Tag: university of Birmingham

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Cultural Studies

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in – Sadie Plant / Cultural Studies Department, Birmingham University referenced in The Guardian today

Key article in The Guardian today. I was one of Sadie Plant’s students from 1992-1995 in the Cultural Studies Department, University of Birmingham.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in?CMP=share_btn_fb

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in

The world is changing at dizzying speed – but for some thinkers, not fast enough. Is accelerationism a dangerous idea or does it speak to our troubled times?

by Andy Beckett

(excerpt)

By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. Land wrote in 1992 that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead had always been held back by politics, “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind”. He dismissed Europe as a sclerotic, increasingly marginal place, “the racial trash-can of Asia”. And he saw civilisation everywhere accelerating towards an apocalypse: “Disorder must increase… Any [human] organisation is … a mere … detour in the inexorable death-flow.”

Land gave strange, theatrical lectures: clambering over chairs as he spoke, or sitting hunched over, rocking back and forth. He also spiced his pronouncements with black humour. He would tell lecture audiences, “I work in the field of The Collapse of Western Civilisation Studies.” A quarter of a century on, some former Warwick philosophy students still talk about him with awe. Robin Mackay says, “I think he’s one of the most important philosophers of the last 50 years.”

But for a would-be guide to the future, Land was in some ways quite old-fashioned. Until the late 90s, he used an ancient green-screen Amstrad computer, and his initial Warwick writings contained far more references to 18th- and 19th-century philosophers – Friedrich Nietzsche was a fixation – than to contemporary thinkers or culture. The Warwick version of accelerationism did not crystallise fully until other radicals arrived in the philosophy department in the mid-90s.

Sadie Plant was one of them: a former Birmingham University lecturer in cultural studies, the study of modern popular culture. Mark Fisher, a former student of hers at Birmingham, was another incomer. He was jumpy and intense, while she was warm and approachable. For a time in the early 90s, she and Land were partners.

Like Land, Plant and Fisher had both read the French accelerationists and were increasingly hostile to the hold they felt traditional leftwing and liberal ideas had on British humanities departments, and on the world beyond. Unlike Land, Plant and Fisher were technophiles: she had an early Apple computer, he was an early mobile phone user. “Computers … pursue accelerating, exponential paths, proliferating, miniaturising, stringing themselves together,” wrote Plant in Zeroes and Ones, a caffeinated 1997 book about the development of computing. Plant and Fisher were also committed fans of the 90s’ increasingly kinetic dance music and action films, which they saw as popular art forms that embodied the possibilities of the new digital era.

With the internet becoming part of everyday life for the first time, and capitalism seemingly triumphant after the collapse of communism in 1989, a belief that the future would be almost entirely shaped by computers and globalisation – the accelerated “movement of the market” that Deleuze and Guattari had called for two decades earlier – spread across British and American academia and politics during the 90s. The Warwick accelerationists were in the vanguard.

Yet there were two different visions of the future. In the US, confident, rainbow-coloured magazines such as Wired promoted what became known as “the Californian ideology”: the optimistic claim that human potential would be unlocked everywhere by digital technology. In Britain, this optimism influenced New Labour. At Warwick, however, the prophecies were darker. “One of our motives,” says Plant, “was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative” – an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets, in her view. “We wanted a more open, convoluted, complicated world, not a shiny new order.”

The Warwick accelerationists were also influenced by their environment. “Britain in the 90s felt cramped, grey, dilapidated,” says Mackay, “We saw capitalism and technology as these intense forces that were trying to take over a decrepit body.” To observe the process, and help hasten it, in 1995 Plant, Fisher, Land, Mackay and two dozen other Warwick students and academics created a radical new institution: the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). It would become one of the most mythologised groups in recent British intellectual history.

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Cultural Studies

2014 is the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, marks this anniversary by reflecting on the legacies of the Centre.

How interesting! I have recently been revisiting the key figures, concepts and work i did for my degree almost 20 years ago and have now found that the department is conducting a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the centre’s establishment. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was closed down in 2002 when it became too multidisciplinary for the university to cope!!

Read about the CCCS and 50th anniversary project here

History of the Centre

In the inaugural lecture that followed his appointment as Professor of English at the University of Birmingham in 1962, Richard Hoggart announced his intention to conduct research into ‘mass’ culture. Two years later, Hoggart had founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Under the directorship of first Hoggart and then Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, and with the commitment of Michael Green throughout, the Centre operated at the intersections of literary criticism, sociology, history and anthropology. Rather than focus on ‘high’ culture, the intention was to carry out group research on areas of popular culture such as chart music, television programmes and advertising. This approach went profoundly against the grain of conventional academic practice.

The Centre had few members of staff and much of the work it produced was the result of collaborations between students, many of whom came from backgrounds that were under-represented in universities. Work produced at the Centre showed that popular culturewas not only worthy of academic study but often also politically significant. It showed, for example, the importance to young people of subcultures based around style and music, the ideological influence of girls’ magazines over their young readership, and why a ‘moral panic’ over the presence of black communities had evolved in 1970s Britain.

The Centre’s focus on the ‘contemporary’ in Birmingham, Britain and later around the world was combined with an engagement with critical theory, often introduced from the continent. The application of these theories to contemporary society was rigorously debated during weekly ‘sub groups’.

Conventional boundaries between teachers and students were intentionally broken down at the Centre, creating a democratic approach to learning that was a training ground for several noted public intellectuals and produced numerous foundational texts. The Centre also had an important influence outside the academy, with numerous former students playing significant roles in altering the political and cultural landscapes of Birmingham and beyond. Having been merged with the Department of Sociology, the Centre was closed down by the University of Birmingham in 2002

The project

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Centre’s establishment, this project seeks to re-examine its significance. Its contribution within academia is now largely well-known – open any cultural studies handbook and you will find a section on the ‘Birmingham school’. The focus for the project is on how a body with relatively little funding was able to arrive at these contributions, and the impact the Centre had outside academia, on the city of Birmingham and beyond. How, for example, did the Centre’s commitment to multi-disciplinarity and collaboration approach work in practice, and how did this affect wider relations with the university? What was the Centre’s relationship with its subject of the ‘contemporary’? What was – and is – the broader political significance of the Centre?

Through the creation of a CCCS archive, recorded interviews with key figures as well as events including an exhibition and a major conference, this project seeks to offer answers to these questions and communicate the significance of the Centre’s work to the widest possible audience. If you have any comments or queries, or material that could be deposited in the archive, please contact us.

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Cultural Studies Uncategorized

Dr. Sadie Plant we need to discuss saving the Internet

Just found this article:

As English author Sadie Plant (my tutor, Cultural Studies Dept. University of Birmingham) said in 1993:

“Cyberfeminism is simply the recognition that patriarchy is doomed.”

Australia’s Rosie X founded the world’s first cyberfeminist zine, Geekgirl, in 1993. Its motto? “Grrrls need modems!”

I studied BA Hons in Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham with Sadie Plant my personal tutor. I am a graduate of 1995

We were her cyberkids we fuelled the hyper thread @. We bashed out a version of the future we now inhabit. Banged neurons with computer Science. Even economics got involved and ended up a wanker. A truly multidisciplinary field. I’ve recently ‘reconnected some rhizomes’ (Deleuze and Guattari) and will be taking my work sideways artistically. I’m goin’ back to my roots. It was the 20 years on since the CJA gathering with activists, archivists and authors and Datacide that refreshed my harddrive. Dusty talk. Cyber net. Time to get involved and get back to ‘work.’

Cyberfeminist

20141105-051710.jpg

Article in Dazed :

The 
revolution will 
be feminised
As youth culture undergoes a digital reinvention, Dazed talks to the women at the vanguard of feminism’s new wave

Arts+Culture Feature 9 months ago
Text Zing Tsjeng

bootbitch, from tender journal #1
Maja Malou Lyse
x6
The revolution will be feminised

Taken from the February 2014 issue of Dazed & Confused:

In 2014, digital feminism is at a crossroads. “Online feminism: is it really helping?” wonders the Huffington Post. “Nipples, banknotes and internet trolls,” rages the Telegraph. “Is this seriously the best feminism can do?” Meanwhile, columnists endlessly debate the feminist credentials of Miley, Rihanna and Beyoncé, as if discovering a lone feminist in music might somehow eradicate the wage gap. But beyond the vajazzle-n-twerk concerns of sensational media outlets, an underground of young feminists is thriving online. You just have to know where to look.

“The age of having a few feminist representatives is over,” argues Reni Eddo-Lodge, a full-time campaigner and writer who has been blogging about feminism and race for over four years. “When I started getting involved in feminism, all the texts recommended to me were by white women. The internet fundamentally changed that – it’s provided a platform for voices that you simply would not have read before.”

Feminism has always been inextricably linked to developments in technology. Thanks to mass printing, suffragettes at the start of the 20th century were able to cheaply produce newspapers like Votes for Women, which they sold or left on public transport in the hope of converting curious readers to their cause. During the glory years of 70s counterculture, underground periodicals like Spare Rib offered an unvarnished alternative to preening glossies like Cosmopolitan.

In the 90s, riot grrrls adopted the self-publish-and-be-damned spirit of punk fanzines like Maximum Rocknroll, penning intensely personal and political takes on eating disorders, sexism and body image, and the unfiltered and uncensored thoughts and dreams of thousands of young women were endlessly Xeroxed, posted and swapped at zine fairs.

In 1991, Australian art collective VNS Matrix published the utopian “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”, a viral poster image warning “big daddy mainframe” that, in the digital world, “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.” As English author Sadie Plant said in 1993: “Cyberfeminism is simply the recognition that patriarchy is doomed.” Australia’s Rosie X founded the world’s first cyberfeminist zine, Geekgirl, in 1993. Its motto? “Grrrls need modems!”

The new online wave of feminist and female-only collectives and zines channels Geekgirl’s DIY ethos. Crucially, this generation of feminist writers and artists have grown up online; some are old enough to remember the crackle of a modem, while for others GeoCities is an archaic fossil from the early 00s. And they’re networking, @-ing, RT-ing and reblogging each other. Across geographical distances, they’re working out what unites them more than what divides them.

Julia Gray and Bryony Beynon
Photography Daisy Walker
Julia Gray and Bryony Beynon are the founders of anti-harassment campaign Hollaback London. Beynon remembers the dial-up days well: “Growing up in isolated south Wales, I was part of the first generation of teenage girls to create social worlds for themselves on the internet. It exposed me to a dizzying array of ideas about politics, identity, sexuality and gender I would never have come across otherwise.”

Despite the popularity of high-profile feminist campaigns such as No More Page 3 and Everyday Sexism, there is still much to change. In 2013, women in the UK earned almost £5,000 less than their male counterparts, according to TUC analysis. An audit of over 100 galleries in London found that only five per cent exhibited an equal number of male and female artists. Since 2010, feminist literature organisation VIDA has kept track of how male writers are disproportionately represented – and reviewed – in major publications like The New York Times. It’s not looking too good.

“There are so many male-dominated places where women aren’t allowed to feel comfortable,” says photographer Arvida Byström, who runs Gal Space, a pink-floored, female-run gallery in east London. “It’s not spoken aloud, like, ‘This is a male-only place,’ even though it is. Females need their spaces to talk, to get together, to realise they’re not being fucking paranoid (about sexism).”

Arvida Byström
Photography by Daisy Walker
Increasingly, that space exists virtually. Women constitute the majority of users on social networks like Twitter and Facebook – Brian Solis, who has mapped online gender representation for Information is Beautiful, goes as far as calling these sites “matriarchies”. According to comScore, an internet analytics company, women in Europe and North America spend 30 per cent more time on these socially oriented sites than their male counterparts. On average, they also tweet more, follow more people and have more followers.

They include Nottingham-born Beth Siveyer, who founded the feminist zine Girls Get Busy. “I’m not particularly academic – I haven’t even been to university,” she says. “I actually first searched the ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist art’ tags on Tumblr and I think seeing the diverse volume of content is truly what gave me confidence to identify as a feminist and inspired me to start GGB.”

Her story isn’t too far off from that of Eddo-Lodge, who recalls “tapping in something like ‘UK feminism’ into Google” when she came across feminism during an English class at university. Say what you want about the #annoying ubiquity of hashtags and Google’s all-seeing eye, but both have indexed knowledge that is accessible in ways that were unthinkable a few decades ago.

Now on its 20th issue, Girls Get Busy has expanded into a 10,000-follower-strong online platform that distributes other zines and supports female-identified artists, musicians and writers. “The sort of feminism you see celebrated in the media is very one-way – it’s hetero, white, middle-class feminism,” she explains. “But now we can make our own media.”

“The sort of feminism you see celebrated in the media is very one-way – it’s hetero, white, middle-class feminism. But we can make our own media” – Beth Siveyer
Girls Get Busy is just one of the numerous feminist projects thriving online – there’s south London’s SALT., which blends critical theory with visual art, Brooklyn-based zine Illuminati Girl Gang, Petra Collins’ visual arts platform The Ardorous, the literary journal tender, New York music-meets-art zine The Le Sigh… Even a commercial undertaking like Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie runs on explicitly feminist ideals, publishing articles pondering “if only there were a 12-step programme for misogynists” alongside how-to instructionals for DIY ruffle socks.

“Blogs are free,” explains Gabby Bess, founder of Illuminati Girl Gang. “Websites are like, $10. Illuminati Girl Gang started out as a Tumblr blog, and if no one had followed it or cared about it, it would have been no loss to me. The internet just provides more in-roads for people that don’t have access to larger publications and outlets.”

For Bess, blogging is a way of subverting commercial publications and galleries, the traditional gatekeepers of culture, which tend to be dominated by white men. “Personally, I cannot control who owns the major publications and galleries,” she says. “I can only start my own magazine and my own gallery.”

As online connections multiply and overlap, feminist artists and writers are able to join the dots. Following people on Tumblr or Twitter can open up a new network of information, resources and support, as well as radically different modes of feminist thinking and campaigning.

This stuff about intersectionality, that was conceived 25 years ago by a black academic (Kimberlé Crenshaw), but it’s only when people are taking it and applying it to their lives that the theory turns into practice,” Eddo-Lodge enthuses. Intersectionality is about how the different sorts of oppression suffered by disenfranchised groups relate to each other. Are high heels feminist? Who cares? If you know where to look, deeper conversations about class, sexual identity, ethnicity and their effects on sexism are happening at warp speed, increasingly distinct from conventional media coverage of supposedly feminist concerns.

Sophie Collins
Photography by Josh Gordon
Some feminist artists on Tumblr have taken advantage of its visual possibilities to develop a distinctive aesthetic – a kind of sly, acid-laced pastel femininity drawn from riot grrrl, pop culture and early web iconography. Byström’s Tumblr is a classic case in point: webcam selfies, tampons rolled in glitter and one-eyed kittens nestle alongside thoughtful ask.fm meditations on Byström’s own identity as a queer feminist.

Of course, digital feminism hasn’t been without its critics. “I’ve rarely, if ever, heard ‘Tumblr feminism’ used in a positive sense,” says tender founder Sophie Collins. “The term seems equated with superficiality, inconsistency and a lack of practical action.”

Byström is familiar with attacks on the unashamed girliness that pervades Tumblr. “Just because it looks flirty and pink, society sees it as unserious. It’s a complicated thing,” she says. “I have loads of old self-portraits that you could probably argue are objectification, in a way. But at least I’m the one taking the photos, and I get something more from it than just being the muse.”

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook suffer from other problems. Last year, Feminist Times editor Charlotte Raven came under fire from Spare Rib founders for attempting to resurrect the name of their magazine for her new online venture. Raven wondered if feminists were “addicted to arguing,” writing: “These days it is Twitter I am terrified of… Why do so many high-profile feminists seem to relish Twitter spats?”

On Facebook, female artists congregate on invite-only groups to discuss gender representation in the industry. When members of one page criticised artist Daniel Keller (of Aids-3D) for not including females in his 11-man show Liquid Autist, he attacked the “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” effect of such groups.

“When I started getting involved in feminism, all the texts recommended to me were by white women. The internet fundamentally changed that” – Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge
Photography by Daisy Walker
“I really think this female artist FB group is nasty and counterproductive…” he wrote on Facebook. “You can try to justify it as ‘yeah, we have a girls club just like you have a boys club’ but um, we don’t ACTUALLY have a private FB group where we gang up on female artists and curators.”

“Of course it can get to a point where comments become unnecessarily personal,” Collins says, “but it would be highly retrogressive to avoid them altogether through fear of appearing ‘overserious’, ‘mean’, or ‘hysterical’. More dangerous than any debate is the idea we are censored or denied a space in which to have it.”

Still, there’s something to be said for taking the action offline. Byström, Bess and Siveyer have all curated or contributed to female-identified exhibitions, and curators like Zoë Salditch have organised female-only group shows such as her gURLs, which took place in Brooklyn’s Transfer Gallery in August.

Beynon, who runs Hollaback London workshops IRL, takes care to distinguish between online chatter and offline action. “Twitter in itself is not activism,” she emphasises. “An e-petition is no substitute for talking, protesting, meeting and planning. Also, it has a fundamentally western bias, as the overall percentage of women in the world with access to the internet is small.”

In the grand scheme of things, the victories won by online feminism can seem minor: a (relatively) safe space for women to discuss sexism without feeling paranoid; a low-cost alternative to the male-dominated world of professional media and galleries – this isn’t reinventing the wheel or putting a bullet in the head of misogyny. What does a world run by women look like? What does art made by and for women look like? Even now, we struggle to answer these questions. But at least we’re asking.

The struggle for visibility and representation has been going on for hundreds of years, but the internet has allowed women of all backgrounds, ethnicities and sexual orientations to join that fight. These days, the so-called “feminist art ghetto” is a lot bigger. But as Bess wisely says: “I feel like that term should be replaced, more accurately, with ‘feminist cool girl club’. All girls are cool girls.”

Follow Zing Tsjeng on Twitter here @misszing
More: Arts+Culture Feature Girls Rule February 2014 Issue Feminism Zines Rookie Tavi Gevinson Gabby Bess digital art