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Thinking Alien (University of Leeds, 17 September 1996)

By Andrew Eastham, 10 January 1997

Conference review

Thinking Alien was an ambitious conference in which a variety of approaches in philosophy, cultural analysis, aesthetic theory and practice came together through a suggestive metaphor and deftly organised framework. Three methodologies were dominant: first, an historical approach to the representation of the Alien in various media; second, an analysis of philosophical critiques of identity, most commonly involving readings of Deleuze and Guattari; and third, a discussion of practices of language, sound and image generally informed or authorised by those theories.

The first approach generally investigated what Annette Kuhn has called 'the cultural instrumentality of the Alien figure'. The Alien Zone volume generally read all things monstrous as signs of variously displaced anxieties around technology and ecological threat or around sexuality, ethnicity and cultural difference. Ray Guins And Omayra Cruz read Independence Day in this manner and amended the alienist reading of the Alien by reference to hopeful fictional monsters and the open alien thinking they saw in the X-Files. Mark Sinker traced a loose genealogy of the Alien songs and examined the history of radio as a fragmented series of invitations to shifting worlds. Other analyses were less bound to particular media or text but presumed an anxiety around the limits of the human as constitutive of identity.

In this sense a critical philosophy of identity was often presumed in these cultural analyses and produced a critique of representation itself. The discussions of Alien Art generally assumed a disruption or cancellation of the referential object: Simon O'Sullivan's paper Of Angels and Aliens was an example of how this tendency became associated, or perhaps conflated, with a variety of prescriptions for an art without borders, taking a machinic model of art from Deleuze and Guattari alongside a focus on the excess within the mute object .

A number of papers attempted to apply these kinds of theory to artistic forms often creating meaningless style wars between, for example, jungle and techno; last year's 'bubbling dissolve' became this year's 'striated rhythm'. A division ran through the conference between music and text which corresponded with a contrast between a perspective on art or text as a virtual anti-reality headset for conveying suitably decentred and potentially Alien effects, and an ideological focus that treated objects as public utterances. Ambivalently situated in the latter camp, Sarah Ahmed accused Mille Plateaux of proposing and performing an uncritical theory of reading that insisted on its notion of becoming as a seduction the reader must accept. For Ahmed, anyone suspicious of the way that certain figurations of becoming involve a complex of fantasies about female and ethnic identity is branded as a cold fish, abstaining from the textual dance of the Anti-Oedipus project.

This critique was framed alongside Diane Beddoes' and Jane Crawford's Deleuzian feminism in a panel on Becomings. Crawford engaged in suggestive (meta)reflections about glass and fibre optics whilst Beddoes reiterated the machinic model of communication in her description of anomalous assemblages. Both of these took monologue forms that allowed no easy focus for debate. Beddoes began with a refusal to answer common criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari; the charge of appropriating schizophrenia to radicalise a theory of reading was dismissed on the grounds that D&G are referring to machinic rather than human assemblages. This doesn't explain why their texts use metaphors poached from classification devices used upon particular bodies in order to figure moments of alienation, whether this classification is in terms of gender, race or mental health. Yet to invoke these problematics of representation seemed to reference either an all-too human or a bankrupt politics to the participants. The lack of dialogue or argument between these currents was disappointing despite the apparently mutual desire to speak of Transformations, but will hopefully be redressed by the conference of that name at Lancaster next summer.

If these discussions of D&G tended to founder on the irreconcilability of the Anti-Oedipus project with identity politics an alernative line was suggested in Jim Urpeths analysis of post-Kantian aesthetics. This broad analysis provided a context for the transposition of the aesthetic category onto the living form suggested in Focillon's The Life Of Forms in Art, a manoeuvre which complemented the variety of discussions of performance.

Cathy Maidens provided an often entertaining discussion of Karen Finlay, Cindy Sherman and Orlan in terms of the alienation of the female body. Her reference to artists of what Paveen Adams has termed 'cosmimesis' provided a context for the discussion of Brechtian technique which also ran after the panel on Impossibilities. Here Pete Buse attempted to imagine an Actor Inhuman, suggesting that theories of acting were implicitly theories of subjectivity and reading Brecht's theatre of alienation against Meyerhold's theory of biomechanics. This kind of analysis tacitly established Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto as a shadow text in the conference, whilst David Sorfa's analysis of a varietyThinking Alien was an ambitious conference in which a variety of approaches in philosophy, cultural analysis, aesthetic theory and practice came together through a suggestive metaphor and deftly organised framework. Three methodologies were dominant: first, an historical approach to the representation of the Alien in various media; second, an analysis of philosophical critiques of identity, most commonly involving readings of Deleuze and Guattari; and third, a discussion of practices of language, sound and image generally informed or authorised by those theories.

If these debates were left unresolved it is a credit to such an expansive conference framework that they recurred in so many different contexts. Simon O'Sullivan, Dan Welch, Nigel Liddel and Tom Tyler organised each aspect meticulously whilst the general plan allowed enough ambiguities to allow multiple entrance points to any theme. I have necessarily omitted a whole range of film and installation work that was showing simulataneously and a number of popular enquiries; Steven Weinburger's discussion of Alien Languages delighted many who found its premises shaky, as did Nick Land's refusal, or was it insistence, to count 170 bpm in a discussion of the flickering cursor in the bassbin. The association with Drew Hemmet's FutureSonic event was especially productive, and Haywire provided an excellent club event at Back to Basics. Having previously hosted BBC sci-fi retro productions in the grounds of a thousand lectures on modernism, Leeds University's Brutalist planes were the site for Alien receptions which will hopefully recur.

Andrew Eastham