End-of-Year Gathering

All Theory Group Members are invited to the End-of-Year Party. This is a chance to enjoy the last of our PSA Grant (ie drink champagne) and go a little bit silly (ie the long-promised academic celebrity heads). Please bring along something silly and vaguely theory related to share with the group.
Where: Arts 1.13 (upstairs tea room)
When: 4pm Friday 2nd December

On a more serious note, Stacey and I would like to thank everyone for their support for the Group and for their helpful, provocative and insightful comments throughout the meetings this year.

November Meeting

Next meeting is on Thursday 3rd November, in Arts 2.31 (Collaborative Learning Studio) at 1pm. Drinks and nibbles as usual.

The reading (Jameson, 'The Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan', Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977)) for this month's theme of the Lacanian Imaginary is available in the bright yellow folder at the ECCS office.

Irigaray at the speed of light

In the latest round of post-modernism bashing in the The Australian, it appears we have Irigaray to blame for fundamentalist Intelligent Design movement:

But the IDers aspire to scientific truth. Unfortunately, the only way to claim that something empirically false is scientifically true is to question science's capacity for sorting out truth from falsehood, the same way postmodernists do.
Conservatives were quick to point out the danger of this view in the 1980s and 90s. They argued that a science that rejected the idea of truth was vulnerable to the most inane forms of intellectual hucksterism. And they were right. It's not hard to imagine scams such as cold fusion or the Scientologist critique of psychiatric drugs gaining ground in a world where science's ability to identify knowledge has been undermined. (Among other monuments to postmodern thought was the idea that E=mc2 might be a "sexed equation" that "privileges the speed of light over other speeds", as Belgian-French theorist Luce Irigaray once asserted.)

While my summary of the article's argument may be somewhat reductive, so (I suspect) is their representation of postmodern thought. So does anyone know where they have pulled the Irigaray quote from, and what the original context was? And more broadly - any thoughts on the science-theory nexus? (Beyond the obvious answer of the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

September Meeting

The next meeting will be held on Thursday 22nd September, 1-2pm, in Arts G.01. The meeting is a little later in the month than usual, but this makes it during study break, so those people who normally have teaching commitments might be able to make it.
The reading is 'The Commodity-Body-Sign: Toward a General Economy of "Commodity Fetishism" by Robert Miklitsch, in Cultural Critique (Spring 1996) 5-40. Photocopies will be available in the usual bright yellow folder at the ECCS office from Tuesday 23 August.
The usual drinks and food will be provided.

Welcome

Welcome to the Theory Discussion Group blog.
As you can see, it's still a bit of a work in progress. But we hope that having this space will allow us to continue discussing issues of interest outside of the regular meetings. At the moment, only registered members can post and comment, so if you want to join up contact Karen or Stacey. This is a shared space, so go ahead and make yourself at (virtual) home.