SURPLUS EXCESS

On April 4th and 5th, the AESA/Rethinking Marxism conference on SURPLUS EXCESS took place at the University of California, Riverside, welcoming over 70 scholars from around the world to the Southern California campus. With the one exception of the session celebrating the 20th anniversary of RM, the conference dispensed with plenary sessions, offering instead a large array of panels on various aspects of SURPLUS and EXCESS.

Conference goers commented on both the breadth and the genuine interdisciplinarity of the conference. For instance, a series of three sessions on Pre-modern surplus brought together a group of literary critics who focus on the material culture of the medieval European world. Another panel on “The Psychoanalytic Politics of Surplus” examined the effect of the psychoanalytically inflected philosophies of Zizek, Badiou, and Lacan on theories of surplus. Yet another panel took up theoretical considerations of surplus in film studies, while another panel focused on the intersections between Marxism, surplus, and queer theory.

One of the most important characteristics of the conference was the atmosphere of true intellectual exchange generated by the participants. Whether discussing jazz, theories of architecture, concepts of “the gift,” theoretical difficulties of interpellation, or the consequences of “post-humanism,” conference goers worked at creating bridges between their disciplinary islands and points of view. The result was a fostering of real interest across those disciplinary divides, and discussions that generated authentic questioning—of approaches as well as conclusions.

The one plenary session, on the 20th anniversary of Rethinking Marxism, gave some members of the editorial board an opportunity to reflect on their relationship to the journal and its mission, as well as to consider where they would like to see the journal head in the years to come. It was well attended and was captured digitally, and is available as a full podcast at rtsp://mainstream.ucr.edu/marxism.mov or http://mainstream.ucr.edu/marxism.mov.

A number of participants offered feedback on their experiences at the conference. Here are a few:

Thank you and the conference commitment for a truly intellectually stimulating conference. I thoroughly enjoyed the papers and meeting the Rethinking Marxism crowd.-- I came in not knowing at all what to expect. I subscribe to NLR and Radical Philosophy, but I discovered RM through artist's resumes- Mark Lombardi, Martha Rosler, The Atlas Group- and read the call for proposals on your website. Highlights for me include the session on Psychoanalysis, surplus and politics . . . the discussion of demands versus needs I have found to be particularly fruitful with regard to the work that I do as an architect. Much of what I heard in the sessions that I attended was taken up in some of the conversations I had with others afterwards, I thus felt that participation had an ongoing quality about it, informing other sessions and other conversations as the conference went along. I also would have to single out the 20 Year Anniversary Session as important, both because I did not know much about RM in first place, and because hearing the saga of the magazine from the voices of its founders contextualized the progression of the work of the magazine and revealed some of the internal debates that one would not know of otherwise. ---

The conference was literally a piece of art, insofar as, in Lacan's words, an art work "calms people, comforts them, by showing them that at least some of them can live from the exploitation of their desire.". . . I was also impressed by the attitude! It is very rare today to find people whose attitude is no "attitude."--- Smoothly run, intellectually stimulating, and truly interdisciplinary,it was a very successful conference from my perspective. --- One of the elements of the conference I found particularly energizing was its interdisciplinary nature. Perhaps I am inclined to get too walled up within my own field of study, so I found the multiple approaches to the subject to be very refreshing.--- It was by far the most rewarding and challenging intellectual and political conference I've attended in awhile. My head is still swimming with ideas.---

The caliber of the papers was consistently high, yet they were also very accessible despite the incredible interdisciplinarity of the conference. I would like to single out for special mention the talks by graduate students or teams of graduate students and faculty, which I thought were extraordinarily good, paradoxically better than what one hears at most disciplinary conferences. The conference topic and interdisciplinary focus obviously elicited some remarkable submissions. The planning committee and selection committee are both to be commended!---