Recorded Lecture: Akira Mizuta Lippit, "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe"

Ever since 'Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture' announced its open research program, it has been hard to dismiss its excellent line-up of speakers, both academics and artists. Amongst the names is that of Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose presentation "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe" at The Museum of Kyoto on 21 June 2013 was expanded into an essay published digitally in both Japanese and English.

Broaching such classic subjects as mixing metaphors, catastrophe and kitlers, Lippit performs his hallmark critical analysis with gusto on the films of D. W. Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl and Alain Resnais, quite cheekily linking catachresis, cats and filmic representation, and suggesting by the end, "Isn't every film image ultimately a cat?"

"But does a real cat (and cats are always real, it seems) have to be in every scene of catachresis? Is this the way to underscore the rhetoric as if there were some natural and thus non-catachrestic relation between the image of the cat and the trope of catachresis? Are cats the real figures of catachresis? Is a scene of catachresis without a cat incomplete, a catalexis?"

The essay can be found on the Parasophia website, available for download in ePub and pdf formats.

Recorded Lecture: Costas Douzinas, "Philosophy and the Right to Revolution"

 

Listen to Costas Douzinas offer a friendly challenge to Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou in terms of the right to revolution and its lawfulness in this lecture, "Philosophy and the Right to Revolution" (although bearing the slightly modified name on the Backdoor Broadcasting Company where it is archived), recorded in London during the two-day conference Actuality of the Absolute: Hegel, Our Untimely Contemporary. Deviating from Žižek, who adds a few of his own comments from the audience, Douzinas' self-branded "heretical" politics asserts a reading of Hegel, disobedience and the Athens riots of 2008 (to name a few themes) in order to posit and explore the right to revolution.

 

Douzinas scrolls conceptually through "the normative force of the real" - through which previous law is negated in the face of successful revolution (and the criminal rebellion is found to be always already authorised) - before moving on to a close reading of property and subjectivity within Hegel, revolution and crime as motors for legal adjustment, and the right to socio-political rebellion based on necessity.

"The revolution does not just delete the past, it synchronically creates its own conditions of success. ... Fact and law, revolution and right, are closely intertwined. The time arrow is reversed. In this sense, every rebellion is, and will have been, the exercise to the right of revolution. Right and revolution, instead of being antithetical, are coeval, supporting each other."

Other contributors to the Actuality of the Absolute conference include Žižek and previous BiM Seminar guest Catherine Malabou. Find their and other fascinating presentations archived on the Backdoor Broadcasting Company here.

Recorded Lecture: McKenzie Wark, "Telesthesia: How Class and Power Work in the Post-Internet Age"

One of Google's data centers, photographed by Connie Zhou.

McKenzie Wark prods at our understandings of class and social relations with this half-hour video recording, "Telesthesia: How Class and Power Work in the Post-Internet Age", presented at the Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series hosted by the University of Berkeley's Center for New Media on 19 December 2012.

Extracted from his recent book Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (published by Polity in the tail end of last year), Wark offers us an intriguing snapshot at his thesis on the current "vectoral age". Tracing vectoral strategies from the deployment of military force at a distance, to creative reappropriation of spaces and information, and the tactics of growth deployed by rising Fortune 500 corporations such as Google and Apple, Wark proposes that in this post-internet age and "overdeveloped" (first) world, we have entered a third stage of commodity culture - beyond pastoralism and capitalism - of information ruled and managed by the vector. And as the concept of property becomes more abstract, he asserts that the vectoral class now unseats the capitalist in power and dominance.

"The vector becomes much more flexible, elaborate, refined in its flows of data. It is nowhere necessary to cluster related parts of the production process physically near one another. The vector opens the way to a spatial disaggregation of production. It isn't the multitude who fled the scene, it was capital." 

The lecture can be viewed at Archive.org, where various other Art, Technology, and Culture lectures can also be viewed and/or heard, kindly provided by the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Performance & Exhibition: Ruth Clinton, Niamh Moriarty, Michael O'Rourke & Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Rotator

Pallas Projects in Dublin city currently contains the collaborative exhibition by artists Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty. The show, aptly coined with the palindrome Rotator, loops around secrets, crypts, water and topographies in a variety of media forms; it explores the lesser-known currents of one of the city's more familiar waterways (the River Poddle), records endless passageways of/in brick, and commemorates the hidden stories of the underground.

 

The rich textures of Clinton and Moriarty's exhibition - dizzingly wet, mossy and stony - are sensationally enlivened in a recorded "tour" of the exhibition performed by the artists themselves, Michael O'Rourke and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (read by fellow artist John Ryan) on a wintery March evening. Beginning with an introduction by O'Rourke, the tour takes the form of a question-and-answer conversation between the participants inflected by the exhibition works. "Hydrocryptographic", O'Rourke describes Rotator, and the four performers draw upon Serres, Cixous, Derrida, myths of the giant Balor, Blake, T.S. Eliot and a particuarly savvy twenty-questions AI algorithm to trace the damp crevasses of the show within this 45 minute audio recording.

 

Audio of the tour can be found here. The exhibition catalogue is downloadable here. Further pictures and descriptions of the exhibition can be found in the artists' blog posts, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty as well as the Pallas Projects website, where may also be downloaded an information sheet related to Rotator and a podcast interview with the artists recorded by RTE Lyric FM.

"Rotator is more attuned to the inclinations and glossolalic streaming together of matter. The exhibition is an exercise in diverculvertation as we drift from territories of the infinitesimally small - our selves and bodily matter composed mostly of water - to the infinitely vast - rivers, seas, oceans, the sky, moon and stars."

Radio Segment: This American Life, "Mapping", 4 September 1998



David Wood, map of the neighborhood’s phone, cable, and power lines

 Back in 1998, Radio program This American Life produced an hour-long segment entitled "Mapping", tracing five different techniques of mapping following the senses. The first twenty-four minutes are particularly interesting, involving interviews conducted with cartographer Denis Wood on his practices of mapping a myriad of different elements in his neighbourhood (from traffic signs to Halloween pumpkins - see a few examples here), and Toby Lester on his charting of ambient noises and drones produced by everyday machinery, both of which in some way seek to reinterpret one's expectations of cartographical practices.

These are followed by three stories, spanning the final thirty-four minutes of the bracket, which offer slightly flatter stories on the electronic nose developed by Cyrano Sciences (interesting when taken in context of the technology's further development over the past decade in various industrial sectors), on one woman's compulsive and hypochondriacal self-examinations of her body by touch, and on a food writer's mission in the 1980s to map all the eateries of Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The stories can be streamed through the This American Life website as separate recordings or read in transcript form. 

"I'm looking at a map now that's got all of the overhead lines mapped on it, and it is a crazy star field. It's the power lines, the telephone lines, and the cable lines. And there's a hierarchy, of course. They flow into the neighborhood from outside the neighborhood. And as they move into individual homes, they break down. They shatter, so that the homes are all like the ends of little, teeny capillaries. ... It is a living organism."

Denis Wood

Project: The Anthropocene Project, 10 January 2013 - 31 December 2014, Berlin (Part II)

To mark the initiation of the Anthropocene Project (see the previous post on this blog), the the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin staged a four-day symposium for lectures and dialogues between key thinkers in a variety of fields including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, architecture along with many others. Clustering around five thematic "islands" - "Perspectives", "Times", "Gardens", "Oikos" and "Techné" - the transdisciplinary dialogues and lectures staged (some of which have have been audio or video recorded for posterity) interrogate the concept of the anthropocene.

 

A preoccupation with identifying the anthropocene (is the anthropocene legal?, beautiful?, a necessity?, etc.) tends to muffle more open-ended discussion in some of these conversations. Nonetheless, the meeting of minds offered by Claire Colebrook and Cary Wolfe on the subject of "Is the Anthropocene...A Doomsday Device?" manages to navigate its potential nihilism with both playfulness and consideration. The keynotes of Elizabeth Povinelli ("Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism") and John Tresch ("Cosmograms, or How to Do Things with Words") offer sometimes beautiful narratives and ruminations.

 

Dipesh Chakrabarty's bold critique of the anthropocene itself pits the question of and about the anthropocene in challenging detail. Launching his keynote, "History on an Expanded Canvas: The Anthropocene's Invitation", with the delaration that he must "decline the invitation of anthropocene", Chakrabarty underscores the gratuitous magnitude of anthropocene as a conceptual term, while still taking up the narrower (and more graspable) hypotheses of climate change and anthropocenic global warming.

"It has to be one of the profoundest ironies of our modern history that increasing use of such energy should have now transformed our collective image in our own eyes from that of an autonomous, if not sovereign, purposeful agency - from the level of the individual to the level of groups - to that of a force which is defined as the sheer capacity to produce pull or push on an object by interacting [with] it merely as another object."

Dipesh Chakrabaty

Project: The Anthropocene Project, 10 January 2013 - 31 December 2014, Berlin (Part I)

In January of this year, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin opened a fascinating and ambitious new two-year initiative entitled The Anthropocene Project, which seeks to interrogate the effects stemming from the increasing destabilisation of the definition between man and nature.

 

Chasing a paradigm shift throughout the the twentieth and into the twenty-first century in the natural sciences, the project situates Paul Jozef Crutzen's coined geological epoch - the "anthropocene", an "age of mankind" - at its centre in order to explore the mutual enfolding of the "human" and "natural" relations.

 

The opening consisted of a four-day symposium of thinkers, artists, film-makers, scientists and scholars to in conversation over this theme. Recordings of these speakers, which included keynotes by Will Steffen, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, John Tresch and Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as a host of other dialogues, are available online at their website (some of which will be explored in more depth in Part II, posted next week).

 

Upcoming events include: the Unmenschliche Musk Festival: Compositions by Machines, by Animals and by Accident feom 21-24 February, which brings music production under critical inspection; a film series Anthropocene TV which begins on 22 May and continues until the project ends; "The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside" Conference with accompanying exhibition, from 21-22 June; along with many other events. Further information and multimedia are listed on the HKW website.

"Nature as we know it is a concept that belongs to the past. No longer a force separate from and ambivalent to human activity, nature is not an obstacle nor a harmonious other. Humanity forms nature. Humanity and nature are one, embedded within the recent geological record."

Bodies in Movement Seminar with Catherine Malabou - Recordings

We are happy to announce that recordings of our seminar with Catherine Malabou are now available to stream online or download. You can stream the files via the audio player to the right of this screen or by pressing the play button next to the relevant file description on the Event Recordings page. The files may also be downloaded from this page. We sincerely apologise for any graininess in the recordings.

If the recordings do not appear on the player, please clear the cookies on your web browser. These audio files have also been uploaded to Archive.org. Happy listening!

Recorded Lecture: William Connolly, "Freedom, Creativity and Teleodynamism"

Over 30 November to 1 December of 2012, the "Between Deleuze and Foucault" project at Purdue University held a conference which brought together project collaborators to discuss the implications of Deleuze's reading of Foucault. Fortunately, for those unable to attend the conference, video recordings have been made of nearly all the contributions are are currently available to watch from the project website.

Within the conference program, William Connolly features as plenary speaker with his paper, "Freedom, Creativity and Teleodynamism", which he describes as an experiement "between Foucault and Deleuze ... and not only Neitzche but Whitehead". Connolly ambitiously explores the complexities of "creativity" by way of Whitehead as well as biologist and neurologist Terrence Deacon, attending particularly to Deacon's concept of "teleodynamic activity" - a kind of ends-directed and consequence-oriented organisational creativity based on a reciprocal relation to environmental changes and proximities. Within such teleodynamic processes, he argues that new and unplanned formations sometimes emerge from encounters between and within organisms in periodic, positive creativity.

By carefully interlacing this concept of teledynamic process within a reading of Nietzsche's drives of the self (with close attention to the text Daybreak) and Foucault's tactics of the self, Connolly takes an experiemental bite into a vast feld of meaty topics, including but certainly not limited to those of incipience, powers of the false and (briefly) the dangers of creativity and moves towards its quarantine.

"Incompleteness and time-out-of-joint now lose their melancholy standing as mere lacks or losses. They regain them as both dangerous and as uncertain conditions of possibility for positive creativity..."

Interview: John Schaefer with Frank J. Oteri & Paul D. Miller, "The Art of Noise"

On 15 May 2009, WNYC radio's Soundcheck program hosted this radio interview between announcer John Schaefer, Frank J. Oteri (composer and editor of NewMusicBox) and Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, sampling extraordinaire and member of faculty at the European Graduate School) as part of their "Sound Off" Friday Series.

While the "noise versus music" theme which underpins this radio interview continuously threatens to flatten the complexities of the conversation, Oteri and Miller nonetheless manage to conduct an informed and eloquent auricular tour of the relationship between noise sampling and the music industry of the twentieth/twenty-first century. The Futurists, Public Enemy, sonic algorithms, Merzbow, Rhys Chatham, and the ancient Chinese composition Pipa all cycle through the discussion along with a myriad of other topics which test the limits of music recognition and the possibilities of sonic en/de-coding.

"Repetition and giving things a sequence changes the way you hear. ... I think the hidden architecture of the twentieth century was the uneasy tension between noise and repetition."

Paul D. Miller

 That interview, along with other recorded segments of Soundcheck are archived at the WNYC radio website.

 

Recorded Lecture: Jane Bennett, "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency"

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In 2010, Jane Bennett published Vibrant Matter (read the blog post here), a fascinating foray into the agency of things which challenged readers to think beyond the confines of an unquestioned anthropocentric perspective.

If Vibrant Matter proffered the rough layout or skeleton of such a concept, Bennett's talk, "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency", begins a process of enfleshment, building some theoretical muscle on top of that bone. Continuing her project of "thing-power" through a distinctly vital materialist lens, her discussion in this presentation at the Imperial War Museum in London on 3 December 2010 asks the crucial question of what kind of lexicon is available to us to acknowledge and explore the active power of things when language itself tends towards anthropocentrism and instrumentalist positionings.

Propensity, action, trajectory, vital impetus, assemblage - Bennett cycles through a host of possible vocabularies before fixing on the concept of the hoarder. The various attitudes towards objects demonstrated by "extreme" hoarders on the A&E reality television show Hoarders, she argues, gesture towards the intercorporeality of things and humans within the amasser's environment. In such a perception, the self is both porous and aggregate, itself a collection of a vast number of attendant things.

"A vibrant materialist would say that hoarders have exceptionally acute awareness to the extent to which all bodies are intertwined with those in its vicinity. They sense that a variety of 'its' make up a self and that the 'its' possess a vibrancy formerly thought to be unique to organic bodies." 

Bennett's talk in London has been archived on the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website and can be streamed or downloaded from here, along with slideshows from her presentation. You can also track the evolution of this project of lexical accretion by listening to or viewing her other talks on the topic at ICI Berlin in May 2011 and at The New School on 13 September 2011.

Recorded Lecture: François Laruelle, "Pour une philosophie dite ‘contemporaine’ (Towards a Philosophy Deemed ‘Contemporary’)"

Hiroshi Sugimoto Lightning Fields 168, 2009, © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy The Pace Gallery

Courtesy of the London Graduate School and the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, we can now enjoy the ambitious and compelling project canvassed by François Laruelle in his talk on 9 May of this year, entitled "Pour une philosophophie dite 'contemporaine'". Designed as a preface to a lecture he delivered at Goldsmiths the next day ("Non-photographie, vers une interprétation quantique"), Laruelle here carefully anatomises the arguments underpinning his call for a form of contemporary philosophy which rebalances the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and predicates itself on the vectorial and the quantic rather than the object.

His talk, a most useful foreward to his other dense works (some of which have recently or will soon be published in English translation), is equally a series of departures as it is actively propositional. Concerning the arc of his project at large, he notes: "I had to limit philosophy to give way to mathematics; and I had to limit topology to give way to algebra". Indeed, Laruelle underscores decisive points of divergence away from theorists such as Deleuze, Derrida and Meillassoux alongside his deviation from the mascroscopy of the "modern" (i.e, Plato, Decartes, Spinoza, Badiou) in preference of a "contemporary" philosophy which is worked through a relation with the physical by means of "vectoriality". He enquires:

"[W]hat can be invented with history's heritage, what do we do with it? Do we reproduce, remember, smooth, clean the glass or the mirror of language, leaving as always philosophy to be reflected in itself and to auto-model itself? Or do we incline it, 'encline' it (being 'enclined towards', the inclination as Leibnizian concept) and so free up its inventive forces rather than those forces of repression? I put myself in the position of a scientist or an artist for whom philosophy is at once object and materials ... Generic humanity is not a tradition, but an orientation that comes or under-comes"

The lecture can be found archived at the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, where a pdf of the English translation (also distributed to his listeners on the day) can also be downloaded. Laruelle adds, digresses and extrapolates in the talk itself, thus it is worthwhile to both read and listen.

Recorded Lecture: "Interview with J. Hillis Miller as part of 'Signing, Sealing, Sailing: The Life and Work of J. Hillis Miller"

On 2 June 2012, a certain seminar room of the Humanities Institute of Ireland at the University Colleges Dublin campus saw a star-studded lineup of speakers and guests to honour the life and work of legendary literary critic J. Hillis Miller. The event, "Sign, Sealing, Sailing: The Life and Work of J. Hillis Miller", involved speakers such as Martin McQuillan, Nicholas Royle and Miller himself, as well as the first Irish screening of the feature-length, The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller (2012), introduced by the director, Dragan Kujundžić.

The interview with Miller which closed the event has been recorded and archived online at the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland website; the podcast is also freely available via iTunes. Delightfully conversational and crowded with Miller's charming personal anecdotes, the interview is conducted by the organisers Michael O'Rourke and Éamonn Dunne, and is comprised of a selection of questions formulated beforehand by the speakers. Stay tuned to the end to hear Miller's recollections of Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and a curiously (and self-acknowledged) evasive reply on the subject of his mother.

"Which philosopher would I chose to be my mother? ... It wouldn't be Derrida or de Man or Kant or Hegel. I think I would have like to have had J. L. Austin, the author of How to Do Things with Words ... I never met him - and I don't think he was particularly motherly - but, nevertheless, it's a nice fantasy."

Recorded Lecture: Nina Power, "The Spectre of the 'Public': The Ideology of Law and Order"

The Backdoor Broadcasting Company has archived a probing, half-hour talk by Nina Power, presented as part of the Ideology Now Conference at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London on 28 April 2012. Getting messy in the heavy topics of law and the public in the "creative empiricism" of Britain's politico-legal environment, Power casts an analytical eye upon the legal and lingusitic formulation of the public and the legal subject in light of Britain's past year of riots, protests and "public disturbance".

Her discursive, engaging and conversational presentation begins from the question: "Why don't we know anything about the law?" Reassessing Louis Althusser's descriptions of the law as belonging to both the repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatuses, and of the figure of the individual as the bourgeois ideological subject, Power examines what happens when the law confronts (or refuses to confront) collective subjects and group activity.

Power's talk teases out two kinds of legally-recognised publics, a disruptive "bad public" and an always silent and absent "good public". It is on behalf of this good public, constantly terrified of the potentially misbehaving mass of the self-organised mob, that the law and judiciary is "endlessly aggrieved". It is also on behalf of this "good public" that the law is obliged to carve out each component individual from the unsanctioned "bad public",  so as to persecute every member as representatives of an unacceptable collective. Power states:

"With the ongoing and perhaps almost complete destruction of the public sphere in the name of privatisation, individualism and competition, we are at the same time confronted with the necessary ghost of the acceptable public, the one invoked by the state in the name of the preservation of order. This is the mute, static public used against the mobile, protesting public."

Recorded Lecture: Jacques Rancière, "Modernity Revisited"

Jacques Rancière is in scintillating form in his recent London talk "Modernity Revisited" hosted by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at the University of London, Royal Holloway on 9 March 2012. In rapidfire succession over the course of fifty minutes Rancière acrobatically moves from a critical reading of Clement Greenberg's theory of modernist aesthetics to Soviet film director Dziga Vertov to a genealogical overview of Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Winckelmann, around to Ralph Emerson and Walt Whitman, before returning almost full circle to Dziga Vertov once again.

Such an expansive and rapidly paced journey is a fitting trail for the project of his presentation which seeks to restage the issue of time "as a form of distribution of the sensible to see what problem it raises at the core of the modernist project". Carefully dissecting two Soviet posters advertising Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera [pictured above], Rancière highlights the modernist transformation of the artwork medium into a "global sensorium" which conflates not merely representation and performance but also form, words and movements and thus seeks to destroy an entrenched dependence on a representational aesthetic paradigm that privileges the active, organic body. Unseating the hierarchical order of action and purpose, he suggests that it is towards an purposeless, endless and egalitarian concept of movement that modernity's aesthetic project turns in order to model its new artistic sensibility.

"What appears on the impossible surface of these posters is not only the passage from representation to direct performance, nor is it only the wedding of the human body with the machine, it's a new configuration of space and time in which the daily activity of men and women is identical with the indifference of free movement and the inactivity of play embodied in collective freedom."

The posters and Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera are also available on Backdoor Broadcasting along with audio files of the lecture and the following questions.

Recorded Lecture: Catherine Malabou, "Continental Philosophy and the Brain: Towards a Critical Neuroscience"

In this inaugural lecture presented by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy on 2 February 2012 in London, Catherine Malabou asks whether it is possible to constitute the brain as an object for non-cognitivist, "continental" strands of study. Malabou cleverly revives Michel Foucault's often superficially read essay "What is Enlightenment?" (or "What is Critique?") in order to argue that critique may allow us to bridge the often discordant discourses of neuroscience and continental philosophy.

This is a dialogue which Malabou quite literally realises in a staged conversation between Foucault-the-continental-philosopher and Thomas-Metzinger-the-German-cognititian, in which both carefully interrogate the statement: "You are your synapses". While elements of their discussion would appear to spill into an argumentational "battlefield", Malabou suggests that neurobiology, philosophy and critique can be repositioned creatively (rather than combatitively) through the concept of neuroplasticity. The consonance that can be found here, she argues, transgresses both the neurobiological and the continental traditions; rather, it requires us to invent a new experimental and challenging form of philosophical enquiry.

"The term 'plasticity' ... is what allows us to mediate (according to me) the conflict between cognitivism and philosophy. We see paradoxically that if neurotransparency causes the illusion of subjectivity and reveals that we are no one, neuroplasticity - which is intimately linked with neurotransparency - on the contrary situates the brain as the core of our individual experiences and identity. We may be no one, but this impersonality is plastic, which means that this absence of subjectivity is paradoxically malleable, fashionable, so that each of us is each no one in our own way."

Recorded Lecture: Stephen Duncombe, "Art of the Impossible: Utopia, Imagination, and Critical Media Practice"

Stephen Duncombe, Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University, talks utopias and critical medial production in this "insight" organised by Comparative Media Studies programmers at MIT and available for streaming or download from their website. In this incisive talk recorded in 2009, Duncombe explores the possible affects caused by a climate of information (over)abundance upon forms of political activism and cultural resistance.

Fascinated with the evolution of "truth" in a world drowning in information, and which speaks in the language of persistently debatable and mutable facts (which he brands "a surplus of truth") and its attendant surplus of critique, Duncombe posits that the traditional, "hard-hitting" versions of truth and critique have been subsumed and neutralised within the structure of prevailing hegemonic ideology.

While critique is rendered impotent by this process incorporation, critical media producers are thus responding by creating new practical forms for expression based not on "truth" but, rather, on fantasy and the portrayal of possible (albeit not promised) futurities. In presenting ultimately unbelievable, utopian alternatives, Duncombe suggests that these newly developing political practices leave space for the return of the currently displaced political through the interactions and responses of a public exposed to such critical media forms.

"There's another factor ... a much more profound one, a much more disturbing one for those who have been engaged in critical media practices, which is the exhaustion of critique. That is, those contemporary creators of media utopias, consciously or not, have come to the conclusion that rational criticism no longer has a critical function."

Recorded Lectures: P.E.S.T.: Black Metal Theory Symposium

On 20 November 2011, the tenebrous Pint Bar in the heart of Dublin city played host to a discrete but buzzing crowd for the third black metal theory conference (the previous two held in Brooklyn in 2009 and London in 2011). Named somewhat mysteriously "Philial Epidemic Strategy Tryst" and organised by familiar BiM Conference names Karin Sellberg and Michael O'Rourke, the lineup featured presentations by both of them as well as talks by such people as the wonderfully discursive Scott Wilson, the vaguely heretical Nicola Masciandaro, shrewdly challenging Steven Shakespeare and Vincent Como, artist-philosopher on blackness (whose artwork accentuated both the physical space of the symposium and the P.E.S.T. circular).

While the first two symposia provoked vehement cries of alarm and disgust from academics and black metal fans alike, the furor seems to have substantially calmed, replaced by a greater audience fascination and demand. Consequently, the entire symposium was live-streamed and has been archived as two video recordings by independent publishing house and experimental recording label Radical Matters (accessible through the Black Metal Theory blog). Two of the presenters who were unable to attend in person have also posted their video recordings online; links to these can also be found at the Black Metal Theory site. The abstracts for each talk can be found here.

"The future, in the sense of the to-come, presupposes the philial, the epidemic, the strategic tryst. Black Metal Theory has as its prerequisite a kind of collective self-making... This is the very condition and principle of Black Metal theory’s politics, by which I mean its final nondeterminability and unrealizability, its bursting open. Not not black metal, not not theory, yes, yes black metal, yes, yes theory."

[Michael O'Rourke, "The Mutual Pestering of Black Metal and Theory"]

Recorded Lecture: Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey, "Sort, Work and Recurse: The Strategematic Rhythms of Grey Media Events"

Featuring as a keynote lecture at the Rhythm and Event symposium held at the London Graduate School on 29 October 2011, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (the two masterminds behind the forthcoming text Evil Media) talk rhythm and strategy in the ecology of the everyday in this recorded lecture archived with the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Stepping into the keynote role for Steve Goodman ("we are not the Steve Goodman tribute band"), Fuller and Goffey allow themselves to be guided in their discussion by Goodman's text Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear and his recording work with Hyperdub Records, tracing resonances between his work and theirs in analysing the forces produced in the enfolding of rhythm and event.

Fascinated by the gridded and sequenced "tetrisisation" of the world's normative rhythms, and their correlative potential for creativity, Fuller and Goffey take this thirty minutes to unpack three key techniques of rhythmic control (recursion, sorting and workflow) which exist in quotidian life and "make up the contemporary infrastructure". These strategems operate within and constitute "grey events"; such events are so undifferentiated, vague and "grey" as to be imperceptible, yet are also the points which, entwined with these widely-used stratagems, may generate new creative configurations.

"It's that interstice [of the non-correlation of the formalisms of software and peculiarities of the everyday] and the patterns of events that emerge out of it where the rhythms grey media events occur and which strategies try to operate with that matters for us. Those operations are meant to ferment, to stimulate and propagate, to produce more gaps and cracks for crowd-sourcing entrepreneurs to set up shop in, for a hive mind with diminishingly small fractal gaps of appropriable activity or attention to operate with. Alternatively, they allow us to maintain a state of plausible deniability regarding the interstice and the efficacy of the rhythms that it introduces."

Recorded Lecture: Sylvère Lotringer, "Biopower"

Slyvère Lotringer's "Biopower" is the most recent addition to extensive list of seminar discussions recorded and archived at The European Graduate School. Lotringer stages a discussion of Foucauldian biopolitics through a detailed analysis of sections of Jean Baudrillard's Forget Foucault.

Working through Baudrillard's argument, Lotringer adeptly intwines a diverse range of topics, from elements of Foucault's work on power relations and the presence of death in Georges Bataille's writing, to a potted history of the critical response to liberalism and neo-liberalism as well as a neo-Marxist reading of feudalism, finally capping the seminar with a small diatribe against the current political and economic climate in America. His lecture is an expansive, hour-long history of the development of this area of critical thought.

Throughout 2010 and 2011 (and more sporadically in previous years), the EGS have been putting these recordings of critical and communication theory lectures online as an open access resource. This seminar session and many others by Lotringer are available for viewing on the Video Lectures page of the EGS website. While there, you may want to cast your eye over the ridiculously long list of thinkers that comprise the faculty of the European Graduate School, many of whom have lectures and workshops of their own available in the site.