[csaa-forum] Melbourne Lecture by Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall

[Felicity Colman]

Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall : Politics and Ethics in the Age of New Media

Public Lecture at University of Melbourne
presented by the Cinema Program and the English and Cultural Studies Program
Many thanks to Stelarc for facilitating this event.

Monday 21 August 6pm start
Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre A.
University of Melbourne
(use Swanston Street entrance, building behind the Ian Potter Gallery)

Gary Hall and Joanna Zylinska are UK-based cultural theorists, working in
the areas of digital culture, new media technologies and cultural studies.
They have published books and articles on subjects as diverse as the
anti-capitalist movement, art, cyborgs, deconstruction, electronic
publishing, ethics, immigration, the Holocaust, the institution of the
university, the idea of the intellectual, feminist theory, open source
movement, parasites, prostheses, psychoanalysis, open-access archiving,
spiders and Stelarc. They have also been involved in various new media
publishing projects, including the editorship of the international,
peer-reviewed e-journal of cultural theory and cultural studies, Culture
Machine <http://www.culturemachine.net> (now in its seventh year of
running).

Lecture details:

Joanna Zylinska, ‘Imagining Perfection: The Politics and Ethics of the
Makeover Culture’

In my presentation I will address the issue of identity transformation in
the age of new media. Focusing on the current ‘makeover culture’, I will
explore a number of popular international TV shows, such as Extreme
Makeover, I Want a Famous Face, and, in particular, The Swan. The premise
of these shows is to present and assess a radical transformation of human
identity – face, body, taste and personality – towards an imagined state
of perfection. This transformation is conducted via a number of
technologies, including cosmetic surgery and confidence training. In the
context of the ‘Iraq makeover’ that Western politicians have orchestrated
together with international news stations, the examination of makeover
shows as applications of the dominant technologies of life is extremely
urgent. And it is the exploration of the ‘zone of indistinction’ between
biological and political life that will become crucial for my parallel
reading of the extreme makeovers of the individual bodies of Western women
and the collective lives of Iraq’s population - both accessible to us via
TV screens. Drawing on select ideas from cultural theory and continental
philosophy (work by Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas,
Donna Haraway), I will explore the emotional as well as financial promises
and failures that such a radical makeover entails. I will also consider
some of its political and ethical consequences, for individuals and
populations alike.

Gary Hall, 'The Future of the University in the Age of Digital
Reproduction: or, How to Build an Ethical Cultural Studies Institution'

What kind of university is desirable, or even possible, in the age of
digital reproduction: DVDs, cell phones, computers, the World Wide Web,
the Internet, email, blogging, Google, mp3, podcasting and so forth?
This presentation will explore the forms an institution specifically
designed to exploit the unique properties of new technology might take. It
will do so by taking as a case study a project drawn from my own
'practical' experience as a new media writer, editor, theorist and
publisher: the development of an 'open access' archive for the free
publication, dissemination, communication, storage and retrieval of
research and knowledge. The ramifications of 'digitisation' - including
the possibility of making all the research literature freely available to
researchers, teachers, students and the public alike, on a world-wide
basis - have been hotly debated within the sciences. However, it has for
the most part been regarded there as offering merely a ‘prosthetic’
improvement to the performance of our existing disciplinary fields and
'paper' forms of publication. There has been little serious consideration
of: (1) the way in which new technologies, with their undermining of the
boundaries separating authors, editors, producers, users and consumers,
promise to transform fundamentally our relationship to knowledge; and (2)
the 'ethical' questions raised by digitisation for academic and
institutional authority. My presentation will argue that the electronic
reproduction of academic research provides us with an opportunity to keep
open the ethical question of what forms of knowledge should be published
and stored and what should not, and thus of how different disciplines and
forms of knowledge fit together. In this way, it will demonstrate that
digitisation enables us to think rather differently about the future of
the university: in a way that resorts neither to the discourses of
accountability, managerialism and consumerism which are increasingly
taking over the institution; nor to a nostalgia for ideas of the
university viewed in terms of an elite cultural training and reproduction
of a national culture which dominated previous eras.





Their bios:

Dr Gary HALL
Website: www.garyhall.info; email: g.hall at mdx.ac.uk
Media, Culture and Communications, School of Arts, Middlesex University,
London N14 4YZ
Gary Hall is a cultural theorist working on cultural studies,
deconstruction and new technologies. He is Senior Lecturer in Media and
Cultural Studies at Middlesex University in London, UK. Author of the
monograph Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory (Continuum,
2002), which explores the relationship between cultural studies, cultural
theory and cultural politics, his work has appeared in numerous
international journals, including Angelaki, Live Art Letters, Mediactive,
Parallax, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, The
South Atlantic Quarterly and The Oxford Literary Review. A new media
writer, editor and publisher, he is founding co-editor of the
international online journal Culture Machine, co-editor of Continuum's
Technologies book series, editor of Berg's Culture Machine book series –
featuring Paul Virilio’s most recent book, City of Panic (2005) - and
founder of the (forthcoming) Cultural Studies e-Archive (CSeARCH). He is
also editor of The e-Issue (2003) and co-editor of Taking Risks with the
Future (1999), The University Culture Machine (2000) and Deconstruction
is/in Cultural Studies (2004) editions of Culture Machine as well as
co-editor of the Authorizing Culture issue of Angelaki: Journal of the
Theoretical Humanities (1996). Forthcoming publications include (with
Clare Birchall) New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh
University Press, 2006) and (with Simon Morgan Wortham) Experimenting: On
Samuel Weber (Fordham University Press, 2006). He is currently completing
a monograph entitled Digitise This! Cultural Studies in the Age of Digital
Reproduction for University of Minnesota Press.

Dr Joanna ZYLINSKA
Website: www.joannazylinska.net; Email: j.zylinska at gold.ac.uk
Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of
London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK

Joanna Zylinska is a cultural theorist writing on new technologies,
ethics, cultural studies and feminist theory. She is a Senior Lecturer in
New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London,
UK and a Programme Convenor for MA Digital Media. Zylinska is the author
of two monographs: The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On
Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime
(Manchester University Press, 2001). She is editor of The Cyborg
Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, a collection of
essays on the work of performance artists Stelarc and Orlan (Continuum,
2002). She is also co-editor of ‘Deconstruction is/in Cultural Studies',
Culture Machine, vol. 6, 2004, and of a special issue of Strategies:
Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics on 'Cultural Studies: Between
Politics and Ethics' (November 2001), and editor of 'The Ethico-Political
Issue', Culture Machine, Vol. 4, 2002. Her collection of essays, Imaginary
Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust
(co-edited with D. Glowacka), is forthcoming from the University of
Nebraska Press. Reviews Editor for Culture Machine, Zylinska is currently
writing a book on forms of bioethics for the 'new media age' for The MIT
Press. This project is informed by the philosophy of Levinas, Derrida,
Agamben and Butler, the 'cyberfeminist' approaches to technology as well
as the latest experiments in robotics, biotechnology and aesthetic
surgery.



-- 
for further details please contact:
Dr Felicity Colman,
Lecturer, Cinema Program,
The School of Art History, Cinema, Classics & Archaeology
Arts Faculty
The University of Melbourne  Victoria  3010
Australia
http://www.ahcca.unimelb.edu.au
Tel: 61-3-83445565\tFax: 61-3-8344 5563
fcolman at unimelb.edu.au