Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

How can we think of novelty without attributing ontological prominence and metaphysical distinction between discreteness and continuity, or between the actual and the virtual, the analog and the digital, or the spatial and the temporal? Can a concept of ‘rhythm’ understood as a vibratory movement detached from substance, structure, metric property, and lived experience, become a method with which to account for how the new comes to be? Certainly, on the one hand, Bergson and, following him, Deleuze allow room for the coexistence of these concepts
away from opposition. On the other hand, Bachelard and, following him, Lefebvre, have attempted to construct a rhythmanalysis of newness, while Badiou’s theory of the event signals an interruption in the spatiotemporal order. But perhaps there are yet other connections to be made between (what is absent in) these thinkers and towards conceiving ‘a rhythmics of the event’. For example, for theorists such as Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman rhythm points to a complex ecology of speeds, inciting mutations across the human-machine network to allow for the construction of a sonic futurity: a virtual coexistence of past and future in the present.
The purpose of this symposium is to elaborate a philosophy of rhythm as an appropriate mode of analysis of the event. Whether aesthetic, cultural, strategic, or other, we understand the event to be an instance of rhythmic time, summoning, expressing and animated by the abstract yet real (virtual) movements of matter. A rhythmic onto genetics of this kind necessarily departs from a binary split between, on the one hand, natural bodily rhythms (breath, heartbeat and so on) and,on the other, a mechanics of steady tempo or pulse presupposing the metric organisation of spacetime. Instead, this symposium seeks to explore rhythm as an interface between diverse elements (human, machine or other) and a somewhat non-sensory, irregular and amodal movement, lurking at the most potentially unknown or ‘unthought ’ dimensions of the event.

—————————————

PROGRAMME:
Introductory Music (Claudia Martinho)

PLAY

 

download

Performance Rhythmic Materialism: dynamic patterning through corporeal mediaWith:

• Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths)
• Claudia Martinho (Goldsmiths)
• Paola Crespi (University of Surrey)

PLAY

 

download

 

Welcome by Eleni Ikoniadou .

 

Plenary

Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey: Sort, Work and Recurse: the stratagematic rhythmns of grey media events
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Panel 1
Chair: John Mullarkey

Olga Goriunova (London Metropolitan University): Software, Time and Avant-garde
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths College): Two Diagrams of the Production of the Subject
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Eleni Ikoniadou (Kingston University): Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event
[AUDIO HERE]

—————————————————–

Panel 2
Chair: Jussi Parikka

Michael Goddard (Salford): Industrial Music for Post-Industrial People
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Milla Tiainen (Anglia Ruskin): The voice as transversal rhythmics
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Scott Wilson (Kingston University): Rhythm, a-rhythmia and the Revolutionary Drive
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Panel 2 questions

PLAY

 

download

—————————————————–

Plenary

Angus Carlyle (CRiSAP): Scales of Rhythm
[AUDIO HERE]

—————————————————–

Panel 3
Chair: Scott Wilson

John Mullarkey (Kingston University): Almost Nothing Happening: An Essay on Action and Event
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Pasi Väliaho (Goldsmiths College): Rhythms of the Console Screen
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Marcel Swiboda (University of Leeds): In Search of Lost Time-Images
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Panel 4
Chair: Olga Goriunova

Stella Baraklianou (University of Portsmouth)
The photograph as pulsating event
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Iain Campbell (Kingston University): Rhythmic Bodies, Rhythmic Relations
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Judith Wambacq (Ghent University): What kind of structure defines a rhythm?
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Panel 5
Chair: Pasi Väliaho

James Lavender (University of Leeds): Bodies of Sound
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Chiara Alfano (University of Sussex): Caesura: The Rhythmed Event
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Shintaro Miyazaki (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart):
AlgoRhythmics. Microtemporal Transductions of Information, its Aesthetics, Production of Capital and Affects.
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Panel 6
Chair: Eleni Ikoniadou

Corry Shores (Husserl Archives) & Scott Wollschleger (Manhattan School of Music):
Rhythm without Time
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Frauke Behrendt (University of Brighton):
Rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre on a GPS Sound Walk
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

Tim Stephens (LSBU):
‘The End(s) of the Still’ – Releasing rhythm from photographic geometry
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

 

Plenary

Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art/ University of Southampton)
The Aesthetico-Technical Rhythm
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

LIVE PERFORMANCE   - Good luck Mr. Gorsky
[AUDIO HERE]

———————————————–

photographs from the conference:

Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

———————————————–

Chiara Alfano (University of Sussex):
Caesura: The Rhythmed Event 

Can a literature bring forth a political event? There is no doubt to how Jacques Derrida would have answered this question. There is, however, still lingering uncertainty on just how. I believe that in order to understand how Derrida reads Marx with Hamlet, but also how he deems such a reading to rearticulate, reinstate and even redefine political engagement, we must look into his conceptualisation and practice of rhythm in Spectres of Marx. In this paper I propose to readdress Derrida’s understanding of rhythm through Werner Hamacher’s ‘Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx’ and the earlier ‘Afformative, Strike’ a text written about Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Hamacher’s extraordinary achievement in the latter lies in his formulation of the afformative out of Benjamin’s historical and political act of deposing and his notion of the pure mediacy of language. Hamacher’s afformative is not only what makes every performative possible, but also that it is with this notion also locates the possibility of an (political) event in language and, indeed, literature. By defining the afformative as ‘the ellipsis which silently accompanies any act and which may silently interrupt any speech act’, Hamacher as Derrida, also understands what in language opens itself to an event in terms of rhythm. This idea is also shared by Benjamin who understands the pure mediacy as a caesura in turn defined as ‘pure word, counter-rhythmical interruption’. Hamacher’s two pieces suggest that all who wish to elaborate a philosophy of rhythm as an appropriate mode of analysis of the event may also profit from turning their attention to the parallels between the way rhythm is conceptualised addressed in Benjamin and the way rhythm is understood to be at work in Spectres.

Chiara Alfano studied English and Italian Literature at Queen’s College, Oxford and is currently concluding her PhD in Critical Theory at the University of Sussex. Her research interests revolve around two themes: the relationship between literature and philosophy, and philosophical or literary uses of the ear. She is currently finishing a thesis on  how Shakespeare features in the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida.

———————————————–

talk:

PLAY

 

download

———————————————–

questions:

PLAY

 

download

———————————————–