An international conference seeks participants to debate the temporalities of criticism.
Speakers include:
Professor Geoffrey Bennington (Sussex)
Professor Thomas Docherty (Kent)
Dr. Peter Osborne (Middlesex)
Professor Stuart Sim (Sunderland)
Professor Daniel Herwitz (Natal)
Professor Philip Smallwood (UCE)
'Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain
experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and
thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first
and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture
is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original
task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to "change
the world", but also - and above all - to "change time".'
(Giorgio Agamben)
'Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass
of time.'
(Karl Marx)
In an essay entitled "Time Today", Jean-François Lyotard argues that modernity is in part predicated on a conception of time in which the "future" is always already given. The subject of modernity operates in the manner of the Leibnizian God, the "consummate archivist" who "conserves in complete retention the totality of information constituting the world". The future, for this subject, is already known, already mapped according to a narrative of progress and a project of emancipation. What is lost in this project, argues Lyotard, is precisely time itself, the openness to an event which has not already been anticipated and recorded in the "archive" which constitutes, for this kind of thought, the only possible future (that is, no future at all).
For theory in its institutionalized forms, time is essentially an empty and homogeneous continuum which proceeds toward a future which - given the static, "archival" conception of temporality with which it operates - is already a knowable and quantifiable datum. In this sense, modern criticism is "the criticism of the future", a criticism which posits and appeals to a future conceived as the final term in the static continuum: past-present-future.
Time, for Western philosophical thinking, is persistently the object of a certain conserving and stockpiling impulse; it is that which must be saved or gained in the name of a posited emancipatory future. This conception of temporality informs the modern theoretical project, in terms of an impulse toward speed. Speed is the defining characteristic of those discourses which we have come to call theoretical, and of the criticism to which they give rise.
This conference seeks to address the question of how we might begin to rethink our conceptions of theory in the light of an altered understanding of the temporality of thought and criticism, to slow down the critical process precisely in order that we might open ourselves to the "criticism of the future" (in the other sense of the genitive).
Possible topics include:
The Time of Criticism - The Criticism of Time - Time and History - Giorgio Agamben - Time and Narrative - Criticism and Tradition - Criticism as Avant-Garde - The Speed of Criticism - Paul Virilio - The Futures of Criticism - Criticism and the Contemporary - Critical Moments, Critical Events - Lyotard - Allegory - The Sublime - Cinematic Time - Deleuze - Criticism and Apocalypse - Now - Then
Send abstracts (300-350 words) by Friday 11 April 1997, to:
Brian Dillon, School of English, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK.
E-mail: bgd1@ukc.ac.uk
Dialling code for Canterbury: 01227 (UK) or +44 1227 (international)
Tel: 764000 switchboard
Fax: 827001