Historical Materialism Conference (HM) in Beirut from March 10 to March 12, 2017
**** THE CFP BELOW IS NOW CLOSED.****
The final program is online, see you in Beirut, March 10-12, 2017!
https://docs.google.com/…/1HqNctOHj9HfdJBKt5qRBDlsdfH…/edit…
Historical Materialism Conference Beirut, Final Program, March 10-12, 2017
Friday, March 10, 2017
March 10, 14:30-15:00
Welcome address
Maamari Auditorium (OSB)
March 10, 15:00-17:00
The Capitalist Unconscious
Maamari Auditorium (OSB)
Oxana Timofeeva: Freedom Is Slavery: Hegel’s Master and Slave Dialectics Today
Samo Tomsic: Labour in Psychoanalysis: Freud, Marx, and the Question of Organisation
Keti Chukhrov: Aberrations of the Anti-Capitalist Critique: Desiring Alienation
March 10, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 01
Nicely Hall N 406
Rima Majed: Sectarianism 101: Challenging the Mainstream Analysis of Conflict in the Middle East
Fuat Ercan: Stages of Capital Accumulation and/or Stages of State Building: A Critical Analysis of the Turkish Experience with Military Coups
Sai Englert: Exclusion and Segregation in the Labour Market: Palestinian Workers in the Israeli Construction industry
March 10, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 04
Nicely Hall N 411
Nassima Sahraoui: Autumn
Thomas Telios: Collective Agency proper. A Materialists’ Approach
Doreen Mende: Solidarity in Struggle
March 10, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 32
Nicely Hall N 415
Kurtar Tanyılmaz: The Contemporary Metamorphosis of the Turkish Bourgeoisie
Sungur Savran: Turkey: Quest for a New Caliphate?
Cenk Saraçoğlu: The “Core” and Contingent Elements of the AKP Project in Turkey in the Context of the Protracted Crisis of Imperialism
March 10, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 08
Nicely Hall N 107
Joshua David Gonsalves: World History Without
Mark Hayek: Violence Against Oneself: The First Step Towards Discourse
Iyad Raya: Against the act of deprovincializing Marx
March 10, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 30
Nicely Hall N 406
Helene Kazan: The Object of Risk: As Accident and Design in Aerial Bombardment
Kutlu Dane: Revolution as the driving force of modern Middle Eastern history
Raluca Bejan: The working men have no country”. On Marx, nationalism, and “Eastern European” populism
March 10, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 26
Nicely Hall N 411
Ziad Dallal: On Derivatives
Irene Sotiropoulou: What if there is no Surplus in the Economy?
Alan Nasser: Economic Possibilities For Our Children: Declining Private Investment and the End of Work
March 10, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 03
Nicely Hall N 415
Maïa Pal: Migration as agency in capital accumulation and migrants subjects for critical pedagogies
Aziz Choudry and Mira Younes: Learning from Migrant/Immigrant Workers’ Centres as alternative sites for organizing
Mahdi Ganjavi: Imperialism, Cold War and Exporting Education
Saturday, March 11, 2017
March 11, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 19
Nicely Hall N 202
Aaron Benanav: 2016: The Year We Transitioned to a Post-Industrial World
Cassandra Troyan and Maya Andrea Gonzalez: Sex Work Is Work: Agency, Identity, and Policing Personhood in the Labor of Selling Sex
John Clegg: Exploitation/domination
March 11, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 09
Nicely Hall N 206
Joseph Daher: Hezbollah, a Challenge to the Sectarian and Bourgeois Lebanese Political System
Jeremy Randall: The Emergence of Inequality Discourses Against Sectarianism in Post-War Lebanon
Omar Bortolazzi: From Disenfranchisement to Wealth: The Making of a Shiite Bourgeoisie in Lebanon between Collectivism and Unrepentant Neoliberal Practices
March 11, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 06
Nicely Hall N 209
Toni Prug: Marxian determinate abstractions in non-capitalist development: public transport
Martin Hergouth: Marx with the shadow of Hegel: Too much alienation or not enough?
Mattin Artiach: Commodification of Consciousness: Alienation from below
March 11, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 02
Nicely Hall N 210
Walid Sadek: Sleepless Nights
Søren Rosendal: Truth and The Scientific Unconscious
Jaakko Karhunen: The Unconscious as an Invention
March 11, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 31
Nicely Hall N 211
Levent Dölek: Turkey: Civil War of the Bourgeoisie
Fatih Çağatay Cengiz: Turkey’s Sub-imperialist Foreign Policy in AKP Rule
Mustafa Kemal Coşkun: Workers’ Piety in Turkey
March 11, 11:30-13:30
Maamari Auditorium (OSB)
Keynote lecture
Rebecca Comay: Revolutionary Inheritance
March 11, 13:30-15:00 Lunch Break
Meet the editors of the HM editorial board London (Nicely Hall N 202)
March 11, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 07
Nicely Hall N 202
Double Bind: Nationalism and Masculinity in Crisis
Speakers/Authors:
Larne Abse Gogarty
Christina Chalmers , Rose-Anne Gush
Dimitra Kotouza
Hannah Proctor
Amy Tobin
Papers:
Critique of sexual violence: the sexual contract, state formation and crisis
Misogyny: Fantasy Operations in Its Repudiation and Reproduction Today
“Everything’s Cracking Up” : Defeat, Disillusionment and the Psychic Investments of the Left
March 11, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 05
Nicely Hall N 206
Jann Boeddeling: The Emergence of ‘the People’ – Spontaneity of Collective Subjectivity in the 2010/11 Tunisian Revolutionary Mass Mobilisation
Oubenal Mohamed and Zeroual Abdellatif: The dynamics of court capitalism in Morocco
Ramy Magdy Ahmed: Loyal Comrades: How Far Nasserism Was Historically Materialist?
Hannah Elsisi: Modernity and the Mu’taqal: The Emergence of Mass Political Incarceration in Egypt
March 11, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 10
Nicely Hall N 209
Damiano Roberi: Scale(s) and Stairways: a Benjaminian Materialistic-expressive Structure for History
Stamatia Noutsou: Voices from the past: Walter Benjamin´s historical materialism, medieval heretics and the emancipatory potentials of the history of the Middle Ages.
Giovanni Tusa: Touching at distance: Marx, Harun Farocki, and Einfühlung
March 11, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 11
Nicely Hall N 210
Melda Yaman: What is missing in the Capital ? The Sexual Division of Labour in the Capitalist Society
Alan Sears: Dispossession and Desire: The Social Reproduction of Normative Sexualities
Paul Reynolds: Can we have Queer Marxism?
March 11, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 12
Nicely Hall N 211
Federica Gregoratto: Marx on Love
Armin Schneider: Economy, Labor and Repetition in Hegel’s Jena Period
Charlotte Szász: Religion and materialism: Mythology and Divinity in Materialism
March 11, 17:30-19:30
Haptic materialism
Nicely Hall N 210
Mirt Komel: Haptic Hieroglyphs: Sign, Value and the Tactility of Commodity Fetishism
Ana Jovanović, Clinamen Declined: Materialism from Epicur to Marx and Lacan
Goran Vranešević: The Rule of Thumb: Speculative Unity of the Touchable and Untouchable
Bara Kolenc: The (Un)Touchable Value: Capital and Repetition
March 11, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 13
Nicely Hall N 212
Abbas Shahrabi Farahani: Iranian Left and the Unfinished Project of 1907 Constitutional Revolution Reflections on the Theoretical Reconstruction of an Iranian Democratic Socialism
Mahsa Asadollahnejad and Hesam Salamat: Iranian Social Democrats in the second parliament of Constitution: Conflicts between civic legislature and religious institution
Sophie Chamas: The Limits of the Metropole: Middle East Studies and the Secular Subject
March 11, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 18
Nicely Hall N 214
Idris Robinson: Form-Of-Life, Species-Being, and the Inconsistent Linguistic Foundations of the Coming Politics
Nikolay Karkov: Towards a “Communism of the Abject”: Georgi Markov’s Contribution to Historical Materialism
Jamie Allinson: What does it mean to be a counter-revolutionary today?
March 11, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 15
Nicely Hall N 320
Maya El Helou and Sara Salem: Intersectionality and the Global South
Bouchra Ali: Why real revolutions must be female: Concepts and practices of the Kurdish women’s movement
Peer Illner: The Locals do it better: Occupy Sandy and Social Reproduction
March 11, 17:30-19:30
parallel panel PP 20
Nicely Hall N 322
Ali Harfouch: Hegel, Fanon and the Problem of Recognition
Mira Adoumier: Beyond These Lands: A film Essay on Fanon and Post-Colonial Social Structures in the Lebanese Society
Behzad Khosravi Noori and Benji Boyadgian: Around About
Sunday, March 12, 2017
March 12, 09:00-11:00
The Comic Telos of Historical Repetition
Nicely Hall N 206
Gregor Moder: On Teleology: from Nature to Spirit, from Organ to Bone
Jamila Mascat: Hegel’s Comedy of Consciousness
Rachel Aumiller: History’s Shrill Laughter or Comic Stutter
March 12, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 17
Nicely Hall N 202
Ayesha Hameed: Black Atlantis
MF Kalfat: Egyptian Uprising: Should the revolution be televised?: Media and historical (self-) consciousness in Egypt
Kenan Behzat Sharpe: Afterlives of the Turkish 60s
March 12, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 24
Nicely Hall N 209
Stefan Apostolou-Hölscher: Communism, Beauty, and Dis-identification in the ‘Idealist‘ Materialism of Jacques Rancière
Stuart W Smithers: Rehearsing the Revolution: Barbarians, Children and Other Destructive Characters
Nikos Pegioudis: The Redundant Avant-Garde: Walter Benjamin and the Intelligentsia in the Age of Its Disappearance
March 12, 09:00-11:00
parallel panel PP 27
Nicely Hall N 210
Ezgi Pinar: Talking the Analytical Capacity of Neoliberalism Over: Brain Storming on How to Make Use of the Term
Owen Worth: The Essence of Neoliberal Hegemony: Consent, Cohesion and Semi-Peripheral Society
Nikhil Vettukattil: On the crisis of parliamentary democracy
March 12, 11:30-13:30
Maamari Auditorium (OSB)
Plenary session with members of BICAR and HM Beirut:
Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Elia El Khazen, Sami Khatib, Angela Harutyunyan
March 12, 13:30-15:00 Lunch Break
March 12, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 22
Nicely Hall N 202
Tom Allen: A Policy That is Not of This World: Insurance, Fate and Catastrophe in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina
Sam Dolbear: Revolutionary Degeneracy
Betty Schulz: European Identity, Colonial Unconscious: Hopi snake rituals, Mexican ruins and the legibility of the Other
March 12, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 21
Nicely Hall N 206
Yasemin Özgün: The Possibility of the Autonomous Self -Rule in The Middle East
Rachel Gorman: Lebanon/Palestine Dismembered: Disidentification, hybridity, and indigeneity in Vicky Moufawad-Paul’s video art
Ziad Suidan: New Visual Cultures of Beirut: Artistic Responses to a Reconstructed Capital
Chris Nickell: Hearing Pyrrhic Victory in Lebanon’s 2015 Protests
March 12, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 33
Nicely Hall N 209
Brian Whitener: Primitive Accumulation and its Limits
Alexander Ammar: Marx on primitive accumulation
Salameh Kaileh: Historical Materialism
March 12, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 14
Nicely Hall N 210
Harry Halpin and Jessica Khazrik: Beyond the Disciplinary and Algorithmic Production of Knowledge under Late Capitalism.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Fereirra da Silva: Screening of Serpent Rain
Jamie Magnusson and Shahrzad Mojab: Gendering the Military-Entertainment Complex: New Social Media and State Military Partnerships
March 12, 15:00-17:00
parallel panel PP 28
Nicely Hall N 212
Guillermo Martínez de Velasco: Revisiting the Agrarian Question in the 2015 San Quintin Jornalero Uprising
Tamara Buble: Hybrid development of cities: socialism and capitalism in Novi Jelkovec, Zagreb
Mateusz Sapija: Post-Democracy and Contemporary Art in Lebanon – Art as a Materialist Praxis?
Mark Camilleri: A Hegelian-Marxist critique to Fukuyama’s End of History Theory
March 12, 17:30-19:00
Maamari Auditorium (OSB)
Concluding roundtable with HM Beirut and BICAR and guests
Rooms
N: Nicely Hall
OSB: Maamari Auditorium in the Olayan School of Business (OSB)
You can download the full AUB campus map to see where the buildings are: https://www.aub.edu.lb/communicat…/Documents/map_posters.pdf
CFP (now closed):
The Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) is hosting a Historical Materialism Conference (HM) in Beirut from March 10 to March 12, 2017.
BICAR is organizing this event in collaboration with the Center for Arts and Humanities (CAH) at the American University of Beirut (AUB); Jnanapravaha Mumbai (JP); and the Historical Materialism Journal in London.
Debates around historical materialism have evolved in the wake of the collapse of ‘actually existing’ socialist states, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, where historical materialism was the officially sanctioned method for understanding the dynamics of revolutionary reality. Socialist states in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as South and South East Asia also claimed to follow historical materialism, whether officially or semi-officially, as part of the Cold War battle against the ideology of positivist neutrality. However different the outcomes of these historical attempts and experiments were, they prove the futility of turning states into an exclusive embodiment of historical materialism and treating the latter as an empty signifier serving the purposes of ideological state apparatuses. Post 1989, these contexts are no longer the historical embodiments of the method and historical materialism has been taken up and debated by the Left during the past three decades. Scholars around the world have attempted to rethink historical materialism in a post Cold War world where the end of history has been simultaneously proclaimed and perpetuated, both descriptively and normatively. Here we encounter a double fissure, the first triggered by the collapse of the very historical experiences that gave rise to historical materialism as a method, and the second by the schism between the realities of global capitalism today – the political status quo it generates – and the immanent imperative of the historical materialist method – the need to politicize theory despite the depoliticizing effects of capitalist ideology.
What happens when historical materialism, because of the historical conditions in which it is situated today, becomes a theoretical endeavor rather than a political weapon? Is it possible to reconnect method and practice, critique and practice, when the structural conditions – the untimely absence of a political avant-garde, mass mobilization movements with emancipatory agendas, and revolutionary political programs on a large scale – makes praxis difficult, even impossible?
This conference invites scholars, activists and other invested members of the public to think the possibility of praxis today by taking Beirut as both a critical site of the troubled legacies of communism, socialism and Stalinism, and as a site for critique. At the same time, Beirut is the dumping ground for neoliberal, authoritarian, and theocratic policies that date back to Lebanon’s role during the Cold War era. This ideological wasteland has a material base, articulated by the contradictions of global capitalism in today’s Lebanon: Beirut is the future past of the national state, a state without a state, run by sectarian neoliberalism. Despite this present, the short history of Beirut and Lebanon in the 20th century tells the untold story of what could have been: the unredeemed desire for a non-capitalist modernity, neither secular nor religious, neither “Western” nor “Eastern.”
Among the themes we would like to explore:
The False Promise of the Victim and the Desire for the Revolution
Primitive Accumulation
The Capitalist Unconscious: Lacan and Marx
Marxist and Materialist Feminism
Capitalism, Alienation, Authenticity
World History Without a Worldview
The Invisibility of the Class Struggle in the Aftermath of Colonialism
History and Repetition, or the Temporalities of Capitalism
Capitalism and Barbarism
What is Praxis?
Materialist Aesthetics
Deprovincializing Marxism
(This is a non-exclusive list – other subjects are of course welcome too. Pre-constituted panels are welcome but we reserve the right to disaggregate them and create new panels with some of the speakers proposed.)
The submissions (300 word abstracts) should be sent to info@bicar-lebanon.org, by September 10 2016.
مؤتمر المادية التاريخية
10-ـ 12 آذار/مارس، 2017
كلية بيروت للبحث والتحليل النقدي (BICAR) تستضيف مؤتمر المادية التاريخية (Historical Materialism) في بيروت من 10 آذار/مارس إلى 12 آذار/مارس 2017. تنظم BICAR هذا الحدث بالتعاون مع مركز الفنون والعلوم الإنسانية (CAH) في الجامعة الأميركية في بيروت (AUB) وجنانابرفاها مومباي (JP) ومجلة المادية التاريخية في لندن (HM).
تطور النقاش حول المادية التاريخية عقب انهيار “الدول الاشتراكية”، وخاصة منذ سقوط الاتحاد السوفياتي، حيث كانت المادية التاريخية المنهج المتعارف عليه لفهم ديناميات الواقع الثوري.في هذا السياق، ادّعت “الدول الاشتراكية” في أميركا اللاتينية والشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا وجنوب شرق آسيا تبني منهجية المادية التاريخية، سواء على الصعيد الرسمي أو شبه الرسمي، كجزء من معركة الحرب الباردة ضد عقيدة الحياد الإيجابي. مهما اختلفت وكانت نتائج هذه المحاولات التاريخية والتجارب، فإنها تثبت عدم جدوى تحويل الدولة إلى تجسيد حصري للمادية التاريخية واستعمال هذا المنهج كمدلول فارغ من المضمون لخدمة أجهزة الدولة الأيديولوجية. لم تعد هذه السياقات تمثل التجسيد التاريخي لهذه المنهجية ،وفي فترة ما بعد سنة 1989خلال العقود الثلاثة الماضية لقد أعاد اليسار التفكير بالمادية التاريخية. وقد حاول مفكرون في جميع أنحاء العالم إعادة تعريف المادية التاريخية في عصر ما بعد الحرب الباردة حيث كانت قد أُعلنت في وقت واحد وبشكل دائم وعلى الصعيدين الوصفي والمعياري، نهاية التاريخ.
هنا نواجه فجوة مزدوجة، الأولى ناجمة عن انهيار التجارب التاريخية التي أدت إلى اعتناق المادية التاريخية كمنهجية معترف بها، والثانية عن طريق الانقسامات بين واقع الرأسمالية العالمية اليوم والوضع السياسي الراهن الذي تنتجه.هناك اذاً ضرورة لمنهجية المادية التاريخية وحاجة إلى تسييس النظرية على الرغم من تداعيات الأيديولوجيا الرأسمالية.
ماذا يحدث عندما تستعمل المادية التاريخية، نظرا للظروف التاريخية التي تقع فيها اليوم، كمسعى نظري بدلا من سلاح سياسي؟ هل من الممكن التوفيق بين المنهجية والممارسة، وبين النقض والممارسة، عندما تجعل الأوضاع البنيوية من غياب غير ملائم لتنظيم سياسي طليعي، إلى غياب حركات تعبئة جماهيرية مع أجندات تحررية وبرامج سياسية ثورية على نطاق واسع التطبيق العملي أمراً صعباً، لا بل مستحيل التحقيق؟
يدعو هذا المؤتمر الأكاديميين والناشطين وغيرهم إلى التفكير في الممارسة السياسية اليوم من خلال اتخاذ بيروت على حد سواء كموقع محوري يتضمن الموروثات المضطربة للشيوعية والاشتراكية والستالينية، وكموقع للنقض وللنقد. وفي الوقت نفسه، بيروت هي مكبا للسياسات النيوليبرالية، الاستبدادية، والثيوقراطية التي يعود تاريخها إلى دور لبنان خلال حقبة الحرب الباردة. القفار الأيديولوجية هذه لها قاعدة مادية، تعبر عنها تناقضات الرأسمالية العالمية في لبنان اليوم: بيروت هي الماضي الحاضر للدولة القومية، دولة دون دولة، تديرها النيوليبرالية الطائفية. وعلى الرغم من هذا الحاضر، يروي تاريخ بيروت ولبنان القصير في القرن العشرين قصة لم تروَ بعد لما كان يمكن أن يكون: رغبة لم تتحقق لحداثة غير رأسمالية، غير علمانية ولا دينية، غير “غربية” ولا “شرقية”.
ومن بين المواضيع التي نود أن نستكشفها:
• الوعد الزائف للضحية والرغبة بالثورة أو، رفض منطق الضحية والتضحية في قراءة الصراعات السياسية والإجتماعية
• التراكم البدائي
• اللاوعي والرأسمالية:جاك لاكان وماركس
• الرأسمالية، الاغتراب والأصالة
• تاريخ العالم من دون نظرة أيديولوجية مؤطرة للتاريخ
• تغييب الصراع الطبقي عقب الاستعمار
• التاريخ والتكرار و أزمنة رأس المال
• الرأسمالية والبربرية
• ما هي الممارسة السياسية؟
• جماليات المادية
• تمييز المفاهيم الماركسية من خلال العلاقة الديالكتية بين الخاص والكوني
• النسويات الماركسية والمادية
(هذه قائمة غير حصرية وبالطبع فإن مواضيع أخرى مرحب بها أيضا. كما نرحب بالطاولات المستديرة المشكلة سلفا لكننا نحتفظ بحق حلها وإنشاء مجموعات جديدة مع بعض المتحدثين المقترحين)
ترسل الطلبات (ملخص من 300 كلمة) على العنوان info@bicar-lebanon.org، بحلول 15 آب/أغسطس 2016. للمزيد من المعلومات زوروا الموقع:
http://www.bicar-lebanon.org/
