conference speakers

On gestural ethics

René ten Bos

The question 'Where is ethics?' deserves only one answer: it is where language is not (yet) there. So, in the keynote lecture some suspicions about logo centric tendencies in (business) ethics will be raised. Ethics belongs to a domain of silence or, perhaps better, a domain of gestures. It will be argued that this domain is beyond logos and ratiocination and seems to defy managerial logics.

Professor René ten Bos is a philosopher and organizational theorist working at Redbud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He takes an interest in and has published on a wild variety of subjects such as organizational ethics, strategic management, non-human animals and organization, managerial melancholia, organizational defacement, epistemological problems about accountancy, problems of inclusion and exclusion, gender issues, and so forth. For the near future, there are no plans for any decent specialization even though there is a tendency to become more and more involved with aesthetics and political philosophy rather than with organizational theory. At the moment he writes about animals, water, self-help, and ethics.

Anti-Capital 2.0

K-Punk

The recent Disney Pixar film Wall-E is typical of many recent Hollywood products in that it depicts multinational capitalism as a despoiling exploiter. Far from constituting some act of self-laceration, this 'ethical' attack on corporate capital by a multinational corporation is in fact an example of how late capitalist ideology operates: capitalist ideology is itself 'anti-capitalist'. Capitalist ideology, as typified by many aspects of Web 2.0, does not repress, it elicits participation and involvement. Its slogan is: Join the debate. This lecture will ask what form can an effective anti-capitalism take in these conditions. Can anti-capitalism be adequately conceived in terms of an ethics, or must ethics – as Marx and Jameson have argued – always inevitably involve an occlusion of the political? In what ways might the web escape inane discursive inertia and contribute to an anti-capitalist practice?

Mark Fisher is a writer, lecturer and cultural theorist. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre For Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University Of London, and his writing has appeared in Frieze, The Wire, Sight & Sound and Fact magazine. He is best known, though, for his weblog k-punk (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org).