Event Date: Friday, March 30, 2007 Location: Slought Foundation
Evasions of Power Conference Series
| Organized by
Katherine Carl, Aaron Levy, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss
Slought Foundation and the Department of Architecture, PennDesign, are pleased to announce "Samuel Weber on Networks, Netwar, and Narratives." This event will take place at Slought Foundation on Friday, March 30, 2007 from 6:30-8:30pm, and will begin with prepared remarks by Peter Krapp on "Networks," Eduardo Cadava on "Netwar," and Catherine Liu on "Narratives." A public conversation with Samuel Weber, moderated by Jean-Michel Rabaté, will take place immediately after. In the wake of September 11 and the “war on terror," this wide-ranging discussion expands upon Samuel Weber’s recent study of “targeting” and its relation to thinking, self-definition, war, violence, technology, media, nationalism, and sovereignty.
The evening is predicated on close readings of Weber's recent essay “Target of Opportunity: Networks, Netwar, and Narratives” (Grey Room, Volume 15, Spring 2004, MIT Press). Audience participation is encouraged; please contact us by e-mail to request an electronic copy. Individuals from institutions with MIT Press subscriptions can download a copy here.
“Samuel Weber has been one of the most important critical voices within the fields of literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media theory for more than thirty years now. He is a luminous, intricate, and preeminently ethical critic whose work has helped define the stakes and tasks of research and scholarship in the humanities during this era of great transformation...” –Eduardo Cadava
“What blurring and blending have in common with swarming is the tendency to suspend, up to a point, the oppositional logic of mutual exclusivity and hence also of the clear-cut distinctions informed by it. Such “blurring” of distinctions can however go further and affect not just the individual components or nodes of a network but the network itself, rendering its enabling limits difficult if not impossible to determine. This can result in a certain indeterminacy about where a network begins and ends, spatially as well as temporally. And this indeterminacy can carry over and affect the conflicts in which the network engages. This is why “netwar,” unlike traditional war, requires no formal declaration to begin or to end and why such declarations today seem increasingly superfluous even on the part of nation-states, as with the recent war against Iraq. At the same time, what stands out against this background of indeterminacy is the one notion that netwar shares with traditional war: that of targeting. There is still an enemy, and however acephalous, or Janus-faced it might be, it must still be targeted—which is to say, located and subdued, either by being killed, destroyed, or rendered dysfunctional.” – Samuel Weber
This event is part of the “Evasions of Power” conference, a series of roundtable discussions exploring the relations between literature, architecture, and geo-politics. The photo-documentation on this webpage–of military forces from Montenegro transporting and installing a shrine on the Serbian border–exemplifies this intersection. The proceedings will take place in Philadelphia from March 30-31, 2007 and have been jointly organized by Slought Foundation and the Department of Architecture, PennDesign, in conjunction with the Centre for Architecture Research, Goldsmiths College, London, the
Department of Art History, University of Pennsylvania, the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, and Eastern State Penitentiary historic site and museum, Philadelphia, with publication support from
The Graham Foundation, Chicago. Departing from the usual academic convention of presenting knowledge in the form of straightforward talks or presentations, this project will include a series of roundtable discussions, debates and interventions of varying duration, with an integrated online presence. For more information about the “Evasions of Power” conference, please consult http://slought.org/series/Evasions/
Samuel Weber is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern and co-director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory. Professor Weber studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book, Prisms, he co-translated into English. The translation of, and introduction to Theodor Adorno's most important book of cultural criticism helped define the way in which the work of the Frankfurt School would be read and understood in the English-speaking world. Professor Weber has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation. In the 1980s he worked in Germany as a “dramaturge” in theater and opera productions. Out of the confrontation of that experience with his work in critical theory came the book, Theatricality as Medium, published in 2005 by Fordham University Press. He recently completed Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking and is currently at work on a book entitled Benjamin’s-abilities. Weber began teaching at the Free University of Berlin and subsequently taught at the Johns Hopkins University and UCLA.
Catherine Liu is a co-director of the Arts and Humanities Undergraduate Major and teaches in Comparative Literature and in Film and Media / Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has published on psychoanalytic theory, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, museums, modernity and is presently completing a polemic against cultural studies and academic populism tentatively entitled Redeeming Reason in the Age of Aquarius: Astrology, Celebrity, Conspiracy. Liu was the inaugural recipient of the 2006 Slought Foundation Award for Rogue Thought.
Peter Krapp is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Director of the PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also contributes to an interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts-Computing-Engineering. He authored Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (University of Minnesota Press 2004) and co-edited Medium Cool (Duke University Press 2002: SAQ 101:3).
Eduardo Cadava teaches in the English Department at Princeton University and is on the Slought Foundation Advisory Board. Publications include Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Cities Without Citizens (co-edited with Aaron Levy), and And Justice for all? The Claims of Human Rights (co-edited with Ian Balfour). He is completing a book about the ethics and politics of mourning.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and has authored or edited twenty books on Modernism, Bernard, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Lacan, Derrida, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
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To Cite this Page using MLA Style:
Samuel Weber, et al. "Samuel Weber on Networks, Netwar, and Narratives." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[30 March 2007;
Accessed 5 September 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11331/>.
This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of Centre for Architecture Research, Goldsmiths College, London, the Department of Art History, University of Pennsylvania, the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, and Eastern State Penitentiary historic site and museum, Philadelphia. Major support for Evasions of Power has been provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Media sponsorship provided by Archinect.
