Cultural Studies Program

"Radical Politics// Destruction Aesthetics// Experimental Inquiry"

In this provocative talk, Culp will discuss the fusion of destruction aesthetics and radical politics as a model for experimental scholarship. Inspired by the historic avant-garde, he combines critical and creative inquiry to explore undisciplined scholarship.

Film Screening of Machines in Flames to follow at 8pm, also in The Bishop back room!

Machines in Flames (2022, 50min) is a cinematic search for ‘CLODO’, an elusive group that started bombing computer firms in 1980 Toulouse only to disappear 3 years later without ever being caught. Journeying through the cybernetic nodes of military, industrial, and socialist development, the film exposes how recording devices fail to collect the ashes of history. The film combines archival traces, a viral desktop choreography, and late-night video recordings of CLODO’s targets into an investigation of self-destruction. The film is the debut work of the Destructionist International, and the first in a series of films on the appetite for abolition in ultra-leftism. It was first distributed through a network of self-erasing USB data sticks dropped outside corporate campuses.

Andrew Culp is a media theorist and maker at the California Institute of the Arts. His writing has been published in a dozen languages, including the books Dark Deleuze and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal. Machines in Flames is his debut documentary film.

The Destructionist International is dedicated to the negative in all of its forms. It is drivenby a shared inclination: a taste for the fury of destruction, away from the dull submissionof situations to reasoned judgement. This passion helps DI maintain a militant indifference toward individuals, organization, and institutionalization of any kind. It owesits existence to radical events, those rare situations in which abolition becomes actual.

The Destructionist International works across a variety of creative mediums (text, image, video, sound) and themes (militancy, sabotage, technology, liberation). Its first work was the film Machines in Flames, in which media scholar Andrew Culp and cultural geographer Thomas Dekeyser retraced the footsteps of CLODO’s historic attacks on computer firms in the 1980s.

Series Description

Cultural Studies has often been framed as a method of approach, a way of understanding and interpreting the relationship between cultural narratives and social and political institutions with particular attention to questions of power and resistance. The past few decades have seen several challenges to this method, from the new materialist critique of the linguistic turn to post-critical and auto-theoretical emphases on aesthetics, affect, and memoir. These movements have been especially central to work in queer studies and queer of color critique, most centrally expressed in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s complaint about the stultifying sameness of approach in queer theoretical writing and its mistaken fidelity to exposure and persuasion as activist modes. These challenges have broadened the scope of humanities research, taking in archives formerly left to the sciences and modes of thought once considered too creative to count as academic arguments. The resulting profusion of subjects and styles reflects the robustness of our field in a way often overlooked by the so-called method wars.

This year, Culture Nights seeks to celebrate and enrich our work on how we write and what we write about with a series of meetings that push us beyond the form of scholarly writing. How can we understand these forms as producing criticism, and what sort of criticism do they produce? Our series invites scholars whose works have taken the form of films, pamphlets, and how-to books, archival and visual curation, plastic and fabric art practices, and event-creation, to discuss how (and whether!) they see their work as forms of criticism. As a way of putting our interests into practice, we will encourage presentations that experiment with form and media, including film screenings, interviews, readings, and collaborative workshops.