Architecture_Media_Politics_Society Kenneth Frampton interview

If there is a modern invention that is apocalyptical, it is not the atomic bomb. It is the automobile…

A quick notice that Vol 1, no. 4 of ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is now available on-line. This month’s issue, ‘A Critical Architecture: Comments on Politics and Society’, is a fascinating interview-article with Kenneth Frampton.

Read it at: http://architecturemps.com/full-text/

Anne Witchard on ‘Lucky cat’ show, resonance fm this Saturday

Listen this Saturday 1^st December at 3.30pm to our own Anne Witchard on the Lucky Cat show on Resonance FM, hosted by Zoe Baxter. Anne will be talking about her latest book Lao She in London (Hong Kong University Press 2012) which details the time Chinese writer Lao She spent in London in the 1920s. The book reveals Lao She’s encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce as well as his tiem spent in the notorious and much sensationalised East End Chinatown of Limehouse.

If you don’t happen to be in central London, you can listen online at: Resonance 104.4FM.

Agit Disco updates

Stefan Szczelkun’s Agit Disco has been widely and very positively reviewed in a number of recent publications. The project collects the playlists of its 23 writers to tell the story of how music has politically influenced and inspired them. The book provides a multi-genre survey of political musics that goes beyond protest songs into the darker hinterlands of musical meaning.

In Anarchist Studies 20.2, Jim Donaghey describes Agit Disco as ‘highly effective in sparking a reconsideration of the reader’s or listener’s experience of music and politics’, in a way which ‘will surely encourage others to begin their own dialogues, and contribute to those million compilation CDs that Szczelkun hopes for’, while Phil England, in The Wire, remarks that the ‘personal selections inside, directly or indirectly, prompt all kinds of questions, reanimating them as a living dialogue in the present.

In a lengthy review in the journal Socialism and Democracy, Matt Callahan is particularly insightful: ‘The music industry long ago made pop music journalism an extension of its dominance over music production, distribution and consumption. Agit Disco has the great virtue of enabling informed discussion of music by people who clearly cherish the music they are discussing. The value of music, therefore, is of a different order of magnitude than that of a disposable unit manufactured for financial gain. What comes across is a love and respect for music, a celebration of music’s timeless role in the life of communities and in their resistance to oppression … The task Agit Disco sets out to accomplish, therefore, bears a superficial resemblance to both cultural studies and pop music journalism while on a more profound level making a critique of both. That this critique comes in the form of a praxis as opposed to a conventional polemic is actually part of the critique – targeting self-proclaimed or institutionally sanctioned “experts” who in addition to passing judgement on what is good music and its proper relationship with politics, rule out the intelligence and creativity of working-class and other supposedly less qualified people’.

There is also an interview with Stefan Szczelkun and Anthony Iles published in BANTmag (Turkey): http://www.bantmag.com/mag/04/page/view/448

Agit Disco is published by Mute books, 46 lexington st, london, w1f 0lp. www.metamute.org

Classifying Films seminar, December 5th 2012

Classifying Films: The British Board of Film Classification in 2012

December 5^th 2012, 3.00pm
Room 3.07, University of Westminster, Little Titchfield Street, London

Our friends and colleagues in the Centre for the Study of Law, Society and Popular Culture are pleased to announce the next instalment of the Entertainment Law: Theory Meets Practice series, which will be a guest lecture given by Lucy Brett, Head of Education and an Examiner at the British Board of Film Classification. The talk will involve the viewing of clips from key films from the BBFC’s archive! All are welcome.

The BBFC celebrates its centenary this year, and you might also be interested in the current film series and exhibition at the British Film Institute, Uncut, and also the new book Behind the Scenes at the BBFC, to which two members of the Law School at Westminster have contributed.

Overloaded Form: Pynchon and Bolano seminar, Nov 28th

Wednesday 28^th November, 4.00pm – 5.30pm
Room 106, Wells Street, University of Westminster, London W1T

Martin Eve (University of Sussex)
‘Opening children’s eyes’: Overloaded Forms and the Didactic Function

Since Pynchon, the postmodern encyclopaedic form has been recognised as possessing an ethical core. Indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow was only briefly treated solely as a structure of interminable play and quickly found its place, especially in light of Pynchon’s other novels, as a politicised work focusing on the military-industrial complex and contemporary America. It can equally be asserted, though, that the “ethical turn” in literary studies is sited at a specific, historicized moment and is not without its own problems: when we say “ethical”, rather than “moralising”, are we, in fact, merely refusing to recognise the relativity and transitivity of our own moral strictures? To begin to formulate a less innocent, more experienced, new terminology for this mode, this paper will look at two overloaded works, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Through an analysis of these immense, torrential novels, the paper will unearth their inherent didactic function, examine the way in which they conscript our intellectual capital to pre-dispose us towards their ethics and draw out the place of teaching and learning, through the representation of the university and academia.

Allan Stoekl seminar: Surrealism: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Question of External Cost, Nov 21

Wednesday 21st November, 4.00-5.30pm
Room 104, Univesity of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T

Professor Allan Stoekl
‘Surrealism: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Question of External Cost’

Our Visiting Professor in the Institute this year, Allan Stoekl, will be giving a small series of seminars reading work from the book he is currently writing on post-sustainable cities, energy and the avant-garde.

The first of these will be on Wednesday 21st November from 4-5.30 in room 104, in the University’s Wells Street building. If you’d like to attend, do please email David Cunningham: cunninda@wmin.ac.uk

Allan is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. His many publications include the books Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Tom Hingley talk, November 16th, 1pm

For any aging ‘baggies’ out there, our friends in the Law School are hosting Tom Hingley in their Entertainment Law: Theory Meets Practice series. The event will take place in the University of Westminster’s Portland Hall, Little Titchfield Street building at 1.00 on 16th November 2012. All welcome.

Tom was the singer for the pop group the Inspiral Carpets, one of the key bands of 1990s along with The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays. Tom has recently published an excellent memoir Carpet Burns and he will be talking about his experiences in the music business as well as signing copies of his book. In addition, Tom may perform a few numbers from his extensive back catalogue.

Derrida: A Biography review

For fans of Jacques Derrida, David Cunningham’s review of Benoit Peeters’s recently published biography, which appears in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, is currently up as a freebie on the website. You can read it here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/grande-biog

New Reading Group at Carroll / Fletcher, Dec 12 2012

Reading Group at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery
Chapter 1 | Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition

December 12^th 2012,7.30pm
Caroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ

Chapter 1 is the first session in a series of participatory discussions that will use relevant, accessible texts as a starting point. For this opening meeting, we will be considering David Harvey’s 2009 text Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition. In this essay, Harvey analyses the events that have led to the current economic crisis and maps out the various social movements that are currently challenging capitalism.

The discussion will be initiated by David Cunningham, writer, academic and Principal Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Westminster and editor at the journal Radical Philosophy; and Jon Goodbun, writer, academic and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Westminster. The conversation will be open to the audience and their contributions welcome.

To download David Harvey’s text click here

Booking essential as places are limited: carrollfletcher.eventbrite.co.uk

Refreshments will be provided

t +44 (0)20 7323 6111
e info@carrollfletcher.com
www.carrollfletcher.com

Englishness Elsewhere: Contemporary English Travel Novel seminar

Wednesday 14th November, 4.00pm – 5.15pm
Wells Street, room 106

Bianca Leggett (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Englishness Elsewhere: Exploring Parochialism in the Contemporary English Travel Novel

Ever since the days of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, English fiction has repeatedly portrayed travelling protagonists who feel possessed by the need to be English elsewhere, that is, to travel. Terry Eagleton has suggested that the ‘striking number of contemporary novels written in England but set in some non-English locale suggests ‘a sense that from the viewpoint of “creative” writing there is something peculiarly unpropitious about the typical social experience of an industrially declining, culturally parochial, post-imperial nation.’ This paper traces the historical and cultural origins of the myth of the English as a nation that both loves travel and yet remains staunchly parochial, suggesting that contemporary Crusoe-stories are part of how the English have attempted to understand their role in a post-war postcolonial world. It considers how this myth is revisited and revised in three stories of Englishmen in Continental Europe, Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (1990), Julian Barnes’s Metroland (1980) and Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance (1998). While each novel comments on historically distinct moments in English attitudes to European identity, their similarities suggest a shared desire to critique English insularity. Finally, the paper asks whether the portrait of Englishness which finally emerges is more ambivalent than it first appears, suggesting that its admonitory messages are tempered by elements of postcolonial melancholia and nostalgia.

Capitalism, Democracy and the Novel seminar

Courtesy of our friends in the Centre of the Study of Democracy …

The Prose of the World:
Capitalism, Democracy and the Novel

Dr David Cunningham, University of Westminster
Tuesday November 6, 17:15-18:45 | Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, Wells Street

UPDATE: Video posted at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR5ktvgFqVc&feature=em-share_video_user

THE MAKING OF MODERN ANKARA: SPACE, POLITICS, REPRESENTATION, November 23rd

FRIDAY 23 NOVEMBER, 2012 2-7PM (followed by exhibition opening and reception)
MG14, UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER, 35 MARYLEBONE ROAD, LONDON NW1 5LS

An international symposium organised by the Architecture Research Group at the University of Westminster in conjunction with SOAS Seminars on Turkey.

The making of modern Ankara is a momentous yet oft-neglected episode in twentieth century history. The transformation of this ancient Anatolian town into the capital of the Turkish Republic captured the world’s attention during the interwar period, when Ankara became a laboratory of modernism and nation building.
Largely designed by European architects, the new capital embodied the reformist ethos of a secular state firmly projected towards the West. Today, as this sprawling city of over four millions seeks to reinvent its identity, its modern development is the subject of growing scholarship and public interest.

The half-day symposium brings together a panel of scholars from architecture, planning, art history, heritage, and Turkish studies to revisit the making of modern Ankara in a cross-disciplinary perspective, while also debating its legacy on the eve of the Republic’s 90th anniversary. The event will be followed by the launch of Building Identities, an exhibition about Ankara’s Republican architecture curated by the Turkish Chamber of Architects, Ankara branch.

THE EVENT IS FREE FOR ALL. PLEASE BOOK AT themakingofmodernankara.eventbrite.co.uk

PARTICIPANTS WILL INCLUDE: Elvan Altan Ergut, Middle East Technical University Martina Becker, ENGLOBE/Marie Curie, Middle East Technical University Lindsay Bremner, University of Westminster Eray Çaylı, University College London Davide Deriu, University of Westminster Benjamin Fortna, SOAS Zeynep Kezer, University of Newcastle Melania Savino, SOAS, Kunsthistorische Institut Florence

Queer London Conference: Call for Papers

Queer London Conference: Call for Papers

Saturday 23^rd March, 2013
Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster, London, UK

Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Matt Cook (Birkbeck College, University of London)

This one-day conference is dedicated to a consideration of London and its role in creating, housing, reflecting and facilitating queer life. It aims to bring together scholars from a variety of different disciplines and backgrounds to consider representations of queer London and how London itself represents queers.

That London is a focus and centre for queer life and culture can be seen on its stages; in its bar and club scenes; in its film festivals and its representations in film; in its performance art; in its political life; in its gyms; in its history; in its book groups and book shops; and in its representations in the contemporary queer fiction of writers like Alan Hollinghurst and Sarah Waters. What the ‘Queer London’ conference aims to do then is to offer an opportunity for further analysis and investigation of these representations / representational platforms and to consider the socio-cultural role that London plays in queer life. The conference will focus on the period 1885 to the present and welcomes interdisciplinary proposals and those from a wide range of disciplines, including: Literature, History, Art, Cultural Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies.

Please send abstracts of 500 words, or proposals for panels of three linked papers, by Friday 30^th November 2012 to Dr. Simon Avery and Dr. Katherine M. Graham at the University of Westminster. Abstracts should be sent as Word attachments to s.avery@westminster.ac.uk and k.graham1@westminster.ac.uk, and should include details of your current affiliation and a very short author bio.

Conference blog page: http://queerlondonconf.wordpress.com/

Contemporary Representations of Digital Technology seminar, Weds 31 October

Wednesday 31^st October, 4.00pm – 5.30pm
Wells Street, room 106

Zara Dinnen (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Did we Miss it? The Legacy of Cyberculture in Contemporary Representations of Digital Technology

It seems today the watchword of the contemporary is augmented reality not virtual reality. As we move toward an increasingly ubiquitous digital culture, are we able to begin to historicise late twentieth century projections for a digital future? This talk will discuss how cyberculture might be perceived as being of a distinct technocultural moment, and the ways that might matter for approaches to our digital present.

Further details as usual at: http://seminarserieswmin.wordpress.com/

British Science Fiction Film and Television of the 1950s seminar

Wednesday 17^th October, 4.00pm – 5.15pm
Room 106, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW 

Christopher Daley (University of Westminster)
‘Too many machines’: British Science Fiction Film and Television of the 1950s

In analysing British cinema between 1945 and 1965, Tony Shaw (2001) argues that the influence of American cinema on British audiences was undeniable: ‘Hollywood films dominated the British market from the beginning to the end of the period and not to recognize the potentially significant role American productions had in shaping British perceptions of the Cold War would be misleading’ (p.4). Movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Forbidden Planet (1956) persist as potent symbols of an era which mixed fear of communism and nuclear war with utopian hopes for the technological conquest of other worlds. Whilst the political content of these popular films has been continuously reviewed by critics and scholars alike, the contemporaneous works of British filmmakers has received limited attention. In this paper, I will analyse a series of British films and television programmes which not only challenged or complicated the political content of prominent American SF productions, but crucially, made use of the speculative imagination to reflect upon the state-of-the-nation during a period of rapid technological and social transformation.

Death and Space, Somerset House, Oct 23rd

Death and Space
Tue 23 October 2012, 6.15 pm

£5 full price; £3 student, unemployed and over 65s
The Deadhouse, Somerset House, The Strand, WC2R 1LA

‘Death and the Contemporary’ is a series of site-specific events organised by our new colleague Georgina Colby, along with Anthony Luvera, that will take place across London in October 2012 as part of the Inside Out Festival. Panel discussions with keynote philosophers, writers, visual artists, and theorists will provide an exciting interdisciplinary forum in which to consider issues surrounding the representation of death in contemporary culture.

The first event, ‘Death and Space’, is scheduled to take place at the Dead House, Somerset House, on October 23rd, 2012. Confirmed panellists include David Bate, Andrea Brady, Robert Hampson and Tom Hunter. A glass of wine in included in the ticket price.

Further details at: http://www.insideoutfestival.org.uk/events/death-and-the-contemporary/

China in Britain.4: Visual and Literary Cultures

China in Britain: Myths and Realities
Aesthetics: Visual and Literary Cultures

December 8^th 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm
The Cayley Room, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

You are warmly invited to the fourth in this University of Westminster/AHRC funded series. The day will present an eclectic programme with presentations on modernist architecture, fashion and literature, chinoiserie, and both literature and photography ‘then and now’. Speakers in the morning are Sarah Cheang (Royal College of Art), Edward Denision (Bartlett, UCL), Patricia Laurence (City University of New York), and David Porter (Michigan). The afternoon sessions will include a presentation by photographer Grace Lau and conversations with Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking (Penguin 2012) and novelist Xiaolu Guo. The day will end with a drinks reception.

The full programme along with abstracts and biogs can be found at: www.translatingchina.info

Entrance – including lunch and refreshments – is free of charge so for catering purposes it is essential to book your place by emailing: anne@translatingchina.info

Cultural Politics during the French Occupation seminar, Oct 10th

Cultural Politics during the French Occupation
Wednesday 10 October 2012, 6 pm – 8 pm, Room 354
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Organised by our colleagues in the Group for War and Culture Studies at Westminster

Alan Riding, best-selling author and journalist, on “Writing with the Enemy”

Alan Riding, a Brazilian-born Briton, is a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, most recently as the paper’s arts correspondent for Europe. He is author of Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans and co-author of Essential Shakespeare Handbook and Opera. His latest book is And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. He lives in Paris.

David Drake, Emeritus Reader at Middlesex University, on “Jean-Paul Sartre and les années noires.”

David Drake has written two monographs on French Intellectuals and Politics (both published by Palgrave/ Macmillan). He is currently a UK co-editor of Sartre Studies International and is the author of a biography of Sartre (Haus, 2005). He is Emeritus Reader at Middlesex University, and in 2005, was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Entrance free. To reserve a place, please R.S.V.P. Dr Caroline Perret: C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk

Forthcoming Events in the Centre for the Study of Democracy

Some events coming up that IMCC-followers may be interested in, organised by our upstairs neighbours in the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster.

On Saturday 3rd November, from 1-7pm, there’s half-day conference on ‘The Promise of Democracy’, with speakers including David Chandler, Albena Azmanova, Mihaela Mihai and Paulina Tambakaki. The keynote address will be given by Professor Fred Dallmayr from the University of Notre Dame. Everything will take place in the Boardroom in 309 Regent Street, and will be followed by a wine reception at 7.00. Register online at: http://promiseofdemocracy.eventbrite.com

CSD is also running its usual seminar series on Tuesdays in the Westminster Forum at Wells Street. Speakers this semester include Nicholas Rengger (St Andrews) on Dystopic Liberalism; David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster) on capitalism, democracy and the novel; and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths) on tragedy as a political category. Further details at: http://www.facebook.com/csdwestminster

The IMCC welcomes Allan Stoekl, Visiting Professor in the Institute

The Institute is excited and delighted to welcome our new Visiting Professor in the IMCC, Professor Allan Stoekl. Allan will be based at the Institute during 2012-13, while on research leave in London from his position as Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.

Allan’s many publications include the books Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He was editor of a seminal special issue of Yale French Studies, ‘On Bataille’ (1990), and also translated Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike (2003).

During his time at Westminster, Allan will be working on a new book provisionally entitled Avatars of the Postsustainable City, while also contributing to the work of the Institute in various ways. We very much look forward to working with him!