Interceptions

Interceptions: Theory's Modernism and Modernism's Theory was a postgraduate symposium that ran parallel to the conference on Saturday.

The day kicked off with an opening keynote from Stephen Ross, whose edited collection Modernism and Theory was a big influence on our thinking when organising the symposium. His paper 'Modernist Ethics and the Force of Critique' performed a hilarious and virtuosic close reading of the car crash in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, the highlight of which was an analysis of Adela and Ronny's decision that the cause of the crash was a hyena. These animals, it turns out, have long been associated in folklore with sexual perversion. In the 1930s it was discovered that hyenas have very complex genitalia (helpfully illustrated with a PowerPoint slide-show) and their sexual behaviours don't correspond to those found more generally in the animal kingdom. In his paper Stephen developed an argument that modernism took up the task of critique that the Englightenment let slip, that modernism's "make it new" is the 'battlecry of critique'. He touched on the possibility of 'opening the door to the other knowing that it can't come in', on the violence of truth and knowledge and the pros and cons of the poststructuralist deferral of decision-making.

The symposium came in part out of Glasgow University's Theory at Random reading group, and the reading group model was a guiding concept. The morning's panels had 6 speakers whose papers had been distributed a month before the conference to delegates. On Saturday, those speakers had ten minutes to summarise or expand on their papers, leaving an hour for group discussion. The panel on 'Modernism, Posthumanism and Theories of the Avant-Garde' featured Tom Betteridge's paper on Badiou, the body and contemporary art; Mark West's on the 60s counterculture, small presses and theories of the avant-garde; Derek Ryan's on Virginia Woolf's Flush and Derrida's cat; Sam Wiseman on Mary Butts' Dorset and the nature/culture boundary; and Kaori Kikuchi reading Virginia Woolf's architectural politics through a dialogue between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. The discussion took in the degree to which the category of the 'new' has been co-opted by business, the worth of Donna Haraway's neologism 'nature-cultures', and the tasks and errors of representation, amongst other subjects.

In the afternoon, the symposium was given over to Theory at Random reading workshops, with reading material from Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem (Henry King's introduction title possibly taking the award for the weekend's best title, 'Troubadour Buggery from Pound to Agamben'), and Jean-Luc Nany's "The Intruder". The Illich discussion centred around the possibilities for a less hierarchical education system, the pluralisation of learning, the potentialities of the reading group model, and the questioning of the function of education. Although not the answering of that question!

The symposium ended with Pamela Caughie's keynote address, 'On or about December 2010, human character changed, again: Modernism and Posthumanism'. She tracked the development of the posthuman through the history of the reproduction of the human voice, from the phonautograph to the gramophone and beyond. It posed provocative questions about the nature of our era - if 1910 was the age of modernism and 1985 that of postmodernism, then is 2010 the time of posthumanism?