The London Conference in Critical Thought

The London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) is an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional event created to foster emergent critical thought and provide new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration. It welcomes diverse and interdisciplinary work from the humanities and social sciences including, but not limited to, papers drawing upon continental philosophy, critical legal theory, critical geography and critical theory.

The LCCT will take place at Birkbeck College, June 29th and 30th, 2012.  It is supported in its inaugural year by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. The conference is free, however, registration is mandatory. A full programme of the conference will be available soon with abstracts will be available soon, however, in the meantime we have now released a short version of the programme which can be found here:

LCCT short programme 21 05 2012

Streams and Panels include:

A Transdiciplinary Approach to Law and Culture	Radical Political Rhetoric
Common Life: Critical Perspectives on Authority, Experience and Community	Sovereignty at the Margins: Critical Encounters with Early Modern Theories of the Sate
Cosmopolitanism and the City	Textual Space/Spatial Text
Critical Art	The Object: Between Time and Temporality
Critical Human Rights	The Question of the Animal, the City and the World
Critique of Critical Theory	Thinking Egalitarian Emancipation
Deleuzian Theory in Practice	Zizek and the Political
Mapping the Concept: Developments in the Productive Power of Critical Theory	Marx and Marxism Today Critical Education

To register please follow the following link: http://criticalthought.eventbrite.co.uk/

It is advised that if you are traveling from outside of London that you make travel and accommodation arrangements as soon as possible as the Olympics will be affecting availability throughout the summer.

Critical Education

Stream Coordinators: Matthew Charles, Timothy Ivison, Tom Vandeputte

The idea of public education – situated as it is at the intersection of political ideology (the reproduction of the class relations) and economics (funded, in principle, through the State) – has come under increasing attack over the last decade and a half, as it find itself subjected to the neo-liberal dogmas of privatization, market competition, instrumentalized efficiency, and consumer choice. In many instances, educational institutions have masochistically pre-empted this agenda, cutting courses and staff on the basis of calculations over state funding or student choice prejudiced by a narrowly utilitarian notion of vocationality, which therefore becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this context, the humanities in general and subjects associated with critical thinking in particular have borne the brunt of these hasty and often brutal decisions.

Yet recent attempts to defend critical thinking, the humanities, and the wider values of education have evoked ideals of individual self-development, independence and autonomy, or good citizenship and liberal democracy, or appeals to aesthetic education that would have once been subject to the most stringent and unsparing philosophical and ideological critiques. Must the defence of critical thinking become uncritical? Can we defend the humanities without resorting to a “reactionary” humanism? Has an attentiveness to the material conditions underlying the transformation of mass education been replaced by a nostalgic idealism?

Education – as a value, a concept, and as an institution – can no longer be taken as a simple given. The current predicament of higher education compels us not only to critically examine the political and economic conditions to which we have been subjected, but also to seek out creative alternatives to mainstream notions of institutional learning.

We are particularly interested in proposals that engage with:

 

-       Theories of Practice:

• Althusser and Rancière on ideology
• Derrida and GREPH
• critical theory and pedagogy
• public education, the State, and the limits of independence

 

-       Practices of Theory:

• critical experiments
• pedagogical legacies (classical, enlightenment, May ’68, postmodern)
• Bifo and Italian Workerism
• Technology and pedagogy

Textual Space/Spatial Text

Stream Coordinators: Hannah Gregory and Edwina Attlee

“I read and I daydream . . . . My reading is thus a sort of impertinent absence. Is reading an exercise in ubiquity? . . . [The reader’s place] is not here or there, one or the other, but neither one or the other, simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both by mixing them together.”

Michel de Certeau ‘Reading as Poaching’ The Practice of Everyday Life

This stream seeks to address ideas of space as text and text as space. What does the act of reading entail and, as city dwellers, are we ever not reading? If the activity of reading involves a kind of wandering and being in the city involves modes of reading, where do text and space overlap? Simple turns of phrase –passages of time, trains of thought or lines of questioning –reveal complex ways in which space feeds into text. In Ancient Greece, narrative traced subjective geographies –songs were conceived as pathways, sentences as promenades or roads.

Central to this line of questioning is the problematic relationship between inside and outside. Gaston Bachelard writes that “outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains . . . If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.” What does it mean when we apply this sense of the borderline both as we move through space and as we move through text? How does the current digitisation of media affect these distinctions?

Suggested points for discussion;

signs and semiotics, the reading body, the language of advertising, the space of the book, mapping, walking, naming, building in the city, thresholds, palimpsests, mobility and memory, reading practice, creative cities, translation, how can questions of space and distance (critical or otherwise) bring meaningful insight to critical thought?

The Object: Between Time and Temporality

Stream Coordinators: Sam Wilson, Matt Mahon

It is time we take the temporality of the object seriously. Objects are multiple sites of value – of materiality, identity, production, exchange, historicity, and symbolic comportment. They are predominantly conceived of in spatial terms (how do we, I, you, situate ourselves to this or that object?). But they find themselves also embedded within discourses of time and temporal unfolding; instrumentality, desire, decay.

Whether characterized as commodity, conceptual, perceptual, or artistic objects each can be seen to hold a relationship to time and temporality. This relationship itself shapes, in turn, their statuses as sites of value. This network of interconnected ideas affords an exploration of the object/objects as a viable beginning for transdisciplinary dialogues, a non-centered knotting together of conceptual threads – object, time, perception, history, etc. – without axiomatic first-principles.

Disciplinary boundaries help to constitute particular objects of focus. Can (should) such divisions be overcome? Can the spatial object of architectural study be considered temporally, as ensconced by the passing of time? Can the temporal object of musicological study be considered spatially, with the spatial as stemming from the temporal? Must a critique of the temporality of the subject result in a contraction to a pure present? What potentials are there for transdisciplinary objects of study?

This discussion comes at a time of when temporality is itself an object of study, be this Fredric Jameson’s (2003) analysis of ‘The End of Temporality’, Cory Arcangel’s critical-artistic explorations of technological objects’ relationships with time, Karol Berger’s (2005) study of the historicity of concepts of time as mediated musically, David Couzens Hoy’s (2009) critical history of temporality, or recent revivals in process philosophy and non-representational theory.

Papers on the following topics, as well as related areas, are welcomed:

• History in/of the object
• Intersections of subject and object as shaped by time/temporality
• Time, temporality, and the materiality of objects (commodity, symbolic produce, etc.)
• Transdisciplinary objects of study
• Critiques of subjectivity through the object

The Question of the Animal, the City and the World

Stream Coordinator: Yoriko Otomo

Following Jacques Derrida’s explicit provocation to think the ‘question of the animal’ within the context of a ‘carnophallogocentric’ economy,  scholars in the English-speaking world have since the turn of the millenium started developing what can broadly be called posthumanist work. What are the possibilities and limitations of thinking the human/animal distinction in our various disciplines and projects?  Panels may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:

Consumption and the Question of the Animal

Regulating Animal Life

Animals in Domestic and Urban Space

Wearing Animals

Animal Life: Beyond Good and Evil

Sovereignty at the Margins: Critical Encounters with Early Modern Theories of the State

Stream coordinators: Verena Erlenbusch, Osman Nemli, ColinMcQuillan

The renewed interest in the concept of sovereignty in political philosophy should come as no surprise to observers of contemporary politics. Globalization, increased political interdependence, the repercussions of a global war on terror, and the emergence of new forms of power in diverse parts of the political system have resulted in a weakening of state sovereignty. At the same time, nation states continue to hold to the principle of sovereignty and promote it as the only defense against the perceived dangers of terrorism, immigration, and other threats resulting from porous borders. Given these conditions, many scholars contend that traditional conceptions of sovereignty developed by early modern theorists of the state – Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau – are no longer adequate, while others invoke the modern theory of the state to theorize and even defend sovereignty.

Navigating between dismissal and uncritical invocation, this stream of panels invites papers interested in a critical re-evaluation of the traditional theory of sovereignty and the reception of the modern theory of the state in contemporary continental political philosophy. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Evaluations of modern theorists of sovereignty like Bodin, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, et al. with regard to their contemporary relevance for political theory and practice.
• The reception and reworking of traditional theories of sovereignty in contemporary continental political philosophy (Schmitt, Bataille, Benjamin, Derrida, Foucault, Balibar, Agamben, Esposito, etc.).
• Alternatives to sovereignty, possibilities of post-sovereign or non-sovereign politics.

A Transdiciplinary Approach to Law and Culture

Stream Cooridnator:  Eddie Bruce-Jones

This stream is dedicated to examining different interwoven disciplinary approaches to analysing the tense space at the intersection of law and culture.  Indeed naming an ‘intersection’ between law and culture suggests a separation between these broad concepts, which will also certainly be under scrutiny.  Like the contested boundaries of ‘law’ and ‘culture’, disciplinary boundaries are also contested, as methodology and knowledge production between genres is often intertextual and interdependent.  This stream urges scholars to critically examine the tension between the methodological approaches of (a) disciplinary conformity to genre-specific epistemologies of persuasion and (b) disciplinary self-criticique in critical study of law and culture.  Scholars are encouraged to use any style(s) or genre(s) they wish.