The 2022 boundary 2 Annual Conference was held from March 31-April 2 at Dartmouth College. The meeting also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the journal. Talks from the conference are now available online below and via YouTube.
Paul A. Bové: The Education of Henry Adams
Charles Bernstein: Reading from his Poetry
Arne DeBoever: Smears
David Golumbia: Cyberlibertarianism
Bruce Robbins: There Is No Why
Christian Thorne: “What We Once Hoped of Critique”
Jonathan Arac: William Empson and the Invention of Modern Literary Study
Stathis Gourgouris: No More Artificial Anthropisms
Donald E. Pease: Settler Liberalism
Lindsay Waters: Still Enmired in the Age of Incommensurability
R.A. Judy: Poetic Socialities and Aesthetic Anarchy
James Livingston’s talk, “Fuck Work” is now online! Livingston gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
James Livingston says Fuck Work. That was the original title of the book that now appears as No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea (2016). For centuries we have believed that work is where we build character, and that the labor market allocates incomes more or less rationally. These beliefs have become delusions. What then? Why do we hold fast to full employment as the cure for what ails us, and retain faith in the labor market’s efficiencies?
James Livingston teaches History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He is the author of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (2011).
Christian Thorne’s talk, “Towards the Sociology of Science and Nescience” is now online! Thorne gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
Christian Thorne is Professor of English at Williams College.
Leah Feldman’s talk, “Post-Soviet, Neoliberal, New Right Formations” is now online! Feldman gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
This talk takes up Post-socialist New Right responses to Neoliberalism through a comparative analysis of Eurasianist and Neoliberal models of totality. Following Mirowski’s discussion of the centrality of interdisciplinary, transdisiciplinary, and transacademic structures based on a conception of the informational marketplace and drawn from the post-humanist “cyborg” sciences, I argue that the Traditionalist International not only emerged, as it claims, to battle Neoliberal secular America as Antichrist, but by inhabiting some of the knowledge structures of the thought collective and its vision of totality.
Leah Feldman is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her teaching and research explore the poetics and the politics of global literary networks, focusing on critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and Marxist aesthetics. Her current research traces connections between the Russian and Soviet empires and the Turko-Persianate world. Before joining the University of Chicago, Leah held two fellowships in residence at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies and the Institute of Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest between 2013 and 2015. Her current book project On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus, 1905-1929 exposes the ways in which the idea of revolution informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-colonial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry, prose, and visual media. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union.
David Golumbia’s talk, “Mirowski As Critic of the Digital” is now online! Golumbia gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
Although Philip Mirowski’s work has been profoundly influential in fields as diverse as economics, history of science, political theory, and even literary studies, it is less well-known in the emerging complex of fields which are sometimes referred to as “digital studies,” meaning all the fields that directly analyze the social, cultural, and political-economic impact of the computer. This is unfortunate enough from the perspective of political economy, since Mirowski’s writings on neoliberalism resonate strongly with some of the most incisive political-economic work in digital studies. It is even more unfortunate when Mirowski’s work is seen at a larger scale, wherein he emerges as one of the most serious thinkers anywhere regarding the myriad impacts of the computer, especially but not only on intellectual practice over the last hundred or so years. From his writings on the neoliberal grounding of concepts like “open science,” to his recent “fictionalist” account of the function of information in economics, and especially in his thorough and uncompromising analysis of the computer and its metaphorics across a variety of disciplines in Machine Dreams, Mirowski’s work constitutes an unmatched source of critical thought that deserves to be far more widely disseminated among scholars of the digital.
David Golumbia is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (2016), and The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009).
Chris Connery’s talk, “China, Neoliberal Constellations and the Left” is now online! Connery gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 17, 2017.
Chris Connery is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Donald E. Pease’s talk, “The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism” is now online! Pease gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
Political commentators have adopted contradictory interpretive frames – the end of neoliberalism tout court, the end of progressive neo-liberalism, the emergence of quintessential neo-liberalism, the continuation of neo-liberalism by populist, or fascist, or ethno-nationalist means – to describe the significance of Donald Trump’s election. In his talk, Pease borrows conceptual metaphors and quasi-juridical criteria from Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis get to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown to sort out and critically evaluate these sundry accounts.
Donald E. Pease is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth, where he is also the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities. He is an authority on 19th- and 20th- century American literature and literary theory and founder/director of the Futures of American Studies Institute. He has written numerous books, including most recently Theodor Seuss Geisel (2010), and over 100 articles on figures in American and British literature. He is editor of The New Americanist series, which has transformed the field of American Studies.
Annie McClanahan’s talk, “Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late” is now online! This lecture was given as part of b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
This talk attempts to think critically about the way neoliberalism functions as a periodizing term in cultural and literary studies. It explores the representation of so-called “neoliberal subjectivity”—particularly its association with an ostensibly rich individualism optimistic (if “cruelly” so) about its own entrepreneurial human capital—and argues that this characterization misses what is most quantitatively and qualitatively new about the present. By looking at the way the university has become a privileged site of these critiques, McClanahan argues that accounts of the “neoliberalization” of higher education depend on a historically inaccurate story about the university’s supposedly non-economic past, and also misunderstand the affective and material condition of students today. Turning instead to other sites—the payday loan shop, the homeless encampment, and the prison—she argues for a reframing of how we understand the subjects proper to our current historical epoch.
Annie McClanahan is Assistant Professor of English at UC Irvine. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture(2016). She has previously been a System Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Faculty Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. Her research interests include contemporary American literature and culture, economic thought and history, Marxist theory, and theory of the novel.
Frank Pasquale’s talk, “Relocating the Knowledge Problem: Preserving Professional Judgment in an Era of Metric Power” is now online! This talk was given as part of b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh, on March 17, 2017.
Could a robot do your job? For many business leaders, professions like medicine, education, and law are relics, destined to be replaced by some combination of software, artificial intelligence, and Uber-ized, precarious labor. But this disruptive vision of robotization is based on a naïve view of the quality of existing data, and the nature of progress in these fields. Preserving judgment and autonomy in professional work is critical both for humane labor policies, and improving quality in these fields.
Frank Pasquale researches the law of big data, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. He has testified before or advised groups ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services, the House Judiciary Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and directorates-general of the European Commission. He is the author of The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, French, and Serbian. The book developed a social theory of reputation, search, and finance. He has served on the NSF-sponsored Council on Big Data, Ethics, & Society, and the program committees of the Workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency and the NIPS Symposium on Machine Learning and the Law. Frank has co-authored a casebook on administrative law and co-authored or authored over 50 scholarly articles. He co-convened the conference “Unlocking the Black Box: The Promise and Limits of Algorithmic Accountability in the Professions” at Yale University. He is now at work on a book tentatively titled Laws of Robotics: The Future of Professionalism in an Era of Automation (under contract to Harvard University Press).
Bruce Robbins’ talk, “Liberal Elites” is now online! This talk opened b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh, March 17, 2017.
The term “liberal elites” works as well as it does for the Right because the elites it targets are credentialled by the state, and elites credentialled by the state, whatever their politics, are the targets of a great deal of hostility– much more hostility than elites who owe their status to money. This gives an immediate practical importance to the question of how to think about the state, a question which is in any case at the center of recent debates over neoliberalism. This paper will propose a way of thinking about the state that is aimed in particular at the interests of the humanities and and the scale at which the humanities operate, the scale of human history from the beginnings to the present. Can one see the state as a signature facet of the modern that sets the culture of modernity apart from the culture of pre-modernity? Do the answers to this question help explain contemporary anti-statiism?
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He works mainly in the areas of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999), and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993), among other works.
