Thursday April 15, 10:30am – 12:00pm
Outsides
Chair: Dr. Bina Freiwald (Department of English, director of Interdiscipliary Humanities PhD program)
Eric Ronis Laughter as Resistance
Laughter destabilizes. When laughter comes to bear on a subject, that sub- ject is irrevocably changed. Laughter encourages freedom from rules and from authority. As such, it’s a useful tool for civil disobedience, and it even has the potential to spark revolution. Various protest groups around the world have made innovative use of laughter. In this presentation I will focus on two: AIDS activists in 1980s New York City (ACTUP) and anti-Milosevic student protestors in 1990s Serbia (Otpor).
I apply two key theories: Bakhtin on the “carnivalesque” and Burke on the “comic frame.” For Bakhtin, carnival elements connect with laughter in several different ways: through transgressing established norms, through parody, through the degradation of the sacred, and through the calling of attention to the mankind’s bodily nature. He writes, “Laughter purifies from dogmatism; from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry” (Rabelais and His World 123). By creating carnivalized space/time in the day-to-day life of the city, protestors were able to push boundaries, take license, taste freedom. Laughter was their ally in their battle with officialdom.
What ultimately keeps people obedient except their fears? Using Burke’s comic frame, protestors are able to “convert downward” official objects of fear and awe. As Burke notes, “Humor specializes in incongruities . . . by its stylistic way of reassuring us in dwarfing the magnitude of obstacles or threats, it provides us relief in laughter” (Attitudes Toward History 58). The impious and comic actions that Otpor and ACT UP relied upon eventually did succeed in converting Milosevic in one case, Reagan and his administration in the other case, from objects of respect (and even terror), to those of scorn and mockery.
Laughter was the weapon of choice for ACT UP and Otpor. It was the antidote for their pure anger, the glue which kept them together as a community, and the fuel for their acts of resistance.
ERIC RONIS teaches human communication and acting at Champlain College. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from Harvard and an M.F.A. in Theatre from Boston University. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University. His field of research is street protest and the authenticity of live performance. As an actor, Eric has appeared in numerous plays in Boston, Chicago, New York and Vermont, most recently his own one-man show, “Things I’m Not Supposed to Say.” He is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and has appeared in several feature films. Eric is the Assistant Dean of the Communication and Creative Media Division at Champlain College.
Nadia Hausfather Resisting love, loving resistance?
Do radical activists love resistance, or are they resisting love? Is it true that the activism of some of the most radical segments of society is built on anger, with no positive vision of a common alternative? Where is the love in radical, confrontational activism? If both utopian and scientific socialists have had little to say about love (Kelley, 2002), how do other activists and scholars relate the romantic, familial and other ‘faces’ of love (Johnson, 2001) to their resistance to injustice? Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with activists in Canada and through an interdisciplinary lens, this paper will explore the role of love for radical activ- ists and how it relates to and expands existing literature on this topic. Sociologists, historians, psychologists, philosophers and scholars from a variety of disciplines have been thinking about this question in different ways, some more recently than others. In particular, hooks (2000) thinks it is the responsibility of feminists to salvage a radical theory and practice of love. How do these academic ideas about love relate to the motives and visions of activists in Canada, particularly male activists who have been engaged in attitudes or tactics that have been considered confrontational? Findings from these interviews suggest that while love and resistance don’t always mix well, they can not live without each other. Exploring the different ways that love can be relevant, challenging and inspirational to such social justice actors and goals can bring interdisciplinary insight for activists and scholars of social movements, revolution and emotion.
NADIA HAUSFATHER completed her B.A. in psychology and her Masters in Community Psychology, which focused on the controversy around homeless youth activists in Ontario. She has been directly involved in different types of research on a range of issues, from Indigenous women’s access to identity in Bolivia, to the housing experiences of low-income individuals in Kitchener-Waterloo. She is now studying in the PhD program in Humanities at Concordia University.
Megan Hyslop Speaking From our Hearts: the Planning Process of a Collective Garden in Verdun.
In response to government cuts to social programs in the nineties, citizen and community groups in Quebec began to form collective gardens, parcels of land where gardeners work together on the same plot and share food between them (Steigman, 2004) to take action to increase social integration and food security. Research shows that community is the most important component of such gardens (Winne, 2008; Tracey, 2007); conscious community building is a vital part of both the creation and the continuation of collectively cultivated spaces and must begin long before the planting in the spring. This presentation investigates techniques that enable effective communication while planning a collective garden and that encourage mutual support and democratic participation. From September 2009 until the present, we have been researching, through observation, participation, interviews, and pilot projects, the creation of a collective garden in the city of Verdun. We have experienced both the challenges of open communication in the group with our differences in ap- proaches and goals and the rewards of creating links between neighbours, diverse sectors of the community, and between the community and the university. Steigman (2004) emphasizes that part of the power comes from the mobilization of participants; we learn from collective action that we can make changes in our communities.
As part of our continued commitment to transparency and collectivity, this paper will be a collaborative presentation between two field researchers presenting our research and a group member from Verdun sharing her own experience of the project.
MEGAN HYSLOP: My research investigates the healing power of collective gardens through the SIP (Special Individualized Programs) department at Concordia. My interests within this field include permaculture, storytelling, somatic and archetypal psychology, sacred activism, and community economic development. I am also a member of the Canadian Horticultural Therapist Association. Thanks to the Transitions Project and the Global Futures lab for the support of the project and to Ver- dun community members, especially France Gaumond, for their vision. (BA in Latin American Literature, Uni-
versity of Victoria; apprenticeship in herbology, organic agriculture, and seed saving, Salt Spring Seeds, BC).
Institutional Affiliation: SIP (Special Individualized Programs), Concordia I will also be presenting with Morgan Buck (Concordia BA honours, Sociology) and France Gaumond, (Verdun Art Therapist, yoga teacher, and initiator of project).
FRANCE GAUMOND practices healing art. She is a breathing coach and the initiator of MUG (My Urban Goat), a community-building initiative in Verdun.
Originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, MORGAN BUCK is a Concordia student currently finishing an Honours Sociology Undergraduate degree. Morgan’s current academic interest is in North American alternative food networks and urban food security, involving research in both Canada and the United States.
Thursday, April 15, 1:30- 3:30pm
Site, Place, Politics
Chair: Rebecca Lavoie (Interdisciplinary Humanities)
Amber Landgraff Poetic Resistances: Francis Alys Does Something Political
There is something arresting about Francis Alÿs’ Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Becomes Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Becomes Poetic (2005). This work offers a poetic and poignant commentary about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Simple in structure, this work has a poetic gesture take the place of a heroic one. The work functions on the idealistic assumption that it should be possible to at the very least act as an entry point for dialogue. When artists claim political intent for their works, criticism often focuses on two concerns: Why should this work be considered art and not activism? And, what role do aesthetics play in an experience of the work? Criticism often oscillates between complaints of being too aesthetic and not aesthetic enough. The political weight of these works often gets lost in this back and forth. Examining the way that poetics and politics intertwine in Alÿs’ intervention opens up an interesting discussion about the power of art to create dialogue in places where dialogue would otherwise not exist. I would argue that the poetic gesture that Alÿs performs has the weight it does because of its poetic nature.
AMBER LANDGRAFF is a writer/ curator/artist based in Toronto. She is currently completing her MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at the Ontario College of Art and Design, with a focus on radical pedagogy and interventionist art practice. A supporter of not-for-profit art systems, she also works at Fuse Magazine as their editorial intern.
Carolyne Clare Micropolitics of Kwakwaka’wakw Dancing Bodies
The Canadian Indian Act of 1867 sought to establish the Federal government’s dominion throughout the nation, by legislating the Parliament’s management of First Nations’ governance, land use, education and health care. A notable aspect of the Indian Act is that it aims to regulate life by imposing colonial movement and spatial regimes, such as implementing Euro- Canadian city planning in order to manage embodied practices. Moreover, the Indian Act explicitly outlawed some embodied traditions between 1884 and 1951, including the potlatch ceremo- ny practiced by the Kwakwaka’wakw nation of western British Columbia.
This essay will investigate how bodies are implicated in Canadian federal politics, and how bodies continue to resist colonialism. To begin I suggest that disciplinary and biopolitical power, as presented by Michel Foucault, initially influenced the activity and health of Kwakwaka’wakw bodies. Thereafter, I analyze the work of the U’mista Cultural Society, an organization that seeks to revive Kwakwaka’wakw embodied practices such as the potlatch and its associated dances. I suggest that Kwakwaka’wakw dancers are integral to recreating Kwakwaka’wakw micropolitics by generating particular affective and perceptual relations to the land and life. I study transcripts of interviews with Kwakwaka’wakw dancers, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to explicate how dancing bodies recreate Kwakwaka’wakw politics and resist colonialism.
CAROLYNE CLARE is completing a Masters in Museum Studies at the Uni- versity of Toronto. She is researching the politics and use of the Jean-Pierre Perreault dance archive housed at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. She has also enjoyed working as a curatorial assistant at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, performing in over 100 showings of Casse Noisette, and being a zebra’s back end for Bread and Puppet Theatre.
Noah Ross Nature, place and resistance
This paper is concerned with thinking about resistance through the activism of settler communities in specific Canadian places. As we learn from Edward Casey, the dominant approach to place in Western Thought since the Middle Ages has been to conceive of place as a site that is invested by culture. This view of place emphasizes the importance of a general cultural space rather than the particularities of place. In terms of political thought, analysis based in this tradition tends to pass over the place in which resistances occur and instead analyzes resistance based on models of politics which are not place-dependent and, in doing so, perpetuates the reduction of place to site. I challenge this flattening of place and consider how, in terms of environmental activism, resistance can profitably be understood in relation to spe- cific places rather than in the context of debates over nature. Here we are called to leave our ideas of the political behind when we approach place so as to avoid colonizing the relations that occur in that place with our own preconceived ideas of the political. In doing so, we allow for the articulation of emerging con- ceptions of the intersections between place, politics and culture based on the political commitments articulated and fought for by rural activists. Building on this, I propose to consider instances of rural environmental resistance in terms of a cultural-political horizon emerging in relation to the places that activism is engaged with and then explore the consequences of such as approach.
NOAH ROSS is an M.A. student in Political Science with a specialization in Cultural, Social and Political Thought at the University of Victoria. He is interested in the relations between place, culture and politics in the territory claimed by the colonial state of Canada.
Nuria Carton de Grammont Architecture parasitaire : pratiques de résistance dans l’espace public à la ville de Mexico
Aujourd’hui une tendance de l’art public contemporain mexicain questionne les origines modernistes de la planification urbaine imposée au Mexique dans le contexte postrévolutionnaire (après 1921), modèle qui devait entrainer le progrès et l’émancipation sociale. En proposant des structures parasitaires inspirées de l’architecture des bidonvilles conçues à partir de matériaux de récupération et de déchets urbains, des artistes tels qu’Antonio O’Oconnell, Hector Zamora et Gilberto Esparza contestent ce modèle devenu insuffisant pour rendre compte de la complexité actuelle de l’espace urbain à la ville de Mexico. En créant des formes qui s’adhèrent ou se dissémi- nent comme des virus dans les bâtiments et le décor citadin, ils prennent position face à la vision moderne de la ville conçue d’un point de vue surélevé, voir panoramique (Edward Soja, Anthony Vidler), pour revendiquer la réalité des périphéries urbaines et des quartiers marginaux, cherchant à déplacer le centre-ville comme parangon, de lui enlever son rôle de suprématie et de contrôle. Ces pratiques mettent en question la rhétorique spatiale dominante fondée sur un ordre visuel et architectural de la ville, en récupérant les contradictions de l’espace urbain et les défaillances d’un système calqué à l’image des pays développés qui ne tiens pas compte de l’hétérogénéité et des divergences sociales. En proposant un récit plus impliqué dans le contexte social, ces manifestations d’art urbain inventent de nouvelles formes de parcourir, d’organiser, de percevoir le quotidien et, comme le dirait Michel de Certeau, de décrire d’autres énonciations spatiales. Ma communication analyse ces pratiques de résistance spatiale qui rendent possible de multiples formes de cartographier la mémoire urbaine et qui proposent une relecture du récit urbain mettant en valeur de nouveaux paradigmes sur l’histoire locale.
NURIA CARTON DE GRAMMONT, franco-mexicaine, a fait ces études de licence en Histoire à l’Université Nationale Autonome du Mexique (UNAM). Postérieurement elle a réalisé sa maîtrise en Études des arts à l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) et actuellement prépare sa thèse de doctorat dans le département d’Histoire de l’art à l’Université Concordia sur l’art public mexicain contemporain.
Thursday, April 15. 4:00 – 6:00pm
Compromise, Consensus, Contradiction
panel chair: Dr. Gada Mahrouse (Simone de Beauvoir Institute)
Jan Gasparic Resistance: a call to arms or the death knell of dissension?
The term ʻresistanceʼ operates in strange modes of rhetoric and social conduct in contemporary post-modern times. Prefigured by inclusion within a larger sphere, it operates as a mode of (re)negotiating existing relations. As every corner of the world is forcibly integrated into the global economy, ʻresistanceʼ mediates the crushing weight of modernity. Conjuring images of often violent refus- als of compliance, how does a rhetoric of resistance shape the trajectories of debate? As a methodology, is it inherently fractious? How does ʻresistanceʼ operate today and has it become outmoded in a multi-polar world?
Drawing upon James H. Smith & Jeffrey W. Mantzʼs analysis of the operations of Mai-Mai militias in coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo and their socio-economic consequences, I intend to show how a rhetoric of resistance is deployed to maintain asymmetrical relations of production by a multitude of competing micro-factions. With reference to the work of Langdon Winner on the relationship of politics and architecture, I will analyze how a lack of rhetoric of resistance was in fact an act of resisting demographic pressures by creating geographies of social exclusion through public works projects in the 1930s in Long Island, New York. Finally, I will examine a work of the artist Francis Alys, When Faith Moves Mountains, as a mode of alter-conduct, in achieving a moment of social integration and affirmation of commonalities.
Through contrasting these three examples, ʻresistanceʼ will be shown in several different guises, from genocide, rupture and disintegration, to cohesion, affirmation and social altruism. In conducting such a survey, I hope to offer a point of departure for the examination of ʻresistanceʼ as a mode of social conduct in contemporary times. Can ʻresistanceʼ still function as a spirited site of debate? Or are acts of counter-conduct anachronisms in todayʼs multi-vocal discursive spheres?
JAN GASPARIC is currently an MA candidate in NYU Steinhardtʼs Media, Culture, and Communications program, graduating in 2011. His formative years were spent between Beijing, Singapore and Ljubljana, which stoked an interest in the myriad cultures of the world. This was further ingrained during my travels throughout South East Asia, Europe and South America. Prior to attending NYU, he completed a BA in Fine Art at Londonʼs Central St. Martinʼs College of Art & Design, and subsequently worked for several years in the cityʼs vibrant gallery industry. Upon graduation, he hopes to pursue a career with an international NGO that will fully utilize his language skills and cultural experiences to promote global perspectives underscored by ethical innovation.
Erik Bordeleau Sloterdijk’s Conception of Resistance as Demobilization
In the era of global mobilization, the primordial etico-political imperative consists in finding ways to interrupt the media-spectacular flux that go through us and constitute us. This is what Deleuze and Guattari have expressed in their own way almost 20 years ago when they wrote: “we do not lack communication (…) we lack resistance to the present”. This poses the question of the how of demobilisation – the political question par excellence of our era.
In my presentation, I’d like to discuss Peter Sloterdijk’s conception of resistance in the context of his media theory of spheres. Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres is based on the idea of the inherent communicability of the living. The spheres are thus defined as “the places of inter-animal resonance in which the way in which living creatures are together transform itself into a plastic power”. In others words, Sloterdijk conceives of the social as a psycho-political continuum charged with an anthropogenetic power.
Sloterdijk defines global mobilization as “the establishment of a system of synchronous stress on a world-wide scale”, a system in which everyone is required to carry out identity service, that is, a system in which “excitability becomes the first civic duty”. In this context, if resistance as any sense for Sloterdijk, it is as a politics of non-proliferation of what he calls the “massifying synchronic stress”, that is, a resistance conceived as a possibility of interruption of the media flux that constitutes us. In this context, the mission of the philosopher is to “prove that a subject can be an interrupter.” In a global-mobilized world, this can be interpreted as Sloterdijk’s own version of Heidegger’s idea of Gelassenheit (serenity, laisser-être).
ERIK BORDELEAU is currently a post- doctoral fellow at McGill University
Friday, April 16. 10:30am – 12:00pm
Collectvity, Mobilization, Crowds
chair: Brian Fauteux (Communication Studies)
Dom Nasilowski A Revolution in Vision or Visions of Revolution? The Panorama as a visual mass media and collective experience in 1789-1793
In 1789 ‘A View of Edinburgh from Calton Hill’ was exhibited in London. Robert Barker’s patented invention was received as a new form of painting, mass media, and experiment in optical perspective. The ‘panorama’ as it later coined, inaugurated a ‘revo- lution in seeing’ by enabling up to 140 people at once to view a single, 360-degree image in a cylindrical format. Previously painting was designed around a single point perspective of 46 degrees and dependent upon elite patronage. The result of Barker’s innovation signifies not only a transition to content driven by mass appeal in painting but also renegotiating the re- lationship between art and its publics. The effect of the panoramic representation of space has been considered in various ways as a Foucauldian technology of power. As an eminent form of nineteenth century mass media, it has been read as a panopticization of leisure within a rapidly industrializing culture. Conversely it has been interpreted as a heterotropic space containing the potential for resistance to official narratives. The elimination of single point perspective allows for multiple viewing positions which further destablilize the way composition orders meaning in images. Drawing from Michael Baxandall’s concept of the period eye I consider the multiple statuses of the panorama across discourses of late eighteenth century art, mass entertainment and optics. In the viewing platform panorama visitors perform socially sanctioned subject positions enacting external narratives such as those of British imperialism. Vision redefined through social interaction provides a basis for examining the potential for resistance to narrative within the panorama. This paper will trace its failure to produce a cohesive illusion through changes in form and content in its develop- ment in light of these social aspects.
DOM NASILOWSKI is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Concordia University. Research interests include: the gendered experience and representation of modernity in early twentieth century painting and photography, feminism, post-colonialism and theories of the subject.
David Mather Crowd Formations: Mass Agency in Italian Futurist Painting, 1910 to 1915
Italian futurist paintings overflow with energies that coalesce around an anonymous reservoir of the crowd. Their crowd imagery participates in an overarching historical discourse on mass agency, which articulates competing ideologies of social and cultural change before World War I. Mediating among aesthetic practices and sociohistorical processes, their images of collectivity function as pictorial expressions of four different types of agency: productive, agitated, consumptive, and patriotic.
Through expenditures of physical force, the productive crowd demonstrates a socialist project of determinate aims and socioeconomic betterment. The agitated crowd enacts a physical threat posed by the masses to social order through its various strategies for transforming disparate social energies into images of revolt, yielding potent visual metaphors for the radicalization of workers in Italy and elsewhere. Futurist crowd imagery also corroborates a capitalist ideology; the consumer crowd avoids more troubling aspects of social conflict by emphasizing bourgeois excess and perceptual disruption. Finally, the futurists combine various strategies of the types in the patriotic visual earlier crowd.
Even as this artistic movement fails to avoid an all-consuming nationalism, its crowd imagery derives diverse and sometimes incompatible solutions to the problem of imagining mass agency. Futurist painters transcribe pervasive sociohistorical forces into different types of crowd imagery and they reveal a tense competition among ideas, metaphors, and rationales for social change. This overview of futurist visual strategies attempts to explain how their demonstrative efforts comprise a valuable historical lineage of social action in the arts, which enacts some of the tensions and contradictions endemic to picturing mass agency and social action and which can continue to inform artistic practice.
DAVID MATHER is a fifth-year Art History and Theory Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California at San Diego. He is working on a revisionist account of early Italian futurism, which uses a comparative approach to investigate images of bodily movement across a range of mediums and in the contexts of visual art, science, and politics. His writing has appeared in such publications as LEONARDO, Left History journal, the Sarai Reader, and El Palacio magazine. Residing in Los Angeles, he has curated shows on electronic art and sound art, and he has worked with non-profit art organizations, such as The Fellows of Contemporary Art, West of Rome, and The Southern California Consortium of Art Schools.
Monica Guu Title: Beautiful Politics: Towards an Aesthetics of Ideology in Chinese Art, 1958-1976
Current art historical accounts of images produced in the People’s Republic of China during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) say little about their status as pictures beyond their overt political content. Western scholarship on these images, which stress their bright colors, transparent narrative content, or their “authentic” (i.e. peasant or worker) authorship, uncannily echo the Communist Party’s claims of forging art for, and by, the People. By analyzing images from this period that foreground “the Land” and its industrial transformation (or its intransigence), this paper moves beyond a descriptive art history and attempts to establish a framework with which to speak of the aesthetics of ideology. Part of the paper’s interpretive lens hinges upon Slavoj Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which Ideology is posited as an all-encompassing system that disguises—obscenely—the lack of conviction at its core from which there is no escape. As such, images of industrialized nature are read as double-edged cultural forms: deeply anxious attempts to imagine China out of the Third World and also beautiful works in which authors engage with the limits and fruitfulness of their pictorial traditions. This paper is an attempt at resistance on multiple fronts: against the implicit belief that beauty is a bad word to apply to popular art forms, against Chinese art history’s half-hearted attempts at creating a space for modern Chinese art (not to mention its failure to speak convincingly about Communist art), and against the misrepresentation of Chinese artists as actors entirely subservient to the mechanisms of the state apparatus.
MONICA GUU: I am a PhD student in the department of art, University of Toronto. My dissertation, “Polyphonic Texts: Tracking the Meanings of Art Deco in Shanghai, 1923-37” centers on the forms in which Art Deco, an ostensibly cosmopolitan style, was disseminated in semi-colonial Shanghai and the ways in which it was received. Other research interests include mod- ern and contemporary Chinese and Japanese visual culture. I have written on topics such as the use of classical Chinese literature in popular music, cigarette advertisements in 1920s Shanghai, the Ghibli Museum in Japan, and the Lacanian dimensions of the anime franchise, Evangelion. I also like to knit during conference and seminar presentations, but have experienced varying levels of disapproval. I think it would be a very illuminating experience (for me) if audience members could be encouraged to bring their creative projects to my presentation and knit, crochet, or sew while I speak. Having audience members engage in their hobbies or “folk” art-making in the conference room is my tip-of-the-hat to one of the projects of Communist art: that of disseminating art forms and practices that have had (or may set down) deeper roots in rural communities.
Friday, April 16. 1:30-3:30pm
Hidden Counter-Narratives
James Henry and Nathalia Lebedinskaia Green Photographs: A Collective Pensive Image.
For the Resistances: Counter-conduct, inter-disruptions, compromising acts we propose a presentation of a joined paper, which will be the result of the dialogue between the co-authors. A discourse that strives to unpack the significance of photographs and vid- eos taken by protesters in Iran as part of the Green Movement, a mass outcry of protest which followed the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009. Viewing these images as infinitely more complex than journalistic documentation, we explore their implications for photographic theory, journalism, and a re-evaluation of art’s capabilities for participating in new modes of resistance.
In the case of the Green Movement, the physical reality is collectively and anonymously documented by the protestors- photographers who are consciously implicating themselves, their subjects, and their audience in the political act of photographing and being photographed. The anonymity of the images is a necessity: identification can lead to physical consequences: arrest, torture. As a result we encounter a qualitative multiplicity of photographic relations that goes beyond the individuation of the apparatus, given the homogeneity of the photographers and the photographed. As the photographs are not taken by the official press, their audience cannot identify with the detachment and relative safety of the journalist: there is no
mediation, no careful composition, no expensive equipment, and no glossy magazine paper to set the images apart from the grainy digital photos of friends taken with a cell phone camera. The erasure of the boundary between the photograph, the photographer, and the audience, as well as the coupling of the cell phone cameras with Internet, result in an ever evolving rhizomatic collective. While being complex, this collective is flexible in its becoming and able of constant innovative trans- formations, continually rendering futile the official government attempts at suppressing and censoring the movement.
James Henry: Originally from Tehran, Iran, James Henry has received his BFA in New Media Art and Cinema from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is currently a researcher at the SenseLab, a Montreal-based research/creation laboratory run by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. Henry’s art practice is composed primarily of narrative new media installations based on new cognitive philosophies, in combination with traditional Sufi and Buddhist practices. Henry also continues to be an active film writer, specializing in Deleuzian philosophies, formal analysis, and Middle Eastern cinema. (http://www.henry.com)
NATALIA LEBEDINSKAIA: Originally from Moscow, Russia, Natalia Lebedinskaia is an MA candidate Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her research focuses on vernacular photography, immigrant communities in Canada, and ethics of display, as they relate to nostalgia and the formation of national identity. Leb- edinskaia also works as an independent curator and critic, having curated exhibitions in Montreal and at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Alberta, where she held a curatorial internship from 2008 to 2009. She is the currently co-directing Studio Beluga, an exhibition and studio space for emerging artists and curators in Montreal.
Claudie Massicotte Being Watched by the Invisible Subject of History: A Reflection on the Impos- sible Space of Trauma and the Failure to See the Past in Michael Haneke’s film Caché
Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) narrates the story of two bourgeois Parisians, Georges and Anne, who receive videotapes suggesting that they are being watched. As the film progresses, these videotapes force Georges to revisit his long forgotten childhood cruelties: when he was six years old, he deliberately sabotaged his parents’ plan to adopt Majid, the orphaned son of two workers killed by the French police during the pro-Alge- rian demonstration of October 1961.
My presentation will focus on Haneke’s treatment of images in Caché, in relation to Cathy Caruth’s text “Traumatic Awakenings” and its reflection on trauma and/as a failure to see. Questioning the invisibility of Georges’ anonymous observer and the impossible angles from which the images of the latter’s videotapes are captured, I propose that Haneke’s film offers a reflection on the traumatic past as a haunting presence which cannot be seen (encountered/represented) in an original, designated site. As an inherently belated, inassimilable experience, or as a repetition of différance, the traumatic past (in Haneke’s film: that of Georges, but also, allegorically, that of the 1961 French massacre of the Algerian demonstrators) exceeds the boundaries of its own reality. Its haunting, or its address to the present, therefore calls for a responsibility which both recognizes and exceeds its specific context. In that sense, Haneke’s film also offers a complex understanding of our resistances to the traumas of the personal and historical past, as well as on the resistances of these past traumas themselves to our vain attempt to fully grasp their “primary” or “original” source.
CLAUDIE MASSICOTTE is a PhD student from the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. Her research aims to explore the relationship between art and major critical theories on history and memory through the study of metaphorical figures – more specifically, the figures of the phantom and the spectre – in contemporary discourses. Her pre- vious and future publications include the articles “Mémoires de la modernité : la fonction de l’architecture ferroviaire dans Austerlitz de W.G. Sebald” (Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, vol.1- 2, no. 103-104, 2009) and ‘‘Hantise et architecture cryptique : transmission du passé dans Le confessionnal de Robert Lepage’’ (accepted for publication, Revenances et Hantise, 2010).
Doug Pope Resistance and Paranoia
To be paranoid is to feel that the world is against you. It is an anxiety-provoking, unsettling feeling, but it is also a form of explanation. The paranoiac lives in a world governed by secrets. What makes this point of view so difficult to ward off or to contain is that the world is, despite everything one might say to the con- trary, full of secrets and conspiracies. A similar spirit of suspicion is commonly adopted among contemporary critics who feel that no message says what it seems to say, no meaning is evident without an ingenious scheme of inter- pretation capable of looking beyond surface deceptions. This way of thinking was termed “the hermeneutics of suspicion” by the French philosopher Paul Riceour in his study, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Riceour compared Freud’s working methods to hermeneutics, with its emphasis on decoding the meaning of a text. Ricoeur’s theory has been challenged in recent years by Susan Sontag, Eve Sedgwick and other critics, who question the ethics of uncovering hidden thoughts or messages. How is this exposure a useful strategy in talking about art or life? Sedgwick uses Melanie Klein’s concept of reparative strategies to emerge from a self-debilitating “paranoid position,” yet remain active as a critical thinker.
This paper looks at the relationship of paranoia to the postmodern impulse to resist the manipulation of coded messages. I use the work of two artists, cartoonist Saul Steinberg and British graphic designer Alan Fletcher, to make points about the use and abuse of criticism in contemporary debates in the field of art criticism.
DOUG POPE is a doctoral candidate at Concordia University, where he received an MA in art history. Before coming to art history he worked in the advertising, publishing and film industries, interests which he continues to explore in writings on the inter-relationship of mass media and culture. His MA thesis concerned the theme of motion in the work of three contemporary Canadian artists, Rita Letendre, Serge Lemoyne and Claude Tousignant, a theme amplified by the theories of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Doug Pope’s current teaching and research interests include paranoia in film and art of the Cold War period, 1960-2000.
Martin Watson: Krzhizhanovsky and the Resistance to Time
In his 1929 novella Memories of the Future Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887- 1950), a polish-born author of Russian fiction, tells the story of brilliant inventor Max Shterer and his ‘timecutter’, a fantastic device allowing him to travel back and forth through time. Funded by desperate individuals ready to forsake their possessions for a chance to escape the Bolshevik present, he completes his machine, travels forward to 1954 and eventually ‘crashes’ back into 1928. Krzhizhanovsky almost lived to see the future that Shterer glimpsed, but died far before the publication of this, or any of his other novellas. Most of his oeuvre was never even sent to a publisher, its content far too shocking and ‘non-contemporary’ for his Soviet present, and was instead shelved in the State Archives after his death, only to be discovered in the distant future of 1976 and finally published for the first time in 1989. I propose an exploration of the theme of resistance to time present in Memories of the Future, including an examination of the theorists of time with whom Krzhizhanovsky explicitly engages (Einstein, Minkowski, Husserl, Bergson) considered in light of a powerful contemporary thinker of resistance and temporality: Antonio Negri (particularly in his Time for Revolution). Through the theoretic lens provided by Negri’s critique of the power of Capitalism to transform the materiality of time itself for the working class, and the openings for resistance made possible by the ensuing class-based temporal asymmetry, I will examine not only the content of Krzhizhanovsky time travel narrative, but the way in which the novella itself became dislocated in time, emerging in an era so unlike its origins, and how this and other chronological dislocations can speak to the idea of resistance in the face of the political and phenomenal rhythms that demand conformity to a particular sense of temporal being.
MARTIN WATSON is a PhD candidate in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities. He has published and presented essays on Jorge Luis Borges, the films of Bruce Elder and Finnegans Wake among other topics, and is currently working on a dissertation examining the works of James Joyce, Sergei Eisenstein and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Friday, April 16, 4:00 -6:00pm
From Theory to Praxis
chair: David Madden
Chad Andrews Negri and the Philosophical Foundations of Resistance
As we find in Empire and Multitude, Antonio Negri’s political project is a thoroughly Marxist analysis and critique of global or late capitalism. By modifying and updating Marx’s conceptual tools, he is able to provide a clear account of capitalism’s processes, its expanding reach, and the revolutionary potential that functions as its motor.
By turning to Negri’s philosophical works, however, we find that this political analysis is founded on a series of concepts and theoretical trajectories. This paper attempts to clarify this foundation, highlighting in particular the manner in which Negri builds a radical concept of resistance on the shoulders of a radical reading of Spinoza. As Negri makes clear, this methodology indicates the connection between theory and politics, between the abstract process of thinking and the tangible, material process of action or praxis.
Our contemporary political landscape can therefore be traced to a theoretical foundation, and we can initiate political change, it seems, by questioning these theoretical assumptions. Negri points us in this direction: opposing the long history of transcendence in epistemology and metaphysics (one that stretches from Plato to Kant), Negri’s reworked ontological perspective positions individuals – not god or some other transcendent source – as the primary agents responsible for molding the ontological landscape.
Combined with his understanding of kairòs (subjective, immeasurable time), this ontology lays the groundwork for opposing transcendence and rethinking contemporary politics.
CHAD ANDREWS received his BA in Philosophy and English Literature from Brock University, and then completed his Masters in Philosophy at Brock as well. His MA thesis project focused on Antonio Negri’s analysis of Capitalism, Marx, and Spinoza. At Trent, this research informs his work, where he plans to combine an understanding of political subversion and resistance with unique research into cyberpunk literature. The project aims to articulate some of the complex conjunctions among cyberpunk narrative, technoculture, and capitalist processes, ultimately contributing something significant to the field of science fiction studies.
Eben Hensby Resisting, Rancière
French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s theorizing lends itself to the question of resistance. Through his unique take on the interactions between the logics of police and politics, he offers a structural framework within which to conceptualize resistance. For Rancière, the police is first and foremost a distribution of the sensible: it is the allocation of what is and is not ‘proper.’ Politics, by contrast, is a direct break with the police logic: politics, guided by an egalitarian logic, can emerge from the fundamental wrong underlying any police order. This paper will explain and examine this critical framework by highlighting the theoretical role of “occupation”: in terms of one’s ‘proper’ job (the ‘proper’ use of one’s time), the forcible presence of the police, and the intervention of politics (even into language and the aesthetic realm of appearance). Rancière suggests that a better police order is one that has been opened to increased infiltration by politics. After a discussion of his atemporal structurality, a critique will be offered: this paper will suggest that he ‘domesticates’ the spirit of the interplay between the logics of equality, politics, and police. In so doing, politics becomes about reaction and incrementalism; we are held beholden to the police. Through several exploratory cases, this paper will question the concept of politics as formulated by Rancière. These questions, regarding what his theory may have excluded, will be left open as a potential challenge or troubling to his ideas. They will also speak to larger issues pertaining to the questions and complications of resistance in general.
EBEN HENSBY is an MA student in the Theory, Culture and Politics program at Trent University. He finished
his BA in English at the University of Victoria and with his MA is moving towards political theory. He is interested in the interrelations of politics and religion, poetry and metaphor, and the formation of Enlightenment thinking.
Tatiana Koroleva The Day of Simple Things – Post-communist Rituals in Russian Federation
I never knew what it is to have the country of origin. My personal mythology didn’t coincide neither with soviet nor with democratic story. A gloomy mixture of soviet cartoons, grand-mother’s fairy-tales, history of Slavic tribes, German porno films on Russian court culture, Crime and Punishment at the age of 14, vodka sold in plastic bottles, Latin- American soap operas watched ritualistically every evening, huge dinner parties of my parents with folklore songs and dances on the table, my dearly loved jeans my brother brought me from Germany in 1989, classes of political economy with professors who were bribed for a good grade, emigration of my best friends and apocalyptic destructive patriotism of the others formed a strange sense of non-belonging.
Drawing on multiple texts as well as her personal experience Koroleva will examine the complex issues of transitory cultural politics in post-soviet Russia. The presentation will focus on reconstruction of Eastern-European mythology during the perestroika and its modification into a new system of cul- tural practices in Russian Federation.
