Public Lecture:

Prof Fred Moten, UC Riverside
'Resistance and Conduction'

Monday 13th June, 6-7.30pm
The Old Courtroom, Church Street, Brighton

Part of the Critical Studies Research Group's 5th International Conference, this year on 'Resistance'.

All welcome for Prof Moten's lecture. To register for the conference and for more information, please click here.

Abstract:

I want to think about resistance by way of the music of Lawrence “Butch” Morris, a musician I greatly admire whose work I have been trying to study for years. I am interested in his theory and practice of conduction as a mode of (black) aesthetic resistance but I am also interested in something like the resistance to conduction as a particular mode of improvised compositional leadership in music making. Morris’s performances were amazing examples of group dynamics and organization but they were also profound examples of the age-old tension between the imperative to resist external domination and the danger of reifying or acceding to forms of internal domination. At stake are old questions concerning sovereignty, which in black musical terms is usually manifest in relation to the figure of the soloist but which, in Morris’s work, is played out in relation to his own instantiation of the figure of the conductor. Anyway, I hope that by trying to consider the tension between resistance in conduction and resistance to conduction that it might be possible to make a small and tentative contribution to the study of the thermodynamics of revolution.

'In' or 'Out' of Europe - Which Way for the Left?

A debate:
Caroline Lucas (Green MP for the Brighton Pavilion Constituency)
and
Tom Hickey (Lecturer in Philosophy and Political Economy)

8pm, Thursday 12th May
The Old Courtroom, Church Street, BN1 1UD
 
The first half of the referendum debate has been a distortion of the central issues. One side has argued for British withdrawal to escape the constraints of EU legislation on UK policy, and to restore UK sovereignty.  The other argues for continued British membership but in a EU whose protective legislation and regulations are weakened in the interests of those who benefit from the free market and neo-liberal policies.
 
There is another debate entirely. It is one that is not confined to pursuing neo-liberal policies outside the EU against those who want the same policies pursued within the Union.
 
This different debate is one about justice, equality and environmental sustainability.  It is between those who think these values are best pursued as part of the EU, and those who think the nature and structure of the EU to be incompatible with them.
 
The different positions in this debate do not defend 'little England' as a preferable place to be.  Nor are they about the best conditions for the operation of market capitalism.  They are about human need and flourishing, and whether the EU offers a route, or an obstacle, to those objectives.
 
That is the discussion that ought to have dominated the EU Referendum debate. Here is a contribution to that discussion: two introductory and contrasting perspectives, and plenty of time for participation in the debate.

Hosted by the Politics, Philosophy, Aesthetics Seminar Series, School of Humanities, University of Brighton

ADMISSION FREE & ALL WELCOME BUT SEATING AND ADMISSION ARE LIMITED

Doors at 7.30pm