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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11248/
Please join us on Friday, December 17, 2004 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation for a public conversation with Susan Stewart and Michele Richman, and moderated by Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire. This event is part of the “The Alexandria Project: On the Future of the Organization" series, and is co-produced with Peregrine Arts. Stewart will address forms of life, forms of art, and forms of organization, and 'give and take' as functions of form. Richman will address how social movements and political actions both emerge from alternative social formations and recognize individual practice.
“The Alexandria Project: On the Future of the Organization” is a discursive event series that proposes a new culture of temporality and non-permanence. This series focuses on the American organization as one of the most overt and prolific embodiments of contemporary cultural practice. The series title acknowledges the incendiary aggressiveness with which Marinetti questioned the cultural establishment of his time. "The Alexandria Project" translates the literal incendiary desires of the Futurists into a purely conceptual framework and extreme metaphor as a way of striking at the heart of our cultural discomfort with the idea of non-permanence and change in all their forms.
As George Bataille writes in the first volume of his Accursed Share, An Essay on General Economy, “It is not necessity, but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.” This event seeks to reorient cultural organizations away from a dependence upon classical models of economics in which principles of scarcity and escalation of commitment dominate. The lavish application of altruism and expenditure provides a powerful alternative to classical models of economics. Following Bataille, can we envision an alternative institution built on alternative forms of cultural altruism and expenditure? This event also questions traditional distinctions between art and organization, and asks whether the organization itself has risen today to the level of an aesthetic form in itself. This event will begin with a reading from theoretical texts including Bataille's Accursed Share and Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.
Susan Stewart is a poet and critic. She teaches the history of lyric poetry, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, and cultural studies. Her most recent book of poetry is Columbarium, which won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her books of criticism include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago UP); Crimes of Writing (Oxford UP and Duke UP); On Longing (Duke UP); and Nonsense (Johns Hopkins UP). She frequently writes on contemporary art as well and has collaborated with the installation artist Ann Hamilton and Penn composer James Primosch. Professor Stewart was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1997. Susan Stewart is Professor of English at Princeton University. Her 2003 lecture at Slought Foundation, "On the Art of the Future," is available online in audio format.
Michèle H. Richman is Associate Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate Chair for French. She teaches relations between literature, anthropology, and social criticism, especially in the 20 century, as well as the history and development of critical theory. Her publications include Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the College de Sociologie, and articles devoted to Mauss, Bataille, Leiris, and Barthes. She is currently preparing a critical introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss.
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