The inaugural lecture of professor Scott Wilson

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Time: 6.00pm - 7.00pm
Venue: Room JG0003, John Galsworthy building, Penrhyn Road campus, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
Price: free
Speaker(s): Professor Scott Wilson

This talk re-examines Friedrich Kittler's contention that what he calls the ‘discourse networks of 1800' establish the conditions for the rise of the classic Freudian neuroses, obsession and hysteria, the former embodied by the ‘bureaucrat-poet'. The talk then goes on to argue that with the reformatting and homogenization of analogue technologies into digital code and convergence onto various platforms, particularly those predicated on the model of the personal computer, we see both a return and an a-subjective intensification and acceleration of obsessional neuroses across the whole field of techno-bureaucracy. Re-iterating the essential distinction that the computer is not at all a model of the mind or brain, but the materialization of a particularly bureaucratic mode of thought, the talk draws on the self-description of David Adam's obsessive-compulsive disorder as a computer with a glitch or virus in his book The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought (2014), in order to help characterize the life and psychic structure of machine assemblages in the discourse network of 2000.

Followed by a drinks reception.

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Contact: Lucy Williams
Email: l.williams@kingston.ac.uk