The Centre for Film, Media, Discourse and Culture at the University of Wolverhampton warmly invites you to a Summer Seminar series

14.45-17.30 Wednesday 22nd May 2019
MC232, Millennium City Building
University of Wolverhampton

William Pawlett (University of Wolverhampton) From the formlessness of society to hyper-modern consumer-security zones: a schematic analysis 

This paper brings into contact the aberrant social thought of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard with recent work by Giorgio Agamben on bio-politics and Grégoire Chamayou on violence and surveillance. It charts the emergence of hyper-modern security spaces, zones where consumer freedoms merge with security and surveillance. The principles of liberal democracy have done nothing to inhibit the merging of consumer and security spaces, indeed these principles are perhaps a condition of this merging. For Bataille all societies are ultimately formless, consisting only in a system of barriers erected against “sacred horror”: death and decomposition, menstrual blood, sacrificial madness, self-annihilation. Yet, in modernity, barriers are folded and multiple: they do not limit outsides but seek to eliminate them. A surveillance space is defined, following Baudrillard, as the product of the postulation of ‘reality’ by techniques of abstraction and representation generating an integrated, indifferent yet hostile space. I suggest that consumerism and surveillance operate in tandem as modes of internal and external disciplining, that is, as techniques for controlling others or outsiders as well as the control of the self. Consumerism and surveillance have merged almost to the point of being indistinguishable; the freedom to buy is also the unfreedom to be tracked and monitored: at train stations and airports consumer transactions are also security checks overseen by armed police; even at colleges and universities Prevent policies are seamlessly intermeshed with customer relations. As Chamayou contends, surveillance makes possible the complete separation of lethal violence from any possibility of reciprocity or of risk to the aggressor. Can human societies endure in formlessness, or are they being irreversibly deformed into consumer-security spaces?

Maria Urbina (University of Wolverhampton), Heather Watkins and Jon Mansell (Nottingham Trent University) Obstinate Memory: Working Class Tradition & Neoliberal Forgetting in the UK and Chile*

The Chilean Solidarity Campaign (CSC) of the 1970s-80s, celebrated in the 2018 documentary Nae Pasaran, might be considered to be one of the high watermarks of UK working class internationalism.  Seen as an exemplar of social movement unionism (Waterman, 2008), the CSC was able to operate at both political-emotional (demos and protests) and organisational levels (lobbying government, running its own media), constructing a ‘broad front’ approach which embraced different Left factions, refugee groups, human rights organisations, church groups, and cultural and academic sectors. This paper considers the political relevance of reviving memories of this campaign now. In 2018, working class agency appears transformed, with decades of global neoliberal restructuring creating a ‘solidarity crisis’ of deep material inequalities between the formal labour force and a vastly expanded precariat.  Working class institutions have been systematically dismantled (trade unions, libraries, the NHS), or subjected to the exclusive logics of capitalism (football, popular music), while most Social Democratic parties are in a crisis of legitimacy.  What is left is an account of a ‘new’ working class which is fragmented, socially immobile, has high levels of democratic abstention, and is primarily driven by a desire for ‘national identity based law-making’ (Ainsley, 2018). The renewed interest in the CSC is presented here as more than nostalgia for a pre-neoliberal Left, but rather a pressing recovery of historical memory in the face of neoliberal ‘presentism’ – Benjamin’s ‘empty homogenous time’. We explore this in Chile as an institutionalisation of memory as a condition of democratisation, and in the UK as a discursive depoliticization of class struggles, leaving only ‘heritage’. Expanding precarity, particularly among the young, is forcing a ‘new’ working-class to relearn the political-emotional and organisational lessons of the past, and engage in material struggles on a range of new terrains, in both Chile and the UK.  The CSC thus provides a timely reminder that effective struggle combines material actions with the articulation of powerful narratives of internationally-shared identity and experience, thus addressing the heart of the current ‘solidarity crisis’ – its reductive economic nationalism.  

About the speakers:
Dr William Pawlett is Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of Wolverhampton. His main areas of research are social, cultural and media theory, continental philosophy and the application of these to the issues of sexuality and consumerism and to violence, hatred and ‘otherness’. His has written three monographs, including Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality (2007), Violence, Society and Radical Theory: Bataille, Baudrillard and Contemporary Society (Ashgate 2013); and Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society (Routledge 2015). He is currently completing a fourth monograph entitled Capitalism, Profanation and Filth (Routledge, 2020).

Dr Maria Urbina is Senior Lecturer in Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research interests centre on Latin American politics of media and its impact on political culture. Recently, she has focused on neoliberal transitions in Chile and the UK as well as the impact of neoliberal narratives of national exceptionalism in Chilean political culture. 

Dr Heather Watkins is a Lecturer in European and Global Studies at Nottingham Trent University Lecturer. Her academic interests focus on localism and decentralised politics in the UK, seen as responses to broader political crises and transitions.  She has written on the impact of neo-liberal and “Third Way” logics on post-industrial communities, and understandings of citizenship on the construction of the Thatcherite narrative of national renewal.

Jon Mansell is a Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. His work covers international political theory focused on the concepts of Otherness and Neighbourhood and international political economy, in particular a comparative analysis of neoliberal transitions in the UK and Chile. 


All welcome - please contact Fran Pheasant-Kelly at [log in to unmask] to register a place; refreshments provided.

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