Uncertainty Symposium: Saturday 11th June 2011

Uncertainty: Theory in the 21st Century

A Postgraduate Symposium

Saturday 11th June 2011

Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG

Keynote speakers: Professor Martin McQuillan (Kingston) and Professor Mark Currie (QMUL)

'Symbol of Uncertainty', John Gilbert

‘The most harrowing contemporary fears are born of existential uncertainty’

– Zygmunt Bauman

We enter the second decade of the 21st Century less certain than ever about who ‘we’ are, where we are heading, or what kind of a society we want to be. This interdisciplinary symposium aims to interrogate the role of theory – literary, political, philosophical and sociological – in an uncertain time. In doing so, it hopes to render the very concept of uncertainty uncertain: that is, to place it under examination in a way that might help us think our way into a more ethically responsible future.

Programme

9.00: Registration and welcome

9:50: Opening remarks

10.00: Keynote 1: 'Priority Subjects', Professor Martin McQuillan (Kingston)

11.00: Break

11.15: Panel 1: Rethinking Criticism: Theoretical Uncertainty

• ‘Uncertainty and Alan Kirby’s digimodernism’, Joe Barton (Newcastle)
• ‘Theory Without Words: The Invisible Influence of Practical Criticism’, Angus Brown (Oxford)
• ‘In the key of K: identifying states of knowing and not-knowing in relation to aphoristic and disconnected writing styles’, Naomi Wynter-Vincent (Sussex)

12.30: Lunch (own arrangements)

13.30: Panel 2: Representation and Uncertainty

• ‘The Ethical Space of Mourning, Post-Terror’, Allan Rae (Stirling)
• ‘Millennium Approaches: Apocalyptic Representations of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic’, Chisomo Kalinga (KCL)
• ‘Fear of the Unstageable’, Karen Quigley (KCL)

14.45: Break

15.00: Keynote 2: 'Theoretical Approaches to the Unforeseeable', Professor Mark Currie (Queen Mary, University of London)

16.00: Break

16.15: Panel 3: Beyond Endings: Embracing Uncertainty

• ‘Environment and humanity: a path towards an uncertain relationship’, Marco Bernardini (Reading)
• ‘Pataphysics and the Integral Reality of String Theory’, Marc Özses, (Sussex)
• ‘Towards the End of Now: Obsolescence and Futurity in Literary Study’, Aaron Hanlon, (Oxford)

17.30: Closing remarks and wine reception.

Registration for this event is now closed.

Session 5: Animals (Tuesday 29th March)

'Breathing the Same Air: Posthuman and Preanimal'

Dr. Steven Morrison
(Independent Scholar)

Tuesday 29th March, 6-8pm, Senate House, Room 102

"There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view [that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution] and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur. . . . But although denying that we have a special position in the natural world might seem becomingly modest in the eye of eternity, it might also be used as an excuse for evading our responsibilities. The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have" (David Attenborough)

If posthuman and posthistorical man is an animal like any other, need this animal worry about the preposthuman and preposthistorical mess? Steven Morrison, independent scholar and Homo sapiens, will be worrying out loud about the sustainability of distinctions between human and animal with reference to extracts from the following:

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2003).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 4: Speaker: Professor Robert Eaglestone (Monday 14th March)

'Discourses of Biopolitics, the Human and Mass Murder'

Professor Robert Eaglestone
(Royal Holloway)

Monday 14th March, 6-8pm, Senate House, Room G32

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (formerly Director) of the Royal Holloway Holocaust Research Centre, and is the series editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. He works on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies. Robert is particularly interested in issues of ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of history, and has spent some years working through a series of questions about the legacy of the Holocaust and the Second Word War in these fields. His publications include Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), Doing English (Routledge, 1999; third edition 2009), and The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004). He has also recently co-edited, with Simon Glendinning, Legacies of Derrida: Literature and Philosophy (Routledge, 2008) and, with Elleke Boehmer and Katy Iddiols, J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (Continuum, 2009). He is currently completing a manuscript on the Holocaust and genocide in contemporary literature and culture, as well as a volume of the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Volume 2: 1966 to Present Day).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 3: Violence (Monday 28th February)

"It is no doubt possible to create conditions under which men are dehumanized ... and, under such conditions, not rage and violence but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization."

- Hannah Arendt

VIOLENCE

6-8pm, Monday 28th February
Senate House, room 103 (1st floor)

Is violence endemic to the human condition? What role does it play in the contemporary world? Can it ever be justified? And what ethical concerns does it raise for literature, the arts and critical theory?

Our third session this term will be introduced with a 10-minute 'provocation' by Dr Eva Aldea (Westminster and Goldsmiths). Eva's current research focuses on beheadings, including videos of terrorist beheadings. It argues that such violence can be understood as a system of signs, and asks if this is what makes it uniquely human.

The readings are extracts from the following:

• Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
  

• Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2009).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 2: Speaker: Professor Derek Attridge (Monday 14th February)

'What Does it Make You Feel?: Responding Affectively to Literature'

Professor Derek Attridge
(University of York)

Monday 14th February, 3-5pm Senate House, room 103 (1st floor)

Derek Attridge has published many influential books on literature and theory, most recently The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004), How to Read Joyce (Granta Books, 2007), and Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), as well as the forthcoming co-edited volume Theory After 'Theory' (with Jane Elliot, Routledge, 2010). His interests centre on the language of literature, but radiate in many different directions. Much of his work reflects his long association with the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a selection of whose work he has edited. In The Singularity of Literature, he raises the question of the distinctiveness of literature as a linguistic and social practice, and argues that a crucial element is the response to otherness that characterises both the writing of an inventive literary work and the reading of it as literature. This book is also informed by recent developments in ethics arising from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. In September 2006 he won an ESSE Book Award for this work.


This session should appeal broadly to students of literature, as well as those from other disciplines with an interest in critical theory.

All are welcome to attend. We hope to see you there!

Spring Term, Session 1: Posthumanism (Monday 31st January)

Where does the 'human' end and the 'non-human' begin? Have we entered a 'posthuman' age, or were we ever really 'human' in the first place? What implications can a questioning of the 'human' have for gender, race, age, disability and ethics?

The general theme for this term's Literary and Critical Theory Seminars is 'The Idea of the Human', and our first session will be on the topic of 'posthumanism'. It will take place from 6-8pm on Monday 31st January in Senate House, room 103 (1st Floor). The readings are as follows:

• Donna Haraway - 'A Cyborg Manifesto', in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
  

• N. Katherine Hayles - 'Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere', in Theory, Culture & Society, 2006 vol. 23: 159-166.
  

The session will begin with a paper by Louise LePage (PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London). Louise's project aims to critically explore the identity and form of ‘the human’ in its representations as dramatic characters via an interrogation of its traditional borders with animals, machines, and the nonphysical (mind, ghosts, etc.). Her study adopts Donna Haraway’s cyborg as a trope to open up a posthumanist way of seeing and approaching identity, which re-constitutes the self as composed of multiple parts - natural and cultural - that extend beyond the borders of the skin to formulate an inherently provisional and protean identity and entity.

All are welcome to attend.

'Derrida' DVD Screening (Monday 10th January)

The Literary and Critical Theory Seminar is beginning the Spring term with a DVD screening of Derrida (2002, directors: Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman).

The screening will take place on Monday 10th January in Senate House, room G34, from 6-8pm. All are welcome to come along!

Here are some details on the film:

"This award-winning documentary gives an intimate portrait of the brilliant, controversial philosopher and intellectual French icon Jacques Derrida, whose theory of deconstruction has deeply influenced the studies of literature, philosophy, ethics, architecture and law, indelibly marking the intellectual landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries.

"Combining extremely rare private footage of Derrida with his reflections on violence, love and death, the film also investigates the concept of biography, exploring the relationship between the public and the private. Provocative, potent and entertaining, Derrida marks an inspired collaboration between philosophy scholar Amy Ziering Kofman and filmmaker Kirby Dick, the director of Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. The mesmerising score is courtesy of Ryuchi Sakamoto (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Gohatto)."

Hope to see you there!

Session 5: Environmental Disappointment (Wednesday 8th December)

Our next session will take place on Wednesday 8th December in room G35 in Senate House from 6-8pm. We will be looking at two extracts focusing on responses to ecological issues, one from Politics of Nature: How to bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004) by Bruno Latour and one from The Politics of Climate Change (2009) by Anthony Giddens.

Politics of Nature (London & Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

The Politics of Climate Change (London: Polity Press, 2009).

As optional further reading, Latour includes a very short section at the end of the book entitled 'Summary of the Argument (for Readers in a Hurry...).'

We welcome postgraduates from all disciplines.