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 Workshops are limited to 10 participants. Applications are now being accepted and will be considered as of February 18, until space has been filled. Thank you for submitting your intention to participate in the workshop: "The European Collapse and the Emergence of the Cognitive Precarious Subjectivity". We will be in contact with you shortly. "The European Collapse and the Emergence of the Cognitive Precarious Subjectivity." Workshop: Wednesday, March 2, 11AM to 1PM / 3PM to 6PM Thursday, March 3, 11AM to 1PM 283 College Street, Upper Floors (west of Spadina) $65 / $85 - Enrolment Closed. This workshop will explore, within the context of social collapse & sacrifice, the emergence of the general intellect as historical actor, with particular emphasis on its compositional search for a properly pleasurable body amidst an accelerated Infosphere and stressed Psychosphere. Franco Berardi, aka Bifo, is a writer, theorist and activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Like others involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980s he contributed to the magazines Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris), Metropoli (Rome), and Musica 80 (Milan). His recent published works include Ethereal Shadows (2007), Felix Guattari (2008), Precarious Rhapsody (2009), The Soul at Work (2010), and After The Future (2011). He is currently collaborating on the magazines Loop and Alfabeta2, as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. Workshops are limited to 10 participants. Applications are now being accepted and will be considered as of February 18, until space has been filled. Thank you for submitting your intention to participate in the workshop: "Dr. Freud's Nephew or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Commodity Fetishism". We will be in contact with you shortly. "Dr. Freud's Nephew or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Commodity Fetishism." Workshop: Saturday, March 12, 11AM to 1PM / 3PM to 6PM Sunday, March 13, 11AM to 1PM 283 College Street, Upper Floors (west of Spadina) $65 / $85 - Enrolment Closed. Dr. Jeanne Randolph is a psychoanalytically-biased intellectual who free associates in public. The good doctor will perform an autopsy on consumerism while it is still alive. Dr. R will begin with a dissection of the modernist presumptions of Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, the so-called "Father of Spin." This will no doubt expose the hypotheses and illusions infecting her next book The Godliness of Goods. Ethics of Luxury and the Luxury of Ethics Public Address: Monday, March 14, 7PM at Lula Lounge 1585 Dundas St. W. (west of Dufferin) $5 admission Jeanne Randolph refers to her presentations as research. The research method is free association in response to selected slide images from her vast collection. Jeanne's cogitations will address the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to contemporary culture, her paranoia about the underlying assumptions of advertising, and her recent musings about pantheistic aspects of consumerism, all accompanied by unpredictable fugitive hypotheses. Dr. R's most recent book is Ethics of Luxury: Materialism and Imagination (YYZBOOKS). Since 1980 she has written and "lectured" in Canada, the USA, and Europe on psychoanalytic dimensions of phenomena such as MRIs, Barbie dolls, boxing, computer games and advertising. Jeanne escaped from Toronto seven years ago and is now hiding in Winnipeg. Due to seating capacity, workshops are limited to 12 participants. Applications are now being accepted and will be considered as of April 8, until space has been filled. Thank you for submitting your intention to participate in the workshop: "Externalities and Sublimities". We will be in contact with you shortly. PUBLIC ADDRESS: "Externalities and Sublimities" Friday, April 29, 7:30PM at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art Suite 124, 401 Richmond Street West $7 / $10 admission, includes refreshments & reception. This public address will deal with the problem of external costs, the possible impossibility of their resolution, what this means for sustainability theory and, en plus, the implications of all this for theories of the sublime and the urban sublime. Prof. Stoekl will be considering the aesthetics of the city, the status of waste in the city, and the relation between the sublime and waste. WORKSHOP: "Externalities and Sublimities" Satuday, April 30: 11AM to 1PM / 3PM to 6PM Sunday, May 1: 11AM to 2PM. 283 College Street, Upper Floors (just west of Spadina) $65 / $85 - Picking up from Friday's public address, this weekend workshop will focus upon the three themes of externalized costs, retrofitting the city, and gleaning: Externalities. What are they? How can they be calculated? What is the "sublime" of externalities? How does thinking about externalities change the way we can think about "sustainability"? Retrofitting. Necessity of calculating energy inputs. Concomitant impossibility: temptation of Technocracy (as political/planning movement). The temptation of fascism (Technocracy) vs. the anarchism of the local. Planning and its necessity/impossibility: the era of detournement and retrofit. The goal of "happiness" calculation, the question of sacrifice, and their relation to the sublime in the "experience" of the localized / retrofit city. Gleaning. The Gift economy as a response to the collapse of the money / global economy. Gift and sacrifice in the rituals of depletion. Gift giving as a recognition of the sacred (depleted) object as its own agent. The gift as a response to post-mortem materialism. Retrofit as gleaning. The sublime of the gleaned, retrofit city, as opposed to the esthetics of the city. BIOGRAPHY: Allan Stoekl is Professor of French and Comparative Literature in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Penn State University. A leading scholar of twentieth century continental French literature and intellectual history, Stoekl has focused his recent efforts upon the questions of energy and social space from a global, economic, and political perspective, with particular emphasis upon the city as locus of a transformative ecology. His most recent publication is Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minnesota 2007). Robert Hullot-Kentor's public address & workshop "On the Electronics of Human Depletion" has been postponed until Fall 2011.
An experiment in organized curiosity: wondering about the gravy train, post-fordist luxury, austerity measures waste and - where has luxury gone, the luxurious, the wasteful, in crisis. Via a series of intimate workshops & public addresses.
Friday April 29: Public address with Allan Stoekl on postsustainability. 7:30pm at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art. View poster here. Robert Hullot-Kentor's visit is postponed until Fall 2011. Queries may be sent to knot@283college.ca An experiment designed by Of Swallows, their Deeds, & the Winter Below and LOT: Experiments in Urban Research. With the generous support of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and the Canadian Media Research Consortium.
Queries may be sent to knot@283college.ca 
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