This time, the Jour fixe will be hosted by Titusz Tarnai. His lecture in English tackles the cultural history of eating.
They can eat.
Investigation of a viral accident.
Viral. Every now and then something goes viral. It is hard to predict what it is going to be. Sometimes it is a cat doing something unexpected.
Viral and the Iconic. Whereas contemporary society contains a dimension defined by entertaining a certain hysteric aspect towards the sterile and the hygienic, allergic to hypothetical poisoning, celebrating a state of chronic phobic hypochondria, the collective shared psychodynamic soup of mass social media is frequently and recurrently exposed to infections of a celebrated kind. How is it that we allow ourselves to be infected on the psychic realm while on the other hand we remain so on guard regarding our gestation?
Hunger. There seems to be a need, or say a hunger, which by this collective feasting on viral content is pleasurably satisfied. This lecture is based on the dissection of a particular image which unexpectedly went viral in 2017. The technique of expanding the attention span, the viral image is arrested to last long enough to undergo a compositional analysis, a technique borrowed from the profession of art theory. Treating, or deliberately confusing, the ephemeral and accidental image as an expression of conscious and unconscious symbolic meaning might allow for understanding as to how the viral image bursts through our mental immune system.
They can eat. The lecture, a one-slide-show, be an exposition of a contemporary feast. Or: a psychodynamic dissection of the iconography of today’s emperors oral symbolism. In particular, of male dominant elites. Mapping current sublimation techniques of eating (with) the other. A live wire. How does it taste when our heroes meet to eat? Now that our emperors themselves have become of a poisoned kind, it might be a good moment to revisit them in a time they were still untainted.
Time: 10. April 2018, 18:30-20:00
Place: SFU Freudplatz 1, 1020 Wien, Raum: 1002