August 4th, 2006 Failing Better

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Exclusively for MA students at Goldsmiths College.

"Failing Better: The Greatest MA Student Conference on Earth!

August 4th, 2006

11am to 6pm in the Small Cinema (Main Building, Goldsmiths)

A joint CCS and CUCR conference for MA students in Culture, Globalisation and the City, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Anthropology and Cultural Politics, and Sociology.

This student conference is intended as an opportunity for Masters students in the fields broadly related to the study of 'culture' to have an occasion to share our own exciting research and writing, to hear other people's research directions, and to give creative feedback and input.
As part of departments related to the broad study of 'culture', whether urban cultures, cultural studies, or anthropology and postcolonial studies, we share an interest in critically engaging with key questions in contemporary academic and political debates. Addressing issues around culture industries (high and low), globalism, colonialism in all its neo- and post- guises, identity, politics, alterity, hybridity, community, race and class, our scholarship is linked together by its resolute combination of theory and practice, and its keen importance for contemporary social theory. Our conference title is a pilfered paraphrase from Samuel Beckett, suggesting that while perfection is impossible, there is always the possibility of failing better (we are thinking here in the realms of both politics and research). Though not limited to the subject, submissions that examine the relevance of cultural studies to politics and polity today are particularly encouraged."
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8 September 2006 - Masashi Iwasa

Pacific Asia Cultural Studies Forum presents:

Time:5-7pm,
8 September 2006
Venue: 137a Main Building, Goldsmiths College (a.k.a. Richard HoggartBuilding)

Speaker: Masashi Iwasa (Research Fellow in Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan)

Title:“Social movements in an age of cultural complexity: the case of anti-US base movements in Okinawa”

Abstract: Anti-US base movements have been active for decades in Okinawa, the southernmost island area in Japan. Discussion on them, either in sociology and cultural studies, have tended to take a certain collectivity of Okinawans almost as given, framing the movements as a matter of their collective engagements. However, the expanded opportunities for non-Okinawans to get involved with the movements in recent years remind us that communication processes among different participants of them need more careful understanding than the “collective identity” paradigm would assume. In other words, we need to pay closer attention to experiences and knowledge of each individual in the movements, who thereby seek to find their own meanings in them. The findings from my specific research will have major implications for the way a research on social movements ingeneral should be conducted in an age of cultural complexity.

Keywords: cultural complexity; social movements; individual; knowledge; experience
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5 July David Bennett

CCS presents:

A TALK by David Bennett

venue 1pm, BPLT Goldsmiths

TITLE: Libidinal Economy and the Prostitute as Prototypical Consumer

Is desire something quantifiable that we can save, spend, squander orprofitably invest in productive activities and relationships? Caneconomic tropes make sense of psycho-sexual energy? This paperre-examines the history of libidinal economy as a tradition ofexplaining sexual psychology in terms of monetary models and metaphors, by tracking how the figure of the prostitute has featured in discoursesof libidinal economy ranging from nineteenth-century medicine, anthropology and pornography, through Freudian psychoanalysis, WilhelmReich’s ‘sex-economic revolution’, Georges Bataille’s ‘general theory ofexpenditure’, to Jean-François Lyotard’s 'libidinal-economic' re-readingof Marx. It will show how early Victorian constructions of the prostitute as both a compulsive shopper and capitalism’s ‘drain’ and outlaw were taken up by anti-capitalist radicals such as Reich, Marcuseand Bataille and deployed as images of libidinal subversion of capitalism — but also how the arguments of these radicals uncannily parallel those of capitalist economists who advocated a shift from a productivist to a consumerist paradigm, or a saving to a spending mindset. The paper will also suggest how the figure of the (female)prostitute, traditionally treated as an exemplary site of libidinal-economic exchange, has been symbolically rehabilitated in postmodern shopping culture through the so-called prostitute-chic andthe 'hooker look'.

David Bennett teaches literary and cultural studies at MelbourneUniversity, where he was the founding director of the Interdepartmental Cultural Studies Programme. His paper comes from a book-in-progress (provisionally entitled ‘Sexual Spending in Consumer Culture’) on the historical nexus between the discourses of economics and sexualpsychology since the 18th century. Previous parts of this project haveappeared in _Public Culture_ 16, 2 (2005): 1—25; _Journal for thePsychoanalysis of Culture and Society_ 6, 1 (2001): 123-38; and _NewLiterary History_ 30, 2 (1999): 269—94
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