2021-22 Speaker Series
Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.
Upcoming speakers:
December 3, 2021
10:00 a.m. EST
Gavin Mueller
Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam
Platformisation as Subsumption; or, What Hackers Can Learn from the Luddites
https://westernuniversity.zoom.us/j/98161822373
Contact theory@uwo.ca for Passcode
“Platformisation” is a concept in the political economy of new media used to describe the rise in prominence and power of digital platforms that provide the infrastructure for cultural production and consumption in digital space. This talk proposes that platformisation can be fruitfully understood through the Marxist concept of subsumption, whereby capital reorganizes the means of production in particular ways to erect mechanisms of control and intensification. This process has historically provoked intense social struggles, most infamously the Luddite rebellions at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. How can contemporary battles over platforms -- ranging from their opaque algorithms, to their pervasive datafied surveillance, to their overall monopolistic influence over the cultural economy -- be productively reframed as struggles over subsumption? And how might this reframing illuminate the possibilities and limitations in the development of deep web and blockchain alternatives, loosely grouped together as “Web3”?
March 17, 2022
4:00 p.m. EST
Sayak Valencia Triana
Profesora-Investigadora,
Departamento de Estudios Culturales
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube
Past Speakers:
November 19, 2021
April 29, 2021
April 23, 2021
April 6, 2021
February 11, 2021
February 5, 2021
