Seminar 47 // 16, 17, 18 October 2014 // London

This year the seminar will be devoted to the question 'How to Work'. Irit will be discussing questions of method and how new ways of working have entered our methodology in the wake of other practices: artistic, spatial, curatorial, organisational, bureaucratic and activist. Stefan will be discussing how to work with concepts, how they emerge and how the can be deployed across a broad range of inquiries.

Thursday, 16 October 2014, 11am – 5pm

Location: Deptford Town Hall G5

(This is on the ground floor and you will need a card for the building, if you don't have a card, one of us will be there from a few minutes before 11.)

There are two things on the agenda for this day. The first is to discuss the possible formats for presentation of practice-based dissertations. Stefan and I would like to produce a document with a portfolio of possible models for how to conceptualise and present dissertations, with a sliding scale of theoretical and practice components that make it up. We would like to discuss this with you, hear your ideas, think through some of ours and then write a document for the Graduate School and maybe beyond.

Secondly we want to present and discuss the new teaching structure and outline what we will be doing this year. The two items for the day are not unrelated as we are aware that people shifting the emphasis of their activity from practice to academic are faced with numerous difficult transitions. It is for this reason that we will be devoting the year to thinking about 'How to Work'.

Discussions of readings will be across the 3 days of the seminar.

We will begin with Thomas Kuhn, the chapter on paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
It is unlikely that with all the issues we need to discuss we will get much further, but the next text I would like to look at is Giorgio Agamben's The Signature of All Things: On Method.

Readings:

– Thomas S. Kuhn, The Priority of Paradigms
– Giorgio Agamben, What Is a Paradigm?
– Roland Barthes, From Work to Text

Lunch Break: 1.30–2.30pm

Thursday, 16 October 2014, 5–7pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building 309

Visual Cultures Public Programme: 'Post-Punk Then and Now'

Gavin Butt (Professor of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths): Being in a Band: Artschool Experimentalism in the Post-Punk Commons

‘Post-Punk Then and Now’ consists of a series of lectures, in-conversations and film screenings exploring post-punk’s popular modernist search for the new in the very broadest of contexts. The series will take in the changing cultural and political conditions between the 1970s and the 21st century.

Friday, 17 October 2014, 11am – 6pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building 140

(The room is on the ground floor in the back of the building. No need for a Goldsmiths card for this room.)

Depending on how much progress we have made in our discussions on Thursday, Stefan would like to look at the concept of 'experience' through two texts of Walter Benjamin: 'Experience' is one of these concepts that are hard to grasp, yet central to research, thought, and practices. Benjamin's texts stand for two distinctly different ways of approaching the concept and making it work. 

Readings:

– Walter Benjamin, On the Program of the Coming Philosophy
– Walter Benjamin, Experience and Poverty

Lunch Break: 2–3pm

8pm: Dinner together

Saturday, 18 October 2014, 12–5pm

Location: Raven Row (Seminar Room), 56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS (closest tube: Liverpool Street Station)

Discussion of new Reading Group structure and continuing discussion of texts.