Will someone please inform BAVO that the concept of BAVO--a two-man academic thinktank, a.k.a. "friendship," calling themselves what looks like (but from what I can tell isn't) an acronym--sounds terribly silly? While you're at it, let BAVO in on the secret that ending the title of every other article BAVO publishes with an exclamation point may lead people to believe BAVO really Really REALLY! enthusiastic or hysterical! Really! Unironic exclamation points destroy your credibility!
Below the fold you can find the CFP which brought BAVO to my attention. Upon googling BAVO, some of the practical difficulties of being BAVO forced themselves upon me: when BAVO introduces a panel, which BAVO of BAVO does the speaking? Does BAVO alternate every other word with BAVO? Or does BAVO chant in unison? Does BAVO harmonize? Could BAVO harmonize? Because that would be the introductions to end all introductions.
[I reserve the right to remove this post at my discretion. Currently, BAVO reminds me too much of BARJO or DEVO or some post-communist pro-socialist collective. If it turns out to be a reputable European thinktank which only seems forebodingly monolithic in translation, I'll admit to my mistake. Now, back to NERDT's Empire.]
PSYCHOANALYSIS, URBAN THEORY AND THE CITY OF LATE CAPITALISM
A three day international workshop
Organized by BAVO & Lorenzo Chiesa
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands
November 18th - 20th, 2005
Today, the long-held belief that urban culture is the engine par excellence for democratization and emancipation processes, has been dealt some lethal blows. If Marx and his avatars still dreamt of ‘the urban’ as the incubator and accelerator of universal solidarity and radical social change, today metropolitan areas are more often than not labelled as social time-bombs that threaten to draw its hinterland into a downward spiral of disintegration, segregation and mute violence. Similarly, if for Freud the metropolitan way of life provided the ‘humus’ for the modern hysterical subjectivity – endlessly questioning and ‘working through’ the traditional mores – today, in an environment in which individuals and communities redraw into technologically nurtured capsular environments, subjectivity seems to evaporate again into a generalized autism.
In this conference we invite experts from the field of Marxist urban theory, radical political philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to give presentations on topics relevant to understand the current post-metropolitan condition as well as ways to intervene or resist it.
Day 1: Identifying the Urban Unconscious
This day aims at the identification of the construct of the city of late capitalism. What are its basic procedures? How do they secure the city’s normal functioning? Or inversely, how is the city kept in a permanent "state of emergency."
Of special interest here are studies of Marxist-oriented urban theorists and Lacanian inspired psychoanalysts that lay bare how the city of late capitalism depends more and more on psychosocial processes to generate the necessary increase in ‘return value’ or to secure control over its subjects. Think of the production of geographies of fear, the stimulation of a phantasmatic economy of all-pervasive transgression, the explosive ‘inmixing’ of race and class tensions, the virtualization of the everyday, etc. In these phenomena, we seem to stumble upon the ‘urban unconscious’ of today’s metropolis.
However, given the fact that today everybody seems to know very well how the unconscious functions but nonetheless acts according to it, an important issue is what position these analyses occupy. Is it simply a matter of uncovering obscure processes hidden to the untrained or non-engaged eye? Or, is analysis able to ‘render visible what is visible’ – a marking of what is all too visible and therefore provokes constant repression or reification?
Participants
BAVO (introduction)
Edward W. Soja
Marc De Kesel
Michael Zinganel
Juliet Flower MacCannell
André Nusselder
Day 2: Conceiving of an Urban Act
This day focuses on the issue of agency within the late capitalist urban situation. Which spatial tactics are most adequate and effective to tackle the late capitalist mechanisms discussed in day one? What consequences can be drawn with regards to the subject position of the urban designer, activist or analyst?
Both urban theory and psychoanalysis are quick to note how the city of late capitalism feeds upon the same forces that resist it in order to reproduce itself, how its managers indulge themselves in constant self-undermining ‘hysterical’ activity to get the jump on their opponents, how it utilizes urban guerrilla tactics as ultimate marketing tool, etc. However, if the city of late capitalism thus draws several classic critical stances into its orbit and depoliticizes the leftover by marking it as ‘merely terrorist’, where does this leave the possibility of an urbano-political act?
What do these analyses offer as ways of intervening and/or interrupting late-capitalist urban processes – albeit in an inverted or negative form? And further, what are the contours of an urbano-analytic act that not only reveals the truth of a certain situation or turns it upside-down, but opens up a space in which a different kind of urban organisation becomes possible?
Participants
BAVO (introduction)
Yannis Stavrakakis
Friedrich von Borries
Alberto Toscano
Roemer van Toorn
BAVO
Day 3: The Political role of Psychoanalysis with regard to Spatial Problematics
Text still under construction.
Participants:
Lorenzo Chiesa (introduction)
Aaron Schuster
Dany Nobus
Renata Salecl
Oliver Feltham
What's the name of the SNL skit with the two German guys (one of whom was Mike Myers) in black turtlenecks at a hip nightclub?
Posted by: camicao | Sunday, 02 October 2005 at 09:24 PM