This short series of talks sought to offer a place where the university, the academic institution and the social and intellectual traditions that surround them, will be presented and negotiated, challenged or celebrated. The first talk, on 18th October 2006, heard Thomas Docherty discuss ‘The English Question; or, Academic Freedom’.

At the second talk, on Wednesday 15th November, ‘Reading Paul Hirst: The Challenge of Graduate Research’ Mark Cousins discussed Paul Hirst’s essay “Education and the Production of New Ideas“.This thought provoking essay from 1995 presents some of the key issues related to the current roles of and challenges facing the university and the intellectual at a time of “institutional and intellectual crisis.” Professor Paul Hirst (1947-2003) was one of the founders of the London Consortium and Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London. Among his many publications are Associative Democracy (1993), Globalisation in Question and Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (2005).

These talks were organised by PhD student Noam Leshem.

Part 2: Hesitation
ICA, Thursday 7 September 2006. 7pm Nash Room.

A new series celebrating the continued relevance of phenomenology, a philosophy aimed at making explicit structures of lived experience and modes of human existence in the world: those things that are encountered every day without thought, those actions that are repeated automatically.

Hesitation is an important part of our daily lives. Its causes can be wildly variable and its effects can range from a benign waste of time to the life threatening delay. Yet we often choose to dismiss it as a sign of weakness.

Tonight’s Speakers:

Nicholas Parsons, chairman of Radio 4’s Just A Minute, the popular panel game, which invites guests to talk on subjects for 60 seconds without repetition, deviation or hesitation.

Gulsen Bal, visual artist and theoretician, she is currently working on the notion of ‘production of subject’ as a form of hesitation in which the possible is ‘engendered’ within representations;

Neil Mullarkey, founder-member of the Comedy Store Players, Britain’s top improvisation troupe, and who has appeared in two Austin Powers movies

Robin Lickley, lecturer in Linguistics specialising in disfluency at the Speech Science Research Centre of Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.

Full Price : £10 / Concession : £9 / ICA Members : £8.
Book tickets on 020 7930 3647

Part 1: Walking
ICA, Mon 19 June 2006. 19:00 Nash Room.

A new series celebrating the continued relevance of phenomenology, a philosophy aimed at making explicit structures of lived experience and modes of human existence in the world: those things that are encountered every day without thought, those actions that are repeated automatically.

Tonight’s speaker Rebecca Solnit, author of the bestselling Wanderlust: A History of Walking will discuss the fascinating but often-overlooked significance of the first human mode of transport. Joining Rebecca Solnit will be special guests:

Andrea Phillips, an art historian researching connections between performance, architecture and social space, who is currently completing a book, Walking into Trouble, on contemporary art and pedestrianism. She is Assistant Director of MA Creative Curating, Goldsmiths College.

Sukhdev Sandhu, author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003) and I’ll Get My Coat (2005). He is the chief film critic of the Daily Telegraph, and writes for Modern Painters and the London Review of Books.

And for those with stamina, an optional walking tour around the ICA, led by Jackie Stater, follows the talk. For many years Jackie Stater has traveled the world as a Fashion Accessory Buyer, until one day she realized that she lived in the world’s most fascinating and exciting city. Having trained as a London Blue Badge Guide, she is now able to share this insight with people from all over the world. There is no better way to see London than on foot.

Full Price : £8 / Concession : £7 / ICA Members : £6.
Book tickets on 020 7930 3647

4th February 2006

The London Consortium supported this one-day conference in contemporary aesthetics, organised by Naked Punch Magazine in honour of the work of Arthur Danto.

Speakers included:
Arthur Danto - Embodied Meanings as Aesthetic Ideas
Richard Shusterman - Ars Erotica: Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Nicolas Vieillescazes - The Return of the Hegelian Repressed
Jear-Pierre Cometti - Being and Doing: Aesthetics at the Crossroads

www.nakedpunch.com

In association with the Architectural Association

Following on from last year’s successful talks, the following artists and art theorists appeared at the AA during the spring 2006 term:
Georges Didi-Huberman: ‘Image, Event and Duration’, 20 January 2006
Thomas Demand: ‘Artist Talk’, 3 February 2006
Parveen Adams: ‘Hanged, Drawn and Quartered: Goya After the Chapmans’, 10 February 2006
Christian Marclay: ‘Artist Talk’, 17 February 2006

23 November 2005, 6pm, Brunei Gallery, SOAS

The legal philosopher HLA Hart once wrote of his own discipline: “jurisprudence trembles uncertainly on the margin of many subjects.” By using the word “tremble” he gave a clue to how the concept of the interdisciplinary be rethought. In this lecture Anthony Julius, the new Chairman of the London Consortium and Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, pursued Hart’s clue to a series of conclusions about the nature of interdisciplinary practices in the arts and humanities.

7 November 2005, 6.30pm, in association with the Architectural Association

Professor Marcos Novak of the University of California, Santa Barbara describes himself as a global nomad, artist, theorist and transarchitect. At this joint event with the Architectural Association, he discussed ‘Transvergence’, a term he has coined to describe the clusters of cultural impacts and creative conditions brought about by accelerating cultural change.

The London Consortium sponsored a series of talks at the Architectural Association, where the following artists and critics appeared in conversation with Consortium faculty member Parveen Adams:
James Casbere, Friday 21 January 2005
Jonas Dahlberg, Friday 4 February 2005
Mariele Neudecker, Friday 11 February 2005
Jake Chapman, Friday 4 March 2005

Two panel sessions initiated by students to run in tandem with the Intellectuals, Professionals and Museums course. Organised by Consortium student Luke Smith.

• 11 January, 2005: Curating Modern Art with Jessica Morgan (Tate Modern), Catherine Wood (Tate Modern) and Jens Hoffman (ICA)
• 25 January, 2005: Curating British Art and the Tate Collection, with Chris Stephens, Martin Myrone, Heidi Reitmaier and Richard Humphreys (all speakers from Tate Britain)

8th December 2004, Kings College London Chapel, in association with the ICA

We are still believers, but the things we believe are not worth believing in. Slavoj Zizek, radical social theorist and Lacanian psychoanalyst, has established himself as one of the most trenchant and perceptive critics of Western political culture at work in the world today. In a unique and provocative sermon, Zizek questioned our pretensions to enlightened unbelief. Those who believe in social change should now work to defend the Judaeo-Christian heritage against its burgeoning modern alternatives – everything from new-age religions to astrology to Western Buddhism – which are too shallow and too private to be capable of offering us real spiritual succour.

• 13 October, 2004
  Michael Hirsch ‘Social Theory and Aesthetics: How to use Adorno today’
• 27 October, 2004
  Dave Beech ‘Alternative or Nothing’
• 10 November, 2004
  Paul Taylor ‘The Pornographic Barbarism of the Self-Reflecting Sign and the Poignancy of the Pinstripe Suit’
• 24 November, 2004
  Jessica Morgan ‘Common Wealth’

16th June 2004, Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain, in association with Tate Britain

Juliet Mitchell is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of several highly influential studies of the relations between psychoanalysis, gender and culture, including the groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), which challenged orthodox views of Freud as the patriarchal enemy of feminism. Subsequent books include Women: The Longest Revolution (1984) and Men and Medusa: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Sibling Relationship for the Human Condition (2000). A member of the Visiting Faculty for the London Consortium, Mitchell gave the 2004 Consortium Summer Lecture in which she discussed the issues around siblings and lateral relationships that are explored in her most recent study, Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003).

Listen to the lecture here: http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/juliet_mitchell/

10th December 2003, in association Tate Britain

Jacqueline Rose is Professor of English in the department of English and Drama at London University’s Queen Mary and Westfield College. Her research focuses on the interface between literature, psychoanalysis, politics and culture; publications include The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Virago, 1991, reissued 1996), States of Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 1996) and, as

editor and translator, Moutaphas Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training, (Macmillan, 2000).

Performance and talk, 30 May 2003, in association with the Architectural Association

Allen S. Weiss has written and edited over 30 books, including The Aesthetics of Excess(SUNY); Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon (SUNY); Mirrors of Infinity (PAP); Phantasmic Radio (Duke); Sade and the Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge); Taste, Nostalgia (Lusitania); Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture (PAP); Experimental Sound and Radio (MIT); French Food (Routledge); Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Wesleyan); Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime (SUNY). He has recently directed Theater of the Ears, a play for electronic marionette and taped voice based on the writings of Valère Novarina, and is completing a book of short stories, The Aphoristic Theater. He teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University.

10 December 2002, in association with the ICA

Filmmaker Patrick Keiller - director of London (1993) and Robinson in Space (1997) - is currently AHRB Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Royal College of Art.
A lecture discussing his current work, which explores the development of urban and other landscapes since the end of the nineteenth century.

The talk was introduced by Colin MacCabe.

June 2002, in association with Tate Britain

Award winning writer and critic Marina Warner discusses the image of paradise in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. She examines the painting int he light of the first encounter with the Americas and the earliest ethonographical account, Ramon Pane’s Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. The author of numerous acclaimed works on myth, symbolism and fairy tales, including Monuments and Maidensand No Go the Bogeyman, Marina Warner has also given the Reith Lectures (1994), is Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, and is a member of the London Consortium Visiting Faculty.