Polemics in Practice: On the (ir)reconcilability of Marxism and Post-Structural Thought
Saturday, March 21st, 2009
Date | Time | Location |
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Saturday, March 21, 2009 | 10:00AM - 5:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Description
Intense contestation has been embedded in the historical trajectory for a politics of social change both inside and outside of the academy. Marxist thought asserts that ideas of social change can be conceived most effectively at the site of production and circulation within capitalist economies. How these processes intricately construct, reproduce and affect the subjectivities involved remains under-theorized. Conversely, the post-structural focus on the construction and reproduction of these subjectivities deems the political-economic context a minor aspect in terms of understanding the reproduction of violence and oppression. Such simplified articulations, however, have significant consequences: a failure to address the complexities that exist amid these positions; an inability to recognize a common vision that underlies such articulations; and the reproduction of difference within such a politics of social change, which ensures the continuation of the very violence these articulations seek to eradicate. The question becomes: How can we (as academics and activists) come together at such a site of contestation, with the mutual vision of eradicating violence and oppression, to develop a politics of social change that can work together instead of work to divide? The possibility that this very question is implicated in the reproduction of such violence causes us to further ask what the limitations and possibilities are of imagining a Polemics IN Practice.
10:00-10:20am Introductions to (ir)reconcilabilities: Marxism & Post-Structuralism
10:30-11:15am On Governance: Power & Political Economy
Challenging Neoliberal Governmentality: Political Economy, Difference, and Research Praxis
– Alex Means, University of Toronto
Disciplinary statistics and the commodification of education
– Tannis Atkinson, University of Toronto
The Market, Marketism, and Sites of Veridiction
– Jon Roberts, University of Toronto
11:30-12:15pm Subject/Identity/Difference: On the Material & the Constituted
Swarms of Power and Knowledge in Marx and Foucault
– Michael Horacki, Queen’s University
Has the Black Man entered History? Spivak’s Bhaduri, America’s Obama and the Subaltern Voice between Marxist Immediacy and Poststructuralist Futurity
– Ricky Varghese, University of Toronto
Identity/Subject Position as fluid, relational and complex dynamics
– A story from a feminist organization –
– Yukyung Kim-Cho, University of Toronto
12:15-1:00pm LUNCH
1:00-1:45pm Cultural Production & Political Praxis: Aesthetics & Economic Circulation
Foucault contra Marx: Pleasure and the Asceticism of the Left
– Dylan Gordon, University of Toronto
The Political Pop-Art of Wang Guangyi: Towards a Post-Marxist Aesthetic Praxis
– James Poborsa, University of Toronto
The Problem of Aesthetic Practices
– Sean Callaghan, University of Toronto
2:00-2:45pm The Inevitability of Violence?: Reflections on Reform and/or Revolution
Activism: Between Agency and Subjection
– John Duncan, University of Toronto
The Truth About Revolution
– Yafet Tewelde
Examining Marxist Revolutionary versus Reproductive Praxis
– Manuel Larrabure, Diane Millar and Sarah O’Sullivan, University of Toronto
3:00-5:00pm ROUNDTABLE
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