UPDATE: cfp--Catastrophe Now (2/20; 3/25-3/27)

Catastrophe Now: The Wreckage of Utopia

Keynote Speakers: Susan Buck-Morss and
Christian Parenti

March 25-27 at University of Florida

"In the wake of the failed utopia of industrial modernity, where the 
promises of mass sovereignty, mass production, and mass culture have led 
not to abundance and more freedoms, but instead to ecological devastation, 
catastrophes of war, exploitation, dictatorship, and technological 
destruction and to a panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize 
the violence of modernity and anaesthetize its victims, how do we 
re-conceive collective political action and a present utopia?" (Susan 
Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East 
and West)


This conference seeks papers that address how pedagogy, activism, 
aesthetics, and theory help constitute positions against the hegemony of 
Global Capital. To be precise, how do we disrupt the seemingly 
undisruptable: a Capitalist system that conjures up a communal unity that 
eventually obscures the social tensions of class conflict? How do we 
re-constitute past modes of (modernist) discourse into oppositional modes 
of engagement against the State? By dissolving the boundaries of disparate 
modes of discourse e.g., Islamism, aesthetics, Marxism, can we produce new 
forms of engagement against Global Capital? How do we turn the dreamworld 
of consumerism into a state of desertion and engagement? How can we imagine 
a progressive globalization? How do we construct a progressive global left?


Susan Buck-Morss, a professor of political philosophy and social theory at 
Cornell University, is the author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and 
Critical Theory on the Left, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of 
Mass Utopia in East and West, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and 
the Arcades Project, and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodore 
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. Buck-Morss has 
written a number of innovative essays on aesthetics, politics, and the work 
of art, including: "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork 
Essay Reconsidered" and "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe."

Christian Parenti is the author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in 
the Age of Crisis, Taking Liberties: Prisons, Policing, and Surveillance in 
an Age of Crisis, and The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery 
to the War on Terror. He is a Soros Senior Justice Fellow of the Open 
Society Institute and a Visiting Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School's 
Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. He teaches at the New College of 
California in San Francisco and works as a radio journalist in Central 
America, New York and California. Parenti is a regular contributor to 
numerous publications, including: Salon,The Nation,San Diego Union Tribune, 
Washington Post, The Progressive, In These Times, Christian Science 
Monitor, and The New York News Day.

*Prospective papers may address (but are not limited to) the following:
*Anti-humanism/post-humanism in Empire
*Reification of history.
*Narrative mappings of the political.
*What counts as labor?
*Re-thinking subjectivities through singularity.
*Society of control and new forms of policing/discipline.
*The aesthetics of security.
*Re-writing the frontiers of the nation-state.
*Exploiting security: crime and the warehousing of the poor
*Prosthetics, Clones, Cyborgs: The body and technological ontologies.
*Strategies of containing revolutionary practices.
*Gender and the place of work.
*Global capital and imagining the apocalypse.
*Pedagogies and reorganizing relations of space.
*Literature and collectivity.
*Insurgent spatial practices: sites for alternative production.
*Professionalization and the corporate university.
*Media and formulations of collectivity.
*Constructions of a revolutionary identity.
*"National Dreams" of Prosperity and Poverty
*Politics of zoning.
*US policy, war, and terrorism.

Non-traditional or performative panels will also be considered.

 One-page abstracts, questions, and comments should be submitted to the 
Marxist Reading Group at extinction@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Abstracts due: February 20 (deadline extended).
For more information about our group, conferences, and keynote speakers go 
to www.english.ufl.edu/mrg