[csaa-forum] 'On Time' Seminar UTS This Thrsday

Tue Apr 21 20:18:59 CST 2009

Transforming Cultures invites you to join a new Seminar Series:
'On Time'
Throughout the next few years this occasional series will bring  
together people and
ideas around the broad idea of time. Of particular interest s the  
question of what is
contemporary time as well as an ongoing exploration of the query Is  
time an
emotion? The thinking will be exciting, the discussion excessively  
friendly and
everyone is invited to participate. The usual form will be one or two  
invited speakers
of 20 minutes each followed by extensive group discussion.  
Occasionally prereadings
will be suggested. Come along to join the discussion.
First Time Seminar:
DATE: Thursday, April 23
TIME: 10 am - 12 pm
WHERE: UTS, Building 3, Level 2, Room 2.10
RSVP: Transforming.Cultures at uts.edu.au
Our invites speakers for this first seminar are Julia Horncastle and  
Amanda Third
from Murdoch University, WA. Please find enclosed their abstracts and  
brief
biographies:
Dr. Amanda Third
Terrorist Time: Terrorism, the Everyday and the Apocalyptic
Implosion of Modernity’
'Think over my philosophy, Mr – Mr Verloc… Go for the first  
meridian.
You don’t know the middle classes as well as I do. Their  
sensibilities are jaded.
The first meridian. Nothing better and nothing easier, I should think.'
Mr Vladimir in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent
Ghassan Hage has commented that, within the Western imagination,  
'terrorism'
marks 'the worst possible kind of violence.' Similarly,  
counterterrorist commentator
Philip Jenkins claims that terrorism 'is perceived as a kind of  
ultimate evil.' In this
paper, I am interested in understanding the process by which  
terrorism gets
constructed as deadly and catastrophic - as both the epitome of evil  
and the scourge
of modern (political) life. Understanding terrorism as a form of  
communication, this
paper argues that terrorism 'from below' generates affect because it  
fundamentally
challenges concepts of 'modern time'. I argue that modernity, as a  
project of order, is
based upon two different but mutually constitutive conceptions of  
time - namely,
linear time and the time of routine - both of which come under attack  
in the context of
terrorism. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Henri Lefebvre,  
Zygmunt
Bauman and Michel de Certeau, I demonstrate that it is this quality  
of terrorism - its
undermining of the linear and routine time of modernity - that marks  
terrorism with its
political power.
Bio Amanda Third:
Dr Amanda Third is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media,  
Communication and
Culture and Director of the Centre for Everyday Life at Murdoch  
University. Her
research interests include: the gendering of terrorism; the media and  
political
resistance; the politics of embodied identity; representation and  
postcoloniality; and
the social and cultural dimensions of new media technologies such as  
mobile
telephony. This paper is drawn from a recently completed manuscript  
on North
American popular cultural representations of female terrorists.  
Focusing on women
active in underground ‘revolutionary’ organisations in the United  
States in the late
1960s and early 1970s (eg: Valerie Solanas, Society for Cutting Up  
Men and Patricia
Campbell Hearst, Symbionese Liberation Army), this manuscript  
discusses how
second wave feminism came to be ‘cross-wired’ with terrorism  
within the popular
imagination. Dr Third is a member of the Inspire Foundation’s  
Western Australian
Advisory Board; a member of the Technology and Wellbeing Roundtable;  
and current
President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA).  
She also
frequently feels like 'time is short' and loathes the fact that 'time  
is money'.
Dr. Julia Horncastle
'The Splitting of Figs: Queer Temporality and the Transformative
Self'
This discussion paper addresses ways in which we might combine some  
unlikely
bedfellows (Nietzsche, poetry, and contemporary queer experience)  
through the lens
of temporality. By drawing on queer existential phenomenology the  
paper provides
us with a way of examining the seamless temporality of “then”  
and “now”. I will
question whether the poetic and transformative oddities of queer  
being actually
coalesce around what could be called a suspensive-temporal paradigm  
(in the sense
of being in ‘the now’ which is a moment pour soi; neither future  
nor past fixated). At
the (dis)juncture between abstract notions of our being in time and  
our practical arts
of living, I suggest that ontological endeavours which examine  
everyday experience,
can speak of being in terms of ‘interstitialities’ and  
‘thresholds’. These are moments
of in-between-ness that exist in such places as the propinquities of  
poetry and the
mundane, theory and practice, self and other, as well as the over- 
arching temporal
components of a Western chronos: past, present and future.
The way that I link notions of time division, the arts of living  
queerly, and moments of
in-between-ness, is to introduce them as problems for existential  
phenomenology
and it is through them that I look at selfhood as transformative  
practice. In my view
the latest queer work in phenomenology lends itself to unorthodox  
analyses of being,
that is: being in relation to oddity, to orientation, to self- 
reference or care and the
reality and appearance of life experience. What I will convey as part  
of my addition to
the conversations that are already happening in queer phenomenology  
is that queer
being can be understood as transformative being and one way that  
I’ve come to
structure this understanding is through a knowledge of what I call  
interstitiality or
interstitial sensibility.
Although my broader analysis is of being (temporally and spatially  
configured) this
paper creates a discussion space around the specificity of queer,  
poetic temporality.
Bio Julia Horncastle:
Dr Julia Horncastle teaches at Murdoch University, Western Australia,  
in the Gender
and Cultural Studies program. She completed her PhD in April 2008,  
entitled, “Queer
Being and the Sexual Interstice: A Phenomenological Approach to the  
Queer
Transformative Self”. A self-styled queer-feminist- phenomenologist,  
she is interested
in the everyday realities of queer being and is currently working on  
a theory of queer
ethics and sensibilities.
We are looking forward to seeing you at 'On Time'.

Dr Katrina Schlunke
Higher Degrees Research Coordinator
Communications Program

Senior Lecturer
Cultural Studies Academic Group
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Editor Cultural Studies Review
http://www.csreview.unimelb.edu.au/

University of Technology Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway NSW 2007
Australia
Tel: +61 (0)2 9514 2294

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