Title: Exercise Machines: Life in the Epoch of Social Systems
Lecturer: Mark Seltzer (Professor, Department of English, UCLA)
Chairperson: JIN Wen (Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 1:30 pm, June 16th, 2017 (Friday)
Venue: Room 5103, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
A modern world comes to itself by staging, and reporting, its own conditions. Prior the nineteenth century, society could not describe itself. Now it cannot stop describing itself -- as it attempts to keep up with what it is at every moment bringing about. This state of affairs has been generalized as a planetary situation of continuous suspense.The state of suspense brings the unknown future into view, and that leads to a mutual heightening of security and insecurity. As in the global financial markets, stabilization is attained through the spread and transfer of instabilities. Via the strategies of the planetary financial system, systemic risk is at once fostered and recycled. In this way, “the flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system.” These are the contours of life in what has been called “the world interior of capital” and what might be called the epoch of social systems. In this talk I focus on how we live in, observe, and describe this kind of world, and, centrally, how these social interactions are felt on the body. Drawing examples from recent literature, film, and media, I center on the strange fitness practices and stress-tests -- the exercise machines -- that adapt us to life in the systems epoch.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Mark Seltzer, Department of English at UCLA, Evan Frankel Professor of Literature and Distinguished Professor of English. Five sole-authored books, including The Official World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), Bodies and Machines (New York and London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, new edition, 2015). Lectured in different countries and spoke wildly in public media.