Please be invited to the 2012 TfC Lunchtime Series.

Meredith Jones, UTS Institute for Interactive Media and Learning

Sleep has long been associated with transformation. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White wake to find they have been transformed into powerful queens. In contemporary science fiction film, sleep is a doorway to other worlds. Films like Minority Report, The Matrix, Avatar and Source Code show protagonists becoming heroic while sleeping, using their bodies and intellects in extraordinary ways.

In this paper Meredith will discuss these contemporary texts along with medical and managerial/corporate approaches to sleep (sleep pods, the power nap) that are designed to enhance workers’ output.

In contrast, she will also introduce and analyse two pieces that represent sleep in transgressive ways: Julia Leigh’s film Sleeping Beauty, and Philipp Lachenmann’s video SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby). Meredith will argue that these works represent sleep as malignant, enchanted, and radically hospitable.

Meredith Jones has published extensively about bodies, gender, media and popular culture. She is best known for her work on cosmetic surgery and is currently working on a large international project about cosmetic surgery tourism. In 2009 she co-founded the innovative Trunk Book collections, the first of which was HAIR. The next volume in the Trunk Book series will be BLOOD. Meredith teaches media and cultural studies, with a focus on digital media, at the University of Technology Sydney.

Rowan Savage, Lecturer, UTS International Studies, TfC Autonomy, Intersubjectivity and the Desiring Self in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism

Autonomy, Intersubjectivity and the Desiring Self in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism

In contemporary discussions around radical sexuality, monogamy is often depicted negatively as a patriarchal, bourgeois, heteronormative practice conceptually based on property as a value – the opposite of freedom. Rowan argues the reverse – that non-monogamous practices, and their perceived radicality or transgressiveness, is premised on an individualist, neoliberal model of sexual and romantic relationships.

While the central question for contemporary sexual radicals has been, "how can I get what I want?", the more genuinely anti-hegemonic move is to ask, "why do I want what I want?" This argument draws on the ongoing philosophical and pragmatic problems brought about by the arising, with the Enlightenment, of the modern subject –autonomous, rational-instrumental, liberated from the bonds of society and tradition, and ever more technologically mediated.

The philosophical and countercultural quest for the ’Other of Reason,’ sought in desire, in the body, in emotions, in sex and in altered states ofconsciousness, has emerged from this paradigm. Rowan will engage with Michel Foucault’s ’repressive hypothesis,’ Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive desublimation, and Jessica Benjamin’s work on intersubjectivity and mutual recognition, to argue that, in the postwar era, capitalism has subverted and commodified ’transgression.’

The radical freedom and fulfilment posited by advocates of non-monogamy is premised on the capitalist desire-gratification complex; on freedom conceived in neoliberal terms as unfettered freedom of choice in the marketplace; and on a masculinist autonomy which wholly rejects the limitations of history and community, treats the Other instrumentally, and seeks to evade the productive tension of genuinely intersubjective and historical relationships.

In concluding, Rowan suggests that Buddhist models of desire, gratification and suffering may provide a way to reconceptualise freedom as fulfilment in the context of intimate relationships.

Please find the full TfC Lunchtime program for the Autumn Semester 2012 here: http://datasearch2.uts.edu.au/tfc/news-events/events-detail.cfm?ItemId=22302