Zylinska and Hall lecture
Posted on | August 18, 2006 |
Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall - part of the Culture Machine collective, an interesting group of cultural studies people based in the UK - are doing a couple of appearances while they’re in Australia. I just finished reviewing Zylinska’s Ethics of Cultural Studies for IJCS. She’s doing interesting things at the difficult nexus between philosophy and cultural theory. She also works at what is no secret my absolute utopian fantasy of a department, Media at Goldsmiths.
I wish they were coming to Brisbane (come! come!!), but read on for details on Monday’s Melbourne event. If anyone’s going, I’d love to hear about it after, especially the second paper.
Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall
Politics and Ethics in the Age of New Media
Public Lecture at University of Melbourne presented by the Cinema Program and the English and Cultural Studies Program
Monday 21 August 6pm start
Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre A.
University of Melbourne
(use Swanston Street entrance, building behind the Ian Potter Gallery)
Lecture details:
Joanna Zylinska, ‘Imagining Perfection: The Politics and Ethics of the Makeover Culture’
In my presentation I will address the issue of identity transformation in the age of new media. Focusing on the current ‘makeover culture’, I will explore a number of popular international TV shows, such as Extreme Makeover, I Want a Famous Face, and, in particular, The Swan. The premise of these shows is to present and assess a radical transformation of human identity – face, body, taste and personality – towards an imagined state of perfection. This transformation is conducted via a number of technologies, including cosmetic surgery and confidence training. In the context of the ‘Iraq makeover’ that Western politicians have orchestrated together with international news stations, the examination of makeover shows as applications of the dominant technologies of life is extremely urgent. And it is the exploration of the ‘zone of indistinction’ between biological and political life that will become crucial for my parallel reading of the extreme makeovers of the individual bodies of Western women and the collective lives of Iraq’s population - both accessible to us via TV screens. Drawing on select ideas from cultural theory and continental philosophy (work by Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Donna Haraway), I will explore the emotional as well as financial promises and failures that such a radical makeover entails. I will also consider some of its political and ethical consequences, for individuals and populations alike.
Gary Hall, ‘The Future of the University in the Age of Digital Reproduction: or, How to Build an Ethical Cultural Studies Institution’
What kind of university is desirable, or even possible, in the age of digital reproduction: DVDs, cell phones, computers, the World Wide Web, the Internet, email, blogging, Google, mp3, podcasting and so forth? This presentation will explore the forms an institution specifically designed to exploit the unique properties of new technology might take. It will do so by taking as a case study a project drawn from my own ‘practical’ experience as a new media writer, editor, theorist and publisher: the development of an ‘open access’ archive for the free publication, dissemination, communication, storage and retrieval of research and knowledge. The ramifications of ‘digitisation’ - including the possibility of making all the research literature freely available to researchers, teachers, students and the public alike, on a world-wide basis - have been hotly debated within the sciences. However, it has for the most part been regarded there as offering merely a ‘prosthetic’ improvement to the performance of our existing disciplinary fields and ‘paper’ forms of publication. There has been little serious consideration of: (1) the way in which new technologies, with their undermining of the boundaries separating authors, editors, producers, users and consumers, promise to transform fundamentally our relationship to knowledge; and (2) the ‘ethical’ questions raised by digitisation for academic and institutional authority. My presentation will argue that the electronic reproduction of academic research provides us with an opportunity to keep open the ethical question of what forms of knowledge should be published and stored and what should not, and thus of how different disciplines and forms of knowledge fit together. In this way, it will demonstrate that digitisation enables us to think rather differently about the future of the university: in a way that resorts neither to the discourses of accountability, managerialism and consumerism which are increasingly taking over the institution; nor to a nostalgia for ideas of the university viewed in terms of an elite cultural training and reproduction of a national culture which dominated previous eras.
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August 22nd, 2006 @ 1:44 am
I went to this event tonight, then we went for Lebanese food afterward. By the sounds of it, they don’t have the time to go up to Brisbane, but are doing things in Canberra before heading back.
November 8th, 2006 @ 6:49 pm
I saw Gary Hall speak at a Symposium at the School of Art at ANU.
It was reasonably interesting, and he got a good response talking about managerialism. There was a thread all through his talk recognising and maintaining the privileged (academic) position of Proper Published Books. A telling moment came when he was asked at the end of the session where online we could find a version of his talk so we could explore the dense references - but he has a book almost finished and nothing online until a year after that.