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Uke 37(10. - 14.september)"The Reverie of Boredom: The Situationists And Their Legacy" Steven Open panel discussion with Steven, Jorunn, Wencke and Øystein: Theme: "Does Art make progress?" (Gjør kunsten fremskritt?) Introduction lecture by Steven Dixon Uke 40 (29. september - 3.oktober)Steve Power, Authority, Legitimacy: Weber and Arendt on the Legitimacy of the Political and questions of Violence and Intersubjectivity.How is force, violence and power related to in the state and in political configurations, and how does one distinguish between legitimate uses of power and illegitimate uses of authority in the political? For Weber it is possible to locate the conditions of the legitimate formation of power relationships. In his opinion, power is the possibility to influence and shape other people's will according to our own. For Hannah Arendt, however, Weber's conception is more a matter of force than of power, and ultimately it is the possibility that this force can be turn into violence. Arendt sees this violence of the state as not only something other than power, but at its core a fundamental lack of power and the inability for the state to create conditions of intersubjectivity (nonhierarchical communication and positioning) amongst its members. This lack of true power articulates itself in a state structure as the impossibility of consensual agreement among the members of a state and therefore comes to be expressed in the mechanisms of violence and propaganda carried out by the state toward its members. This lecture will explore both Weber's and Arendt's views of political organization, power, violence and the role of legitimacy and terror. Comparing and the detailing the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Max Weber we will look at the question of authority and its relationship to the political and how this expresses itself in the structure of the stateand its expressions in power and propaganda. *This lecture is a part of an ongoing thematic project entitled, Authorship and Authority Who speaks, who reveals, who frames? These are essential questions of authorship and authority which are of concern to both makers and viewers. Comprised of a series of public lectures and a private reading seminar running the duration of the semester, this thematic project explores and moreover problematizes, the implicit, explicit or neutral position of the author/maker. Conceived by Steve Dixon and Renee Turner, the lectures and readings will weave into each other and pull from a variety of sources ranging from theorists such as Roland Barthes, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, to artists like Yvonne Rainer and Chris Marker, to writers such as Clarice Lispector. *Note: While the lectures are open to everyone, the reading seminars are limited to a maximum of 12 people. These sessions build upon each other and require a consistent group of people to explore specific texts/works in depth Steve Reading/Screening Seminar for: Power, Authority, Legitimacy: Weber and Arendt on the Legitimacy of The Political and The Questions of Violence and Power.Follow up reading and discussion Seminar on the notions of the state, terror, propaganda and the legitimacy of the state . This seminar will explore works and texts addressed in Tuesday's lecture. It is an opportunity to do a closer reading and open up the theme for discussion. Members are encouraged to attend Tuesday lecture, and read texts made available online (url forthcoming). Please be ready to discuss these texts. Readings are: Arbeidsform: Discussion Seminar Renee Reading/Screening Seminar: Authorship: a post-mortem examinationThis seminar will explore works and texts addressed in Tuesday's lecture. It is an opportunity to do a closer reading and open up the theme for discussion. Uke 46 (10. november - 14. november) Steve The Bloody Path: Containment, Flow, and Horror in Pan's Labyrinth, A Company of Wolves, and Ginger SnapsThe questions of containments and flows, the disciplined boundary verses the flow of the rearticulating body, have haunted the questions of the horror text and film. The articulated position of the subject- categories of in and out, here and there, flows and stasis- are abandoned and yet in the end, reaffirmed in the locale of the horror genre. This lecture will look at a number of horror texts and films which question recurrent forms of the horror genre which, in its standard form, brings to the fore the horrific questions of us and the other, nature vs. culture, wild vs. civilized, eaten vs. eating. The rejected questions of boundaries of the body (being one of the overriding and driving narrative functions of the horror form), and the implementation of the irresolvable category, is performed within these films by the articulation of menstrual blood as writing the female and the reaffirmation of the other. Whereas the horror form looks to the chills and revulsion of the breakdown of the categories of containment and flow I will hope to explore the ways that some of the typical aspects of his genre have been reassessed in a number explicitly horror texts and films - with special focus on the films "A Company of Wolves", "Ginger Snaps", and "Pan's Labyrinth" - through the writing of the abjected female body and it's reasserted inscriptions and questionings in the luminal state of the flowing and bloodied body of the menstruating other. Uke 49 (1.desember - 5. desember)Steve The State, the Law, and the Exercise of the Political: Life and the Sovereign Power in the thinking of Foucault and Agamben.According to Foucault, a transformation in the exercise of power by the State comes to a new beginning with the eighteenth century, where life itself becomes an object and exercise for power. "Biopower" is the term Foucault uses to describe the new set of social and legal mechanisms and tactics of power focused on life (that is to say, individual bodies and members of the state) which are carried out by the organization and ideology of the state. In Homo Sacer, Agamben takes up and disagrees with the Foucaultian stance and reestablishes it on the very terrain that the latter had wanted to break from: the field of sovereignty. Agamben argues that sovereign power is not linked to the explicit bearing of rights by individuals within the state, but is covertly linked to "bare life," which is life as operating within the political realm by a paradoxical position of its exclusion from the positions of rights and under the alienated position of total exposure to the decisions of the state as ultimate sovereign power. This lecture will look at Foucault's development of the notion of biopower as a shift away from the political organization of the state as sovereign power and its social and institutional consequences and how Agamben, in his work, reestablishes this notion in his analysis of contemporary political states and their expressions. Steve ReadingScreening Seminar for: The State, the Law, and the Exercise of the Political: Life and the Sovereign Power in the thinking of Foucault and Agamben.Primary writings dealing with the focus of legal and social institutions on the "life" of individuals and populations within the nexus of social controls. This seminar will explore works and texts addressed in Tuesday's lecture. It is an opportunity to do a closer reading and open up the theme for discussion. Members are encouraged to attend Tuesday lecture, and read texts made available online (url forthcoming). Please be ready to discuss these texts. Arbeidsform: Discussion Seminar Readings: Michel Foucault: Giorgio Agamben: The State of Exception (Selections) |