dead public

 

Dr. Mick Wilson leading a discussion - Dead Public - at "re : public", temple bar gallery, as part of the 'debate-to-death' seminar series contribution to Daniel Jewesbury's programme of events. [5/4/10]

 

of public culture, political imagination and mortal agency

 

 

A lecture and seminar series which takes death (mortality, finitude)
as the point of departure for an examination of contemporary
debates on public cultural practices, political community and agency.
The seminar series began with an inaugural meeting on Friday 2/10/09,
and the group normally meets on alternating Fridays, typically in the
late afternoon (with some variability to allow for international exchange etc.)
In the Spring 2010 semester several of the group's meetings will take
place within the framework of the exhibition platform 'Re : Public'
curated by Daniel Jewesbury at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin.

 

resources

 

 

some prompts:

 

Title page of John Graunt's (1662) Natural and Political Observations
Made upon the Bills of Mortality. This is cited by many as a key text
in ther emergence of modern governmental statistical practices. intriguingly,
it is a work based upon reading 'Bills of Mortality' - the weekly and annual
lists of deaths produced in England from the late 16th century onwards.

 

'[T]he adjective "liberal" is often synonymous with "theoretically weak," "politically unsavory," or both.
[...]
[Carl] Schmitt's view [...] is that the liberal commitment to open discussion is practically untenable and that general liberal principles undermine, rather than facilitate, politics.
Schmitt is not alone in thinking that liberalism is all talk and no action and that such a theory is a mockery of politics. Politics is about making decisions and getting things done, in his view. He approvingly quotes Leon Trotsky's remark to Karl Kautsky: "the awareness of relative truths never gives one the courage to use force or spill blood." [...]
It is an anti-liberal staple to charge that the liberal's putative respect of others' perspectives and the consequent need for dialogue result in "cowardly intellectualism": endless discussions and unwillingness of any single party to commit to any sort of action.'
Mika LaVaque-Manty (2002) Arguments and Fists: Political Agency and Justification in Liberal Theory.

 

'Political theorists today, those scholars who think and write broadly about politics...have been largely silent about death, and that vast omission ought to be largely reexamined'
John E. Seery (1996) Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Images of Death

 

'No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'

'The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them.'
Thomas Hobbes (1651) Leviathan

 

'Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.'

Death the Leveller James Shirley (1596-1666)

 

However, death appears to be an uneven leveller. There is a profound variation in longevity globally. See the global distribution of average longevity by state from an unusual source:
[ www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook]

 

'Socioeconomic inequalities in premature mortality in Britain increased over the second half of the 20th century, particularly from the early 1970s onwards. The magnitude of mortality differentials reflects the trend in income inequality, which has also undergone a dramatic increase over the past quarter century.'
G Davey Smith, D Dorling, R Mitchell, M Shaw (2002) 'Health inequalities in Britain: continuing increases up to the end of the 20th century' Epidemiol Community Health 56:434–435
See also Shaw M, Dorling D, Gordon D, et al. (1999) The widening gap: health inequalities and policy in Britain. Bristol: The Policy Press.

 

'People in lower socio-economic status groups experience poorer health and have shorter lives than those in higher status groups and these differences have increased in both sexes in recent years.'
Marie-Josèphe Saurel-Cubizolles et al. (2009) 'Social inequalities in mortality by cause among men and women in France'. J Epidemiol Community Health. March; 63(3): 197–202.

 

'A substantial proportion of the world’s population never officially exist, in that neither their death nor their birth will ever be recorded by any government agency. This is especially likely in areas of conflict, where there are often large-scale movements of population and where registration systems are a low priority. Even in countries that appear to have well-functioning registration systems there may be considerable discrepancies between official data and that gathered by household surveys. Data on infant mortality are especially problematic, even among some groups in advanced industrialised countries.'
Martin McKee (2001)' Global Health Inequalities: The Challenge to Epidemiology' NSW Public Health Bulletin Vol.12 No.5 p.130
See for the original debate on the correlation between inequality and mortality patterns see:
Wilkinson RG. (1992) 'National mortality rates: the impact of inequality?' Am J Public Health. 82: 1082–4.
Judge K. (1995) Income distribution and life expectancy: a critical appraisal. BMJ 311: 1282–1285.

 

'There are various ways of dealing with the fact that all lives, including those of people we love have an end. The end of human life, which we call death, can be mythologized through the idea of an afterlife in Hades or Valhalla, in Hell or Paradise. This is the oldest and commonest form of human endeavour to come to terms with the finiteness of life. We can attempt to avoid the thought of death by pushing it as far from ourselves as possible - by hiding and repressing an unwelcome idea - or by holding an unshakable belief in our own personal immortality - 'others die, I do not'. There is a strong tendency towards this in the advanced societies of our day. Finally, we can look death in the face as a fact of our own existence; we can adjust our lives, and particularly our behaviour towards other people, to the limited span of every life. We might see it as our task to make the end, the parting from human beings, when it comes, as easy and as pleasant as possible, for others as for ourselves; and we might pose the question of how this task is to be performed. [...] The social problem of death is especially difficult to solve because the living find it hard to identify with the dying.'
Norbert Elias (2001) [orig. 1985] The Loneliness of the Dying.

 

'In the fall of 1965 four theology students of the Chicago Theology Seminary approached me for assistance in a research project they had chosen. Their class was to write a paper on "crisis in human life," and the four students considered death as the biggest crisis people had to face. Then the natural question arose: How do you do research on dying, when the data is so impossible to get? When you cannot verify your data and cannot set up experiments? We met for a while and decided that the best possible way we could study death and dying was by asking terminally ill patients to be our teachers.'
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1969) On Death and Dying.

 

'...the dead do not as a rule write. They are written about. The dead do not ‘know’ their own death. Although only the dead may, yet, have an experience of death—a somewhat singular experience that is nearly inaccessible to all others—there is perhaps never enough time to ‘know’ death. It is the living we who try to make sense of death. We write on death. We cheer, condemn, co-opt or cash in on death.'
Anup Kumar Dhar (2004) ' Survival of Violence: Violence of Survival', Identity, Culture and Politics, Vol 5, Nos. 1 & 2, pp.60-85.

 

'...the sort of (literal or metaphorical) encounter with death which can sometimes liberate the narcissistic subject from self-enclosure...'
Donald L. Carveth (1994) 'Dark epiphany: the encounter with finitude or the discovery of the object in The Body, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 17:215-250

 

My hypothesis, which had already been proposed by Edgar Morin, was that there was a relationship between man’s attitude toward death and his awareness of self, of his degree of existence, or simply of his individuality. […] But my research […] slightly altered my original hypothesis, raised other questions, and opened up other perspectives. Awareness of one’s self or one’s destiny was no longer the only possible point of departure. […] Having abandoned my preconceived ideas along the way, I turn and cast my eye over this thousand-year landscape, like an astronaut looking down at the distant earth. This vast space seems to me to be organized around the simple variations of four psychological themes. The first is the one that guided my investigation, awareness of the individual. The others are: the defense of society against untamed nature, belief in an afterlife, and belief in the existence of evil.
Philippe Ariès (1977/1987) The Hour of Our Death, London: Penguin.

 

'Theorists such as Judith Butler, Nancy Frazer, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Joan Scott, Iris Marion Young, and Slavoj Zizek - to name only a few - have been pre-occupied with articulating workable and varied conceptions of politics in times of increasing delegitimation of progressive and leftist critical projects. Many also express concern about the general depoliticization of public life. Part of the problem in attempting to repoliticize things may lie with the fact that "politics" is overused, a floating signifier in critical discourse devoid of any truly descriptive power and open to anyone's private, dehistoricized spin on its definition and role.'
Thomas R. West (2002) Signs of Struggle: The rhetorical politics of cultural difference.
Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.

'Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss?'
See [http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/13348]

 

'Foucault's death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics.
Giorgio Agamben (1998) (orig. 1995) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press. p. 4.

 

These 'prompts' propose themes at the intersection of politics, mortality, dialogue and agency and indicate the dispersed field of concerns that constitute the point of departure for an unorthodox and ill-'disciplined' enquiry.

 

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about the seminar topic

 

'...to the public, or nobody, the well-known...'
Georg Hamann (1759) Socratic Memorabilia

 

This structured seminar series examines how the questions of the political and of the public might be approached through attending to mortality - not simply as an existential horizon (not as a ‘fact’ of personal biography) but rather as a condition of embodied temporal coexistence and as a fundamental dimension of material social being. ('Natality', as thematised by Arendt, also operates here, and we must consider its claim on our attention also.) The clumsy overreaching questions presented as initial points of departure are: how might the themes of the political, mortality and social collectivity or 'publicness' be understood together and read through their interrelationship? And how might the interaction of these themes recast the questions of each: what is the political? what is the public? what is it to die? Perhaps, these last three questions may also be transposed from this ontological form to a question about the practical possibility of things being otherwise: how might we do politics otherwise? how can we produce publics otherwise? how can we share that we die otherwise? (how can we speak of ‘we’?)

The presumption is that there is some significant interconnection between these three discursive 'nodes' that may be fruitfully explored in an effort to orientate ourselves critically with respect to the current re-thinking or the questions of public culture and politics. Therefore, it might be appropriate to re-state the point of departure for the seminar as being to explore the proposition that there is indeed a significant interaction between these three moments - the political, the mortal, and the public. The seminar will attempt to test the viability of this proposition seeking to establish in what degree there may be salient interrelationships here that warrant unpacking and sustained interrogation. (A first response might be to name the interconnection between these three terms as ‘religion’, and thus find some shadowy legitimation in the contemporary turn to religion and theological constructs in philosophy and political theory so prominent in the last decade. However this may risk ‘jumping the gun’ a little.)

This seminar has been nominated as ‘a cultural enquiry’ in order to distance the research process developed here from any one fixed disciplinary locus, and to place the enquiry in the general context of cultural work that broadly attends to the production of meaning and value - with a particular priority attached to various modes of indeterminacy, instability and ambivalence with respect to meaning and value. This is not to locate the enquiry in a space of endless academic hedging or of unreason – or to seek to speak madness – but rather to pursue (in a reversal of the standard terminology) a research-based cultural practice.

The seminar also seeks to provide a space for researchers to 'test out' their own critical thinking in respect of various aspects of these very broad themes

The seminar is ‘structured’ by being divided into two parts in each session. In the first part a lecture will be made based on a pre-identified reading. In the second part there will be a discussion of the reading and the lecture. In the first instance the seminar series will draw on material from political theory, cultural studies and contemporary art. While primarily targeted at postgraduate researchers, participation is open to other interested parties. (email mick.wilson(at)gradcam.ie)

 

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Friday 15/01/09 16:00-18:00

researcher presentation: reading Levinas.

 

Tina Kinsella will discuss her recent work on Levinas which she has undertaken as part of initiating her doctoral studies.

[Tina's text is available here (password required) - as emailed on 11/02/10]

 

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Friday 05/02/10 Temple Bar Gallery 16:00-18:00

re : public session #1: Dead Public

 

See re : public - ation 01: Dead Public #1

 

This is the first of three experimental lecture and seminar sessions which take place within the context of the exhibition project "re : public" curated by Daniel Jewesbury at Temple Bar Gallery [04/02/10-13/03/10]. Each of these three sessions will entail consideration and discussion of an artwork and a text (or set of shorter texts) within the 'public' setting of the exhibition space.

For this session we will consider:
Amanda Ralph’s (2000) Coroner Regrets
Judith Butler’s (2004) Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence

There will be a presentation of Amanda Ralph's audio work in the Gallery during the exhibition also.

“Approximately 26 people were in the court. The Coroner, the Registrar, Gardai, family members, journalists, and a priest. The Coroner gave full explanation of the proceedings; that an inquest was required by law into certain deaths, to establish the identity of the deceased, the cause and date of death and where the death occurred. Questions of civil or criminal liability could not be considered or investigated and no person could be exonerated.”
Amanda Ralph (2000) Coroner Regrets, p.23.
“I propose to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follws, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions […] Loss has made a tenuous we of us all.”
Judith Butler (2004) Precarious Life, pp. 19-20.
“Political theorists today, those scholars who think and write broadly about politics...have been largely silent about death, and that vast omission ought to be largely reexamined.”
John E. Seery (1996) Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Images of Death
“People in lower socio-economic status groups experience poorer health and have shorter lives than those in higher status groups and these differences have increased in both sexes in recent years.”
Marie-Josèphe Saurel-Cubizolles et al. (2009) 'Social inequalities in mortality by cause among men and women in France'. J Epidemiol Community Health. March; 63(3): 197–202.

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Friday 12/02/10 Temple Bar Gallery 16:00-18:00

re : public session #2: Dead Public

 

This is the second of three experimental lecture and seminar sessions which take place within the context of the exhibition project "re : public" curated by Daniel Jewesbury at Temple Bar Gallery [04/02/10-13/03/10]. Each of these three sessions will entail consideration and discussion of an artwork and a text (or set of shorter texts) within the 'public' setting of the exhibition space.

A discussion with Sylvia Loeffler about her recent research at NCAD under the supervison of Dr. Paul O'Brien, on "Mapping the Blind Spots: A Multidisciplinary Investigation of Visual Waste Products in Public Urban Space."

Sylvia Loeffler's research is based omn an investigation of visual culture, the public and the city, with specfic reference to Dublin. her work explores the emotional and effective dimensions of the city and the various ways in which space, place and intimacy are apparent in 'blind spots' within the city. The session will begin with a short sequence of snapshot images that are points of departture for critical reflection on the city.

 

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Friday 26/02/10

re : public session #3: Dead Public

 

This is the third and final of three experimental lecture and seminar sessions which take place within the context of the exhibition project "re : public" curated by Daniel Jewesbury at Temple Bar Gallery [04/02/10-13/03/10]. Each of these three sessions entails consideration and discussion of an artwork and a text (or set of shorter texts) within the 'public' setting of the exhibition space.

This session will involve discussion of Shane Cullen’s (1997) Fragmens sur les Institutions Republicaines IV.

Shane presented his work and several responses to that work and there was a sustained discussion with the audience. A key issue that arose was the question of political agency and contemporary Irish society as well as considerations of cultural amnesia and questions of cultural politics and the agency of cultural work. Again the question of integrating themes of public-ness, mortality and the nature of the political was rehearsed and there was a strong sense of coherency generated by the work under discussion. The session lasted for several hours and there was great generosity shown on the part of both the artist and the audience in persevering with a very challenging discussion over a long period of time.

The work represents secret communications or comms written by Irish Republican Hunger Strikers which were smuggled out of the Maze Prison (the so-called H-Blocks) during the highly charged period of the hunger strike in Northern Ireland in 1981. These hunger strikes, in which ten participants died, were mounted in an effort to establish political status for IRA prisoners.
In Cullen's representation of these comms the emotional and fragile language of the private, graphically and in a proclaimatory way, is introduced into the public domain of the polis - that which pervades both the physical and political space.
(Liam Kelly, Foreword)

 

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Friday 26/03/10 16:00-18:00 Johns Street 16:00-18:00

Joan Fowler, Sylvia Loeffler, Mick Wilson and Gini Tevendale met in a follow up on the conclusion of the ‘Re : Public’ exhibition curated by Daniel Jewesbury in a session that focused on the question – "In what way has our understanding of public-ness been advanced – or not - by this project in general, and by the 3 seminars ‘Dead Public’, in particular?" The discussion was dominated ultimately by the question of how to proceed in the next few sessions.

Two key issues emerged: (i) a desire for a critical writing workshop and (ii) a desire by some in the group to continue the specific discussion of public-ness, mortality and the political.

A plan was developed to create a specific series of sessions that looked at writing and criticism and the punblic function of critical writing - These sessions are scheduled for April 16th, May 7th, May 21st and May 28th. See the Criticism Workshop page for full details.

Subsequent to the meeting it has also been proposed to continue the 'Dead Public' seminar series, starting with a session on April 23rd.

 

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Monday 26/04/10 14:00-16:00 Johns Street 16:00-18:00

Introducing the Academic Politics of Mortality

The reading for this session:

KELLEHEAR, Allan (2009) "What the social and behavioural studies say about dying" in KELLEHEAR (ed.) The Study of Dying: From Autonomy to Transformation, Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-26.

 

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Friday 14/05/10 16:00-18:00 Johns Street 16:00-18:00

Mortal Bodies

The proposed readings for this session are:

BOTTUM, Joseph (2007) "Death & Politics" [http://www.firstthings.com/print/article/2009/02/001-death-politics-29]
BUTLER, Judith (2009) "Violence, Mourning, Politics" in J. Harding & E.D. Pribram (eds.) Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader, Routledge. [see also Chapter 2 of Precarious Life]
STEVENS, Jacqueline (2010) "Introduction" to States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, NY: Columbia University Press. pp. 1-26

 

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Monday 24/05/10 14:00-16:00 Johns Street 16:00-18:00

Biopowers/Necropowers

The proposed readings for this session are:

TAUSSIG, Michael "Culture of Terror-Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture" in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), pp. 467-497. [Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178552]

THACKER, Eugene (2009) "The Shadows of Atheology: Epidemics, Power and Life after Foucault" Theory, Culture & Society, SAGE, Vol. 26(6): 134–152
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/26/6/134

 

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Monday 14/06/10 14:00-16:00 Johns Street 16:00-18:00

To be announced

The proposed readings for this session are:

“The real outside is 'at the heart' of the inside“ - An interview with Jean-Luc Nancy [see http://www.atopia.tk/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=41]

 

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resources / bibliography (not complete)

 

ALLAN, William (2002) “Review of Markus Dubischar, Die Agonszenen bei Euripides: Untersuchungen zu ausgewählten Dramen,” in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, (2002-06- Item 42) [http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2002/2002-06-42.html] (29/5/06)
AGAMBEN, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
ARENDT, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
ARENDT, Hannah (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
ARENDT, Hannah (1996) Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
ARENDT, Hannah (2005) The Promise of Politics. New York: Schocken Books.
ARIÈS, Philippe (1977/1987) The Hour of Our Death, London: Penguin.
BRADBURY, Mary (1999) Representations of Death: A Social Psychological Perspective, Routledge.
CARVETH, Donald L. (1994) 'Dark epiphany: the encounter with finitude or the discovery of the object in The Body, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 17:215-250
ELIAS, Norbert (2001) [orig. 1985] The Loneliness of the Dying.
FOUCAULT, Michel (1998) The History of Sexuality Vol.1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin.
HERTZ, Robert (1960) (Orig. 1907) "A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death." In Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham (eds.) Death and the Right Hand. New York: Free Press.
HOBBES, Thomas (1651) Leviathan
HERTZ, Robert (1960) (Orig. 1907) "A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death." In Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham (eds.) Death and the Right Hand. New York: Free Press.
HUTCHEON, Linda (2003) "Rhetoric and Competition: Academic Agonistics," Common Knowledge, Vol. 9, No. 1, Winter, pp. 42-49.
KUBLER-ROSS, Elisabeth (1969) On Death and Dying.
MOUFFE, Chantal (2009/2000) The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso.
MOUFFE, Chantal (2008) "Agonistic Public Spaces, Democratic Politics, and the Dynamic of Passions", in J. Baclstein et al. (eds.) Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics and Art, Berlin/Moscow: Sternberg Press/Interros. pp. 95-104.
MOUFFE, Chantal (2006) "<to insert title>" in Cork Caucus; On Art, Possibility & Democracy, Trevor Joyce and Shep Steiner (eds.) Cork: NSF. pp.
MOUFFE, Chantal (2006/1993) The Return of the Political, London: Verso.
MOUFFE, Chantal (2005) On the Political: Thinking in Action, London: Routledge.
MOUFFE, Chantal (ed.) (1999) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, London: Verso.
MOUFFE, Chantal (2008) "Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space", OPEN N0. 4: Art as a Public Issue: How Art and Its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension Amsterdam: SKOR/NAi. pp. 6-15.
MOUFFE, Chantal (2005) "Some Reflections on an Agonistic Approach to the Public", in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM/MIT. pp.804-809.
NORRIS, Andrew (2000) "Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead", Diacritics, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Winter), pp. 38-58
SCHMITT, Carl (1996) The Concept of the Political, George Schwab (trans.) Chicago University Press.
SEERY, John E. (1996) Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Images of Death, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
SWANSON, Judith A. (1992) The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
TALCOTT, Samuel (2008) “The History of the Idea of Biopower: Foucault's Debt to Canguilhem”. See [http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p265844_index.html]
VATTER, Miguel (2006) "Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt", Revista de Ciencia Política, Volumen 26 Nº2. pp. 137-159. See [http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-090X2006000200008&script=sci_arttext]

 

websites

 

http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/13348 "The Necrosocial"

http://www.deathreference.com/

http://seeingthedifference.berkeley.edu/index.html

http://www.soros.org/death/index.htm

 

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For additional information on the collaborating institutions consult www.dit.ie, www.ncad.ie, www.iadt.ie and www.ulster.ac.uk.