Futures of Property & Personhood

In the 1999-2000 academic year the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine began its current research project, “The Futures of Property and Personhood.” In its focus on property, the topic explores the challenges to social and cultural theory posed by privatization and its broader political, cultural and institutional effects. It considers, too, the manifold changes in the status of personhood brought about by the forces of privatization and globalization, as well as the new technologies that facilitate the remaking of human bodies and determine the politics of reproduction. The most pervasive effects of privatization include a general weakening of liberalism’s hold on the social imaginary, a trend that profoundly affects state practices, socio-cultural reproduction, and the institutional production of knowledge. By exploring the synergy and dissonance between conceptions of the private as marketable and the private as inalienable, the CTI poses the question of how critical theory can productively engage with the contemporary transformations and futures of notions such as property, personhood, and related concepts of citizenship, state, culture, and knowledge.
[Full Project Description] [Project Brochure in PDF format]

Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory:
Akhil Gupta (Cultural & Social Anthropology, Stanford)
“Bodily Practices and Rebirth”
May 14, 2003

Gabriele Schwab (English & Comparative Literature, UCI)
“Ethnographies of the Future:
Personhood, Agency & Power in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis”
April 30, 2003

Akira Lippit (Film Studies, UCI)
“One, Two, Three: The Psychic Economy of Multiplicity”
April 2, 2003

Paul Rabinow (Anthropology, UC Berkeley)
“Untimely Meditations: Belated and Adjacent Work-in-Progress”
February 25, 2003

Etienne Balibar (Political Philosophy, Université de Paris X Nanterre &
French & Italian, UCI)
“ My self and my own: one and the same?”
February 12, 2003

Mary Poovey (English & Director of the Institite for the History of the
Production of Knowledge, NYU)
"Commodifying the Future: Futures Trading on the Stock Market
November 25, 2002

Marilyn Strathern (Social Antropology, Cambridge)
“Divided Origins & the Arithmetic of Ownership”
April 17, 2002

Alexander Gelley (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine)
“Language of Order(s): Jenny Holzer in the Public Sphere”
October 2001

Rosemary Coombe (Law, Communication and Cultural Studies, York U)
“Defending Toy Dolls and Maneuvering Toy Soldiers:
Property & Propriety on the Worldwide Web”
May 16, 2001

Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley),
“The Political Body as Organism and the Property of Life”
February 28, 2001

Lindon Barrett (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine)
“Assumptions of Identity, Racial Blackness and Neo-National Culture”
November 29, 2000

William Maurer (Anthropology, UC Irvine)
“Former Miracles and Future Possessions: Privatization, Property, Risk”
April 26, 2000

N. Katherine Hayles (English, UCLA)
“(Un)masking the Agent: Distributed Cognition and Stanislaw Lem’s ‘The Mask’”
April 19, 2000