SITUATIONS OF THEORY

Fri Oct 29 2021 at 09:30 am to Sat Oct 30 2021 at 05:00 pm

Flinders University at Victoria Square | Adelaide

Stephen Muecke and Julian Murphett
Publisher/HostStephen Muecke and Julian Murphett
SITUATIONS OF THEORY
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How is theory situated today?
About this Event

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‘Theory’ is at once a genre of academic writing, a mode of analysis and a set of intellectual contestations, but where has it gone lately, or where is it going? From the extraordinary way in which structuralism was adopted by every discipline from the 1950s, to the high point of theory in the 80s and 90s, theory has diversified and in some places ceded to a renewed empiricism or pragmatism. Taking Donna Haraway’s (1988) point about ‘situated knowledges’, this symposium traces the powers of universalisation and the relevance of localisations as theory is deployed in a range of humanities disciplines today.


Two day symposium

hosted by College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Flinders University and School of Humanities, University of Adelaide., featuring local and international speakers.


*Please RSVP to receive program and event details.*


Time zones:


Starting time: 9.30 AM Adelaide


Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra = 10AM

Brisbane = 9AM

Western Australia, Hong Kong & Singapore = 7AM

New York = 7PM Thursday

Los Angeles = 4PM Thursday

London = 12AM Thursday


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Speakers


<blockquote>DR RHYS ASTON is Lecturer in Law and Criminal Justice at the University of South Australia. His research is in the field of socio-legal theory with a particular focus on pre-figurative politics and social change</blockquote><blockquote>TULLY BARNETT is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts at Flinders University, holds an ARC DECRA to work on digitisation and the immersive cultural experience and is a Chief Investigator for Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture, looking at ways of understanding value in arts and culture beyond the econometric. She is Deputy Director of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts. She serves on the organising committee for Reset: A New Agenda for Public Value.</blockquote><blockquote>JUSTIN CLEMENS is an Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on psychoanalysis, European philosophy and Australian poetry. He is currently working on a book with Thomas H. Ford about the colonial judge and poet Barron Field.</blockquote><blockquote>MARGARET DAVIES is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Law at Flinders University. She is the author of numerous published works in the field of critical socio-legal theory, including Asking the Law Question and Law Unlimited.</blockquote><blockquote>JOHN FROW is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is On Interpretive Conflict, and he is currently trying to find his way out of the swamps of value theory.</blockquote><blockquote>MARIA GIANNACOPOULOS is Senior Lecturer in Law and Criminology at Flinders University. She has published widely on law’s coloniality.</blockquote><blockquote>GHASSAN HAGE is a professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne.</blockquote><blockquote>JOE HUGHES is a Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has written widely on the postwar French thought and the history of the novel</blockquote><blockquote>MCKENZIE WARK is the author, among other things, of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard 2007), The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso 2011), Molecular Red (Verso 2015) and Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker (Duke 2021). She teaches at The New School in New York City.</blockquote><blockquote>BEN MADDEN is a visiting Research Fellow at the School of Humanities, University of Adelaide. </blockquote><blockquote>ACHILLE MBEMBE is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual. He is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.</blockquote><blockquote>STEPHEN MUECKE is Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University. Recent books are Latour and the Humanities, edited with Rita Felski, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020 and The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia, co-authored with Paddy Roe, Rowman and Littlefield International 2020.</blockquote><blockquote>JULIAN MURPHET is Jury Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide.</blockquote><blockquote>JANA NORMAN is a researcher in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide. Her current project is a critical creative exploration of a moment of queer migration and mobility in mid-70’s South Australia, mapped along the natureculture continuum: Lake Eyre floods, Dunstan peaks and the West Lakes development surges onto the world stage of man-made marvels</blockquote><blockquote>JUSTIN O'CONNOR is Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia. He is editor of the Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries (2015) and Creative Cities in 21st Century Asia (2021), and author of Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020). His book Art of Reconstruction: Culture after Neoliberalism will come out next year. </blockquote><blockquote>MEG SAMUELSON is Associate Professor in the Department of English & Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and Associate Professor Extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University. She has published widely on South African, African and other literatures of the South and in the ‘blue’ or oceanic humanities. She leads the research theme ‘South/South’ in the JM Coetzee Center for Creative Practice and the cluster ‘Stories from the South’ in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide and co-edits the Palgrave Macmillan series ‘Maritime Literature and Culture’.</blockquote><blockquote>STEPHEN ZAGALA is a critical writer and collection curator with a background in art history, philosophy and social anthropology. He has been commentating on contemporary art and visual culture for over 30 years and is currently the Research Fellow in World Cultures at the South Australian Museum</blockquote>

Titles & Abstracts


Meg Samuelson: “Theory from the Shores of the Oceanic South?”


My paper responds to calls for ‘new geographies of theory’ with which to disrupt and rearrange the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ along with those seeking to correct the ‘terrestrial’ bias of critical theory (Roy 2013; Mbembe 2021; Steinberg & Peters 2015). Positing that the South is distinctively and disproportionately oceanic, it takes up a set of interventions from ‘southern theory’, ‘epistemologies of the south’, ‘theory from the South’ and ‘literatures of the south’ (Connell 2007; Santos 2014; Comaroff & Comaroff 2015; Coetzee 2015) and places them in dialogue with critical positions emerging in the ‘blue humanities’. Extending a conceptual cartography of the ‘oceanic South’ (Samuelson & Lavery 2019), it argues for an understanding of the South as littoral condition and proceeds to elaborate the coastal ecotone as a situation from which to think the world otherwise in a context of planetary derangement.


Achille Mbembe: In Conversation on decoloniality, planetarity and thinking the world from Africa


McKenzie Wark: “Low Theory”

Once upon a time there was something called High Theory, which maybe meant something like the reception of Derrida and deconstruction at Yale, and elsewhere in prestigious research universities. As good structuralists, we would surely imagine that this presupposes, as the contemporary meme has it, the existence of low theory. Examples of which might include the alternate uptake of theory in the United States via Semiotext(e), where theory bounced around with "downtown" avant-gardes and social movements, drawing from "uptown" seminars, but putting theory to use in other practices. In the Australian context low theory might be the moment of the 1980s little magazines and presses, including Feral, Local Consumption, Intervention. These positioned themselves, not without tension, between the academy, art and social movements. Since theory has a habit of abstracting from particulars, one might ask if there are concepts one can derive from low theory as a generalized practice. The first thing one might say is that it wants to make concepts for situations outside the academy, and that it can improvise its concepts out of material from anywhere, including High Theory. While High Theory arguably went into decline sometime in the last twenty years, low theory is everywhere. For at least two reasons. Firstly, the technics of intellectual life changed shape with its subsumption into the internet. Secondly, and connected, is the casualization of academic labor. If there's to be theory, it might now be mostly low theory: para-academic, precarious, but perhaps more lively, and more pointed, for all that.


Justin Clemens: “Between the impossible and the intolerable: situating and subtracting representations”

As Alain Badiou has recently put it, the last decades ‘have seen the progressive imposition of a dominant representation that prohibits the least measure or restraint being placed on capitalism.’ Perhaps the major operator of this imposition has been the global restructuring of all discourses according to the constraints of digital media. One of the consequences is the transformation of the relation of bodies to languages, insofar as no utterance – however supposedly private or intimate, committed or radical – eludes this electrification, externalisation, expropriation of the means of communication itself. Whether bodies come to act as avatars of themselves IRL or begin to ‘dream in code’ or unable to express their objections except in the forms of new media, the question of situations, of self-situating, becomes at once more urgent and obscure. This paper will discuss the contemporary challenge of subtraction from representations under such conditions.


John Frow: “The End of Theory, Theories of Value, the Value of Theory”

A few years ago the editor of Wired magazine proclaimed the end of theory: a new era of massively abundant data, he argued, had made the correlation of scientific models with an ontological referent irrelevant. Datasets at the petabyte scale now allow for the untethering of derived qualities from the physical or social or financial world in order to generate probabilistic inferences without reference to the “underlying” from which those data derivatives are drawn. In the realms of finance or of social media mathematical algorithms working on massive datasets underpin the construction of new forms of value which can’t be explained by traditional Marxist or neoclassical theories; my paper explores the productivity of knowledge in developing the intangible and immeasurable assets that lie at the heart of cognitive capitalism.

Session: “Grounding Law”

In this session, Margaret Davies, Rhys Aston and Maria Giannacopoulos will offer short presentations (max 10 mins each) on their latest work (see abstracts below). We will then enter into 15 minutes of dialogue about the issues connecting our papers, highlighting aspects that we consider central to legal theory today.

Margaret Davies: “Living Nomos”

My current research unpacks the material nomos that structures the relationships and exchanges of living and nonliving processes. Insofar as human law is also often understood as a separate regulatory sphere, it constructs the living world, it shapes, categorises, and determines it. But that is only the beginning of the story that connects law and the nonhuman. Combining material ecological connections, the subjectivity and the normativity of each living thing, the normativity of ecosystems at large, and the nomoi of nonlife and the Earth at large it is possible to hypothesize a dynamic image in which all law, including the formal law of nation states, is completely enmeshed in socio-ecological processes as part of a wider normative pluriverse. Human law is constituted as such by multiple intersecting and co-constitutive socio-ecological normative fields, from microbes to artistic endeavours, to philosophy and forests. Intellectually, this image of intersecting plural normative worlds is an extension of the well-established, but human-centred, studies by legal anthropologists and sociologists of the ways that human nomoi – living law, plural cultural worlds, and everyday normative practices – are connected to and inform formal law. Such an extended nomos does not end with life, only to be taken over by purely causal physical laws. Rather, normative Earth systems – and the big composite of multiple systems, Gaia – are composed of agential, patterned, and purposeful nonliving as well as living matter.

Rhys Aston: “Grounds”

The ground is a prevalent concept in philosophy and law, typically denoting a justification or foundation for a knowledge claim, legal matter, or theory. The ground can be either a basis for constructive assertions or a focal point for critique. There is also, of course, another common (and more material) meaning of ground: ground as the surface of the earth and the geological and biotic matter that lies below it. While the actual ground has often been employed as a metaphor for conceptualising and interrogating metaphysical grounds, in this paper I examine the extent to which philosophical and legal grounds include, and are reliant on, the material ground itself. Law is ordinarily perceived as something over and above, that shapes and applies to this ground, for instance through the concept of land title. However, is it possible to think about law as subsisting in a material sense on the ground and also in the ground? In addition to vital normativity, is it possible to speak of geo-normativity? Further, can such a change in orientation provide tools for reconceptualizing law and recasting its singularity and anthropocentrism? Drawing on insights from process philosophy and geo-philosophy, I consider these questions and their framing through the dualistic topologies that separate life from nonlife and the underground from everything above the ground.

Maria Giannacopoulos: “Nomocide and the Nonperformativity of Colonial Law”

In colonial contexts, ‘law’ is not what it says it is nor does it do what it says it does. The undeclared and ongoing war against Indigenous peoples in Australia is perpetrated through law that is nomocidal. Far from being an avenue for Indigenous people to find justice, the Australian legal system is a killing regime seeking to foreclose on Indigenous sovereignty and to deny the immeasurable sovereign debt the colonial state is built upon and owes. That colonial law is an invasive, non-consensual regime built on Indigenous sovereign grounds is also largely ignored in the production of legal knowledge on those unceded grounds, even if most scholars/theorists can acknowledge that Indigenous sovereignty was never ceded. If it is possible to acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded, something that has become common place at academic events and in academic circles, then the colonial law that stems from an imposed and violent sovereignty must, also logically, cease to be seen and treated as an authority with authority. I deploy Sara Ahmed’s concept of nonperformativity (Ahmed 2006) and two concepts I have coined, nomopoly (2020) and nomocide (2021) as all three expose the gap between what colonial law says it is, and the deeply colonising function state law performs.

Joe Hughes: “Conspiracies of Theory”

One of the things that unites the postcritical canon, from Sedgwick and Latour’s founding essays to Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s “surface reading” to Rita Felski’s recent work, is the equation of “critique” with conspiracy theory. All you need to do, the argument goes, is flick on the news or spend an evening doomscrolling and you’ll see racism, homophobia, ecological devastation, etc., radiant in the unending catastrophe. And if those structures are so readily visible, who needs a theory to reconstitute them behind the scenes as a hidden truth? The implication seems to be that there is both a given reality visible to all that requires no reflection, no interpretation, and no construction and, conversely, that any explicit reflection on determining structures starts to look slightly crazy, unfounded, like the elitist fantasies of the academy. The aim of this paper is, partly, to take this situation seriously, to make explicit the kind of theory postcritique projects as its alternative and antagonist, and to work through the implied structure of critical conspiracies. Following this thread, though, will allow me to articulate a set of problems related to the function of criticism today and to raise a series of questions around the composition of the postcritical class and the standpoints from which theory can be built now.

Jana Norman and Stephen Zagala: “Provocative possibilities: the natural and social history museum as situation of co-becoming”

In The Return of Curiosity (2016) Nicholas Thomas points to the divergence of museum studies from museum practice in the late twentieth century. Museum studies was founded on post-Enlightenment critiques of the museums representational authority, and scholars in this field have, for the most part, continued to reiterate these arguments over the past three decades. In response to the same critiques, many people working in museums since the 1990s have transformed what museum’s do from the inside out. These transformations have effectively elaborated new theories of subjectivity, epistemology and historiography through the day-to-day processes of object-oriented practices. This has not only involved situating theoretical work in material encounters; it also challenges theory to be transformed by the way materials ‘think’.

Our presentation discusses what it might mean to attribute thoughtfulness to material culture in a natural history museum and, with equal measure of provocation, in a social history museum. How do materials articulate theories of life? And how do these thoughts that come from beyond the Anthropocene give a new sense of vitality to theoretical work?

Tully Barnett and Justin O'Connor

In this session Tully Barnett and Justin O'Connor will present a paper each on different components of the relationship between theory and the present pressing problems experienced by an arts and cultural sector under attack.

Tully Barnett: “Theory for the cultural economy”


The arts and culture sector is experiencing an ever-deepening and compound crisis. In my research for Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture, I spend time with artists and arts organisations, listening to the barriers they encounter when trying to articulate the value of the work they do to "stakeholders" who cannot hear the answers. One component of the problem is the way the word value has become so mis-used and misunderstood. Firstly, there is the disjunction between value as in worth and values and in principles. Family values is subtext for conservative politics, organisations have values they don't uphold ("Don't be evil" was famously Google's stated value statement, until it wasn't). The genealogy of values is freighted. Secondly, within the problem of ‘value as worth’ there is a disconnect between the core operations of the cultural sector and the way the value of those operations is reported and conferred in and beyond the sector. This is a disconnect between value and evaluation that reduces arts and culture to a function or service at point of exchange. These problems of meaning and of account are complex and multifaceted but underscored in large part by the financialization of language and by the evacuation of the concept of public value. This is apparent in many of the world's so-called wicked problems where public value and public good are in tension with private benefit aka profit, but it is felt acutely in the arts and culture sector. This paper argues that ‘public value’ is central to our understanding of art and culture, and its disappearance from their lexicon signals a profound collapse in its worth and self-worth. There can be no return to older forms of ‘cultural value’, but nor can this crisis be solved by adding more metrics and evaluation categories. At bottom this is a theoretical challenge and this paper seeks to begin this work.

Justin O’Connor: “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies: A Crime Scene Revisited.”


Thirty years ago, in a famous article, Tony Bennett set out to put ‘policy’ into cultural studies. Ostensibly a plea for a more pragmatic approach, moving away from the grandstanding of cultural studies, it was welcomed as connecting theoretical critique with actually existing cultural policy. Taking the empirical reality of cultural policy seriously meant responding to the language and institutional settings within which this policy was made. This at a moment when cultural policy had moved more centre stage as a result of the complex convergence we can call the ‘cultural industries’ moment (soon to morph into ‘creative’).

It spawned the rise of the independent cultural consultant (frequently based in universities) that lasted for two decades before being captured by the big accountancy firms. It also introduced a new critical strand, via Foucault and against Gramsci, in which culture’s role in governmentality (rather than Bourdieu’s social distinction) could be highlighted. This ‘left Foucauldianism’ could be found in Toby Miller’s work. What both these new pragmatic and critical strands failed to realise was that the rather anodyne formulation ‘putting policy into’ was, and was intended to be, fatal to the idea of culture as critique.


The disappearance of culture beneath the contemporary policy horizon, its reduction to the discretionary spend of the sovereign consumer, is of a part with Bennett’s right-wing assault on cultural studies. The reduction of culture to governmentality was an attempt to de-ontologise it, and thus undermine claims that it was capable of pointing beyond the present. Bennett’s work continues that of Ian Henry, who follows Schmidt in seeing the real enemy of the modern state not in Marx but in Kant. Bennett’s quietly destructive work thus stands a barrier to a radically transformative vision for culture as we move into a period of interregnum.




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Flinders University at Victoria Square, 182 Victoria Square, Adelaide, Australia

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