Essays at Cultural Phenomenology

Soap, Senstance and Semblance. Some thoughts developed for the Institute of Making, University College, London, 19th April 2013, and further elaborated in a talk at the Blake Society, Downing College, Cambridge, 1st May 2013.[pdf version]

Plugs. A chapter from my book Paraphernalia, published in Forum: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, 10 (2010) . [pdf version]

The Dust That Measures All Our Time. An essay on sand, written May 2010. [pdf version]

A Philosophy of Fidgets. A talk given as part of the Liverpool Biennial Touched Talks, 17 February 2010 [pdf] [video]

Witchknots, Knitwits and Knots Intrinsicate. A text written to accompany Ravelling, Unravelling, an exhibition of work by Naheed Raza exploring the theme of entanglement in medicine, art, literature and philosophy, Royal Institution, London,13-28 May 2009. [pdf version]

Obnubilation. An extended version of a talk given in a series devoted to Clouds, broadcast as BBC Radio 3’s The Essay, 25 February 2009. [pdf version] [ listen] [download mp3]

Ear Room. A talk given at the Audio Forensics Symposium, Image-Music-Text Gallery, London, 30 November, 2008. [pdf version]

Unholy Smoke. A talk given at Trailing Smoke, Art Workers Guild, London, 12 November 2008, an evening of talks accompanying the exhibition Smoke, Pump House Gallery, Battersea, curated by Implicasphere. [pdf version]

Pulverulence. A talk given at An Evening of Dust, organised by Cabinet Magazine for the Hayward Gallery, London, 17 October 2008. [pdf version]

Thinking Things. A plenary lecture given at ESSE-9, the 9th annual conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), Aarhus, Denmark, 25 August 2008. [pdf version]

De Singultu: The Life and Times of the Sob. A talk given at the Breaking Voices symposium, London College of Fashion, 7 June 2008. [pdf version]

Fix. A text written in April 2007. [pdf]

Sufficently Decayed. A talk given at the Frieze Art Fair, Regent’s Park, London, 15 October 2006.

How to Get Out of Your Head: Toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies. A talk given to the London Consortium, 26 January 2006.

Damage. A talk given at the Barbican Art Gallery to accompany an exhibition of work by Christian Marclay, 6 April 2005.

Corridors. A ‘love letter to an unloved place’, broadcast in BBC3 Nightwaves, 22 June 2004.

On the Air. The script of a feature broadcast at 21.30 on BBC Radio 3 on 13 June 2004.

The Throat of the Loon. A transcript of a conversation with Julius Nil as a guest on his Resonance FM programme,One Reason to Live, 4 May 2004. A less groomed version of the transcript appears in One Reason to Live: Conversations About Music With Julius Nil, ed. Seth Kim-Cohen (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2006). [pdf version]

A Certain Slant of Light. A sound-essay on twilight, broadcast in BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves, 31 October 2003.

Chronic Fatigue. Some thoughts prepared for the ‘Bare Life’ panel, in response to a keynote talk given by Alphonso Lingis, in the Research Symposium Civic Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance , London, 9-16 April 2003.

What Can Cultural Studies Do? The text of an interview conducted for Interrogating Cultural Studies: Interviews in Cultural Theory, Practice and Politics, ed. Paul Bowman (London: Pluto, 2003).

The Help of Your Good Hands: Reports on Clapping. Some thoughts on the singular cultural phenomenon of clapping, added 30 October 2002.

Flat Life. A paper first given at the University of Glasgow in March 2001.

An Airmail From the Monster. A text broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves , 31 January 2001, to mark the 150th anniversay of Mary Shelley’s death.

The Shame of Being a Man. A paper given as part of the Gender and Sexuality seminar series, University of London, 30 November 2000.

Destitution. A lecture given at the Metaphors of Economy conference, University of East Anglia, 23 June 2000.

‘A Door Half Open To Surprise’: Charles Madge’s Imminence. A paper given at the Charles Madge and Mass Observation conference held at the University of Sussex, May 12th, 2000.

The Shakes. A piece of writing that resulted from an invitation to speak at the Research Seminar of the Roehampton Institute Department of Drama, 30 March 2000.

Rough Magic. A series of radio essays exploring the mysteries of everyday objects (bags, wires, screens, sweets), broadcast by BBC Radio 4, January-February 2000. You can listen in Realplayer format to programmes 1 and 2, Bags and Wires, and programmes 3 and 4, Screens and Sweets.

What If There Were No Such Thing As The Aesthetic? A contribution, not an altogether helpful one, perhaps, to a seminar programme called The Function of Contemporary Aesthetics, organised by John Armstrong for the Centre for English Studies and the University of London Philosophy Programme. My paper was given on March 3rd, 1999.

Slow Going. A paper given at the Critical Beckett conference held in Birmingham on 26 September 1998. It has been published in print form in Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000): 153-65.

History in Bits. An expanded version of a paper that was given at the conference After the New Historicism, organised by Steve Clark for the Centre for English Studies, and held at the Clore Centre, Birkbeck College, 13-14 March 1998.

A Few Don’ts By A Cultural Phenomenologist. A rough-and-unready manifesto for the kind of work I thought I wanted to do and see more of.

Noise. A series of 5 programmes which I wrote and presented on BBC Radio 3. The programmes were produced byTim Dee and transmitted February 24-28th, 1997. You can listen to programmes 1-3 (26 mins) and 4-5 (20 mins) in Realplayer format.

Family Time. A paper given at the `Who Stole the Family Values?’ conference, May 11, 1996, at Birkbeck College, London.