Seminar 48 // 4, 5, 6 December 2014 // London

Thursday, 4 December 2014, 11am – 5pm

Location: Deptford Town Hall, Room 106
(for those without Goldsmiths cards: one of us will be outside at 11am)

This will be a teaching day taking up our overarching theme for the year on ‘Methodologies’ and continuing with Giorgio Agamben’s The Signature of All Things: On Method which is already on the C/K site.

1.30–2.30pm: Lunch Break

Readings:

Giorgio Agamben, What Is a Paradigm?

Thursday, 4 December 2014, 5–7pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 309

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

Sue Clayton in conversation with Kodwo Eshun – ‘The Song of the Shirt’

Sue Clayton is a film director, writer and composer. She is Professor of Film & Television and Director of the Screen School at Goldsmiths. Her films include Hamedullah: The Road Home (2012), awarded best documentary short at the London Independent Film Awards, and Song of the Shirt (1979) – an experimental documentary that explores the history of the welfare state through the stories of working women.

Kodwo Eshun is a Lecturer on the MA Aural & Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and a founder member of the Turner nominated Otolith Group.

Post-Punk Then and Now is a series of talks & film screenings exploring post-punk’s popular modernist search for the new from the 1970s to today.

Friday, 5 December 2014, 11am – 5pm

Location: Deptford Town Hall, Room 106

This seminar we have a guest speaker from Berlin, Kai van Eikels. Kai is a theorist of performance, theatre and dance, teaches at the Free University in Berlin and in a multidisciplinary arts practice programme in Hamburg. Kai will take us through his recent book, a very major account of what he calls ‘The Art of Collectives’ on the conjunctions between the performative, the participatory, the self-organised and the spaces of culture.

2–3pm: Lunch Break

In the afternoon Kai will talk about a related dimension of his work:
‘I thought I might give a short account of the “Art of Being Many” gathering that happened at Kampnagel in Hamburg earlier this year in September, adding some reflections on the relation between art and political activism (I am working on a paper about this, whose provisional title is “Activism and the Absence of an As-if”).’

Readings:

Kai van Eikels, What Parts of Us Can Do…
Reader, The Art of Being Many

8pm: Dinner together

Saturday, 6 December 2014, 12–4pm

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

Vipash and Fereshte have taken on convening the Reading Group and will chair the upcoming session together with Ronnie:

The reading group will focus on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’. Could Agamben’s text be read as a ‘rewriting’ of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, however, in a philosophical realm? Should we, and how could we, read and rewrite the text on Bartleby in terms of the curatorial?

Readings:

Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby, or On Contingency
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener (supplementary reading)