VISR Vancouver Institute of Social Research

Sasha Langford: "An Atmosphere of Certain Uncertainty": Knowledge, Embodiment, and Ecology in Thick TimeMarch 25, 2019Anthropocene discourse over the past decade has often framed global warming as a form of "certain uncertainty" that demands new empirical and speculative methodologies in order to be properly known. In this talk, I consider the "certain uncertainty" of climate science and ecological theory in relation to postcolonial and psychoanalytic accounts of embodiment that situate the body as an ambivalent site of knowledge. Accepting climate change as a process with roots in colonial history, I ask how concepts such as "weathering," "atmosphere," and "acclimatization" may blur the boundaries between social and meteorological forms of bodily duress. In doing so, I propose that thinking "certain uncertainty" as a mode of resilient embodiment to environmental conditions may serve to further politicize contemporary ecological theory.Sasha J. Langford is an independent scholar, composer, and musician. Her recent research has considered the visual discourse of the Anthropocene, the placenta as a site of Marxist critique, and the symbolic role of the fee in psychoanalytic practice. Other recent work includes the 2017 essay and hybrid-writing collection Ephemeral Institutions, and performances at the International Noise Conference in Miami, FL; the Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation in Brooklyn, NY; and the Lines of Flight Festival of Experimental Music in Dunedin, New Zealand. She currently teaches media history and theory at Columbia College. "An Atmosphere of Certain Uncertainty": Knowledge, Embodiment, and Ecology in Thick Sasha Langford

Christine Kim: Brutalist Imaginary - North Korea through a Minor Transpacific LensMarch 11, 2019For audiences located in the West, and perhaps beyond, North Korea is a dystopic spectacle that appears ludicrous, terrifying, and tragic. This effect is created through periodic media coverage, films, memoirs, and other cultural representations that fashion North Korea as a cultural fantasy of the inhuman for the West. In this talk, I examine the film The Interview as well as the security concerns surrounding Sony Pictures in order to reflect upon perceptions of North Korea. Given that the film was shot in British Columbia, it also offers a useful opportunity to reflect upon Canada’s position in relation to North Korea and, more specifically, as part of what might be called a ‘minor transpacific’ in order to map the minor histories and cultural flows that connect locations in the Asia Pacific region. This paper takes a minor transpacific as a perspective and a methodology to complicate how North Korea invokes the Cold War for local audiences and to ask what is at stake in popular tendencies to write North Korea in terms that are simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. Christine Kim is an Associate Professor in the English department at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, diaspora studies, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). She has contributed chapters to essay collections on Asian Canadian literature and theatre and published articles in Interventions, Mosaic, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Journal of Intercultural Studies. Christine is co-director of SFU’s Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Currently she is working on a SSHRC funded book-length project on representations of North Korea, cultural fantasies, and Cold War legacies. Brutalist Imaginary - North Korea through a Minor Transpacific Lens Christine Kim

March 19th - Hilda Fernandez - Will a Cyborg Steal My Jouissance? Unconscious Labour and the Enjoying Body of the Virtual.Jouissance, understood as a sort of pleasurable pain, expressing an excessive tension of psychical nature, coded in the body, consumptive, and inaccessible to the symbolic order, is a universal characteristic of the human subject as bestowed by psychoanalysis. Based on the premise that jouissance and the body share interrelated yet separate spaces, as the latter is always displaced in an imagined other, in this talk I approach the virtual enjoyment dominating our current times to inquire the interrelation between the body, the unconscious labour and jouissance.I will engage with Alfie Bown’s report on videogames “The Playstation Dreamworld” (2017), Jon Raffman’s recent work “Dream Journal” (2017) and some examples from HBO TV Series “Western World” (2016) and Netflix’s “Black Mirror” (2011-2017) to read the unconscious labour, firstly, as an investment in the virtual space, via our dreams, fantasies and even symptoms (techno-addiction). And secondly, this same unconscious labour it is the subject’s jouissance-ingrained production, and as such, it involves an undecidable and paradoxical loss and a gain (surplus jouissance), which I aim to locate it with regards to the body (individual and social).With the concept of surplus enjoyment, which Lacan assumes to be parallel to surplus value, I argue that the enjoyment of the subject, via its disembodiment in the virtual space, has resulted in a larger social disembodiment which Tomsic explains as a “self fetishisation” of capitalism. I try to articulate it as a radical shift in subjectivity, where the temporal spatial conditions of embodiment are ever more reliant on mediation and where the lack is unbearable, unless the proliferating world of virtual images mediates it.At the dawn of artificial intelligence and the consolidation of virtual spaces, what relation can be thought between our bodies, the unconscious labour power and our enjoyment? Will our enjoying bodies, the last frontier of our imaginary property, turn out to be stolen goods by a cyborg in servitude of wealth accumulation of big data corporations who have algorithmically manufactured our desires?Hilda Fernandez was born and raised in Mexico City, receiving her MA in Clinical Psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She also holds an MA in Spanish Literature from the University of British Columbia (UBC) She has more than 20 years of training in Lacanian psychoanalysis and practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy in Vancouver, Canada. She co-founded the Lacan Salon in 2007 and currently serves as its president. She is an academic associate with the SFU Institute for the Humanities and is currently engaged in a PhD Program in the Department of Human Geography at Simon Fraser University (SFU), where she is conducting research on discursive spaces of trauma - collective and individual- and the institution.The Vancouver Institute of Social Research takes place on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples; the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Will a Cyborg Steal my Jouissance? Hilda Fernandez

From climate change to mushrooming authoritarianisms, natural disasters to economic and humanitarian crises, contemporary ontology is overwhelmingly problematized as a multiplicity of emergencies, which calls for faster and swifter modes of action, and ostracizes any other engagement as regressive, reactionary, and unrealistic. This talk puts a question mark to the political imperative of conceptualizing social and political issues on the basis of emergencies. For that, it resuscitates Dostoevsky’s idiot. As a figure of uninitiation (a la Deleuze and Guattari), who constantly reminds us to slow down in whatever task we are undertaking (a la Isabelle Stengers), the idiot opens up the possibility of a different political engagement. Rejecting both nihilist and moralist alternatives, it instead offers the aleatory prospects of encounter in transitory spaces, and suggests to suspend time through the unknown of radical empiricism.Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı is a Vancouver-based scholar, who currently teaches science studies inspired social-political theory at Emily Carr University of Arts and Design. Before moving to Vancouver in 2016, she was an assistant professor of sociology at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey; and before that a PhD student and an associate of the Fernand Braduel Center at Binghamton University. Lying at the intersection of science studies, political theory, and historical sociology, her most recent work explores the concepts of the swarm and the cloud, and is particularly inspired by, and a product of the social movements of the post-2010 period. She has published articles and essays in academic, semi-academic, and activist journals in English and Turkish. Resisting Emergencies or the Time of the Idiots Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı

“Small Effects from Big Causes: The Dialogic Documentary Practice of Natalie Bookchin”In her digital video work Mass Ornament (US, 2009), the Testament series (US, 2009), and Now He’s Out in Public and Everyone Can See (US, 2012), Natalie Bookchin gathers clips from vlogs where people perform dances and discuss issues both personal and political, from sexuality to racism and losing their jobs. In this essay, I argue that Bookchin’s work makes an important feminist intervention into discourses that either demonize or lionize social media. Utilizing strategies of seriality, database/narrative and orchestration, Bookchin crafts a set of composite found footage texts that challenge both documentary form that relies on typicality or composites, and i-docs that literalize interactivity. Instead, highlighting the body and the utterance as political “contact zones,” Bookchin uses sonic composition and choreography to challenge restricted notions of political speech, demonstrating the simultaneous insignificance and importance of the everyday. Her work therefore highlights the problematic of communicability that the excess of on-line textual expression presents while at the same time holding out the possibility that—through listening—engaged, dialogic documentary might provide a powerful antidote to the logics of neoliberalism.Natalie Bookchin's videos:https://vimeo.com/19364123https://vimeo.com/19588631https://vimeo.com/19588547https://vimeo.com/5403546https://vimeo.com/38513950 Zoe Druick - May 2, 2016 VISR Vancouver Institute of Social Research

"13 Ways of Looking at a Crocodile"Starting from one of the more obscure and often overlooked literary references in Freud’s Das Unheimliche– a tale about haunted houses and reptilian ghosts – my talk will engage with a series of texts that feature a strange theoretical animal: the crocodile. In a trajectory that leads from Freud’s Viennese home to Max Ernst’s collages from 19th century illustrated journals, I will explore some of the curious literary apparitions of ‘the beast in whose mouth we all are’- to paraphrase a well-known formulation by Jacques Lacan.  Ilinca Iurascu - May 9, 2016 VISR Vancouver Institute of Social Research

This talk will explore dust and materiality through multiple mediations. In general, it will examine processes, and the invisibility of production, distribution, and consumption. Framed through Jussi Parikka’s critical lens, we will study how the “seemingly immaterial is embedded in wide material networks,” and how technoculture is anchored in a transformation of materials—from mining to waste. Specifically, the presentation proposes an approach to dust as media in relation to the body. We will look at selected examples from visual and media arts. Alessandra Santos - April 25 VISR Vancouver