Seminar 54 // 10, 11, 12 Dec 2015 // London
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Program for Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar No 2, 2015-16
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ATTENTION: DUE TO LAST MINUTE CHANGES WE WILL MEET IN RHB 274 AT 10.30AM ON THURSDAY AND THEN MOVE TO RHB 350 AT 11.30AM FOR THE REST OF THE DAY!
Thursday, 10 December 2015, 10.30am – 5pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 274 from 10.30–11.30am, Room 350 from 11.30am–5pm
10.30am – 12pm:
An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives – C/K video project (chaired by Irit Rogoff)
Ifor Duncan realised a first interview for this project. This interview has raised some questions that are crucial for the further development of the project, so we will be discussing it together with Ifor and Lucy Beech.
12–5pm:
Seminar with Mark Fisher on ‘Capitalist Realism’
‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,’ reads the title of Mark Fisher’s 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? In the context of this year’s overarching thematic ‘Can Culture Counter?’, we will have Mark as a guest on this seminar day and discuss some of the main theses of his book with him.
If you don’t get a chance to read the whole book, Mark has suggested that you focus specifically on the following chapters:
1. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
4. Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism
5. October 6, 1979: ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything’
6. All that is solid melts into PR: market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production
Reading:
– Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
2–3pm: Lunch Break
Thursday, 10 December 2015, 5–7pm
Location: Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG02
Lecture by Laboria Cuboniks (Chair: Luciana Parisi)
Laboria Cuboniks (b. 2014) is a polymorphous xenofeminist collective. As an anagram of the ‘Nicolas Bourbaki’ group of mathematicians, Cuboniks also advances an affirmation of abstraction as an episto-political necessity for 21st century claims on equality. The Xenofeminist Manifesto, published earlier in 2015, is a discursive scaffold for future work yet to be built. With the aim of ‘forking’ this foundational, written-gesture into more substantiated forms, two presentations will be delivered, preceded by a introduction as to the impetus driving the generic thematics of xenofeminism.
(As part of ‘Futures & Fictions’, the Visual Cultures Public Programme Autumn 2015)
Friday, 11 December 2015, 11am – 5.30pm
Location: Education Building, Room 226
11am – 1.30pm:
Non-Oppositional Resistance (chaired by Stefan Nowotny)
In this session we will be looking at the chapter ‘Strategies or the Non-Stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)’ from Gilles Deleuze’s 1986 book Foucault. In this exemplary piece of poststructuralist analysis Deleuze not only discusses the specificity of Foucault’s theorization of power. He also explores the relations between power and resistance in a way that moves beyond any understanding of resistance as an op-positional activity that is secondary to, and thus dependent on, the position of power: ‘the final word on power is that resistance comes first.’
Reading:
– Gilles Deleuze, ‘Strategies or the Non-Stratified’
1.30–2.30pm: Lunch Break
2.30–5.30pm:
Betrayal: From Spaces of Appearance to Sites of Articulation (Presentation by C/K participant Joshua Simon)
Joshua will be presenting parts of his recently finished PhD thesis on ‘Betrayal’ as a set of both political and curatorial strategies. The presentation will particularly focus on a chapter which discusses H. Arendt’s notion of ‘political action’ and B. Brecht’s notion of politicized ‘acting’, and proposes a shift from a concern with ‘spaces of appearance’ towards an engagement with ‘sites of articulation’.
Readings:
– Hannah Arendt, Chapters 27–29 from The Human Condition
– Bertolt Brecht, ‘Showing Has to be Shown’, https://books.google.co.il/books?id=JyomfFKieTwC&lpg=PP1&dq=Poems%3A%201...
Additional reading and material:
– A short scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s film La chinoise, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lcrs6m2-zQ
– Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’
Saturday, 12 December 2015, 12–4pm
Location: Raven Row (56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS; closest tube: Liverpool Street Station)
Reading Group – chaired by Elora Tescari (MRes C/K) and Sarah Charalambides (PhD Visual Cultures)
‘Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting.’
This reading group will be dedicated to thinking through the notion of exodus and relating it to the question of immanence. While Paolo Virno refers to a collective defection from the state bond, from certain forms of waged work and from consumerism, Isabell Lorey proposes a movement of exodus within power relations themselves. In this session we will consider the possibilities for instituting ‘a non-state run public sphere’, as well as an immanent exodus in order to intervene again in the circumstances that were refused. In addition we can link this to the overall thematic question (Can Culture Counter?): To what extent can culture desert in its own place, given current conditions of non-sovereignty?
Readings:
– Paolo Virno, ‘Reason of State and Exit’ (from: A Grammar of the Multitude)
– Isabell Lorey, ‘Exodus and Constituting’ (from: State of Insecurity)