[FOPA 2025] Day 1

** Please note the ticket price includes booking fee and GST

Some notes on this years program...

The so-called crisis in education is over, we are simply moving on... and so we asked those participating to respond to a nominal orientation this year: 

“Institutional Drift, Value at the Threshold.”

How the program has taken shape is a credit to those involved in the para-academic sphere.

We will have subtle and nuanced connections between the various sessions. There are however, a number of stand-out thematics across the program:

• Onto-politics, sovereignty, occupation and liberation

• Technics, datasets, AI and imagination

• Education, the university and para-academia

• Economics and value

• Literature, poetry and criticism

Day 1: Friday, 12 December Presentations

09.00am Existentialist Society - The Shifting Shadow of Objectivity
The presentation questions education’s long-standing pursuit of pure objectivity, the “view from nowhere” that values detached knowledge over lived experience. Drawing from physics, law, medicine, and anthropology, it shows how observation shapes outcomes, meaning arises from shared practice, and rigid procedures can obscure context. The double-slit experiment, Wittgenstein’s language games, and the Erin Patterson trial all expose objectivity’s limits when divorced from the human subject. Rigour need not mean detachment; understanding deepens when objective measures integrate first-person experience, when numbers meet narratives and principles meet relationships. For education, this means moving beyond standardised metrics to recognise learning as relational and contextual. The aim is not to abandon objectivity but to humanise it, to rediscover that knowledge flourishes where the view from nowhere meets the view from within.

10.15am Melbourne School of Literature - When Poetry is Healthy
The MSL committee will present a panel on poetry introduced and moderated by Eva Birch and Lucy Van. Melinda Bufton will present on her poetry practice and research into Gurlesque poetics, and what this can mean for unlocking the ambiguities of feminist histories whilst keeping space open for emergent work. The politics unfold, the poetry collects; a speculation into how we might read and feel these accretions and collage-like tendencies threaded through contemporary feminist poetries. George Mouratidis will present on the theory and practice of Beat poetics, counter-cultural production, scrambling the careerist equation of “success”, and engaging and building community organically and intersectionally sans box-ticking brand maintenance and creation of yet another exclusive bubble/”scene” of sniffy hipness. In short: open head, open heart, open eye, open ear, breath, body, kinesis, transmission, compassion, generosity, spontaneity. Sam Moginie will present a short talk on small-press objects from Melbourne’s poetry scene.

11.30am Brendan Casey & David Motamed - Language at the Edge': John Forbes as Prose Writer and Critic
This session revisits 'Language at the Edge', an unpublished talk by poet John Forbes (1950–1998), whose wit and intelligence came to define a generation of Australian poetry. Drawing on this text, and the forthcoming collection Life’s No Joke: Selected Prose, editors Brendan Casey and David Motamed explore Forbes’s work as a prose writer and critic, his reflections on poetry’s institutional and political entanglements, from the avant-garde ferment of the 1970s to the academic consolidation of the 1990s. When language drifts too close to the institutions, Forbes warns, it starts to mistake safety for meaning. Through a reading and discussion, the session traces Forbes’s humour, his resistance to professionalisation, and his continuing challenge to how we value poetry.

12.45pm Eva Birch & David Ferraro - Psychoanalysis, Literature, the Unconscious and Enjoyment
Eva Birch will present a talk on psychoanalytic writing. The seminars of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, presented between 1952 – 1980, inspired a new wave of psychoanalytic writing, termed écriture féminine (women's writing). In the 1970s, writers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Catherine Clément experimented with writing from the unconscious in contrast to more controlled theoretical or scientific forms. From contemporary first-person narrative writing to the fetishisation of the case note in mental health settings, what is the legacy of this movement today? David Ferraro will present on contemporary forms of satisfaction as they relate to psychoanalytic understandings of politics, social bonds and symptoms.

02.00pm Leon Kalumba, Claire Colebrook & Chris Murray - William Blake's Friends in Eternity
Blake is a figure who has been a source of inspiration to those who challenge institutions of knowledge and art. William Blake has long been a source of inspiration for theorists and artists alike. His work moved against Christianity as an organised religion to find a model for a radically vital life. Blake's visionary art was produced in conversation with spiritual entities, his friends in eternity. This panel will explore the way that Blake had been a source of inspiration for 20th Century visionaries. Leon Kalumba will outline Blake’s influence on Marshall McLuhan. Claire Colebrook will present aspects of her work on Gilles Deleuze and Blake. Chris Murray will present on Blake as a source of inspiration for the fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

03.45pm School of Political Economy - The compelling case for teaching political economy and economics outside of economics departments and universities in general.
In no other discipline do students around the world so regularly rebel against the content of their instruction than in the field of economics. This is due to the overly narrow nature of the economics curriculum which students generally find to be dull, difficult, and most of it all, of very limited use to understanding the economy, or the world in general. The remedy for this parlous situation is to introduce intellectual pluralism and interdisciplinarity into the curriculum. As will be explained, this broader and richer approach is best described as ‘political economy’ rather than ‘economics’. Given ongoing resistance to reform within universities, the School of Political Economy (SPE) was established in 2019 to offer the type of economics education that universities should be offering. The presentation looks at SPE’s development thus far and considers the extent to which it might offer a general template for undertaking tertiary education outside the university system.

05.00pm Platonic Academy - Why the Universities Will Never Teach Platonism
The modern state-sponsored institution of research and higher education is often labelled “The Academy” and yet the ethos of the modern Academy has drifted so far from the ethos of the original Academy that the latter now appears thoroughly anti-Academic. This lecture will explain Plato’s approach to academic research and why it would be foolish to expect that Platonic philosophy would ever be taught in the universities of our day.

06.15pm William Bennett & Fabio Bucci - Wertkritik: Threshold to True Emancipation
The value-critique approach to Marxism rejects the transhistorical concept of value and labour. As a political framework it is concerned with moving beyond the threshold of capitalist value and commodity producing labour. This panel is organised to introduce some key concepts and principles of the Marxian philosophical school of Wertkritik (Value-critique). William Bennett will provide a survey of heterodox Marxian lineage of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, through Moishe Postone, to Robert Kurz, in order to introduce a new Marxian theory of Value and Crisis. Fabio Bucci will offer a more in depth analysis drawing on Wertkritik thinkers. He will discuss the concept of dissociation associated to the critique of Value as expressed by Roswilta Scholtz i.e. that “the fundamental contradiction of socialisation through value, between content and nature (substance) and abstract value (form) is determined by its gender specificity.”

07.30pm Mongrel Matter

TBC