[-empyre-] Introducing Kelina Gotman, Alexander Wilson, and Steve Potter

[Gotman, Kelina]

Renate, Tim, all. Thanks for the intro. Will keep this brief for now. I’m struck Tim by your chiding the organisers for not mentioning the strikes when participants were no more vocal about it. I think these are issues we have all discussed amongst ourselves, in coffee breaks, over dinner, etc. I also think there is a lot of revolt fatigue in France where taking to streets has become the modus operandi since (and before) 1968, something those of us living in other parts of the world look to with awe and reverence. I think that is interesting in itself. (Incidentally, 3,000 people did march in London on Wednesday, the day these budget cuts were announced, and a much larger rally has been planned for Nov. 10 for some time.) I say this because, on the one hand, I too am surprised that the strikes didn’t come up more- and wonder from everyone in the room why this is- and, on the other, I’m interested in the fact that although many things are at stake in France besides retirement age [one major thing is the issue of high school-aged students taking to the streets, claiming not only their futures but also a political right to take part in the political arena, when the legal age for penal responsibility has just been lowered, I believe to 15], actually the stakes may not be what they were in 1968, and many people in the room, Stiegler included, perhaps, sensed this. Of course we wonder whether that’s what’s happening, but with the regularisation of street protest (how many major ones per year, though the last big ones in the banlieues in 2005, 2006), it becomes, sadly, strangely, a non-event. An event in the media, an event in the Place Bellecour, disruptions, but nothing of the revolution we’re all trying to see in this, and, interestingly, little of the symbolic force revolts could have, or have been in other contexts. And those of us who were coming from the UK, where the overhaul Simon has so clearly described was looming, could only look at the French situation with a mixture of surprise and disbelief- much more perhaps than with romantic reverence or nostalgia. And we’re not the only ones: family I was staying with- my aunt and her partner who are academics in the social sciences and humanities- found this equally difficult to become impassioned about, although of course the sense is that austerity measures are being taken glibly by Sarkozy.

The conference itself is something I’ll say more about in another email (it’s actually sunny right now and I want to catch a ray of light), but I think there have been two obsessions that are not helping the discussion, and which I want to highlight: one, the obsession with Stiegler (when does a keynote speaker become the subject and object of the event), and two the obsession with the two words ‘making sense’,  which when repeated compulsively do start to lose sense. I think what we did achieve- and I say this as a member of the organising committee and as a participant- was a wildly heterogeneous, anarchic, inconsistent, polyvocal and polymorphic mixture of varied presentations, and conversation across academic and other lines. I say this because I think it’s easy to single out a discourse, or body of discourse and not sit face to face in a room with people with wildly diverging (in some cases) aesthetics and politics. That may have been more radical- and in some cases risky- than some of the discourse we’re trying to extract out of the protests here. Not to claim the event was overturning any sort of academic rigidity or monolingualism, but only to suggest that there was something going on, as challenging as it was at times (in every sense).
More anon,
Kélina

Dr. Kélina A. Gotman
Department of English
King's College London
Strand WC2R 2LS
kelina.gotman at kcl.ac.uk<mailto:kelina.gotman at kcl.ac.uk>
Tel: + 44 (0) 20 7848 1773

From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> [mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au]<mailto:[mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au]> On Behalf Of Renate Ferro
Sent: 23 October 2010 18:26
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] Introducing Kelina Gotman, Alexander Wilson, and Steve Potter

It is our last night in Paris and I have just been able to squeeze in a little free internet so I'm sending three new bios of participants of the Making Sense Colloquium that I'm hoping will feel free to summarize those events at the conference they want to talk about. We had a wonderful lunch with Kelina and Steve and Alexander and am hoping that they will feel free to make numerous posts this week.  We spend the entire day at the Contemporary Art Fair at the Royal Palais and the Louvre.  Christina McPhees film is being shown there but we missed it by an  hour and a half.  We keep looking for at the cafe's but so far no sightings.  A bien tot.  Renate

Dr. Kélina A. Gotman
Department of English
King's College London
Strand WC2R 2LS

Kélina Gotman is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London and Convenor of the MA in Text and Theatre and Performance Studies. She was Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellow in the Medical Humanities at the New York Academy of Medicine (2008-2009), and a speaker at the Institute for the History of Psychiatry Research Seminar, Cornell-Weill Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital, as well as the International Epilepsy, Brain and Mind Congress (Prague, 2010). She has contributed to PAJ, TDR, Theatre Journal, Parachute, and Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies, among others, and translated Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Semiotext(e)/The MIT Press, 2006). As a performer, dramaturg, translator, and choreographer, she has worked on over two dozen theatre and dance productions in the USA, the UK, Canada and Belgium, including Bone, choreographed by Nadine Thouin for the Beijing Modern Dance Company (Place des Arts, Montreal, CD recording with Jerry Snell), Agamemnon, dir. Gisela Cardenas (St. Veronica’s Church, NYC, Drama Desk Award Nominee, 2006), the UK premiere of John Cage’s Variations IV (Oxford Festival of Contemporary Music), and Olivier Cadiot’s A.W.O.L. (59E59 St. Theatre). She is an artistic associate of Witness Relocation, for whom she translated Racine’s Andromaque (In A Hall in the Palace of Pyrrhus, Ice Factory Festival, NYC), and Charles Mee’s Heaven on Earth (P.S. 122, 2010). As a consultant and artistic advisor, she worked with the Festival International de Nouvelle Danse/International New Dance Festival (FIND) (Montreal), Misnomer Dance Theatre, and the English National Opera. Her performance poetry is anthologized in Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry. She has taught cultural and critical theory, experimental theatre, literary theory, dance, and rhetoric at Brown University, Columbia University, Bard College’s Language and Thinking Programme, The Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at The New School, and KCL. She is currently completing a book on dance manias in nineteenth-century medical literature, and working towards a new project on zooanthropy. She was born in Montreal, and dances tango in her spare time.
Alexander Wilson
Alexander Wilson is a media artist, performer, musician, theatre director, and thinker based in Montreal, Canada. He is co-founder of Parabolik Guerilla Theatre (www.parabolikguerilla.com<http://www.parabolikguerilla.com/>) with whom he directs experimental media-enhanced works incorporating a physical training regimen inspired by Japanese Butoh. He also produces video-music works as well as interactive and architectural multimedia installations combining software, sound, images and light. Apart from collaborations and commissions, his music usually revolves around projects for the his own theatre and media productions, as well his solo music project 01ek (01ek.bandcamp.com<http://01ek.bandcamp.com/>) and with the experimental live-electronics trio K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O. (kantnagano.bandcamp.com<http://kantnagano.bandcamp.com/>) with musicians Alexandre St-Onge et Jonathan Parant. Alexander is currently pursuing an art-theory PhD at UQAM, in Montreal. His thesis involves various philosophical explorations of how artistic practice and creativity relate to memory, the body, and time, drawing from sources like Deleuze’s philosophy of repetition, Simondon’s theory of individuation, and Stiegler’s general organology.

Steve Potter

For some reason I do not have Steve's biography. He is a composer and just completed his Phd so I'm hoping that for his first post he will send along a bio,



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