Video of the event: http://www.spreecast.com/events/n2014-comp-lit-majors-choice-lecture/clips/n2014-comp-lit-majors-choice-lecture-excommunication
| The Comp Lit Undergraduate Majors' Choice Lecture is an annual event open to the public organized by Comp Lit students--presenting topics in literature, critical theory, philosophy, and writing. Previous speakers include Judith Butler, Laurence Rickels, and Gayatri Spivak. Alexander R. Galloway is associate professor of media studies at New York University and lives in New York, NY. He is the author of four books on digital media and critical theory, most recently, The Interface Effect. Eugene Thacker is associate professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of many books, including After Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press. McKenzie Wark is professor of liberal studies at The New School for Social Research and lives in Queens, NY. His books include A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. (Quoted from the University of Chicago Press Website) |
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