‘Visions of Plenitude and Excess in the Cinema: Fantasy, Ideology, Freedom’

By Professor Todd McGowan (University of Vermont, USA)

Date: Monday 14th March 2011 Time: 5.00pm Location: 2.18 (Auditorium), Euros, Park Place

All are welcome to attend. For further information please contact Fabio Vighi (EUROS) at VighiF@cardiff.ac.uk, Robert Crich (EUROS) at crichra@cardiff.ac.uk or go to marxlacanzizek.wordpress.com

Supported by the Graduate School, EUROS, & ENCAP

‘Drive, Complexity and University Discourse’

By Professor Jodi Dean from The Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York

Date: Thursday 10th March 2011

Time: 5.00pm

Location: EUROS, room 0.22

Professor Dean is a political scientist whose publications include Blog Theory (2010), Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009), Zizek’s Politics (2006) and Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (2002). She also Blogs at ICITE jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/

All are welcome to attend. For further information please contact Tom Constant (ENCAP) at constantt@cardiff.ac.uk or Robert Crich (EUROS) at crichra@cardiff.ac.uk

Supported by the Graduate School, EUROS, & ENCAP

The Ideology Interdisciplinary Research Group (IIRG) is pleased to announce the following event on Higher Education and ideology:

‘From ivory towers to ‘real problems’: The circuit of capital and ideological shifts in higher education’

Speakers: Filip Vostal and Lorenzo Silvaggi from the Philosophy of Social Science Study Group at University of Bristol

Date: Thursday 28th October
Time: 6.00
Location: The Graduate Centre, Room 3.19

All are welcome to attend

For further information please contact Robert Crich (EUROS) at CrichRA@cardifff.ac.uk or go to marxlacanzizek.wordpress.com

Supported by the Graduate School, the Centre for Ideology Critique and Žižek Studies, EUROS, & ENCAP

Thanks to the very kind Mike Tueller for this. Definitely worth a chuckle for its surreal overtones.

Žižek and Badiou

This special graduate student issue of the International Journal of Žižek Studies will explore the relationship between Slavoj Žižek’s and Alain Badiou’s work. It asks, how can we combine Žižek’s and Badiou‘s work? Are there specific areas or issues which enable a productive confrontation between their respective approaches? And, how can we utilise the differences and continuities to stimulate innovative engagements within other discourses?

For Issue 5.1 of the International Journal of Žižek Studies we invite graduate student submissions, within any context, on the above or related themes. Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted by 31st August 2010 and the final deadline for submission of papers will be September 15th 2010. Please contact Guest-Editor Robert Crich to discuss submissions or queries: CrichRA@cardiff.ac.uk

Areas of interest include: comparative-engagements which utilise their different approaches to shed new light on a particular topic; comparative studies of their respective approaches to any particular issue; evaluations of their critical positions in relation to a particular theory or thinker; evaluations of the overlap between their respective philosophical and critical positions; their political positions and, for example, their critiques of liberal democracy, multiculturalism or the notion of tolerance; their account of capitalism and the role of political economy in their work; the role of ideology critique in their work.

the constitutionally myopic financial markets are beginning to wake up to the fact that capitalism is very badly broken. The Keynesian economist Paul Krugman wrote a few days ago: “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression,” following those of the late 19th century and of the 1930s. Marx described his own intellectual project as the critique of political economy: Marxism therefore lives or dies by its ability to make sense of the dynamics of capitalism and to offer a way out of it.

from the Guardian

….and feel free to play ‘spot the examples of capitalist realism’ in the cif section below the article.

“I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist,” he says. “For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good! My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.”

“Cameron is of little interest, except as a cipher, a sort of nonentity who channels the prevailing geist”

So goes the introduction of Richard Seymour’s excellent new book, The Meaning of David Cameron. Indeed, David Cameron has been portrayed as something of a nonentity elsewhere. Amando Iannucci’s Time Trumpet, for example, made light of the vacuous nature of David Cameron’s leadership. His presentational style, mimicking Blair, a simulacrum of an already image obsessed hollowed out political shell.

It argues, then, what ‘Cameron’ stands for, or rather represents  is very much a continuation of Blair. In other words, a re-hash of the Thatcher imposed, now status-quo, neo-liberal model of government and public services, and the anti-democratic rule by financiers, business and technicians which this brings with it.

What I have been, particularly impressed with when reading The Meaning of David Cameron, is Seymour’s close reading of the ideological co-ordinates that make up this ‘prevailing geist’. Of course, he draws our attention to the crayola-broad-brush-stroke ideological idealisations that DC and his tory chums try to pass off as our future Arcadia. Like Blair used ‘commutarianism’ or ‘the third-way’ as window dressing to what was basically an oath of allegiance to Thatcher, Cameron of course has brought with him ‘Red Toryism’ and ‘Big Society’. Yet Seymour, importantly, also points to a deeper level of ideological mystification on which both New Labour and David Cameron’s party have relied on. This is their appeals to Meritocracy.

If there is one thing that Seymour wants to underline in his book it is how the language of Meriotcracy is merely the smoke and mirrors to hide class rule and hierarchy. Whilst meritocracy may intuitively seem to imply fairness or a common-sensical approach for the organisation of difference in society, it is in fact for nothing other than the validation of ‘a principle of inequality’. This is the books greatest triumph. It shows that where ‘meritocracy’ was considered in any substantive and logically rigorous way it was universally rejected by politicians. The hackneyed political cliché that we have got instead has done nothing but reinterpreted privilege as merit, legitimized ‘the actually existing class system’ and encouraged people to blame individuals for social problems.

Here Seymour, importantly, carves open a space in political discourse in to which we must force our critical powers.

Meritocracy “as applied to the present state of affairs, is a kind of collective insult on humankind. To imply that those currently at the top – the Warren Buffets and Roman Abramoviches of this world – are the very best, the nec plus ultra of humanity, is a kind of hate speech toward the species. Dignity demands that we refute it.”