Please click on the names of London Consortium core faculty below for details of some of their selected publications.
Parveen Adams
Samantha Ashenden
Steven Connor
Barry Curtis
Colin MacCabe
Tom McCarthy
Laura Mulvey
Aura Satz
John Sellars
Patrick Wright
Parveen Adams
“Hanged, Drawn and Quartered or Goya after the Chapmansâ€, in Chris Townsend (Ed.) The Art of Jake and Dinos Chapman, (London: Thames and Hudson, forthcoming 2007)
“Art and the Time of Repetitionâ€, in Juli Carson (Ed.) Exile of the Imaginary , (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007)
“Boxed in and Spaced Out: Psyche und Raum: Ãœber Expansion, Kontraktion, Anschluss und Gleichgewicht im Werk Naumansâ€, in Bruce Nauman – Mental Exercises, Kat. | Cat. (Düsseldorf: NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, 2006)
“Out of Sight, Out of Body: The Sugimoto/Demand Effectâ€, Grey Room 23. (Winter 2006), pp86–104
“The Sexual Relation in James Joyce and in Cronenberg’s Crash“, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 13. (May 2005), pp131-145
Art: Sublimation or Symptom, (New York: Other Press, 2003)
The Emptiness of the Image, (London: Routledge, 1996)
The Woman in Question (with E.Cowie), (Cambridge Mass: MIT, 1990)
m/f Journal, (co-edited with E. Cowie), (1978-86)
Samanthan Ashenden
‘The Problem of Power in Luhmann’s systems theory’, Luhmann on Law and Politics: Critical Appraisals and Applications, edited by M. King and C. Thornhill (Hart, Oxford, 2006) pp 127-144.
‘Structuralism and post-structuralism’, Modern Social Theory, ed. A. Harrington, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005) pp 196-214.
Governing Child Sexual Abuse: negotiating the boundaries of public and private, law and science (Routledge, London, 2004)
‘Policing Perversion: the contemporary governance of paedophilia’, Special Issue of Cultural Values: Journal for Cultural Research on ‘Culture and Governance’, edited by M.Dillon and J. Valentine (Routledge, London, January-April 2002) Volume 6, Issues 1 & 2, pp. 197-222.
Foucault contra Habermas: recasting the dialogue between genealogy and critical theory (Sage, London, 1999), co-edited with David Owen, University of Southampton
‘Habermas on discursive consensus: rethinking the welfare state in the face of cultural pluralism’, Welfare and Culture in Europe: Towards a New Paradigm in Social Policy, eds P. Chamberlayne, A. Cooper, R. Freeman & M. Rustin (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, 1999) pp. 216-239.
‘Pluralism within the limits of reason alone? Habermas and the discursive negotiation of consensus’, Special Issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy on ‘Pluralism and Liberal Neutrality’, edited by R. Bellamy and M. Hollis, (Frank Cass Publishers, London, Autumn 1998) Volume 1, Number 3, pp. 117-136.
‘Feminism, postmodernism and the sociology of gender’, Sociology after Postmodernism, ed. D. Owen (Sage, London, 1997) pp. 40-64.
‘Reflexive governance and child sexual abuse: liberal welfare rationality and the Cleveland Inquiry’, Economy and Society (Routledge, London, February 1996) Volume 25, Number 1, pp. 64-88.
Steve Connor
Fly, (Reaktion Press 2006)
Few creatures are as universally despised as flies. Blamed for pestilence and plagues, they were publicly excommunicated from the medieval church. Beelzebub, “the lord of the flies,†was said to be the embodiment of evil, and, for centuries, flies were considered the result of spontaneous generation—the unnatural consequence of rotting meat. Steven Connor’s Fly, published by Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, explores the history of this much-maligned creature and then turns to examine its newfound redemption through science. The secrets of the fly’s versatile powers of flight, Steven Connor reveals, are only beginning to be understood and appreciated. Its eyes and wings, for instance, have evolved so perfectly that they provide inspiration for some of today’s most daring technological and scientific innovations. And the humble fruit fly, Connor demonstrates, stands at the center of revolutionary advances in genetic research. Connor delights in tracking his lowly subject through myth, literature, poetry, painting, film, and biology. Humans live in close and intimate quarters with flies, but Fly is the first book to give these common creatures their due. Chapters: 1. Fly Familiar; 2. Musca Maledicta; 3. Sticky Fun 4. Orders of Magnitude; 5. Fly Wars; 6. Mutable Fly; 7. Fly Leaves
Read more about flies here.
The Book of Skin, (Reaktion Press 2003)
The Book of Skin explores the amazingly elaborate and varied functions, roles and meanings of human skin within Western culture. Skin, Steven Connor argues, has never been more visible. He examines a wide range of sources, including literature, non-fiction and medical texts; art, photography and film; folklore, popular song and language. The book covers all aspects of skin’s cultural history, including the chromatics of skin colour and pigmentation, blushing, suntanning, paleness, darkening, tattooing, scarification, the Turin shroud, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the destructive rage exercised against skin in all kinds of violent fantasies, and the intensities and attenuations of touch. Connor also explains why particular colours are ascribed to feelings and conditions, such as green for envy, purple for rage and yellow for cowardice.
Moving from the human body itself to photography and the cinema screen, and from medieval leprosy, Renaissance flaying, and syphilis to cosmetics, plastic surgery and contemporary skin cancers, the author fully surveys our skin’s obvious and yet unfamiliar terrain. The Book of Skin shows that skin has never been at once so manifest and so in jeopardy as it is today, when, as Marshall MacLuhan puts it, each of us wears all of mankind as his skin.
Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, (Oxford University Press 2000)
Ventriloquism, the art of “seeming to speak where one is not”, speaks so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition. We now think nothing of hearing voices–our own and others’–propelled over intercoms, cellphones, and answering machines. Yet, why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? And why does the magician’s trick of speaking through a dummy entertain as well as disturb us? These are the kind of questions which impel Dumbstruck, Steven Connor’s wide-ranging, relentlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice.
Connor follows his subject from its early beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the outcries of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination. Surprisingly, he finds that women like the sibyls of Delphi were the key voices in these male-dominated times. Connor then turns to the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange cultural obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, that flourished during the Enlightenment. He retells the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the ‘vocalic uncanny’ of technologies like the telephone, radio, film, and the internet.
Brimming with anecdote and insight, Dumbstruck is a provocative archeology of a seemingly trivial yet profoundly relevant presence in human history. Its pages overflow with virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.
For a full listing of all of Steve Connor’s publications, visit his website.
Barry Curtis
‘Suburbia as Negotiated Modernism’ in Making a New World’, ed. Marieke Kuipers (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008)
Dark Places: The Haunted House in the Cinema, (Reaktion, London, 2008)
‘Protest and Nuclear Fear’ in Cold War Modern ed. Jane Pavey and David Crowley, (Victoria and Albert Museum catalogue, London, 2008)
‘Dinosaur Design’ in Visual Rhetoric and the Special Eloquence of Design Artifacts ed. Leslie Atzmon (Parlor Press NY, 2007)
‘Building the Trip’ in Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era , ed. Christophe Grunenberg (Tate Publications, London, 2005)
‘A Highly Mobile and Plastic Environ’ in Art and the Sixties: This Was Tomorrow, ed. Chris Stephens and Katherine Stout (Tate Publications, London, 2004)
‘Location Envy’ in Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility, ed. David Blamey (Open Editions, London, 2003), with Claire Pajaczkowska
Colin MacCabe
Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, (Faber & Faber 2004)
Jean-Luc Godard’s early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the Superbrats of Hollywood to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in 1968 he abandoned one of the most brilliant careers in French cinema to pursue his investigations into sound and image on the periphery of the industry he had rejected.
Following a protected childhood in Switzerland in the Second World War, the post-war years saw Godard as a troubled adolescent in Paris, where the prescribed courses of the Sorbonne were ignored in favour of the extraordinary teaching of André Bazin, the greatest of film critics. In the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Godard - together with Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol - hammered out an aesthetic that would take the world by storm as the young critics swapped pens for cameras at the end of the 1950s to create the cinema of the nouvelle vague. Hugely prolific in his first 10 years - A Bout de Souffle, Le Petit Soldat, Le Mepris, Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville, Made in USA and many others all appeared in the 1960s - Godard became and remains one of the most adventurous and enigmatic film-directors at work in the world today.
Praise for the book:
‘Godard aficionados should have it on their shelves, but it succeeds for a general reader too… fresh and vital’ The Independent
‘MacCabe has done what Godard would never (now) dare to do: he tells it like it is. … Of particular note is the sheer depth and extent of research. MacCabe has spoken to key characters in a series of ongoing interviews. These shed a particularly personal light on the relevant milieu and Godard’s famous disposition.… MacCabe has composed an ecology of lovers, friends, enemies and gods that occupy the spaces between Jean-Luc Godard’s many selves’ Contemporary
Tom McCarthy
Tintin and the Secret of Literature, (Granta 2006)
Noting that the work of Belgian cartoonist Herges plays a mastery of character and plot, theme and symbol rivalling that of the great novelists, McCarthy asks ‘Is it literature?’ Taking a cue from Tintin himself, who spends much of his time tracking down illicit radio signals, entering crypts and decoding puzzles, McCarthy suggests that we need to ‘tune in’ and decode if we want to capture what’s really going on in Herges’ books. What emerges is a remarkable family story that gets played out through the seventeenth-century pirates and twentieth-century Incas of Herges’ own invention and transposed, via his capricious diva Bianca Castafiore, onto Gounod’s opera Faust. McCarthy shows how the themes and anxieties this story generates - themes such as expulsion from home, violation of the sacred, the host-guest relationship turned sour and anxieties around the questions of forgery and fakeness - are the very same that have both fuelled and troubled writers and thinkers from the classical era to the present day, and hints that Tintin’s ultimate ’secret’ may well be that of literature itself.
Remainder, (Metronome Press 2005, Vintage 2007)
A nameless hero, traumatised by an accident which ‘involves something falling from the sky’ and leaves him eight and a half million pounds richer but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and memories: a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off them… But when this fails to quench his thirst for authenticity, he starts re-enacting more and more violent events, as his repetition addiction spirals out of control. A darkly comic meditation on memory, identity and history, Remainder is a parable for modern times.
‘…strangely gripping… Remainder should be read (and, of course, reread) for its intelligence and humour…’ Times Literary Supplement
‘…This isn’t how we expect a novel to be, but it’s why it’s a very good novel indeed. It trains you out of a certain way of thinking…’ London Review of Books
Laura Mulvey
British Experimental Television, (co-edited with Jamie Sexton), (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2007)
‘Repetition and Return: the Spectator’s Memory’, in Koker Trilogy’ Third Text , (Abbas Kiarostami, forthcoming 2007)
‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai): from after to before the photograph’, Oxford Art Journal, (forthcming 2007)
Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, (Reaktion Books 2006)
In Death 24 x A Second, Laura Mulvey addresses some of the key questions of film theory, spectatorship and narrative. New media technologies, such as video and DVD, have transformed the way we experience film, and the viewers’ relationship to film image and cinema’s narrative structure has also been fundamentally altered. These technologies give viewers the means to control both image and story, so that films produced to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be found to contain unexpected (even unintended) pleasures.
The tension between the still frame and the moving image coincides with the cinema’s capacity to capture the appearance of life and preserve it after death. Mulvey proposes that with the arrival of new technologies and new ways of experiencing the cinematic image, film’s hidden stillness comes to the fore, thereby acquiring a new accessibility and visibility. The individual frame, the projected film’s best-kept secret, can now be revealed, by anyone, at the simple touch of a button. As Mulvey argues, easy access to repetition, slow motion and the freeze-frame may well shift the spectator’s pleasure to a fetishistic rather than a voyeuristic investment in the cinematic object.
The manipulation of the cinematic image by the viewer also makes visible cinema’s material and aesthetic attributes. By exploring how new technologies can give new life to ‘old’ cinema, Death 24 x A Second offers an original re-evaluation of film’s history and also its historical usefulness.
‘Within a single shot: discontinuities of time and space’ in Mark Lewis exhibition catalogue, (FACT Gallery, Liverpool, England 2006)
‘Les premiers quartres plans d’Imitation of Life’ in Traffic, (Paris, France 2006)
‘Death Drives’, in R.Allen & S.Ishi-Gonzales, Past and Future Hitchcock (Routledge, 2004)
‘Passing time: reflections on cinema from a new technological age’ Screen 45, 2004
‘Birdsong’ in Sutapa Biswas, (INoVA, London 2004)
Aura Satz
‘Attacks on Automata’ in Iconoclasm Contested Objects, Contested Terms, Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay (eds), (Ashgate, 2007)
‘Inside the Statue’ in Articulate Objects: Voicing and Listening to Sculpture and Performance, Aura Satz and Jonathan Wood (eds.), (forthcoming 2008)
‘The Conviction of its Existence: Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs and Phantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism’, in Neurology and Modernity, Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (eds.) (forthcoming)
John Sellars
Encounters with Ancient Thought Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (11/3 2006 )
The essays in this volume draw attention to the continuing presence and vitality of ancient thought within modern European philosophy. From Nietzsche and Heidegger, through Bachelard, Serres, and Lacan, to more recent figures such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Badiou, our collective debt to the classical tradition is never far away. Their work abounds with references, allusions, and extended engagements with a wide range of material from ancient philosophy – to the point that at least some background in ancient philosophy is essential for the prospective reader. If we are to engage with these contemporary philosophers properly then we must also be prepared to follow them into the world of ancient thought. The aim of this volume is to illustrate the rich diversity of these contemporary encounters with ancient thought and to offer readers of modern European philosophy an introduction to the classical philosophical tradition.
Justus Lipsius, On Constancy, Translated by John Stradling, Edited with an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography by John Sellars, (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006)
In this volume John Sellars has edited and introduced a long out-of-print translation of a major sixteenth-century philosophical text. Lipsius’ De Constantia (1584), a key Humanist text, was conceived as a philosophical consolation for those suffering through contemporary religious wars. It proved immensely popular in its day and formed the inspiration for what has become known as ‘Neostoicism’, advocating the revival of Stoic ethics in a form that would be palatable to a Christian audience. Sir John Stradling’s translation, first published in 1595, and then re-issued in 1939, is now available to a modern audience.
Stoicism, John Sellars, (Chesham: Acumen & Berkeley: University of California Press 2006)
John Sellars’ Stoicism is the first introduction to Stoic philosophy for 30 years. It provides a comprehensive introduction to this great philosophical school. As well as outlining the central philosophical ideas of Stoicism, it aims to introduce readers to the different ancient authors and sources that they will encounter when exploring Stoicism. The book begins by introducing the ancient Stoics and their works. It then considers how the Stoics themselves conceived philosophy and how they formulated their own philosophical system. The core chapters examine Stoic philosophical doctrines in depth, taking each division of Stoic theory in turn: logic, physics, and ethics. The final chapter provides a fascinating account of the Stoic legacy from later antiquity to the present. The book includes a glossary, chronology and guide to further reading, which, together with its accessible yet authoritative approach, make it an ideal introduction for students and general readers.
“It’s easy to recommend this book as the best introduction to the subject” – The Philosophers’ Magazine
“A lucid, informative and thoughtful introduction to Stoicism. The book provides an overview that is both highly readable and yet based on solid academic study.” – C. J. Gill, University of Exeter
“Stoicism needs a new work of this kind. Sellars not only takes good account of the last thirty years of research, he also has much of his own to contribute. I particularly applaud his focus on Epictetus and on Stoicism as an art of life.” – A. A. Long, University of California, Berkeley
The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy, Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
Presenting philosophy as an art concerned with one’s way of life, Sellars draws on Socratic and Stoic philosophical resources and argues for the ancient claim that philosophy is primarily expressed in one’s behaviour. The book considers the relationship between philosophy and biography, and the bearing that this relationship has on debates concerning the nature and function of philosophy. Questioning the premise that philosophy can only be conceived as a rational discourse, Sellars presents it instead as an art (techne) that combines both ‘logos‘ (rational discourse) and ‘askesis‘ (training), and suggests that this will make it possible to understand better the relationship between philosophy and biography. The first part of this book outlines the Socratic conception of philosophy as an art and the Stoic development of this idea into an art of living, as well as considering some of the ancient objections to the Stoic conception. Part Two goes on to examine the relationship between philosophical discourse and exercises in Stoic philosophy. Taking the literary form of such exercises as central, the author analyses two texts devoted to philosophical exercises by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Patrick Wright
Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War, (Oxford University Press 2007)
One day in August 1954, the Boston Daily Globe informed its readers that ‘Leaping Lena’ had landed in New York. Flown in by plane from Munich, this red-eyed carrier pigeon received ‘the kind of welcome usually reserved for human dignitaries’. Fifteen press photographers clicked away as the incomer was greeted by four ‘hero pigeons’ from World War II, including at least one prospective mate. Carefully primed pigeon fanciers had brought along several hundred other birds, which were ceremoniously released at the chosen moment. One carried a message telling President Eisenhower of the occasion.
‘Leaping Lena’ owed her celebrity to an exhausted landing she had earlier made in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, having become disorientated while racing from Munich to her home loft in Klatzenbach, West Germany. A Czech had found the bird and, recognizing the band on her leg, sent her home with a message addressed to Radio Free Europe. This anonymous fellow begged for ‘speedy liberation’ and urged the west not to waver in the fight against Communism. Radio Free Europe had promptly adopted the pigeon that ‘crashed the iron curtain’ and brought her to New York as a fund-raising mascot for its ‘1955 Crusade for Freedom’. [et cetera, for 450 pages…]
Tank; the Progress of a Monstrous War Machine, (Faber & Faber, 2001. US edition: Viking, 2002; Penguin 2003)
‘Captain Fuller’s text is heavy with symbolic weaponry: swords, helmets, shields, even the “glittering armour of mirth†with which the adepts shield themselves against Christian sentimentality. In the Aeon of Horus, the War of the Freedom of Souls meant setting aside pity: “Life must be held in contempt – the life of self and the life of others. Here there must be no weakness, no sentiment, no reason, no mercy. All must taste of the desolation of the war, and partake of the blood of the cup of death. . .†After pouring contempt on the masses with their “swinish itchings†and “unbridled fornicationsâ€, Fuller yearns for a catastrophe to sweep the Christian era away: “The Maniac’s vision of horror is better than this, and even the shambles clotted with blood…‒ [et cetera for 486 pages]
See also ‘Cubist Slugs’, London Review of Books, 23 June 2005.
Stanley Spencer, (with Timothy Hyman), (Tate Publishing 2001)
‘However inadequate the available lot of land appeared in the early 1920s, the approach to the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere now seems quite classic in a southern English way. The National Trust’s seasonally varied opening times are displayed on a noticeboard planted in the oak-shaded Berkshire hedge; and the gate opens onto a brick pathway that proceeds, straight as a ley-line, through a little grove of apple trees set in flowery native meadow grass. The building itself is made red brick trimmed with white stone. Flanked by low, somewhat bungaloid wings designed to serve as alms houses, the rectangular chapel is capped with a small and awkwardly proportioned pitched roof, said to be the consequence of disagreement between the architect, Lionel Pearson and his commissioning client. Though inspired by Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, Stanley Spencer’s “holy box†is, from the outside, more reminiscent of an early twentieth-century municipal crematorium, or perhaps even a water board pumping station from the same era.’
The River: the Thames in Our Time, (BBC Worldwide, 1999)
‘AEA Technology’s experts in Computational Fluid Dynamics may originally have used their computer simulations to predict flows in nuclear reactors, but they now work on a contractual basis, modelling the movement of liquids or gases through all sorts of systems for clients all over the world. These software engineers have modelled the movement of blood in arteries and of air in domestic products such as vacuum cleaners and hover lawn-mowers. They’ve modelled the fire at King’s Cross station, the ventilation system to be used in the Millennium Dome, and even the progress of tidal surges up the Thames estuary: “The Thames has always challenged our software,†says a spokeswoman, helpfully. . .’ [et cetera for 219 pages]
See also ‘Industrial Bread and a Ship Full of Bombs’, Rising East, 5 September 2006.
The Village that Died for England, (Cape, 1995) Revised and enlarged edition, Faber, 2002
‘I had left London just as the pulsing of the last night-clubs gave way to the greasy chirruping of the inner-city dawn chorus, but I came unstuck at Waterloo. A bleary-eyed ticket inspector directed me on to the wrong train, and it was past midday by the time I climbed up the western edge of Bindon Hill, stepping out on the springy downland grass that Mr Philip Brannon, artist and author of the Victorian guidebook with which I had equipped myself, called “richly verdant turf of exquisite softnessâ€. There were oxe-eye daisies among the scattered flints, snail shells and rabbit droppings – along with wild thyme and the curious hairy-flowered plant known as kidney vetch…’ [et cetera for 468 pages]
A Journey Through Ruins, (Radius 1991, Enlarged edition, Flamingo 1993)
‘London has been through something like this before: picking over the debris, finding surprising new meaning in the ruins. But the first blitz came with a greater sense of reality. Neo-romantic artists, such as John Minton and Graham Sutherland, found strange figures in the debris. The engraver, John Farleigh, wandered through the blitzed streets in 1941, recording that there was “a loveliness about the whole atmosphereâ€, and that bombing had cleansed Tottenham Court Road of its vulgarity and enabled it to achieve “beauty and humilityâ€. He celebrated the fact that the signposts had gone, saying that they had really only been “symbols of our suburbanityâ€, and preferring to wander wide-eyed into the deeper meanings of a city reduced to rubble. . .’ [et cetera for 416 pages]
On Living in an Old Country: the National Past in Contemporary Britain, (Verso, 1985 & 1991)
‘In its historical repertoire National heritage borrows many of the trappings of the English utopia (of Arthurian legend, of Blake and Samuel Palmer, of Morris and Pre-Raphaelitism . . .), yet it stages utopia not as a vision of possibilities which reside in the real – not even as a prophetic if counterfactual perspective on the real – but as a dichotomous realm existing alongside the everyday. Like the utopianism from which it draws, national heritage involves positive energies which certainly can’t be written of as mere ideology. It engages hopes, dissatisfactions, feelings of tradition and freedom, but it tends to do so in a way that diverts these potentially disruptive energies into the separate and regulated spaces of stately display…’ [et cetera for 256 pages]
For full details of all Patrick Wright’s publications and other work, visit his website at www.patrickwright.net.
