Seminar 53 // 22, 23, 24 October 2015 // London
Program for C/K seminar no. 1, 2015-16
Thursday October 22nd
11am - 5.30pm
Location: DTH 106 (Deptford Town Hall Building).
The first day of the seminar we will be together with our colleagues from Helsinki, Nora Sternfeld, Henna Harri and Farbod Fakharzadeh and we will have the final workshop in preparation for our group practice project 'An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives'. In addition we will be joined by the artist Armin Linke and by film maker and producer Lucy Beech. For those of you who are new to this project we will introduce you to it and get you involved with it. The works we have used as a context for conceptualising this project are: Kutlug Ataman, 'KUBA' and Lawrence Wright, Captured on Film (on Syrian Cinema in the 1970s).
Friday October 23rd
11am - 5.30pm
Location: RHB 140 (Richard Hoggart Building).
We will have a joint presentation by Louis Moreno (Goldsmiths) and Nora Sternfeld (Aalto). This is a repeat of the seminar that they did as part of freethought's City Seminar in Bergen, leading up to the 2016 Bergen Assembly.
Spectres of infrastructure: active bodies, haunted cities and dancing tables
The seminar examines the practices and techniques which over the last four decades have made the political economic problematic of infrastructure increasingly cultural and spatial.
The first half of the day draws on texts by David Harvey and Judith Butler to survey the rise of financialisation and neoliberalism. Here we will consider the nature of an emerging regime of infrastructure able to ‘culture’ the spatial and corporeal debt of individuals to capital. The texts will be explored to ask how can we create bodies capable of resisting the apparatuses of debt and credit? What kind of infrastructures can release people from serving debt economies?
The second half takes its point of departure from one of the most simple ‘infrastructures’ available. Beginning with the device of the table, and using Derrida’s reflections on Marx’s figure of the commodity fetish in motion - the ‘dancing table’ - we will consider how we assemble as groups, communities, institutions, states, etc. What are the possibilities for deconstructing infrastructures of cultural representation to create new practices of assembly?
Readings.
Arendt, H., 2013. "The Public Realm: The Common" in The Human Condition: Second Edition, University of Chicago Press. (pp. 50 - 58)
Harvey, D., 2012. Chapter 5 "Reclaiming the City for Anti-Capitalist Struggle" in Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution, London: Verso.
Butler, J., 2011. "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies". Available at: http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en [Accessed October 26, 2014].
Derrida, J., 2012. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Routledge.
Marx, K. & Engels, F., 1848. "The Communist Manifesto". Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
8.00pm Dinner Together
Saturday October 24
12 - 4.00pm
Location: Raven Row (56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS; closest tube: Liverpool Street Station)
Planning meeting for the forthcoming seminars and reading groups.
Reading together:
Michel Foucault, What Is Critique?
Walter Benjamin, Program for Literary Criticism