INSTITUTE OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

7.30 PM NORTH MELBOURNE:

TALK/PRESENTATION: ‘APPLY TO THE BRITISH COUNCIL. FORM WITHIN’: SOME REFLEXIONS ON CONTEMPORARY SPACE AND MATTERS OF ALIGNMENT

Short abstract

‘Apply to the British Council. Form Within’: Some Reflexions on Contemporary Space and Matters of Alignment

Space is imagined – still! - as cartographic space; and the socio-political as a mosaic of discrete nations. Ethnicity is not the future; nor the notion of gemeinshaftlich communities. Geography is dead. Space as a socially meaningful category has to be conceived ethically; as providing zones of participation and communicative possibility. Free trade creates globality; indeed, it relies on it. But globality is not constitutive of the social and cannot be accorded the status of end or guiding principle. The social demands a beyond to itself – a sense of future, a transcendental something. Sensory manipulation, the deletion of personality, the confusion of well being with ‘secure being’, and the dissolution of personal responsibility: these and other mechanisms are the true determinants of contemporary spatiality. Everywhere there is overload and deprivation. Cyberspace itself is gutted. We are bound to the machine; but might not the machineries of our extension operate as it were hands-free and subject to command? The potentiality of computer technology to generate zones of self-objectification are underplayed. Consumption is privileged over election. The notion of culture is inadequate to account for the ‘natural’ variability of thought, motive and action at the personal level. In resurrecting the notion of sensibility we return in a very direct way to the notion of ethical being.