[ecrea] Randy Martin's presidential address - Politics of Association/Trajectories of Affiliation

>Randy Martin's presidential address from this year's CSA conference
>has been posted online. Information below.
>Cheers
>Stevphen
>
>
>Politics of Association/Trajectories of Affiliation
>http://www.archive.org/details/PoliticsOfAssociationtrajectoriesOfAffiliation-RandyMartin
>
>Randy Martin
>Presidential Address
>Cultural Studies Association (U.S.)
>Berkeley, CA March 19, 2010
>
>An address of this sort might properly take cultural studies as its
>object and inquire into its domain and operations. No doubt, much fine
>work has been done toward what must remain an incomplete project.
>Equally certain, what keeps cultural studies interesting and
>interested, is a refusal to take for granted what it is or what it
>does. What follows here is still more partialto take the CSA itself
>as an object to inquire into what it can do, given present conditions.
>The question itself is meant to be projective, not simply a report to
>an academy, but a desire that might be tempted to be entangled in one.
>Organizational wanting is by no means straightforward but calls
>forward a queasy mix of relying upon something, call it a regime of
>disciplining institutionality that is at the same time betraying us.
>What can we ask of an association that might at once stitch us into
>and unmoor us from this matrix of obligations? Like the droll
>announcement once the plane has already landed, we too realize you
>have a choice, that CSA comes without guarantees of return, and that
>many other attachments make their claim on you. How then, can we think
>of affiliation given our multiple sites of belonging to institutions,
>professional practices, and worldly endeavors?
>
>The excitement of this place where we gather is that it lies at the
>crossroads of manifold crisesof the university as a self-regulating
>institution; of knowledge as holding sway over a particular domain; of
>society itself as an accomplishment of human cooperation. Many voices
>are being raised in refusal, resistance, reformatting of these crises.
>Surely we want to know what cultural studies has to say, how its
>critical traditions might orient us, what spaces it might open. But we
>here will also want to know how to give value to our work together,
>how to recognize what it brings together in us, to elaborate the
>organizational capacities that would make of us more than lockers of
>hurt. Perhaps it is worth taking stock of cultural studies own
>conditions of organization and then to see how these articulate with
>the activisms, interventions, and imaginings of our political surround.
>
>

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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
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T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
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Office: 5B.401a
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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