Seminar: The Politics of Common Ground
Tuesday April 29th @ 3-5PM, Room LTB B
University of Essex, Colchester Campus

For this seminar Professor Jeremy Gilbert will discuss his new book 
Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. 
Common Ground explores the philosophical relationship between 
collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. 
Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal 
culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of 
democratic politics.

The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and 
to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to 
protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions 
about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy 
of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and 
practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and 
patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the 
commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

Exploring this fundamental faultline in contemporary political struggle, 
Common Ground proposes a radically non-individualist mode of imagining 
social life, collective creativity and democratic possibility.


Professor Jeremy Gilbert is a writer, researcher and activist whose work 
has appeared in various British, continental, American and Australian 
publications and has been translated into French, Spanish and German. 
His most recent book is Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an 
Age of Individualism (Pluto 2013) and he has co-authored books on the 
philosophy of dance music and the relationship between culture and 
politics in Blair’s Britain as well as publishing numerous articles on 
cultural theory, politics and music.


Sponsored by the Centre for Work, Organization, and Society
This seminar is part of an ongoing workshop series on artist collectives.
For more information contact Stevphen Shukaitis: [log in to unmask]


-- 
Dr. Stevphen Shukaitis
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Work & Organization
University of Essex
Essex Business School
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ
Telephone: +44 (0)120 687 4283

http://www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/staff/profile.aspx?ID=2745
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info