KEYNOTE

The “Beholding Violence” Conference will feature two keynote speakers:

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008
W.J.T. Mitchell
“Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib”
206 Bowen-Thompson Student Union Theater
Bowling Green State University
7:00 p.m.

Friday, Feb. 29, 2008
Michael Uebel
“Masochism in America”
Little Theater
Toledo Museum of Art
6:00 p.m.

 

W.J.T. Mitchell

W.J.T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, will open the conference with his talk on “Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib." A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. His publications include:  The Language of Images (1980), On Narrative (1981); The Politics of Interpretation (1984); “The Pictorial Turn,” Artforum, March 1992; Landscape and Power (1992); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Picture Theory (1994); “What Do Pictures Want?” October, Summer 1997; The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); What Do Pictures Want? (2005). He is currently working on a book addressing the violence of images in the new millennium, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib.

His talk on Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008 at 7:30 p.m. in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union Theater (206 BTSU) is entitled, ““Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib." While wars have always been fought over and conducted by images, the current "war on terror" has raised the imaginary component of warfare to a new level of importance. This lecture explores the role of images as weapons, targets, punctuating moments, causes, and framing metaphors of the current war. It will discuss new media technologies that have made the reproduction, circulation, and transformation of images much faster. It will also examine the metaphor of a "war on terror" as an imaginary, fantasmatic notion, a metaphor that has become all too literal, real, and deadly. The war on terror has thus had the perverse effect of strengthening and proliferating its enemy, or "cloning terror." The figure of cloning, moreover, provides the master image or "metapicture" of image production in our time, which is not merely mechanical or digital, but biocybernetic. The images of the war on terror converge, therefore, with the host of images that surround cloning and biotechnology. Images of viruses, cancers, sleeper cells, infectious diseases, and autoimmune disorders are woven through the discourse of terrorism, and the icons of terror have an uncanny resonance with images of doubles and duplicates, faceless, anonymous, and even headless figures of bare life.

 

Michael Uebel

Michael Uebel, Ph.D., LMSW, has taught literature and theory at the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and the University of Kentucky. Currently a candidate at the Austin Center for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, he practices as a psychotherapist in private practice and as a medical social worker at a hospital in Austin. Uebel was Fellow at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in 2006-7. He is the author of a wide range of essays on cultural and intellectual history and on mental health practice. Author and editor of several books, including Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Duke University Press) and Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages (Palgrave), he is currently working on Masochism in America, examining the formation of moral and social consciousness in the post-war period. Other major projects under way include two co-authored books: one in the field of gerontology and another on the case and memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber.

His talk on Friday, Feb. 29th, 2008 at 6:00 p.m. in the Little Theater at the Toledo Museum of Art is entitled, "Masochism in America." The talk examines the production of moral and social consciousness in the post-war period with special attention to the two decades following WWII, an era in which the threshold of shame declined enough to allow the formation of two predominant modes of its expression, both of which share an interest in libidinalizing shame from complementary, if competing, angles. These modes are psychological theory, especially combat psychiatry, as it developed to explain the violence of WWII and to treat those affected by it, and the popular imagery of Nazi atrocity and sadomasochism, which attempted to work out the shame of the American response to the concentration camps. Fascination with fascism in the post-war period makes a spectacle out of interanimating desires and anxieties associated with gender (the rise of feminism, the dominant woman, and the fading of masculinity into mass man), racial identity (nationalism and the formation of a Jewish state in Israel), and consumerism (fashion and the suburban idyll).