History

Wednesday 10th December, 6.30 pm Nancy Knowles Lecture Theatre Miranda Fay Thomas is writing her PhD on the gender politics of shaming gestures, and is cosupervised by Shakespeare's Globe and King's College London: 'Our hearts you see not': gesture and the art of persuasion in Julius Caesar Cicero once claimed that, 'everyone knows how few actors there are, or ever have been, whom we could bear to watch,' and also quipped, 'we have to study actors as well as orators, that bad practice may not lead us into some inelegant or ugly habit.' The quandary of gesture is that it is motivated by the need for conviction rather than morality: an ambiguous performative issue that was not lost on Cicero or Quintilian. A play such as Julius Caesar revels in such ambiguities: the connections between hands and agency abound in Shakespeare's political drama, with over 40 references to hands. The play's message about the ethical dilemmas of performance is all the more troubling for its application to reality: Francis Gentleman commented in 1773 that all members of Parliament should be made to memorise the play. This paper explores the manipulative dangers of Roman gesture and the parallels Shakespeare draws with the performance of politics, revealing not only how hands can alter the course of history, but how such theatrical practices themselves aid and abet such a diversion.

This paper maps different levels of nomadic existence within and around literary studies departments, from the marginalisation of literary studies (and the humanities) within the neoliberal university to the itinerant casual and temporary staff who prop up literature departments worldwide. What might the future of literary studies look like under these circumstances? Will the future of literary criticism be pushed outside the university? How might we use nomadism as a force for critique of, and resistance against, the schizophrenic forces of advanced capitalism?

This paper is a version of an article for a special issue of Poetics Today on the future of literary studies.

The contemporary concept of place rests on a paradox: in order to move seamlessly within and between places (real and virtual), one must possess a secure—primarily, legal and economic—connection to a place. Without this secure connection, being-in-the-world means being displaced. By drawing on examples in literature, anthropology, and the testimonies of displaced persons, this chapter illustrates that an over-insistence on the ontological primordiality of place potentially aligns phenomenology with the exclusionary dimension of place in the globalized 21st century. In response, I construct a critical phenomenology of forced displacement that is at once critical of the phenomenology of place, but also views phenomenology as critical to overcoming the contemporary paradox of place.

This chapter argues that contemporary literary criticism suffers from a reflexive faith in things, conceived broadly as static objects that reflect wider political, social, and cultural practices. Literature is re-imagined here as an open-ended event that demands an immanent materialism in which distinctions between literary objects and human bodies no longer stand up. By reflecting on the ambiguous “thing-ness” of Shakespeare, Vallelly draws attention to the elusive nature of things in theatrical spaces, and explores how this enigmatic materiality can be applied to literary experience more generally. To do so, he draws on Roberto’s Bolaño’s 2666, affect theory, and new materialism to construct a new literary materialism, one in which literary meaning is located neither in the human nor in the non-human world, but in the affective correspondence between these worlds. To illustrate this point, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between characters and stones in Shakespearean drama.

Literary studies are living a nomadic existence on the margins of the neoliberal university, forced to adapt to the needs of more profitable disciplines and the insidious marketization of higher education to find an intellectual home. By drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory, this article situates the current state of literary studies in the wider networks of power relations that differentially distribute nomadic experiences in the contemporary world. The article begins with an examination of the contradictions of nomadic mobility in the era of globalized capitalism and how these contradictions interrelate with the study of world literature. The second half of the article focuses on the transformation of labor under neoliberalism, charting the rise of cognitive capitalism and its relationship to the university. While the future of literary studies might look precarious in the era of cognitive capitalism, the increasing casualization of intellectual labor creates the conditions for unstructured, unrestrained, and deterritorialized flows of thought that escape the constraints placed on those in the institution. By harnessing literature’s subversive potential, literary studies can use these nomadic flows of thought to resist the operating principles of the neoliberal university and help combat the conditions that create precarious nomadic experiences across the globe.

Download here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/BtznrWXrnArM48hrzIzq/full?target=10.1080/0969725X.2019.1620450

In this article I examine what happens to the “I” when the other disappears. I elucidate the relationship between ontic – relational ties to specific others – and ontological relationality – the fundamental relationality that facilitates the very existence of the “I.” The loss of an ontic relationality, I contend, ensures that the “I” can never be the same as it was prior to the loss. But the disappearance of an ontic relationality also accentuates that the “I” cannot disavow its ontological relationality, despite the pain and suffering brought about by the loss of a specific other. I argue that exposure to this ontological relationality, through the deprivation of an ontic one, offers us the opportunity to re-think habituated and potentially damaging forms of relationality, particularly in an age when neoliberal rationality encourages us to turn away from the other and to seek shelter in the self. To explicate the chiastic relationship between ontic and ontological relationality, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “hinge,” Judith Butler’s work on grief and mourning, and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “face.” By looking specifically at remembrance campaigns for victims of forced disappearance – particularly in Guatemala and Argentina – I show how faces of the disappeared continue to haunt the political present in ways that refuse the fantasy of a return to a former order. In doing so, these campaigns keep exposing us to the ontological relationality that underpins all human life, encouraging us to find new ways of relating that transcend our habituated and repetitive relational behaviours. This exposure, I argue, illustrates that no amount of self-sufficiency allows us to escape the ontological necessity of relationality. The disappearance of the other, any other, discloses the fraudulent anti-relationality of the neoliberal era by revealing the ties that connect beings together. This disclosure, I conclude, constitutes the importance of the relationality of disappearance.

An evening with Kurdish-Iranian writer, filmmaker, and refugee Behrouz Boochani, who is currently (as of June 2018) incarcerated by the Australian government in the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre (Papua New Guinea). Boochani is author of No Friend but the Mountains: Writings from Manus Prison, which won the 2019 Victorian Prize of Literature at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) General Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Behrouz will join us via video link from Manus Island for the event. We will be joined in person by Omid Tofighian, translator of No Friend but the Mountains, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo and Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.

Boochani and Tofighian will be in conversation with Neil Vallelly (Centre for Global Migrations, University of Otago). They will discuss the book, Australian and other border regimes, and the impact of anti-migrant politics in our era. Three Dunedin poets will also present poetry on themes of displacement.

This event is presented in association with English Language Partners, UNESCO City of Literature, Dunedin Public Libraries, and the Centre for Global Migrations and the Programme of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago.

The Centre for Global Migrations and Mornington Methodist Church are co-hosting a conversation between writer, filmmaker and refugee Behrouz Boochani and Professor Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow and the 2019 De Carle Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Otago. The event will be moderated by Dr Neil Vallelly.

This essay examines why utilitarian calculations have come to dominate neoliberal governance—especially through the widespread use of cost-benefit analysis—and how the COVID-19 pandemic has ruthlessly exposed the limitations of utilitarianism as a model for policy making. Dedication to the utilitarian doctrine of cost-benefit analysis hampered many initial governmental responses to the pandemic, most notably with the “herd immunity” theory pushed by the Conservative government in the UK. Drawing on examples from the UK, United States, and New Zealand, this essay illustrates that those pushing utilitarian responses to the pandemic—for example, prioritizing the economy over number of deaths—do so to protect a neoliberal hegemony that depends on the financialization of costs and benefits. In this respect, a crisis of utilitarianism is simultaneously a crisis of neoliberal capitalism and, as such, generates the conditions for an anticapitalist politics to reimagine the relationship between costs and benefits.

Endorsements:

"Neil Vallelly offers a rich tour of what he calls the futilitarian condition brought about by neoliberalization. Systemic and ubiquitous, this condition deprives us of meaningful lives and robs the world of a future. With an elegant pen, reader-friendly philosophical thoughtfulness, and scores of examples, Vallelly explains that gnawing feeling: "isn't what I'm doing--in my job, ecological practices, ethical consumerism and more--really futile?" Becoming-common, he argues, is our only way out."
— Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

"Why do so many of us devote so much of our time to activity that feels futile? In this brilliant and beautifully written book, Neil Vallelly argues that the neoliberal quest for utility has flipped over into a form of frenetic self-maximization that lacks both social and individual utility. From useless jobs to the labour of unemployment regimes to meaningless communication to consumerist activism, Vallelly shows that we have become trapped in a 'futilitarian condition' in which our labours only entrench exploitative market relations. This original and compelling tour de force is essential reading for anyone who thinks that there must be more to life than this."
— Jessica Whyte, UNSW Sydney

"Neil Vallelly's analysis of our neoliberal predicament is at once historically informed, politically sophisticated, and close to our everyday experience. The book documents the ways that business and political leaders have increasingly offloaded responsibility for social ills onto individuals and shows that the constant exhortations to build up our human capital, to network, to self-brand, self-start, and self-actualize serve only to make us feel useless, anxious, and alone. With the term 'futilitarianism,' Vallelly has coined a witty new entry for our critical lexicon and pointed the way to new forms of solidarity that can overcome our individualized futility."
— Adam Kotsko, North Central College, Chicago

"An extremely lucid, smart analysis of our dilemma. That life in neoliberalism is often futile and nihilistic has been obvious for a long time. That neoliberal politics is covertly pessimistic as to human survival has also been clear. What Vallelly achieves here is a remarkable new theoretical insight into why that is, and why utilitarianism under neoliberal capitalism must mutate into futilitarianism. A thoroughly welcome, timely and profound intervention."
— Richard Seymour, author of 'The Twittering Machine'

Description:
If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility—by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves—we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good.

Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms—including “the futilitarian condition,” “homo futilitus,” and “semio-futility”—to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness.

This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.

PERC Papers Series. Forthcoming November 2021.

Media coverage of the World Cup has rightly highlighted the atrocious working conditions of migrant workers. But we need to broaden our definition of human rights abuses to include the global economic system that forces them to go to Qatar in the first place.

Italian Translation of 'Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and The Production of Uselessness'

Èraro che un libro di filosofia ed economia ci parli in maniera così diretta, quasi intima, della nostra condizione esistenziale. Con sgomento chi legge scopre che la persona intrappolata in attività̀ inutili, valutate solo in base al denaro che generano, è lui stesso. Sono nostre le sensazioni di precarietà̀ e di isolamento che rendono coloro che lo circondano concorrenti o compratori dell’immagine posticcia che deve costruire per essere appetibile nel mercato del lavoro. Siamo noi l’Homo Futilitus, impegnato nel ruolo di direttore marketing del prodotto, anzi del brand, che ciascuno di noi è diventato e si ritrova costretto a vendere. Neil Vallelly ci conduce, con ricchezza di esempi che abbracciano epoche e Paesi diversi, lungo il cammino che ci ha portati al punto in cui siamo, dove ci sembra normale ciò̀ che non lo è, dove tutte le colpe e le responsabilità̀ sono addossate a ciascuno di noi invece che al sistema neoliberista, la cui atmosfera orwelliana ci rende difficile persino respirare. Un libro straordinario, specchio della nostra realtà̀, che dopo averci offerto un nuovo punto di vista sul concetto stesso di capitalismo, svelando così l’abisso in cui siamo stati gettati, ci mostra che una via d’uscita dal non futuro che ci è stato preparato esiste, che non siamo monadi, ma esseri che agendo insieme possono creare una comunità̀ in cui non esiste solo il proprio bene, ma il bene di tutti.

[It is rare that a book of philosophy and economics speaks to us in such a direct, almost intimate way about our existential condition. To the reader's dismay, he discovers that the person trapped in useless activities, valued only on the basis of the money they generate, is himself. We own the feelings of precariousness and isolation that make those around him competitors or buyers of the fake image he has to build to be attractive on the job market. We are the Homo Futilitus, engaged in the role of marketing director of the product, indeed of the brand, that each of us has become and finds himself forced to sell. Neil Vallelly leads us, with a wealth of examples that span different eras and countries, along the path that has brought us to where we are, where what seems normal to us is that it is not, where all the blame and responsibility is placed on everyone of us instead of the neoliberal system, whose Orwellian atmosphere makes it difficult even for us to breathe. An extraordinary book, a mirror of our reality, which after having offered us a new point of view on the very concept of capitalism, thus revealing the abyss into which we have been thrown, shows us that a way out of the non-future that has been preparation exists, that we are not monads, but beings who by acting together can create a community in which not only our own good exists, but the good of all.]