CAMRI seminar
Clint Burnham: The Subject Supposed to LOL: Slavoj Žižek and the Event
of the Internet
Wed, 28/1, 14:00
Univ of Westminster
Harrow Campus
Room A7.01
Registration is possible by e-mail to [log in to unmask]
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/clint-burnham-the-subject-supposed-to-lol-slavoj-iek-and-the-event-of-the-internet
Is the Internet an Event? Does it constitute, as Žižek argues an Event
should, a reframing of our experience, a retroactive re-ordering of
everything we thought we knew about the social but were afraid to ask
Facebook?
In this talk Clint Burnham will engage with Žižek’s recent work (Less
than Nothing, Event, Absolute Recoil) as a way to argue, first, that in
order to understand the Internet, we need Žižek’s “immaterial
materialism,” and, in turn, to understand Žižek’s thought and how it
circulates today, we need to think through digital culture and social
media.
As regards the Internet, then, no cynical disavowal, no
Facebook cleanses, no shutting off the wifi: les non-dupes errent, or
those who distance themselves from social media and the like are the
most deceived. Next: the Internet’s two bodies: digital culture is both
the material world of servers, clouds, stacks and devices and the
virtual or affective world of liking, networking, and the mirror stage
of the selfie. And here we must confront the “obscene underside” of
digital culture: not only the trolls, 4chan porn, and gamergate bro’s,
but also the old fashioned exploitation of labour, be it iPhone
assembly-line workers at Foxconn, super-exploited “blood coltan” miners
in the Congo, “like farmers” in India, or social media scrubbers in the
Phillipines, who ensure your feeds are “clean” of porn, beheadings, and
other #NSFW matter. These last concerns, then, mean we also have to
think about what Žižek calls the “undoing of the Event” of the Internet,
the betrayal of the Internet, its diseventalization.
Clint Burnham teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser
University, Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of more than a dozen
books of criticism, poetry, and fiction, including The Jamesonian
Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (1995), The Only Poetry
that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2011), editor
(with Lorna Brown) of the public art catalogue Digital Natives (2011),
and editor (with Paul Budra) of From Text to Txting: New Media in the
Classroom (2012). His essay “Slavoj Žižek as Internet Philosopher” is in
the recent Palgrave collection Žižek and Media Studies (eds. Matthew
Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis), and he is currently writing a book on
Žižek and digital culture called Does the Internet have an Unconscious?
In the winter of 2014-15 he is living and working in Vienna as part of a
residency with the Urban Subjects collective.
Forthcoming talks (open for registration)
Feb 4: Marisol Sandoval - From Corporate to Social Media: Critical
Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and
Communication Industries
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/marisol-sandoval-from-corporate-to-social-media-critical-perspectives-on-corporate-social-responsibility-in-media-and-communication-industries
Feb 11: Justin Lewis - Beyond Consumer Capitalism: A Movie Screening and
Q&A with Justin Lewis
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/justin-lewis-beyond-consumer-capitalism-a-movie-screening-and-q-and-a-with-justin-lewis
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