Nottingham Guest Speaker Series
Generation Net: Arts and Culture in the 21st Century
University of Nottingham
The second speaker in our interdisciplinary guest speaker series,
Dr David Berry, will be speaking on Thursday 14th May.
Admission is free. All are welcome. To book a place at the talk, please
email Iain Smith at [log in to unmask]
'On Being a Good Stream: Postmodern Fables of Financialisation’
Dr David Berry
Thursday 14th May 2009, 6pm-7pm followed by refreshments
Room A18 (Arts Graduate Centre) Trent Building, University of Nottingham.
Financialisation is an analytic term to describe the processes of finance
capital, including the institutions, norms, practices and discourses that
are connected with it. It is thus a useful means to unpack the way in which
claims to an information society or knowledge economy are bound up with
particular situated approaches to organising the economy, society and politics.
In this paper, therefore, I explore financialisation as the process of the
formation of a socio-technical network that is used to stabilize a certain
kind of calculative cognitive-support, that mediates the self and the world
through financial practices, categories, standards and tests. These can be
understood as structuring templates that act as devices that give you the
capacity to calculate, that is, cognitive abilities that do not have to
reside in ‘you’ but can be distributed throughout the investment interface.
This Guattari (1996: 114) calls a ‘processual’ subjectivity that ‘defines
its own co-ordinates and is self-consistent’ but remains ‘inscribed in
external referential coordinates guaranteeing that they are used extensively
and that their meaning is precisely circumscribed’ (Guattari 1996: 116).
Thus following Jean-Francois Lyotard we might declare that the subject
becomes a ‘stream’. Here I want to look at the implications of this notion
of distributed ‘stream’ subjectivity and the implications for theories of
the information society more generally.
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Dr. David M. Berry is a lecturer in the Media and Communication department
at the University of Swansea. He researches the philosophy of technology,
medium theory, digital media and the social and political implications of
the information society. In the early 90s, he co-founded the highly
acclaimed Indymedia newspaper SchNEWS and later founded an underground
electronica record label LOCA records.
Attendance is Free. All are Welcome. Please RSVP to [log in to unmask]
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Part of the Generation Net lecture series. For further information
visit http://generationnet.ning.com/
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Iain Robert Smith
Institute of Film and Television
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
NG7 2RD
Executive Committee
MeCCSA Post-Graduate Network
website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/
Editorial Board
Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies
website: http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/
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