On February 23, Dr. Ira Allen will deliver a Rhetoric Unbound lecture. Dr. Allens’s talk, entitled “On Panic as Inducement to Salvage,” will take place at 8.00 p.m. Eastern. The lecture will last 30 minutes and will be followed by both small- and large-group discussion.
Lecture Description
Panic is widely taken to be a bad thing. As I showed in Panic Now? Tools for Humanizing, this commonsense view sets up unhelpfully limiting ways of negotiating an affect that forms an unavoidable constraint on most near-future lives. Panic, put briefly, is that sensibility wherein we feelingly apprehend the end of a world, the end of our own world. As such, the affect is epistemically on-point. Our world, the world of a carbon-capitalism-colonialism assemblage (CaCaCo) we call modernity or, perhaps, prefer not to name at all while living as its full-time beneficiaries and part-time critics, is ending in fire, flood, pestilence, and more. With an intimation of the end of this CaCaCo world, panic does not merely disrupt our senses of a horizon, of normalcy. Equally, it asks, “And after it all, then what?” In this talk, my contention is that—relative to the polycrisis that is the ongoing unwinding and staggered collapse of our world—judicious panic offers an inducement to salvage. It orients us toward ways of metabolizing resources in our limited remaining period of hyperabundance that can leave better artifacts for future world-builders.
Register for Dr. Ira Allens’s Lecture
Click here to register for Dr. Ira Allens’s lecture.
Rhetoric Unbound 