Grad Prog talks this Weds (6/June)

Adelphi House, 2nd floor lecture theatre:

Internal Speaker: Dr Michael Goddard. 3.10 - 4pm

A Deleuzian 21st Century?: Deleuze and Contemporary Media and Cultural Research

Of any of the post-structuralist theorists associated with the ‘68 generation (Foucualt, Derrida, Lyotard etc), Deleuze’s work is perhaps the most contemporary with the present. In the 1970s Foucault said “perhaps the [20th] Century will become known as Deleuzian” but, in fact, Deleuze’s work, especially in an Anglo context, has had something of a delayed impact. It is only now that this work is beginning to take root in the academy while still enjoying the popularity it has had for decades among art students, postgraduates, autodidacts and range of academic outsiders. So perhaps it is the 21st Century that is becoming Deleuzian.

Rather than the impossible presentation of Deleuze’s work in its entirety, this seminar will give a sketch of its take-ups at various times and in various contexts and focus on its use value for media and cultural research. It will suggest some useful paths into Deleuze’s work via key interviews and short texts as well as suggestions for further reading, and especially deal with those aspects of his work which engage directly or indirectly with questions of media and culture, culminating in an opening to his work on cinema.

External Speaker: Dr Andy Robinson. 4pm - 5pm

(Host: Dr Phoebe Moore-Carter)

Dr. Andrew Robinson is a critical theorist and activist working on a range of topics around social movements, radical theory, oppressive discourse, global power-structures and everyday life. He is co-author of Power, Conflict and Resistance in the Contemporary World, which applies Deleuzian theory to the analysis of social movement networks, reactive networks and the world-system. He has two dozen published articles and papers including “Symptoms of a New Politics: Networks, Minoritarianism and the Social Symptom in Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari”, “Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Spivak and the Subaltern”, and pieces on Gramsci, Zizek, Laclau, Virilio, Negri, Sartre, post-left anarchy, global justice, the Zapatistas, anarchist theories of war, social movements in Manipur, revolutionary subjectivity, US foreign policy, and global exclusion.

Time and Dialogism in Deleuzian Theory

This paper will examine the Deleuzian theory of time, developed in Deleuze’s books on Bergson and Cinema, with a focus on the themes of dialogue and the Event. It will begin by summarising Deleuze’s concepts of past, present and future. It will explain how each perspective is differentiated as a sensorimotor zone constructed through attention to life, providing a particular zone of resonance unique to each person. It will also explain how Deleuze proposes to understand possibilities for dialogue between such zones through the Bergsonian idea of intuition. It will also discuss how the event is seen to interrupt monological sequences of time. Finally, it will explore the idea of “absolute deterritorialisation” and the relevance of Deleuze’s theory of time for social transformation.