limit experience

Foucault for Sale

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:37:21 +0100

Call for sponsorship to buy Michel Foucault’s archives (2013)

13 May 2013 by Clare O’Farrell

Call for sponsorship to buy Michel Foucault’s archives

Paris, 8 May 2013, Art Media Agency (AMA).

The Ministry of Culture sent out a call for sponsorship to French companies in order to purchase the archives of Michel Foucault.

The archives of the French philosopher consist of 37,000 hand-written or typed documents. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) stated its intention to acquire these documents, ranked as a national treasure, a year ago.

The call for sponsorship concerns €3.5m. Supporting the purchase of a national treasure for the State will allow indebted companies with company taxes to benifit from a reduction of up to 90% within 50% of the sum due.

The national treasure title is a way of protection in order to avoid goods holding a major historical, artistic and archeological value for the country from being exported. The BNF often uses this procedure to enrich its collection. That is how in 2009 it bought the archives of Guy Debord, while Yale University showed its interest in the purchase as well.

Some (nice) thoughts about punishment

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:31:00 +0100

On being asked in an interview whether he envisaged a world without prison, Michel Foucault gave the following response:

“The answer is easy: there have been societies without prisons; it was not so long ago. […]

You want me to describe a utopian society where there would be no prison. The problem is to know if we can imagine a society in which groups themselves controlled the application of rules. It is the whole question of political power, the problem of hierarchy, of authority, of the state and state apparatuses. It is only when we have cleared away the brushwood from this immense problem that we will finally be able to say: yes, we should be able to punish this way, or, it is completely useless to punish, or again, society ought to give such a response to this irregular conduct.”

‘Prisons and Revolts in Prisons’ Interview with B. Morawe (June 1973)

This evening I went to a book launch for Thom Brook’s Punishment (Routledge, 2012). My understanding of academic book launches was that the author gives a little taster of what’s in the book and then colleagues, editors, publishers and other relevant minor celebrities on the topic all gush praise on to the author before a wine reception during which everyone else there is guilted into buying a copy of the book.

There was no wine. There was no sign of Routledge. Instead Frances Crook and Baroness Stern deftly demolished poor Brooks and his theoretical posturing on punishment, congratulating him on his ‘interesting’ book and his ‘nice thoughts’. But this wasn’t your average academic pissing contest where junior colleagues are bitch slapped back into their rightful subordinate box. Both Crook and Stern made some excellent points about punishment which for all their simplicity are no less worth repeating.

Crook organised her comments into 9 key points or perhaps theses:

1. the central assumption that punishment is legitimate should be questioned.

2. can punishment ever really be talked about in the abstract?

3. surely punishment always involves inflicting pain.

4. where punishment once constituted a major form of public spectacle and amusement - is this still not often the case?

5. to suggest that the criminal justice system can sort out someone’s life is fallacy and inappropriate

6. curfews and tagging are forms of punishment bringing, an albeit lesser form of, prison into society

7. prison doesn’t make people reflect on what they’ve done but become more selfish

8. Abolish prisons. Very few people pose the kind of threat to society that requires their exclusion.

9. the justice system is still based on the notion of proportionality - ‘an eye for an eye’ etc. - and consequently can only over involve the infliction of pain. what’s required is a radical notion of transformative justice which abandons the whole idea of punishment.

Baroness Stern’s critique was aimed more squarely at certain parts of Brooks’ book but also made some generic point:

1. the term ‘offender’ is objectionable and should be avoided

2. there is no link between ‘crime’ and ‘morality’ - I found the use of the term ‘morality’ by all speakers somewhat problematic yet it also seemed strangely appropriate in its appeal to a general humanist stance towards crime and punishment.

3. individuals are not just punished for the crimes they have committed but , in the case of indeterminate sentences, for those they might go on to commit

4. the dialectic which pits ‘deserve’ against ‘require’ in the discussion of punishment needs to be rethought rather than assumed as valid

5. punishment is not therapeutic but rather entails:

- pain

- degradation

- humiliation

- learning the rhetoric of remorse

6. what does it even mean to talk about a punishment ‘working’ or not? What does ‘work’ mean in this context?

7. how did punishment become transformed into a welfare service for criminals and subsequently spawn a whole industry of bad data and statistics on its effectiveness?

8. what about desistance theory?

14th Street: A Photo Essay

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:12:00 +0100

Some things that I read when looking for John and Theodor. Welcome to the empire state of signs. Not so much an exercise in psychogeographic framing, wanderlust or rhizomo-nomadic masturbatory drifting as a few badly taken snapshots the juxtaposition of which brought me some brief and mild amusement…

A short exercise in semiology and urbanism.

not necessarily in that order.

If there’s no answer - try some or all of the following:

Step. 1

Step 2. (actually you’re not allowed on these steps)

Step 3. How do you poison a TV? Narrative already lost its thread…

maybe like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krsj2bcnRlM

Step. 4 why should an image have any tangible relationship to the text next to it?

Step 5. As the typos seem to imply - perhaps they are spreading themselves a little thin here?

Step 6.

Step 7. But only after you’ve finished Step 6. (I know I’ve already used a variation of this sign but the street is as much about repetition as it is about difference.)

Step, or more accurately, Hop 8.

This seems to be a shop for all one-legged people going by the name of ‘John’.

Then it turned into an existentialist joke like the one where Jean-Paul and Simone are in Les Deux Magots…

FIN.

Call for Papers: Common Ground

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:45:00 +0000

Common Ground – A Two-Day Conference organized by the Centre for Cultural Studies

24-25 June 2013. Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Call for Papers:

Postgraduates in the Centre for Cultural Studies are pleased to announce their annual conference. This year’s theme is Common Ground and we would like to invite papers, artistic presentations, workshops and panel proposals on all aspects of this topic.

This conference comes out of a shared frustration with the framing of canonical discourses. For every subject and object in the world, there is a linear story of its explanation– a forward-projecting narration of origins, development, transformation and signification. What is accomplished in this expository process is a reductivism that not only privileges particular modes of explanation, of knowing, but in doing so also neutralizes the grounds of subversive potential. How can we explode these centralizing rationalities and reconfigure the conceptual space of knowing? How can we think critically about literal and metaphorical spaces and the accompanying temporalities which claim to bring individuals together and form alternative modes of collective being but simply end up privileging dominant, homogenising discourses of social control and organization?

Possible topics could include but are by no means limited to:

Privileging narratives

Writing and Rewriting History

Time, history and asynchronicity

Dissenting Voices

Homogeneity and hegemony

Interiority/exteriority

Discourses of Inclusion/Exclusion

The collective vs. the individual

Who are the 99%?

Nationalism and Identity

Digital Technologies and posthumanism

Crossing borders and limits

Institutional Critique

Spaces of convergence – the street, the square

Public vs. private spaces

Encounters, confrontations, conflicts

The production of difference

Subversive spaces and temporalities

Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words and emailed to:

ccscommonground2013@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions is 26 April 2013. For more information please visit www.commonground2013.wix.com/conference

counter-mapping London

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:53:15 +0000

Some maps of London by this year’s Text and Image class. Unfortunately my scanner is broken and the lighting in here lacks a certain studio quality. Have tried not to cut anything off… Will redo - neater, clearer, better when sort out a new scanner.

Thanks to Lara Choksey for the idea.

Orson Welles film season

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:52:00 +0000

Curated by Anisha Ahmed, the Centre for Cultural Studies Monday night film will resume on 18 February with a mini Orson Welles season. The line up is as follows:

18 February - Mercury Theatre radio broadcast: The War of the Worlds.

25 February - The Magnificent Ambersons.

4 March - Touch of Evil

11 March - The Trial

18 March - F for Fake

We’ll also be showing some of the Orson Welles Sketchbook during screenings.

6.30pm. The Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths, New Cross.

All Welcome.

Monday night film - Erasing David (2010)

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 19:03:47 +0000

A documentary about privacy, surveillance and the database state.

After the Child Benefit Office claim they have ‘lost’ his daughter’s details - David leaves her and his pregnant wife to find out how easy it is to get ‘lost’ inside and outside of the system…

Monday 4 February 2013, 6.30pm

The Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths, Goldsmiths.

All Welcome.

This is not a sailboat

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 08:20:00 +0000

Notes from my Monday lecture.

In Kevin Smith’s film Mallrats (1995)there is an ongoing narrative of William’s failure to see the sailboat hidden within a ‘magic eye’ image. The narrative - which punctuates the main story – this functions as comic relief within an already comic tale but what makes William the comic relief rather than a protagonist or antagonist is that his story can only ever be a form of punctuation. Despite being white and male like the majority of the other characters in the film – his weight and appearance deny him a major role in the film. His exclusion from seeing the image attests to his wider social exclusion. His blocked gaze, his impotence. Moreover, the more he attempts to gain access, to be included, to share in the vision of the sailboat – the more his exclusion is compounded. When, at the end of the film, he finally sees the image, it no longer matters. Inclusion is granted when it ceases to be of value.

Those who can make out the image participate in a shared experience which precludes those who can’t. Knowing what the image here is supposed to be provides no assistance with actually seeing it. Hence, the double irony later in the film when a small girl says she can see a schooner - William laughs smugly – not realizing she has not only seen the boat but defined it with yet more precision.

The process by which our gaze is blocked, whereby we are prevented access to a vision or image of something – in this case the sailboat – raises various questions about the gaze itself, the way it is mediated, filtered and blocked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_f8ayQQx4I

Monday Night Film - The Pillowbook

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 10:19:03 +0000

Postponed from last week, this Monday 28 January, film night will resume with Peter Greenaway’s The Pillowbook (1996). The film will be introduced with a short talk by CCS’s own Theo Reeves-Evison.

6.30pm, The Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths, Goldsmiths. All Welcome.

Text and Image - Lecture 3

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:57:00 +0000

The Text and Image lecture series continues next Monday 21 January with ‘The Refracted Image’ which currently looks something like this:

More to follow.

11-12, BPLT, Goldsmiths. All Welcome.

this is not a signature?

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:38:00 +0000

In my Text and Image course as well as in the Research methods class I teach at Goldsmiths, we have been discussing authors, owners, objects, collecting, the museification of the world, signatures, authentication, unravelling and so on.

Today, I received a book in the post - Edward R. Tufte’s Envisioning Information. It is a beautiful, custom-made book (with bits of folded paper and such like)…

A second hand copy cost about two thirds of a new copy. However, I was seduced into paying slightly more for what claimed to be a ‘collector’s’ copy because it had been signed by the author. On the cover of the book I received was a price tag, setting the price at about 10% of what I paid.

Inside the author’s inscription was far from convincing…

Which led me to consider the following:

- why did I think the book was worth more because someone, somewhere in hyperspace ‘claimed’ it was signed by the author? I don’t know what Tufte’s signature looks like but yet I feel the starring of his printed name on the page is an act of bad faith rather than an assertion of authenticity. Which highlights the importance and validity we attach to other forms of signature, the ones Agamben speaks of, practices of authentication which we accept without question despite the fact these are both arbitrary and historically contingent.

- why was I (at least temporarily) so annoyed about having paid ten times as much for a book than the price tag stuck on the cover? It’s not out of print or particularly rare but at the same time, I didn’t spend any time or effort trawling second hand book stores in the U.S. to find it, store it, inventory it, package it up and it still cost less than a new copy. We willingly pay more for labels and packaging which offer up certain myths. While we acknowledge our complicity in buying into the myths we don’t really believe in we resent having such foolishness pointed out to us by others. It is unacceptable to be directly reminded of this and, worse still, that we might have actually paid someone, somewhere for the time and labour that went into perpetuating the myth.

Given the subject-matter of the book, there is a further irony to all of this…

Unravelled calligrams

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 09:16:41 +0000

An exercise in drawing words from Monday’s Text and Image class. Send me nominations for the best ones and there’ll be a prize next week.

On behalf of all writers...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 10:52:05 +0000

Tomorrow’s film will be Altman’s The Player (1992). A veritable spiral of self-referentiality. More death of the (wrong) author, Hollywood remakes and alternate endings plus the ultimate opening tracking shot.

6.30pm. The Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths, Goldsmiths.

All Welcome.

The font of all knowledge

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 06:43:40 +0000

The most ubiquitous font in the world? CCS film night returns with a documentary about the (benevolent) dictatorship of Helvetica, those responsible for its reign of terror and the pretenders to its throne.

Helvetica (2007, dir. by Gary Hustwit), 6.30pm, Monday 7 January 2013

The Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths, Goldsmiths.

All Welcome.

Monday morning lecture

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:36:29 +0000

Monday night films (January/February 2013)

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:11:00 +0000

The Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths is pleased to announce the schedule for its Monday night films for early 2013:

7 January – Helvetica (dir. Gary Hustwit, 2007)

14 January – The Player (dir. Robert Altman, 1992)

21 January – NO FILM

28 January – The Pillowbook (dir. Peter Greenaway, 1996)

4 February – Erasing David (dir. David Bond and Melissa McDougall, 2010)

The Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths, Laurie Grove, Goldsmiths, University of London.

All Welcome.

Text and Image 2013

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:58:00 +0000

Lectures open to the public. Starting this Monday, 7 January 2013.

11am-12noon. Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Films shown in conjunction with the course will be screened as part of the Monday film night. More details here.

Course Outline:

To present something is always to re-present it, to repeat it, to reproduce it and ultimately to reimagine it. There is no originary gesture here. The World was never a tabula rasa or blank canvas. Meaning has always been inscribed, scratched out and recarved onto its surfaces. The World itself is presented to us (and, indeed, by us) via repetition, a repetition which produces difference via the temporal and spatial interstices emerging from each turn and return, each citation and recitation.

This year’s course will explore the relationship between visual and textual modes of representation via the notions of difference and repetition. The task at hand is three-fold. Not only will this involve consideration of the processes of doubling which occur between texts and images and the blurring of the differences between the two forms and practices but at the same time, we will be attentive to the ways in which theories of text and image replicate this doubling in the language used to describe and analyse different aesthetic and textual/literary practices. Finally, and most importantly, we will explore the political and ethical dimensions of textual and visual objects and practices and the implications of the repetition of difference and the difference of repetition. What is at stake in the proliferation of signs and sign systems, the commodification of art through the mass reproduction and distribution techniques which reach their apotheosis in late capitalism? How might we read banality, loss and impoverishment of meaning against the potential for transgression, profanity and parody which emerges here?

Course Schedule:

I. Taxonomies of Difference

7 January 2013

An Introduction to the profanity of difference and the tyranny of repetition

Reading: Jorge Luis Borges – ‘Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote’ in Labyrinths (Penguin, 1986), pp.62-71.

Gilles Deleuze – Preface to Difference and Repetition (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp.xix-xxii.

14 January 2013

Words and Things

Michel Foucault – ‘The Prose of the World’ in The Order of Things (Routledge, 2002), pp.19-50.

Giorgio Agamben - ‘Theory of Signatures’ in The Signature of All Things (Zone Books, 2009), pp.33-80.

Film: Helvetica (2007), Gary Hustwit (dir.)

II. Frames of Reference

21 January 2013

The Refracted Image

Walter Benjamin, ‘Art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ in One Way Street and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), pp.228-259.

Available: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Ariella Azoulay – ‘Civil Uses of Photography’ in Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), pp.219-241.

28 January 2013

Smoke Screens

Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (Power Institute of Art, 1986).

bell hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’ in Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), pp.197-213.

Gilles Deleuze – ‘Frame and Shot, Framing and Cutting’ in Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Continuum, 2005), pp.13-29.

Film: The Player (1992), Robert Altman (dir.)

4 February 2013

Scar Tissue

Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Legends of Photography’ in Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (MIT Press, 2003), pp.29-66.

Steven Connor, ‘Disfiguring’ in Book of Skin (New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp.73-94.

Film: The Pillow Book (1996), Peter Greenaway (dir.)

READING WEEK

III. Mapping and Counter-Mapping

18 February 2013

The Surface of the Earth

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.57-85.

Paul Virilio, ‘June 1991: Desert Screen’ in Desert Screen (Continuum, 2005), pp.76-94.

25 February 2013

Passports and Postcards

Jacques Derrida – ‘Envois’ (extracts) in The Post Card (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp.3-256.

Amitava Kumar – Passport Photos (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2000).

Film: Erasing David (2010), David Bond and Melissa McDougall (dirs)

4 March 2013

Alternative Cartographies

Rem Koolhaus, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto of Manhattan (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1994). (extracts)

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Vintage, 1997).

IV. Chronographies

11 March 2013

Ghost Writing

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Vintage, 2009).

Ulrich Baer, ‘Revision, Animation, Rescue’ in Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (The MIT Press, 2005), pp.127-178.

18 March 2013

Back to the Future

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History including ‘The Paralipomena’ in Selected Writings: Volume Four (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), pp.389-411.

Available (minus the Paralipomena): http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Rewriting Modernity’ in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp.24-35.

Film: La Jetée (1962), Chris Marker (dir.)

It's beginning to look at lot like Lacan

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 09:08:00 +0000

There are a number of pertinent commentaries on Christmas, capitalism and recuperation.

But none perhaps as insightful as these recent critiques:

Who needs the Grinch, Scrooge or Jack Skellington when you can just have a dinosaur shit Christmas?

And at this risk of pissing off Crimebo the clown again, here’s last year’s definition once more: http://fuggbug.tumblr.com/post/14742940989/crimebo

from Heidegger to Stiegler

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:55:50 +0000

first there were technics…

then there were technologies…

while the proliferation of mnemotechnologies in recent decades has inevitably resulted in the impoverishment of intergenerational relationships, making old people feel stupid and useless, it is clear that young people prefer holding remote controls to spanners.

Foucault Circle 2013 - Call for Papers

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:59:16 +0100

It’s going to be tough to beat last year’s circle with its trip to Attica and seminar on the GIP documents…

Foucault Circle 2013

McGill University, Montreal, Canada

April 18-20, 2013

Papers on any aspect of Foucault’s work, as well as studies,
critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking, are welcome. This
year’s conference also includes two special sessions:

— a discussion of Foucault’s text I, Pierre Rivière;
— a session on Foucault and the family for which we are seeking
individual paper submissions.

Please send an ABSTRACT (as a “.doc” attachment) of no more than 750
words by e-mail to program committee chair
Erinn Gilson (e.gilson@unf.edu)
on or before Friday, November 16th, 2012.
Indicate “Foucault Circle submission” in the subject heading.

Program decisions will be announced in mid-December.

The meeting will begin with a Thursday afternoon screening and
discussion of René Allio’s film, “Moi, Pierre Rivière…” (English
subtitles), followed by an informal welcome session and dinner. There
will be morning and afternoon paper sessions on Friday, followed by a
business meeting and dinner. The conference will conclude with paper
sessions on Saturday morning. Each speaker will have approximately 35
minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined—papers should
be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes, preferably 15).

Logistical information about lodging, transportation, and other
arrangements will be available after the program has been announced.

For more information about the Foucault Circle, please see our
website:
http://www.foucaultcircle.org