Daniel Tutt

I’m hosting a public series for GCAS on the topic of Resistance, Protest and Social Struggles. This free and open to the public series will feature weekly lectures from philosophers, theorists and activists. We will meet weekly on Saturday’s starting February 7th to May 2nd. To register for this free series go here.

The series is free and open to the GCAS community of researchers, students and the general public. Registration is required but there is no cost.

The series will kickoff with a lecture from theorist and poet Joshua Clover on the emerging age of riots. It will be followed by two lectures from the philosopher Farhang Erfani on the late theorist Ernesto Laclau and today’s social struggles.

Lecture #1:

“Riot Material”

Instructor: Joshua Clover

Joshua Clover specializes in 20th Century anglophone poetry and poetics, political economy, crisis theory, with an emphasis on political struggle in literature, environment, feminism, and cultures of finance. He has two books of cultural theory, routed through film and popular music respectively. His book Of Riot, a theorization of riot as historical phenomenon, is forthcoming from Verso in 2016.

Dates:

February 7th and February 14th at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST. Each session will meet for two hours online in the GCAS BigBlue Button online classroom. Courses will include lecture and class discussion.

Register:

https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.wufoo.com/forms/gcas-resistance-protest-and-social-struggles/

Description:

The emerging “Age of Riots” has begun to throw off its own theories, often trying to taxonomize these increasingly significant events and to situate them within political sequences. Our goal will be to understand them first as expressions not of given political subjectivities but of global capital’s necessary restructurations over the long durée, plotting a trajectory from the 17th century to the present. In so doing, we will try to understand riots neither as foreshortened revolt nor as irrational spasm, but as a genre within a larger material struggle with its own historical logic, one which will allow us to make certain predictions about the future of lived political antagonism. We will start with the simplest question: why, on November 24th of last year, did the riots that settled on the hashtag #blacklivesmatter take the form of freeway shutdowns in 20 cities? What does this have to do with bread riots before the Industrial Revolution? And what can this tell us about the revolutionary horizon before us?