Category Archives: Lunchtime Seminars

The State of Unrest: Crowds, Protests, Atmospheres (Crowds, Affects, Cities Seminar Series)

Dr Illan Wall (Law, Warwick University) – The State of Unrest: Crowds, Protests, Atmospheres

In late 1935, Georges Bataille could feel it. He addressed the Contre-Attaque group as Paris was consumed by protest and counter-protest: ‘What drives the crowds into the street is the emotion directly aroused by striking events in the atmosphere of a storm, it is the contagious emotion that, from house to house, from suburb to suburb, suddenly turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being’. The city had become the bearer of new affects. The atmosphere of the storm gathered over it. The clouds were dark with threat, anxiety and excitement. As the protests, riots, marches and strikes continued, this crisis of feeling spread. It thickened. It began to stick to bodies, condensing in every little interaction. The affects of the disorder spread through the city, through the country. France was gripped by a state of unrest. In this paper I will develop the core analysis of my forthcoming book Law and Disorder (Routledge, 2021), I will explore the ways in which atmospheres of crowded protest can seep out from protests or occupations. How the streets around a crowded event can fill with different feelings, and how those feelings can very quickly spread out around a city, a country, a region and at times even around the world. It is about how these affects can be felt among the populace as the opening of new (exciting and/or terrifying) political, social and legal possibilities. In short, I will suggest that in the state of unrest what is socially and politically possible can be radically redefined.

Illan rua Wall is a Reader at the Warwick Law School. He works on questions of unrest, protest and affective atmospheres. His next book is due out soon, entitled Law and Disorder (Routledge 2021). Illan is one of the founding editors of the blog criticallegalthinking.com and the open access publisher Counterpress. He sits on the editorial board of Law and Critique, and is the Co-Director of Warwick’s Centre for Critical Legal Studies.

POSTPONED: Lunchtime Seminar: Discussion with Daniel Lord Smail on ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’

*This event has been postponed due to the current situation regarding COVID-19.* Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard) will lead a discussion on his article ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’ at 1pm on Wednesday 25 March 2020 at QMUL Mile End Campus (ArtsTwo SCR). All are welcome and lunch will be provided. Please contact Evelien (e.c.g.lemmens@qmul.ac.uk) for a copy of the article.

Continue reading →

Lunchtime Seminar: Robert Schneider, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Resentment Paradigm (ca. 1935-1975)’

Robert Schneider (Indiana University) will give a paper titled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Resentment Paradigm (ca. 1935-1975)’. All are welcome.

Abstract:

In the middle decades of the twentieth century there emerged what I am calling the “Resentment Paradigm.” With intellectual roots in Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment (The Genealogy of Morals), but more urgently in response to the historical experience of fascism and other forms of right-wing extremism, largely in Europe but in the US as well, scholars and intellectuals fashioned a well-wrought analysis of these movements and their ideological appeal that hinged on popular resentment against modernizing forces as the decisive explanatory factor. The main figures in this intellectual enterprise were well-established American academics and public intellectuals: Talcott Parsons, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others; but they also acknowledged the influence of writers associated with the Frankfurt School and especially the important 1950 publication, The Authoritarian Personality, in which Theodor Adorno played a central role. In the post-WWII era, this paradigm, I will argue, achieved a hegemonic reach when it came to explaining such movements as populism, anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, nativism, and all variations of fascism. (It was much less deployed to explain movements from the left.)

By the later decades of the twentieth century, however, this paradigm lost its appeal and in most academic and intellectual quarters was largely discredited. Several factors explain its decline, but they can be summarized in a turn away from an intellectual identification with both a psychological (or in many cases a psycho-analytical) approach and modernization theory. Historians and social scientists, starting circa-1970, tended to be more attentive to the grievances and interests that animated popular movements, and less inclined to see their protest and discontent as symptoms of a maladjustment to “modernity.” Interestingly, the decline of this paradigm coincided with the wide-spread social and political protest movements of “the sixties.” Indeed, as I will demonstrate, for the most part these movements were not “coded” in terms of “resentment.” Nor, as I will additionally suggest, was resentment a core emotion among those who identified with them. In short, the “Resentment Paradigm” “fell” both as an intellectual diagnosis and as a lived experience.

As a coda to my paper, I will point to the revival of “resentment” as an explanation in recent decades for a range of phenomena—from religious fundamentalisms around the world, to nativist, xenophobic movements, to Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. But I will also note how our deployment of this term lacks the rigor that once characterized it. And I will propose that we need to rethink our casual and often unthinking reliance on it to explain some of the most puzzling and disturbing movements of our times.

Biography:

Robert Schneider is Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a specialist in Early Modern French history, having published several books on the subject, including Dignified Retreat: Writers and Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu, forthcoming from Oxford University Press this year. He has held fellowships from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the French government (Bourse Chateaubriand). He has been a visiting fellow at All Souls College and Oriel College (Oxford), a visiting professor at the National Irish University at Maynooth, and three times Directeur d’Etudes Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. From 2005-1015 he was Editor of the American Historical Review. His current book project is on “The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of a Political Emotion”.

The talk will take place in room 3.17, Arts Two, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

Lunchtime Seminar: Michael Pettit, ‘Hot Cognition and the Ends of Cold War Psychology’

Michael Pettit (York University, CA) will give a paper titled ‘Hot Cognition and the Ends of Cold War Psychology’. Lunch will be provided and all are welcome.

The talk will take place in room 2.17, Arts Two, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

Events Spring 2018

Lunchtime Seminars

These seminars will be a mixture of ‘brown bag’ (bring your own) and lunch provided. Whether lunch is provided is signalled in the descriptions below.

17 January:  David Geiringer (QMUL), 2.17 Arts Two. Lunch provided.

7 Feb: ‘Brown bag seminar’ (bring your own lunch), Linnea Tillema, ‘“An exercise in freedom”: Emotional work and norms of self-improvement in Sweden, 1960-1980s.’ 2.17 Arts Two

28 Feb: Will McMorran (QMUL), 3.16 Arts Two. Lunch provided.

14 March: Merridee Bailey (Oxford), ‘Formulaic Emotions: Searching Language for Meaning’. 2.17 Arts Two. Lunch provided.

28 March: ‘Brown bag seminar’ (bring your own lunch), Alex Esche (Max Planck, Berlin), ‘Protesting “in a Proper Spirit”: The Moralities and Subjectivities of Late Victorian Anti-Alien Agitation’, 3.16 Arts Two.

25 April: Mike Pettit (University of York, Ca), “The Affective Revolution? Hot Cognition and the Ends of Cold War Psychology.” 2.17 Arts Two. Lunch provided.

Arts Two is number 35 on this campus map. Mile End is easily accessible on the tube via the Central, District and Hammersmith&City lines.

Emotions in Modern British History Seminar: James Southern ‘The ‘Spotting a Homosexual Checklist’: Masculinity, Homosexuality, and the British Foreign Office, 1965-1991’.

*please note the change in date of this event*

Our second paper in the ‘Emotions in Modern British History’ series will be delivered on 22 November by James Southern (QMUL). James’s paper is titled ‘The ‘Spotting a Homosexual Checklist’: Masculinity, Homosexuality, and the British Foreign Office, 1965-1991’.

Abstract:

At the end of the 1960s, the sexual revolution arrived at the doors of the British Foreign Office. The partial decriminalisation of homosexual acts between men in 1967 meant that diplomats would have to decide whether or not to allow openly gay men to join the Diplomatic Service. Wary of recent high-profile diplomatic scandals associated with homosexuality like those of Guy Burgess in 1951 and John Vassall in 1962, the Foreign Office decided that homosexuality represented a security risk and therefore an automatic bar to employment in the Diplomatic Service – a policy which lasted until 1991. This paper uses Foreign Office files and oral history interviews to chart policymakers’ discussion around the introduction of the bar, analysing what definitions of “homosexuality” were used, why gay men were deemed unfit for service, and how the Foreign Office understood its policy in relation to the shifting social context of postwar Britain. The history of gender, sexuality and emotions within social elites is still a burgeoning field, and this paper draws on work by Martin Francis and Michael Roper in its approach. In its analysis of the Diplomatic Service sexuality bar, the paper aims to identify the types of emotional ‘communities’ institutionalised at the FCO which facilitated the maintenance of such an exclusionary policy. Heavily influenced by the gendering of Cold War diplomatic culture by the U.S. State Department, the Foreign Office hastily created an ill-defined and unenforceable bar on gay men and lesbians, from which much can be learned about the emotional economy of diplomacy, and the relationship between masculinity and elite professional life, in 1960s Britain.

No need to book. Lunch is provided.

The talk will take place in room 3.16, Arts Two, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

Other papers in this series include:

4pm, 6th December: Helen McCarthy ‘Graduate Mothers and Emotional Labour in 1960s Britain’.

See our events programme for more information.

Emotions in Modern British History Seminar: Helen McCarthy, ‘Graduate Mothers and Emotional Labour in 1960s Britain’.

Our final seminar this semester in this series will be delivered by Helen McCarthy (QMUL). Helen’s paper is titled ‘Graduate Mothers and Emotional Labour in 1960s Britain’.

Helen’s paper will be followed by the Centre’s Christmas drinks party. All are welcome.

The talk will take place in room 2.17, Arts Two, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

Other papers in this series include:

1pm, 22nd November. James Southern ‘The ‘Spotting a Homosexual Checklist’: Masculinity, Homosexuality, and the British Foreign Office, 1965-1991’. 3.16 Arts 2.

See our events programme for more information.