Speaker: Serge Trottein (CNRS/École Normale Supérieure/PSL Research University)

Title: 'Kant and Postmodern Aesthetics'

Speaker: Joanna Zylinska (Department of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths)

Title: 'Artificial Intelligence, Anthropocene Stupidity'

ABSTRACT

'My talk will engage with two defining apocalyptic narratives of our times: the Anthropocene and AI (Artificial Intelligence). Both of these narratives, in their multiple articulations, predict the end of the human and of the world as we (humans) know it, while also hinting at the possibility of salvation. Looking askew at the conceptual and aesthetic tropes shaping them, and at their socio-political contexts, I will be particularly interested in the way in which these two stories about planetary-level threats come together, and in the reasons for their uncanny proximity. Concurring with Marshall McLuhan that art works as a 'Distant Early Warning system' for all kinds of apocalypse, I will suggest that it can also serve as a testing ground for the making and unmaking of such apocalyptic scenarios. And it is in art that I will seek the possibility of envisaging a better and more prudent relationship with technology - and with the world - from within the Anthropocene-AI nexus. The talk will include a presentation of some visual work from my own art practice'.

Speaker: Rachel Bowlby (Department of Comparative Literature, UCL)

Title: 'Unnatural Resources: Changing Arguments and Reproductive Technologies'

Speaker: Naomi Waltham-Smith (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick)

Title: 'Homofaunie: Non-Human Tonalities of Listening in Derrida and Cixous'

Speaker: Josh Robinson (School of English, Communications, Philosophy, Cardiff)

Title: 'Crisis in Theory'

Josh Robinson teaches modern and contemporary critical theory in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. Most recently, he is author of Adorno’s Poetics of Form, which appeared last year in SUNY’s Contemporary Continental Philosophy series): https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6556-adornos-poetics-of-form.aspx

Crisis in Theory: Beyond the Representational Paradigm

This paper aspires to offer a critical account of a set of assumptions that are widespread in literary and critical theory, both in its historical emergence (as seen primarily through its institutional histories) and in several more recent developments (including the various ‘turns’ that arise from time to time. My focus is on what I term the representational paradigm: in its simplest and broadest formulation, the assumption, explicit or otherwise, within literary studies that works of literature matter insofar as they are representative; that what matters about literary works is their representative character.

This paradigm persists in multiple, not always interdependent (or even necessarily compatible) manifestations, which include: an analytical focus on events represented within works of literature (what might be called a focus on content at the expense of form); a set of analytical procedures that rely on an implicit theory of allegory whereby readings are produced that see elements of a work as representing elements outside it; attempts to reconfigure the canon and/or redesign our curricula such that the works and authors within it are more representative of global society. I outline a tentative taxonomy of these different versions of representationalism, and relate them to a set of shared democratic assumptions about political representation—assumptions which have a tendency to place themselves beyond scrutiny. I argue that while the democratic aspirations expressed at least in progressive versions of representationalism paradigm constitute a commendable alternative to the (not only cultural) conservatism of the tendencies against which they are in many respects a reaction, these underlying assumptions ultimately overlook or even limit the potential of literature’s ways of thinking to contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the political. I thus set out some of the ways in which criticism and theory might move beyond the representational paradigm.

Speaker: Kate Soper (Philosophy, University of Brighton/London Metropolitan University)

Title: 'The Dialectics of Progress: Towards a Post-Growth Aesthetic and Politics of Prosperity'

Speaker: James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Guest Speakers:

Kate Soper (Philosophy, University of Brighton/London Metropolitan University)

Title: 'The Dialectics of Progress: Towards a Post-Growth Aesthetic and Politics of Prosperity'

James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Tuesday 7 July

20.00 Christopher Watkin (Monash), Welcome and introduction

20.15 Ali Alizadeh (Monash), ‘La liberté guide nos pas’: the dialectic of freedom in a French revolutionary poem

20.35 Nick Hewlett (Warwick), Karl Marx and the concept of freedom

20.55 Questions and discussion

21.10 Keynote 1: Peter Hallward (Kingston), A law unto ourselves: autonomy as mass sovereignty

21.50 Questions and discussion

22.10 Serhat Tutkal (National University of Colombia), Autonomy against authoritarian neoliberalism: the removal of Kurdish mayors in Turkey

22.30 Taylor Lau (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Against the economic view of time in the workplace: the claim to free time

22.50 Kayte Stokoe (Birmingham), Crip autonomy and external limitations

23.10 Alex Corcos (Warwick), UK Higher Education in 'A Century for Foxes’: or, a case study in the role of privilege and luck in establishing conditions for radical autonomy

23.30 Questions and discussion

23.50 Close

Wednesday 8 July

20.00 Keynote 2: Louise Amoore (Durham), Of autonomies and algorithms

20.40 Questions and discussion

21.00 Charlotte Heath-Kelly (Warwick), The extremist across history: changing relations of liberty, threat and detection

21.20 Oliver Davis (Warwick), Algorithmic governmentality and the Modern bureaucratic ideal: species of abstraction and autonomy

21.40 Simon Angus (Monash), How liberating is liberation technology?

22.00 Questions and discussion

22.15 Yurii Sheliazhenko (KROK), Informed autonomy: conceptualization of freedom in the digital age

22.35 Alesja Serada (Vaasa), Blockchain owns you: from cypherpunk to a self-sovereign identity

22.55 Ken Archer (independent scholar), Freedom, agency and the hermeneutics of technology

23.15 Questions and discussion

23.30 Close

Thursday 9 July

20.00 Nupur Patel (Oxford), Emancipating the female body: pudeur and Louise Labé’s expression of sexual desire in selected poetry

20.20 Felicity Chaplin (Monash), Freedom and autonomy in the post #MeToo world

20.40 Kirsty Alexander (Strathclyde), The biophilic threads in feminist visions of autonomy

21.00 Ji-Young Lee (Bristol and Copenhagen), Autonomy and assisted reproductive technologies

21.20 Questions and discussion

21.50 Trine Riel (independent scholar and artist, Copenhagen), To what end? Ascetics between renunciation and emancipation

22.10 Andrea Rossi (Koç), Pastoral power: on finitude and autonomy

22.30 Christopher Watkin (Monash), The critique of emancipatory reason

22.50 Questions and discussion

23.10 Close