice Voicework® 

The Vancouver Institute of Social Research takes place on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples; the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

From climate change to mushrooming authoritarianisms, natural disasters to economic and humanitarian crises, contemporary ontology is overwhelmingly problematized as a multiplicity of emergencies, which calls for faster and swifter modes of action, and ostracizes any other engagement as regressive, reactionary, and unrealistic. This talk puts a question mark to the political imperative of conceptualizing social and political issues on the basis of emergencies. For that, it resuscitates Dostoevsky’s idiot. As a figure of uninitiation (a la Deleuze and Guattari), who constantly reminds us to slow down in whatever task we are undertaking (a la Isabelle Stengers), the idiot opens up the possibility of a different political engagement. Rejecting both nihilist and moralist alternatives, it instead offers the aleatory prospects of encounter in transitory spaces, and suggests to suspend time through the unknown of radical empiricism.

Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı is a Vancouver-based scholar, who currently teaches science studies inspired social-political theory at Emily Carr University of Arts and Design. Before moving to Vancouver in 2016, she was an assistant professor of sociology at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey; and before that a PhD student and an associate of the Fernand Braduel Center at Binghamton University. Lying at the intersection of science studies, political theory, and historical sociology, her most recent work explores the concepts of the swarm and the cloud, and is particularly inspired by, and a product of the social movements of the post-2010 period. She has published articles and essays in academic, semi-academic, and activist journals in English and Turkish.

“The Utopia of Finance Capital: Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street”

In this talk, derived from a book forthcoming in the fall of 2016, I argue that Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street is best understood via the critical theory of Fredric Jameson. Just as Jameson argued The Godfather is really about capitalism, we can see that Scorsese’s film is really a gangster picture. Further, through its mobilization of a “brocialist” subjectivity, the movie offers a critique not only of finance capital, but also of a certain naive left tendency, alternately nostalgic for blue collar labor and implicated in a fantasy of libidinal transgression.

“Small Effects from Big Causes: The Dialogic Documentary Practice of Natalie Bookchin”

In her digital video work Mass Ornament (US, 2009), the Testament series (US, 2009), and Now He’s Out in Public and Everyone Can See (US, 2012), Natalie Bookchin gathers clips from vlogs where people perform dances and discuss issues both personal and political, from sexuality to racism and losing their jobs. In this essay, I argue that Bookchin’s work makes an important feminist intervention into discourses that either demonize or lionize social media. Utilizing strategies of seriality, database/narrative and orchestration, Bookchin crafts a set of composite found footage texts that challenge both documentary form that relies on typicality or composites, and i-docs that literalize interactivity. Instead, highlighting the body and the utterance as political “contact zones,” Bookchin uses sonic composition and choreography to challenge restricted notions of political speech, demonstrating the simultaneous insignificance and importance of the everyday. Her work therefore highlights the problematic of communicability that the excess of on-line textual expression presents while at the same time holding out the possibility that—through listening—engaged, dialogic documentary might provide a powerful antidote to the logics of neoliberalism.

Natalie Bookchin's videos:

https://vimeo.com/19364123

https://vimeo.com/19588631

https://vimeo.com/19588547

https://vimeo.com/5403546

https://vimeo.com/38513950

"Adorno's Reading of 'Endgame': Between Autonomy and Authenticity"

Theodor W. Adorno's central philosophical contribution is the development of "negative dialectics." Negative dialectics, itself, emerges as the recognition of the crisis of what Adorno calls "metaphysical meaning" or the Hegelian idea that history can be understood as embodying a rational purpose. Such a crisis becomes especially acute when seen through autonomous artworks. In particular, this essay looks at the manner in which Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" becomes for Adorno the site of a dialectical as opposed to an existential reflection on the crisis of metaphysical meaning. That is to say rather than the manifestation of a timeless condition of "absurdity", "Endgame" itself embodies the catastrophic logic of natural-history.

"13 Ways of Looking at a Crocodile"

Starting from one of the more obscure and often overlooked literary references in Freud’s Das Unheimliche– a tale about haunted houses and reptilian ghosts – my talk will engage with a series of texts that feature a strange theoretical animal: the crocodile. In a trajectory that leads from Freud’s Viennese home to Max Ernst’s collages from 19th century illustrated journals, I will explore some of the curious literary apparitions of ‘the beast in whose mouth we all are’- to paraphrase a well-known formulation by Jacques Lacan. 

There is still a great deal of investment, among writers, scholars and readers, in the idea of "canons" of "great books" that cultured persons are supposed to have read.Mancini's talk will introduce his proposal that certain texts, positioned para-canonically (alongside or nearby canons) antagonize the mythologies of literary canons. While functioning as "paracanonic," texts undermine the privileged aesthetic certainty that canons embody. Mancini will first revisit canon debates since the 1960s, to trace the contour of the canon myths these paracanonical texts perturb. Then he will bring forward a number of contrasting paracanonic case-histories, in order to inventory some of the necessary-but-insufficientconditions (including social-historical contexts and textual features) that contribute to a text’s (always temporary) position as paracanonic. Authors discussed will include William Shakespeare, Aime Cesaire, HP Lovecraft, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman and James Joyce.

This talk will explore dust and materiality through multiple mediations. In general, it will examine processes, and the invisibility of production, distribution, and consumption. Framed through Jussi Parikka’s critical lens, we will study how the “seemingly immaterial is embedded in wide material networks,” and how technoculture is anchored in a transformation of materials—from mining to waste. Specifically, the presentation proposes an approach to dust as media in relation to the body. We will look at selected examples from visual and media arts.