To attend the 2023 public lectures,
you must register using the links below:
Monday June 12
Eyal Weizman: Investigative aesthetics
What is the investigative mode and how does it organize knowledge around points of rupture? What is the relation between the molecular level micro-historical incident and the analysis of long term structural forces? How to think about and employ aesthetics as an epistemological mode of thinking and knowing? And what are the potentials and paradoxes associated with the application of critical technological investigations and their presentations in forums from courts to galleries. The lecture will present and draw upon a number of FA investigations. Register.
Tuesday June 13
Kendall Thomas: The Epistemology of racial metaphor: Understanding the war on “woke”
The lecture will use the concept of "compulsory illiteracy" as an organizing theoretical frame for reflecting on "word politics" of the (so-called) CRT culture wars. I argue that what some have called "The Age of Trump" has to be understood as a battle over the right to democratic literacy that involves nothing less than a kulturkampf about the democratization of language. Register.
Wednesday June 14
McKenzie Wark: The TRANSSEXUAL EXCEPTION
How does the phenomena of transsexuality trouble or modify existing social categories of analysis? Not surprisingly, transsexuality puts pressure on what we take sec or gender or sexuality to be. That is perhaps the place to start a trans critique of social science and social movements alike for which these are key terms. But we can look beyond that to less obvious interactions between transsexuality and social thought. How does it interact with, and even modify, understandings of race and class? And finally, what pressure does it put on the concepts of nature and techniques? This talk gives an overview of what a systematic critical inquiry from the trans point of view might yield, as well as making the case for the relevance of such a standpoint for both trans and cis scholars and activists alike. Register.
