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Event Date: 26 May 2011
Room S274/275
Stewart House
32 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5DN

Time, Politics and Becoming:

A One-Day Conference on William E. Connolly’s A World of Becoming

One of the leading voices in political theory today, for over three decades William E. Connolly has systematically brought the critical insights of Nietzsche and Foucault, Bergson and Deleuze, complexity theory, radical neuroscience, and more to bear on questions of individual and collective identity, the role of faith in public political life, the problematic nature of territorial sovereignty in a globalized age, the changing nature of transnational capitalism, and the micropolitics of affective experience. A World of Becoming (Duke University Press, 2011) is onnolly’s most recent contribution to the development of a pluralist politics and ethics appropriate to a world composed of open and complex systems, existing on different temporal egisters and interacting in ways that can engender profound but sometimes unpredictable changes. This conference will interrogate this book and Connolly’s thought more generally from the perspectives of geography, philosophy, critical legal studies, international relations, andpolitical theory.

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His The Terms of Political Discourse (1974) received the biennial Lippincott Award in 1999 for the “best book in political theory still influential fifteen or more years after publication.” He is also author of Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (1991), The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality (1993), The Ethos ofPluralization (1995), Why I am not a Secularist (1999), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002), Pluralism (2005), and Capitalism and Christianity: American Style (2008).

This event is organized by the Contemporary Political Theory Reading Group (CPTRG) at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Department of Politics, University of Exeter, with the support of Royal Holloway’s Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) and Faculty of History and Social Sciences.

PROGRAMME

OPENING REMARKS: Nathan Widder.

PANEL I: Agency and Master

Clayton Chin - Connolly’s Questions: Ontology, Mastery, and Becoming.
(AUDIO HERE)

Kimberly Hutchings – Against Geist: Hegel, Feminism and Expressive Sovereignty
(AUDIO HERE)

Rory Rowan – A Political Cosmology?: The world beyond the ‘long line of death
(AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Jane Bennett

Panel 1 questions:

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PANEL II: The Ethical Sensibility of William E. Connolly

Terrell Carver – Evil Eye for the Nice Guy (AUDIO HERE)

Victoria Ridler – The Torsion of Meaning: exploring the forces impelling us to cultivate sensibility in the work of William Connolly (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Dario Castiglione

Panel 2 questions:

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PANEL III: Immanence, Transcendence, Becoming

Robin Dunford - Immanence and Transcendence: A Matter of Faith?
(AUDIO HERE)

Stuart Elden – Of: Becoming-World (AUDIO HERE)

Craig Lundy – The Movement and Rest in William E. Connolly’s Conception of Becoming
(AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Nathan Widder

Panel 3 questions:

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CLOSING ADDERSS

William E. Connolly – Two Images of Becoming: Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Cosmopolitics
(AUDIO HERE)

Event date: 3 December 2010
Imperial War Museum, London

The Political Life of Things

A One Day Workshop at The Imperial War Museum, London, UK

The BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group and BISA/PSA Art and Politics Group present a one day workshop at the Imperial War Museum London, 3 December 2010. This workshop starts from the assumption that the subject of politics is always already embodied and exists in the context of a multitude of material objects. Politics thus comprises complex assemblages in which things play a constitutive role. Despite often speaking of the role of things – from ballot papers to missiles – scholars of politics and international relations have largely overlooked their constitutive power. Indeed, the classical agenda of politics scholarship is dominated by an anthropocentrism that locates politics in the figure of the human individual. It is an agenda defined by ideas of agency and rationality that regards things as mere equipment. Despite this seeming neglect, the intersection of materiality and politics has recently become the focus of a number of innovative strands of thought. From Appadurai’s Social Life of Things to Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, via Deleuzian notions of affect and notions of non-representational geographies, new perspectives on what things are and do are re-problematising the constitutive materiality of politics. Artists and art practitioners, of course, have long been engaged with questions of materiality. Whether it is the embodiment of performance, the tactility of sculpture or the physical nature of imaging media, artists have probed the materiality of the assemblages they create. As such, the intersection between such artistic practice and scholarship on materiality provides a fertile ground for exploring the question of what things are and do in politics. This one-day workshop brings together scholars engaged in thinking about materiality to explore the nature, role and power of things in the assemblages of politics. In the context of the material culture collected and displayed by the Imperial War Museum, the workshop will explore how we can understand the role of things in war, conflict, violence and everyday practices of resistance. This workshop will be an interdisciplinary event bringing artists, art practitioners, museum curators, art historians, geographers, anthropologists and international relations scholars together to discuss questions of the political life of things.

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Welcome and Introduction:  Martin Coward .

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Keynote lecture:

Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins): Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency
Discussant: Christine Sylvester (Lancaster University/University of Gothenburg)

(AUDIO HERE)

questions .

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Panel 1 – Do things matter?

Cindy Weber (Sussex University): 
Materializing Violence:  Terror and Horror and War and Citizenship (AUDIO HERE)

Louise Amoore (Durham University):
Making Things Secure: On Objects of Violence and Things of Beauty (AUDIO HERE)

questions .

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Panel 2 – Art Matters

Edmond Clarke (Photographer) (AUDIO HERE)

Roger Tolson (Head of Collections, Imperial War Museum) (AUDIO HERE)

In conversation with Bernadette Buckley (Goldsmiths)

questions .

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Panel 3 – Security Matters

Lisa Smirl & Beth Lister (Sussex University): 
Drive-By Development: Thinking Through the Sports Utility Vehicle in Humanitarian Assistance (AUDIO HERE)

Claudia Aradau (Open University):
‘Crowded Places Are Everywhere You Go’: Materialities of Terrorism and Unexpected Events (AUDIO HERE)

Jairus Grove (Johns Hopkins): Improvised Explosive Devices and The New Ecology Of War (AUDIO HERE)

Nick Vaughan-Williams (Warwick) & Tom Lundborg (Swedish Institute of International Affairs):
There’s More to Life than Biopolitics: Critical Infrastructure, Resilience Planning, and Molecular Security (AUDIO HERE)

questions .

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Roundtable and closing comments .

Debbie Lisle (Queens University Belfast)
Alex Danchev (University of Nottingham)
Chair: Martin Coward (Newcastle University)

Event date: 3 December 2010
Imperial War Museum, London

The Political Life of Things

A One Day Workshop at The Imperial War Museum, London, UK

Keynote lecture:

Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins): Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency

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Discussant: Christine Sylvester (Lancaster University/University of Gothenburg)

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questions:

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accompanying images:

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Event Date: Monday 17th May 2010
Council Room Birkbeck Main Building

Jane Bennett – Walt Whitman’s Solar Judgment

In the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman attributes to the poet this remarkable talent: he has learned how to judge “not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.” To judge as the sun falls: my goal is to examine the techniques — literary, grammatical, conceptual — that Whitman uses to cultivate this queer, even oxymoronic, practice. I suggest that Whitman’s “solar” judging helps to induce a special kind of auditory perception: the ability to detect the voice of “inanimate” things, a voice that announces the role that such things have played in the particular political actions or events to which one is called upon to judge. Thus Whitman’s claim that poets can take on the posture of falling sunlight is linked to his materialism, or the way he conceives of materiality as a living force.

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University and currently a Fellow in the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her latest book is VIBRANT MATTER: A POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF THINGS (Duke University Press, 2010).

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talk:

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questions:

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accompanying media: