Karen Mirza & Brad Butler: The Unreliable Narrator

The Bad Vibes Club presents The Unreliable Narrator, a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, with a talk by Karen Mirza.

The Unreliable Narrator by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler is a video work that revisits the 2008 Mumbai Attacks to depict the deeper battle for control over the event’s grand narratives. Enlisting an unreliable narrator the work destabilises these narratives by drawing attention to the absurd convergence of Bollywood dreams, twisted masculinities, religion, class and fear. Karen Mirza will talk about the themes of The Unreliable Narrator in the context of contemporary forms of terror and their representations in the media.

Mirza and Butler’s work spans filmmaking, installation, drawing, publishing and curating. The artists draw influence from critical moments of change, protest and debate. The Unreliable Narrator is part of a body of work entitled The Museum of Non Participation (2009-present). The term “non participation” for the duo is a device for questioning and challenging current conditions of political involvement and resistance. The Museum of Non Participation embeds its institutional critique in its very title, yet it releases itself from being an actual museum. Instead it travels as a place, a slogan, a banner, a performance, a newspaper, a film, an intervention, an occupation: situations that enable this museum to “act.”

Robin Mackay: Orientation, Acceleration, Futurity

Date: 22.07.14

The Bad Vibes Club presents Robin Mackay. A lecture and discussion group, with food, drink and philosophy

Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

In this lecture and discussion group, Robin Mackay will talk about orientation and futurity in the context of accelerationism, with particular references to Ray Brassier’s essay Prometheanism and its Critics.

Robin Mackay is a philosopher and editor and publisher of Collapse Journal of Philosophical Research and Development. His work addresses contingency and hyper chaos. He has written about, interviewed, translated and published the key thinkers associated with speculative realism and non-philosophy.

Joanna Bourke: “Why Are You Doing This To Me?”: Sexual Violence in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain and America

Date: 08.07.14

What do we really know about rapists? Who are they? Why do they act as they do? What can we do to stop them? By looking at the way sexually violent people have acted and been understood in past societies, we can think differently about violence today.

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the prize-winning author of nine books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, pain, and rape. One of her books is Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007).

Jonathan Rigby: The Dispossessed

Date: 10.06.14

A lecture about the curious empathy aroused by misunderstood monsters, particularly in film.

Jonathan Rigby is the author of five books, among them English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (2000), American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema (2007) and Studies in Terror: Landmarks of Horror Cinema (2011). In 2010-12 he collaborated with Mark Gatiss on the three-part BBC Four documentary A History of Horror and its one-off follow-up Horror Europa. He’s also an actor, best known for playing Kenneth Horne in various stage, radio and TV revivals of the classic comedy series Round the Horne.

Sam Ashenden & James Brown: Guilt and the Survival of the Archaic

Date: 13.05.14

Various thinkers have proposed accounts of guilt that either make the concept itself modern (which is arguably what happens when Ruth Benedict contrasts guilt and shame), or which argue for a specifically modern version of guilt (e.g. Paul Oppenheimer). There is something in this. And yet our thinking and practice with regard to guilt is haunted by concepts that, on the face of it, belong to the remote past, such as pollution, collective guilt and original sin. We will explore the forms and significance of this haunting both for our concepts of guilt and in order to problematize modernity.

Samantha Ashenden is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her current research focuses on guilt, violence and conditions of political legitimacy.

James Brown taught film and literature at Middlesex between 1992 and 2011, and politics and sociology at Birkbeck from 1997 to 2011. He is an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck.

They co-ordinate the work of the Guilt Group in the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Jill Mikkelson: Darkness Descends

Dare: 08.04.14

From its roots and throughout its evolution, metal music has always been an outsiders game. Tracing a manifest sense of social alienation, broaching the personal, political and social struggles of its participants, it has become a beacon of musical negativity, resentment, and violence. This lecture will cover how metal, in its various incarnations since the late 60s, has embodied this alienation, and subsequently rejected perceived societal norms and embraced wholesale negativity, not only in lyrical content, but in its musical presentation, imagery, physical participation, and social networking.

Jill Mikkelson is the full-time in-house promoter at The Unicorn in Camden, University of Toronto History graduate, long-time musician and has regularly contributed to several extreme music publications, including Terrorizer, Zero Tolerance, and Exclaim!, since 2002.

Mark Fisher: Anti-Vital

Date: 11.03.14

This lecture will follow a trajectory of anti-vitalism from Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death in the 1970s through to Nick Land’s extraordinary theory-fictional texts of the 1990s. The lecture will argue that – despite Land’s avowed anti-leftism and the ambivalent political orientation of Baudrillard and Lyotard’s books – a contemporary leftist politics of desire has much to learn from these texts, all of which centrally involve the figure of the death drive that introduced Freud in Beyond The Pleasure Principle. The lecture will maintain that the anti-capitalist left is compromised by its commitment to a vitalist metaphysics. However, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Land’s texts only provide a limited alternative to this metaphysics, because their ostensible negativity amounts to an inverted vitalism. In place of the fevered energetics of this cosmic libertarianism, the lecture will argue for a cooler vision of desire – in which libido is not assumed to be some force inimical to all structuration, but something that can be designed, manipulated and engineered.

Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (2009) and Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). He was a founder member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru). His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Wire, Frieze, The Guardian and Film Quarterly. He is Programme Leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and a lecturer at the University of East London. He has also produced two acclaimed audio-essays in collaboration with Justin Barton: londo

Daniel Oliver: The Efficacy of Awkwardness in Contemporary Participatory Art and Performance

Date: 11.02.14

In this talk, awkwardness is celebrated in its position as an ugly cousin of antagonism and a tolerated guest in pursuits of conviviality. Taking a Žižekian approach to participatory performance, I align awkwardness with acts of over-identification and with unstable relationships between artists, participants and big Others. My focus will be on moments of awkwardness that arise in the participatory practices of art group Reactor and performance artist David Hoyle.

Daniel Oliver is a performance artist and PhD candidate in the Drama department at Queen Mary, University of London. He focuses on awkwardness, desire, and otherness in participatory performance.  He has worked as a solo performance artist and a collaborator across the UK and overseas since 2003. His performance practice experiments with site specificity, incapability and uneasy modes of interactivity. Along with his long term collaborator, Mr Ferris, he is currently reworking a series of performances based on life-mentoring programmes and labyrinths and bringing forth the future through binaural audio action art.