A new piece by Chris Daley in the excellent online journal Alluvium about railway fiction. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:

Railways are news. On the one hand, they are the source of consternation as above inflation fare rises couple with the perceived drudgery of commuting to characterise the railways as a site of soaring ticket prices and overcrowded, invariably late trains. But this sentiment lives alongside whimsy and romanticism, be it through preservation lines or the restoration of ageing steam engines. This paradoxical image of the railway system is, however, nothing new within the British popular imagination and as Ian Carter (2000) points out, this may have something to do with the railways’ historical link to contested areas of modern everyday life: “So much that we take for granted today was invented or perfected in the nineteenth century to facilitate railways’ development, or to limit their potential for political, fiscal or physical mayhem: standardised time, a disciplined and uniform labour force, large-scale bureaucratic organisation, joint-stock industrial corporations, close State regulation of private capitalists’ activities.”

Similarly, British fiction has maintained an ambivalent relationship with railways. Confronted with a new revolutionary transport system, Victorian novelists offered the most sustained exploration of the potentialities of trains, yet by being, as Nicholas Daly (1999) puts it, ‘the agent and icon of the acceleration of the pace of everyday life’ (463) in the mid-nineteenth century, the railways were also a source for the countless anxieties of industrialisation. Contemporary fiction, in Britain at least, is curiously quiet on the railways, with their appearance often limited to neo-Victorian narratives that attempt to reignite the energy of the steam age. However, to mark the 150 year anniversary of the London Underground, Penguin will release, in March, a series of railway writings that could, perhaps, ignite an imaginative investigation of a transport system that is often seen as mundane, yet is simultaneously a potent symbol of transformation. It is therefore apt to briefly map the terrain of railways in fiction and popular culture in order to anticipate where any future speculation may venture.

Read further at: http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2013/01/12/railways-and-fiction/

Eyal Weizman, The Roundabout Revolution

January 29th 2013, 7pm
Department of Architecture, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Eyal Weizman, architect, curator and author of The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza will speak at the first of a 6 part lecture series: ‘Critical Humanitarianism’.  Eyal Weizman is Professor of Visual Cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic Architecture, on the place of architecture in international humanitarian law. He is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine.

Religious tension, diminishing resources, city dwelling and environmental catastrophes continue to create vulnerable regions throughout the world.  The necessity for architects to address humanitarian and environmental issues in their practice is increasing.  Do architects have the means to address these issues through their work?  Or are we powerless to act?  Through a series of 6 talks addressing ‘Critical Humanitarianism’ by Architects volunteering for Charities or working with NGOs in the Development Sector we aim to raise some of the difficult ethical and political questions about Humanitarian work and it’s relation to power.

Reading Group at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery
Chapter 2 | Theory from the South

February 13^th 2013,7.30pm
Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ

Chapter 2 continues Carroll / Fletcher’s series of participatory discussions that use relevant, accessible texts to consider pertinent issues of our times. In this session, the starting point will be the first chapter of Theory From The South. Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, with particular attention on pages one through nineteen. With this text, the Camaroff’s attempt to recontextualize global relations, and challenge our perceptions about ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations.

The discussion will be initiated by Lara Pawson and David Dibosa. Lara Pawson is a writer and journalist who has just completed her first book, a work of literary non-fiction about Angola’s recent history. She has held writing fellowships at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Wolfson College, Cambridge, and worked for the BBC World Service in London and as a correspondent in Mali, Ivory Coast and Angola. Dr. David Dibosa is co-author of Post-Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Routledge, 2012). He is Joint Course Director for MA Art Theory and MA Curating at Chelsea College of Art and Design. The conversation will be open to the audience and their contributions welcome.

Download Theory from the South here

Further suggested reading includes, the text in its entirety (pages one through forty-nine); Ato Quayson’s ‘Coevalness, Recursivity and the Feet of Lionel Messi’ (found here); and Achille Mbembe’s ‘Theory from the Antipodes. Notes on Jeans & John Comaroff’s Theory from the South‘ (found 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

The IMCC is delighted to welcome Martin Willis who is joining us this month as Professor in Science, Literature and Communication based within the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster. Martin’s main research interests lie in the intersections between Victorian literature and science, in particular the literary imagination’s response to marginal sciences such as mesmerism and spiritualism, and by literature’s interrogation of scientific sites and conflicts, from the laboratory and seance room to debates in disease theory and vivisection controversies. He is also Editor of of the Journal of Literature and Science, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to scholarship exploring the cross-fertilisation between literature and science across all literary periods.

Martin’s most recent book, Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920: Ocular Horizons, was published by Pickering and Chatto in 2011 and was winner of both the 2011 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize and 2012 European Society for the Study of English Cultural Studies Book Prize. Drawing on science, technology, and literature, the book aims to analyse the interaction between science, sight and the literary imagination in order to understand better how vision was continually transformed as its boundaries were breached by scientific and technological innovation.

We’re delighted to announce the publication of Leigh Wilson’s new book Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh University Press), which we will be launching at the Green Man pub in Riding House Street on Thursday 10th January.

The book presents a new account of the relation between modernism and occult discourses. While modernism’s engagement with the occult has been approached by critics as the result of a loss of faith in representation, an attempt to draw on science as the primary discourse of modernity, or as an attempt to draw on a hidden history of ideas, Wilson argues that these discourses have at their heart a magical practice which remakes the relationship between world and representation. As she demonstrates, the courses of the occult are based on a magical mimesis which transforms the nature of the copy, from inert to vital, from dead to alive, from static to animated, from powerless to powerful. Modernism and Magic explores the aesthetic and political implications of this relationship in the work of those writers, artists and filmmakers who were most self-consciously experimental, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Dziga Vertov and Sergei M. Eisenstein.

A quick plug for Stir Magazine, edited by former Westminster student Jonny Gordon-Farleigh. Having published over the last couple of years online, Stir is launching into print as a quarterly in April. The issues will feature co-operatives, community-led politics and lots of other bottom-up alternatives.  The first issue will be specially themed on the commons and will be co-edited by David Bollier (editor of The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State).

Annual subscription will be £14 for four issues including P&P. In the meantime, you can read the online publication at: http://stirtoaction.com/

Room MG14, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1
Thursday 24th January, 6.30-8.30

Speakers: David Garcia, Jack Self, Matthew Butcher, Mark Prizeman

Staff and students at University of Westminster are collaborating with Hanmi Gallery, Fitzrovia, on a forthcoming exhibition entitled ‘The Global Archive’. Please do come along for the Private View.

‘The Global Archive’
24th Thursday January – 9th Saturday February 2013, 12-6 pm (Monday closed)

Private View : 23rd Wednesday January, 6 – 9 pm

Artists: Tom Corby, Shezad Dawood, Young-In Hong, susan pui san lok
Curated by: Marquard Smith with Emma Brasó and Nina Trivedi

In collaboration with: Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and the International Association for Visual Culture

Artists:

Tom Corby is an artist and writer interested in issues of climate, technology and systems. His interdisciplinary works have been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as internationally at the Japan Media Art Festival or the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. He lives and works in London.

One of the winners of the 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, Shazed Dawood’s work has been exhibited internationally, including presentations at Tate Britain, the 53rd Venice Biennale, and the Busan Biennale, 2010. Recent projects include a solo touring exhibition that opened at Modern Art Oxford in April 2012, and the installation of his New Dream Machine Project II at Parasol Unit. In 2012, he was nominated for the Jarman Award. He lives and works in London.

Young-In Hong completed her PhD at Goldsmiths in 2011. She has developed a number of site-specific projects including Double Encounter at i-myu Projects, London and The Performing City in Aicho, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include the Museum of Art and Design, New York, Rokeby Gallery, London, and A Foundation Liverpool. She lives and works between London and Seoul.

susan pui san lok is an artist and writer based in London. Her multidisciplinary works evolve out of interests in notions of nostalgia and aspiration, place and migration, translation and diaspora. Recent solo projects include Lightness (2012) and Faster, Higher (2008), both in collaboration with Film & Video Umbrella, DIY Ballroom/Live (2007) and Golden (2005-7), an exhibition/residency at Beaconsfield, London, and Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester.

Curators:

Marquard Smith curates, writes, programmes, commissions, and edits. He is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Emma Brasó was curatorial fellow at CCA Glasgow in 2012. She is a curator and art historian conducting a PhD on pseudonymity at University of Westminster.

Nina Trivedi is currently a doctoral researcher at University of Westminster. She has a MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College and has had recent curatorial projects in London and Berlin.

There will be a broadcast on Resonance Radio, 104.4 fm London and online, on Boxing Day, the 26th December, of Stefan Szczelkun’s arrangement and direction of a performance of John Cage’s magnum opus ‘Song Books’ that took place at Toynbee Theatre in Aldgate earlier this year. The programme will start at 5pm, with ‘Song Books’ broadcast between 5.30 and 6.32pm. The programme will end with Stefan reading a selection of rites from ‘Nature Study Notes’, 1969. This little publication, hand-written by Cornelius Cardew, was given to everyone who joined the Scratch Orchestra and was the main common literary reference for concert performances. This leads into the next stage of the research which will go on from Cage to explore the working methods of The Scratch Orchestra. There is also a review of the performance coming out in the February edition of The Wire.

Death and Trauma

December 20^th 2012, 6.15pm
The Swedenborg Hall, 20 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2TH

Speakers: Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Dr Jennifer Pollard and Professor Robert Eaglestone

‘Death and Trauma’ is the second in the series of events ‘Death and the Contemporary’, hosted by Georgina Colby and Anthony Luvera. The twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of work in the area of trauma, and it is widely acknowledged that our contemporary culture is a post-traumatic culture. How has trauma impacted the philosophical issues surrounding death? A panel discussion with four speakers from across the disciplines of literature, the visual arts, and philosophy will provide an exciting forum in which to explore the issues surrounding death and trauma in contemporary culture.

Tickets: £5 full price; £3 reductions
Book here: http://www.theculturecapitalexchange.co.uk/2012/11/29/death-and-the-contemporary-death-and-trauma/

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

UPDATE: You can find an excellent account of the day’s event on Rachel Marsden’s blog at: http://rachelmarsdenwords.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/china-in-britain-4/

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/

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.

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: 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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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