Article: Maria-Daniella Dick and Robbie McLaughlan, "The Desire Network"

 

With Twitter hitting Wall Street hard yesterday and bouncing twice as high as any rubber ball stuffed with money, it seems appropriate to showcase one of the newer contributions to CTheory's Theory Beyond the Codes: Maria-Daniella Dick and Robbie McLaughlan's "The Desire Network". Casting their eye on Facebook, the authors conduct an intelligent theoretical and political examination of the Zuckerberg effect, which has "largely passed without any thorough critical analysis" through the same academy that saw its inception and disseminated it.

 

While perhaps touting the flag of rhizomatic relations, Dick and McLaughlan argue that in fact this angel of social networking phenomena not only represents but constitutes the ideology of a kind of liberal democracy predicated on the reshaping of desire as a process of perpetual production and, consequently, on a mutated capitalistic machine.

"...the truly revolutionary aspect of social networking is not how knowledge has become privatised, but the revolution that it has instigated in the way in which being now functions within this era of cyber-entrepreneurialism; this ontological shift effects, we argue, a correlative mutation in the function of desire which, in turn, effects a mutation in capitalism."

A "neurotic" portrait of Facebook's workings includes an analysis of David Fincher's 2010 film The Social Network, a quick cameo of Sean Duffy, and (more substantially) a compelling description of Facebook's enactment of the endless deferral of the real. What the authors somewhat chillingly conclude in their psychoanalytic sketch is a model in which "desire becomes its own network", endlessly producing without object or exit.

 

"The Desire Network" is available online at ctheory.net. While there, take some time to check out their new offerings, including Jussi Parikka's interesting "Dust and Exhaustion: The Labor of Media Materialism".

Book: Jonathan Kemp, The Penetrated Male

Jonathan Kemp's new book The Penetrated Male, published through open-access outfit Punctum Books, takes a discursive tour through key texts of early twentieth century literature to locate and unpack the lurking concept of the penetrated male body filling their pages.

From Daniel Paul Schreber through to James Joyce, The Penetrated Male assembles an argument which pushes against the binary reduction of the penetrated male with the feminine and its consequent threat of its erasure. Kemp draws together the threads of this incomprehensibility and inarticulability, outlining the struggle and the tantalising/terrifying failure of the logic of language to circumscribe the rupture posed by the penetrated male body. What he also finds in this pursuit is "a profoundly productive aspect of discourse, generating ways of opening up the male body":

"The penetrated male body ... is capable of not only exposing the gendered structuration of language, but of destroying the entire structure and using the pieces to build something else entirely: a form of representation more grounded in the shifting realities of flux and sensations, more geared towards registering the intensities of material bodies."

The Penetrated Male is available for free download from the Punctum Books website. You may also want to take some time to browse their catalogue of books, and journals published (not to mention their associated titles), many of which are open-access or print-on-demand if required in hard-copy.

The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series presents Catherine Malabou, 21 January 2013, Edinburgh, 10:30am - 5:30pm

The Bodies in Movement Seminar organisers together with Michael O'Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin) and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh) are pleased to announce that we will be holding an intimate, one-day seminar with Catherine Malabou at the University of Edinburgh on Monday, 21 January 2013.
 

Malabou is currently tenured at Kingston University, London and also teaches at the European Graduate School. She is renowned for moving across the fields of neuroscience, anthropology, biology, feminism, politics, literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy, as well as bringing medical and biological science and philosophy into conversation. Her philosophy has created the foundation for a wide range of current research which focuses on the intersections between medicine, (neuro- and biological) science and the humanities.

Held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh EH8 9NW. For further information, see the Bodies in Movement Seminar Series page. If you have any queries or wish to register your interest in attending, please contact the organisers.
 

Kamillea Aghtan (kamillea@hotmail.com)
Karin Sellberg (k.j.k.sellberg@gmail.com)
Lena Wånggren (l.e.wanggren@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Michael O'Rourke (tranquilised_icon@yahoo.com)

Conferences: Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, Plymouth, 13 April 2013; and Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, Manchester, 25-26 April 2013

For the brave amongst us, April 2013 presents a cornucopia of UK conference choices to whet the appetite of the serious horror buff. On 13 April, Plymouth University hosts a one-day symposium entitled Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, designed "to explore, interrogate and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through the paradigms of performance, as well as models of performance through the quintessential zombie activities of eating and walking". Contributors are asked to focus on the contemporary (rather than historical) zombie mythos, and are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of topics from the ethics of survival in zombie landscapes to zombie gaming and acting dead.

The deadline for proposals to this symposium is set for 30 November of this year. All delegates will also be invited to a zombie film festival which takes place the evening of 12 April and will have the option to participate in an "early morning performance, Just after Dawn of the Dead, in the streets of Plymouth, followed by a conference breakfast".

Manchester-based creative writing and literature collective Hic Dragones follows up zombie marches with a like-minded conference focus, Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, on 25-26 April 2013. Not quite as specifically concentrated on contemporary modes, this two-day conference seeks papers from all disciplines which address cannibalism in any setting, "from contemporary horror film to Eucharistic devotion, from Freudian theory to science fiction" and beyond. It seeks proposals on topics such as theorisations of cannibalism, maternal infanticide and eating the enemy. The deadline for proposal submission is set at 31 December 2012.

The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series presents Scott Wilson, 25 May, Edinburgh, 2-6pm

Bodies in Movement, supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), is extremely excited to present Scott Wilson as the first academic speaker in our Spring-Summer 2012 Seminar Series, taking place at IASH, Edinburgh from 2-6pm on 25 May 2012.

A member of both the London Graduate School and the School of Humanities at Kingston University, London, Wilson will join us for a half-day, in-depth discussion of his work. Wilson's current research in psychoanalysis, influenced by cultural theory – particularly within the areas of cinema and music – both tests the limits of psychoanalysis as a discipline and seeks to revise its contemporary social bases. Be prepared for dashes of game theory, Aphex Twin, David Lynch, psychosis and more in this fascinating and dynamic afternoon of discussion.

This is a free event, but booking is essential. Participants are asked to read the following texts in advance, which will be provided by the organisers upon confirmation of attendance:

• "Making Numbers Speak: John F. Nash Jr. and the Madness of Neoliberalism." Culture/Clinic 1.1 (forthcoming): 1–17.
• "The Braindance of the Hikikomori: Towards a Return to Speculative Psychoanalysis." Paragraph 33.3 (2010): 392–409.
• "Neuracinema." David Lynch in Theory. Ed. François-Xavier Gleyzon. Prague: Literaria Pragensia Press, 2010. 70–86.
• Extract from Chapter 6, "Surprised by Joy" in The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment. New York: SUNY, 2008. 117–129.

To secure a place at the seminar, please email one of the conference organisers. Further details on the BiM Seminar Series is available here.

Karin Sellberg (k.j.k.sellberg@gmail.com)
Lena Wånggren (l.e.wanggren@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Kamillea Aghtan (kamillea@hotmail.com)

Order of events:

2:00-2:15pm  Introduction2:15-3:15pm  Scott Wilson presents his work
3:15-3:45pm  Tea and coffee break
3:45-4:45pm  Three responses (15 minutes each) by Michael O'Rourke, Douglas Clark and Christos Hadjiyiannis
4:45-6:00pm  Open discussion

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH)

2 Hope Park Square

Edinburgh EH8 9NW

Book: Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl

After a somewhat protracted hiatus and recovery period, we are happy to be back in the digital flesh with the newly translated book by Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl. Published in English this year with the University of Minnesota Press, Saitō's original Japanese text released in 2000 was pivotal in shaping the decade of scholarship to come on otaku culture.

The significance of the book as a genealogy of the eroticised fighting girl theme in East Asian media, and particularly Japanese animation, may now be seen as somewhat dated given the rapid expansion of the convention, the growing tendency towards intertextual and parodic play within (and without) the anime medium and the increasingly experimental blending of genre, type and character. However, Saitō's final analysis of the economy of sexual desire involved in the Japanese otaku-animated character relationship - set against the backdrop of a furiously evolving motif of the beautiful fighting girl and interwoven with his strangely self-revealing analysis of the outsider art of Henry Darger - climaxes in an almost cinematic manner. Identifying a Japanese environment oversaturated with media codes to the detriment of depth and multiplicity of meaning, Saitō non-critically positions otaku sexuality as a powerful adaptive strategy for negotiating the realities of an informationalised world.

"For us who live this fantasy of an informationalized everyday, there is nothing at all surprising about the existence of something like a fiction more real than reality ... When our desire comes into contact with these spaces, it comes naturally to us to boot up the beautiful fighting girls. I am trying to read into this process an unintended inversion of desire. Why is it that we are so captivated by these phallic girls who will never exist in actuality? Are they not a strategy for resisting the informationalization of society, in other words, the flattening fictionalization of the entire world?"