My diary (detail)

I just wanted to draw attention to a number of interesting events over the next few months. Please let me know below of other seminars, conferences or talks!

29.10.11  |  Rhythm and Event symposium  |  KCL, London

01.11.11  |  John Mullarkey – Art-Practice-Thought: The Case of Cinema  |  Goldsmiths, London

21.11.11  |  Bruno Latour – Waiting for Gaia  |  Institut Français, London

21.11.11  |  Paul Simpson – Ecologies of Performance  |  School of Geography, Oxford

28.11.11  |  Caren Kaplan – The Visual Culture of Stealth  |  School of Geography, Oxford

29.11.11  |  Lars Spuybroek  - The Sympathy of Things  |  AA, London

06.12.11  |  Ian James – Art – Technics  |  Goldsmiths, London

ongoing  |  Topology project  |  Tate Modern, London

forthcoming  |  François Laruelle – Non-Standard Philosophy  |  TBC

forthcoming  |  The New in Social Research seminar series  |  TBC

Photos from a sound-walk, Whitechapel, London

The day I was in London exploring various galleries showing John Latham’s work, I stumbled across a wonderful sound-walk. Janet Cardiff’s (1999) The missing voice (case study B) was something I was aware of, both because of an exhibition of her work (with partner George Bures Miller) at Modern Art Oxford (The House Of Books Has No Windows), and a paper by the geographer David Pinder, ‘Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the City‘:

This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiff’s audio-walk in particular works with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the significance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of the city.

It was just a sign on the wall, and so I went to the reception to enquire. I was asked to fill in some paperwork and required to leave my credit card at the desk. In return, I was handed an iPod Nano with a set of audio files pre-loaded on it, pointed in the right direction and politely told that the first seven minutes or so would not make sense as they were recorded before Whitechapel Gallery was renovated. With this in mind, I stood to one side and got my notebook and camera out. I am not entirely sure how to write about the walk, but I would encourage anyone to do it if they can. The sign said it would take 50 minutes, a fairly decent approximation, and is well worth your time. I took photos as I walked, and jotted down notes and thoughts in my notebook. The binauraul recording is disorienting at first but leads you through the city as if it were holding you by the hand (perhaps it’s by the ear instead). For more information on the piece, see Cardiff’s own site, or Artangel’s, who funded the work (and also host the audio files, if you wish to take your own MP3 and headphones).

Rather than write about the walk, I’ve instead included a collage of snapshots of my journeying (above) and transcribed my (at times nonsensical) notes for posterity.

Shop, KFC | ambulance? Siren | Dogs barking | rhythm of steps | [unreadable] | uncanny timing | Brick Lane – sound and smell | unexpected details – “I ate here” | pause at crossing | find myself turning my head, taking headphones off, wondering if people like me… | mapping different paths – details | no average sign (Eat + Drink) | go past station | fancy men’s clothes – smart suit (uncanny) | church shut – sit on benches at the site | I ready myself, but she comes over, sits down | no tulips or smell… | story is composed of little snippets | took a wrong turn – Bathhouse | McD, weird lights | watching people from railings

Even tstructu re and other works, Lisson Gallery, London

While I was preparing the paper I presented at Aarhus, my research touched upon the work of John Latham (1921-2006), as he is a great inspiration for the work done by the Office of Experiments.

Latham had a visionary outlook that questioned scientific thought. An important contributor to the Destruction in Art Symposium, 1966, and a founder member of the Artist Placement Group, 1966-89, he created performances, paintings, assemblages, sculptures and films. This apparently eclectic practice was united by his concept of Event Structures and Flat Time Theory. Through his experimental and radical work he linked science and art, proving influential in both fields.¹

By some strange chance - coincidence? – it transpired that there was not one but four exhibitions of Latham’s work in London at the time I was writing about him! I took the chance to go to London the weekend before travelling to Denmark and visited both the Lisson Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery. I was unable to explore the collected works at Karsten Schubert as they were shut at the week-end, and Flat Time Ho, Latham’s former house, was too far away for me to manage it. As I was searching for the details (see below), I also found that there had been an exhibition of some of Latham’s art in New York, curated by the same person who had co-curated the archive at Whitechapel.

The Lisson Gallery, not far from Edgware Road underground station, was incredibly quiet; somewhat surprising given that it was the last day of the exhibition. One of Latham’s pieces which had particularly interested me, ‘even tstructu re’ (1966-67), was on display. A large collage, it has the words MAKE EVENT and SPECTATOR EVENT, which are linked by string according to different sets of conditions, illustrating the entanglement of artist, artwork and viewer. I asked the Gallery if I would be able to document the exhibition and they were happy for me to do so, as long as it was for my research. I assured them that if anything were to come of my trip and my materials, I would be sure to acknowledge them. So, my sincere thanks to the Lisson Gallery for enabling me to make a collage of some of Latham’s works. They also offered to provide copies of any publications that I might need, which was very generous.

The ‘Anarchive’ at Whitechapel Gallery was a lot smaller than I had anticipated, and was limited to one of the smaller galleries (#4). There were only a few of Latham’s works on display but interestingly, there were many of his publications, in particular exhibition catalogues, out on the tables of the adjacent room. This turned out to be the main archive room. I asked if I was able to take photos of these documents but was unfortunately unable to. Instead, I sat down and read through them, jotting down the publication details.

Here are the details for the exhibitions but please note that only Anarchive is still on:

Whitechapel Gallery | Anarchive | 02.04 – 05.09 | Tue – Sun, 11:00-18:00 | Aldgate East

Lisson Gallery | The Lisson Gallery Does Not Exist for 100 Years | 05.05 – 05.06 | Mon – Fri, 10:00-18:00; Sun, 11:00-17:00 | Edgware Road

Karsten Schubert / Richard Saltoun | Works 1958(61?) – 1995 | 05.05 – 11.06 | Mon – Fri, 10:00-18:00 | Piccadillly Circus

Flat Time Ho | The Story of the RIO | 06.05 – 06.06 | Thu – Sun, 12:00-18:00 | Peckham Rye Rail

apexart | The Incidental Person | 06.01 – 20.02 | Tue – Sat, 11:00-18:00 | New York (!)

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Jane Bennett: reading group and talk, Royal Holloway, University of London

Last week I was lucky enough to attend a couple of events at Royal Holloway where Prof. Jane Bennett was visiting for the day (thanks to Sebastian for letting me know). The first was a reading group:

The Contemporary Political Theory Research Group and the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, are pleased to be hosting Prof. Jane Bennett of Johns Hopkins University.  Prof. Bennett will be attending our Contemporary Political Theory Reading Group from 12-1:30 pm, to discuss two chapters of her recently published Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).¹

Jane introduced her book, which draws on alternative traditions of materialism, as both trying to to do away with the idea of inert matter, and attempt to move discourse away from moral responsibility towards a political pragmatism more concerned with problem-solving than with evaluating responsibility. The questions posed at the reading group were not straightforward and, at times, perhaps a little aggressive but Jane did well to respond to claims that (1) the work was reactionary and that (2) there was no argument. The first point, that her work was reactionary, was prompted by a reading of a particular paragraph in Chapter 2 (‘the agency of assemblages’, p.37-38) of Vibrant Matter:

Perhaps the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages who conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends? Agency is, I believe, distributed across a mosaic, but it is also possible to say something about the kind of striving that may be exercised by a human within the assemblage.

Arguing that perhaps she is not as radical (as some of the people who were sitting round the table?), Jane explained that she was developing an incrementalist political imaginary. There are always lines of flight and dysfunctional elements that you can accentuate, and you never know what the political implications are, or might be, in advance. Indeed, she compares the exertion we might possess as being analogous to that of riding a bicycle on gravel: whilst you can move yourself in different direction to inflect the bike’s path, you are but one actant operative in a moving whole. The second point, concerning the style of the book, was acknowledged by Jane, who noted that there was not a log of antagonism in the book. However, the book was written as a narrative of experience, as a story and not an argument. The relation between politics and ontology is not direct, she contended, and the book was pitched on a micropolitical register, where sensibilities are formed or altered. Although unable to guarantee the effects of a book , there is definitely a mood to the book which Jane hoped was infectious. Perhaps the book itself is another example of thing-power (developed, in part from Spinoza’s notion of power: the capacity to affect and be affected), which encourages, or fosters, a susceptibility to being altered by encounters. My question, at the end of the discussion, concerned a particular passage in the text: if affiliations in an assemblage require a certain proximity, and if so, is that a spatial proximity? Recognising it was controversial among Deleuzeans, she argued that affiliations did require a spatial proximity as her materialism is very literally physicalist. The most potent affiliations have a physical proximity, she argued, and added that she was moving towards an image of politics that is very much at the city-level. I was rather taken aback, and was unable to press her on this. Perhaps another time!

Later on in the day, Jane presented some of her work-in-progress:

Provisional title: “Michel Serres, A Topography of Becoming, and the Practice of History”²

Abstract: There is a group of political theorists today who affirm one of the various ontologies of “becoming” that philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, and Michel Serres have articulated.  For these thinkers, the cosmos is best characterized not as a fixed order but as a flow, generative process, creative evolution, or ontological ruckus.  While a focus on the fragility and changeability of orders has received much attention, it is also important, I contend, for political theorists of becoming to try to characterize, to give some specificity to, the strange systematicity proper to a mobile and protean world.  My essay draws upon Michel Serres to address the question of how it is that forms manage to appear amidst the general hustle and flow of life.  Serres, I contend, offers a rich conceptual and metaphorical repertoire for thinking about the formativity of becoming and for mapping the course of its congealments.  I first consider Serres’ metaphysics of “noise,” I then turn to the distinctive phases he discerns with it, and I conclude by drawing out some implications of his topography of becoming for the practice of doing history and political theory.

The paper could be seen as a development from her last two books and was modest in its aims. She opened with a discussion of ‘Thing-theory’, mainly discussing the work of Graham Harman who she started reading after finishing Vibrant Matter. An object-oriented philosopher, Harman is critical of two ‘camps’ (process / product) of philosophers who have theorised things. He argues against the grandeur of Duration or Becoming (Bergson, Deleuze), whilst claiming that there is more to the object than its relations (Latour, Whitehead). The task of Jane’s paper was to try to bring these groups together again by seeking to understand how objects withstand the flow of becoming – what she called a ‘strange structuralism’ – through the (perhaps) less well-known metaphysics of Michel Serres, who offers a rich conceptual and metaphorical repertoire for thinking the forms and structures of becoming. Instead of becoming, Serres talks of noise, a hum or buzz, a background of life. So how might shapes take form in this noise?

The aleatory quality of formativity – it could happen, but maybe not – is described using Serres’ vocabulary of surge, fluctuation, rhythm / cadence, vortex, turbulence, and invariance. These phases do not follow a linear progression but are instead contemporaneous, both multi-temporal and poly-chronic. What then, would a political theory alert to the crumpled or unfolded nature of space-time look like? Perhaps (and Jane was not entirely happy with this) theorists might make experimental connections between events or bodies which resemble one another;  Serres endorses this experimentalism. Social scientists should be like Hermes: experimental messengers, exporting and importing, traversing, inventing, working through analogies. The social scientist as maker of analogies: we know no other route to invention, we have to proceed by way of analogy. There is a lot of play in analogies, and they are not founded on a causal relationship but rather a co-shimmering. This does not however, sit comfortably with Deleuze’s preference for examples rather than analogies (preferring an exemplary rather than an analogical philosophy) and when asked, Jane explained that she was most interested in thinking about echoes and sympathies (or lines of affective connection) which perhaps have more to do with webs of resemblance and similitude.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Walking-planting the city, London

The Sense Lab, a laboratory for thought in motion, is composed of artists, academics, researchers, dancers and writers who work together to explore the active passage between research and creation.

As a member by proxy (one of my supervisors has attended various Sense Lab events), I’ve been involved in this year’s project, titled ‘Society of Molecules‘. Each molecule is challenged to set up an aesthetico-political action of some kind; the molecule that I was part of was interested in ‘Diagramming Movements between the cartographic and the choreographic’ and was co-located at Oxford, Chichester and London.

Movement profile
We want to facilitate a distributed field of movement and experiment between two techniques of thinking-space, two technologies of lived abstraction – geography and dance.

As part of this distributed event, the molecule gathered in London on 04.04.09 to meet one another, to talk about what we’d been reading (mainly Chaosmosis, by Guattari) and to be involved in some sort of ethico-aesthetic action. A walk was planned as part of an attempt to link two gallery spaces which were both part of the same exhibition (The Collection). Movement artist Simon Whitehead created a postcard ‘score’ to guide people along a pre-determined route. But walking was only part of it: all those involved were also encouraged to make seed balls and take them on the walk, with the view to introducing them to ‘latent spaces’. Guerilla gardening! SCATTER.

Score of the walk

The collage shows some of the encounters, trails and seeds planted on the walk. Please get in touch with me if you’d like a copy of the collage at full-size (4.4 MB).