{"title":"The London Consortium: a Select Bibliography","authors":"Francis Gooding","doi":"10.1111/criq.12692","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12692","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"49-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44719154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture","authors":"Harry Warwick","doi":"10.1111/criq.12691","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12691","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Standing on the south bank of the Thames, today, its chimneys reconstructed, its brickwork restored, its roof replaced, Battersea Power Station betrays few of the troubles that plagued its development and redevelopment (Figure 1). Like many of London’s power stations, Battersea began as two separate units: Battersea A, the western wing, opened in 1933, and Battersea B, the eastern wing, in 1955. Unlike many of these other power stations, however, in which the ‘B’ building formed an <i>ad hoc</i> response to rising energy demand, and often came to stand for the complex as such (what we today know as Bankside, or as the Tate Modern, is in fact Bankside B, Bankside A having been demolished in 1959), Battersea A and B were planned together from the start, two parts of the same building. ‘Battersea Power Station, as it stands, is a dream only half come true’, wrote one journalist in 1937. ‘Not until all that corrugated iron has been stripped away and another building of the same size has been joined to it, with two more gigantic chimneys pointing to heaven, will the whole dream be realized.’<sup>1</sup> The fourth chimney, granting the building its iconic symmetry, would not be completed for another eighteen years.<sup>2</sup></p><p>Other early observers described the power station as a ‘cathedral of bricks’, a ‘temple of power’, these epithets reflecting not only a certain fossil fetishism, a quasi-religious awe at the scale of energy exploitation, but also the brute reality of Giles Gilbert Scott’s design, which had to complement St Paul’s Cathedral, across the Thames, and appease the Archbishop of Canterbury.<sup>3</sup> The smokestacks at either end of Battersea A were thus to be perceived as twin spires. Gilbert Scott gave the building its grooved brickwork and neoclassical chimneys, while architect James Theodore Halliday could take credit for the control room’s gleaming art deco interiors, no less marvellous than the frontage. Situated directly opposite the St Paul’s, we ought to note, Bankside had to show still greater deference to the cathedral. Gilbert Scott (who had been brought onto the project after his success at Battersea) therefore designed it with a single chimney, topped off at a lower height, to obscure St Paul’s as little as possible.<sup>4</sup> The aesthetics of Battersea and Bankside arise from a simultaneous mimicry and self-effacement, aspiring to the image of the cathedral while genuflecting before it.</p><p>Battersea Power Station is now arguably a cultural icon on a par with St Paul’s. As the new owners’ signage reminds visitors, the station once supplied a fifth of London’s electricity, and it could claim to be the largest brick building in Europe. But the social function of the power station today is quite different. As I write, the transformation of the building and its environs into a gentrified multi-use complex – into luxury apartments, offices and shops – is almost complete. The process of the power station’s rede","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"117-137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12691","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48362732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Consorting","authors":"Steven Connor","doi":"10.1111/criq.12685","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12685","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Middle children are alleged to be calmer than first-borns because they make their entry in the second act – even if it is also in a sense <i>as</i> the second act – of a play that has already been going for some time. They assume that everybody else on the stage knows their lines and cues. Many inaugural enterprises depend on the shared confidence that others involved in them know why they are there and what they are doing, even if you don't. It often turns out that everyone was assuming all along everybody had access to a script. My own arrival on the scene of the London Consortium followed in this tradition. Paul Hirst who had been the Academic Director of the Consortium since its establishment in 1998 had been planning to retire in 2004, but died very suddenly a year before. I had been appointed as Academic Director a year in advance to understudy him but found myself taking on the role in October 2003.</p><p>I do not recall the Consortium ever issuing anything like a mission statement, though there would certainly have been shared scorn at the idea that this was the kind of thing on which an academic programme ought to spend its time. Yet many of those involved in its activities spoke and acted as though there were in fact a shared understanding and commitment to what the Consortium was for. But though there was a great deal that was missionary about the Consortium, I was never convinced that there was ever anything that could plausibly act as mission control, or indeed as a Major Tom.</p><p>It was often said that the Consortium was opposed to the relativism that was supposed to hold sway in the humanities, and when I once let slip that I thought I would have, under <i>peine forte et dure,</i> to describe myself as a relativist, it was akin to owning up to drinking my own bathwater, which I suppose relativism must have seemed to some to resemble. But the antirelativism of the Consortium was a thing of will rather than settled principle (I think I can, I <i>know</i> I can), since nobody was ever likely to agree on, let alone articulate, what the grounds of nonrelative and unrevisable truth and value were supposed to be, apart from the negotiation and articulation of value itself, which is oddly enough more or less what relativists think, or relativists of my criminal stripe.</p><p>The other thing that the London Consortium held out for, consorting a little oddly with this abstract antirelativism, was interdisciplinarity. I once heard Mark Cousins explain (swayingly, at a party, where many of the articles of faith of the Consortium tended to be articulated) what our kind of interdisciplinarity meant, and it has stayed with me, as a standing rebuke to the claims of interdisciplinarity that have now become grimly and greyly orthodox throughout the academic world. I have come to think that the promotion of interdisciplinarity has actually become a method of theme-control, ensuring that everybody marches in time to the same tunes, sung in the sa","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"14-19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12685","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45255236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The London Consortium: a Personal History","authors":"Colin MacCabe","doi":"10.1111/criq.12696","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12696","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"4-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49520510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sweet Shop and the Toy Shop: Consumption, Sign and Play in the Confectionery Industry","authors":"Elena Violaris","doi":"10.1111/criq.12634","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12634","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The confectionery industry is the epitome of processed food: the point at which physically consumable entities most clearly overlap with synthetic objects. This is reinforced by the fact that confectionery is consumed for pleasure rather than nutrition; low on the scale of necessity, it exemplifies the commercially constructed needs that characterise consumer society. Confectionery represents the peak of alimentary superfluity just as it exists at the peak of the dietician’s food pyramid, and according to these principles, I explore the mechanisms and dynamics that condition its consumption. After a brief history of processed food and the confectionery industry, I outline how synthetic food is inherently a commodity according to Marx’s definition, before drawing upon the writings of Jean Baudrillard to delineate the complex relationship between consumption, sign and play in the confectionery industry.</p><p>Food processing has been around for millennia, and Chris Otter remarks that it is ‘misleading to regard the industrialisation of food as a purely “modern” phenomenon’.<sup>1</sup> Methods of food preservation such as salting and smoking date from primitive societies, and heating food is already a modification of it. An article in the <i>Scientific American</i> traces a timeline of food processing from roasted meat (1.8 million years ago) to bread (30,000 years ago), chocolate (1900 BC), sugar (500 BC), coffee (mid-1400s), carbonated water (1767), corn flakes (1894), MSG (1908), spam (1926), chicken nuggets (1950s), high-fructose corn syrup (1957) and lab-grown meat (2013).<sup>2</sup> While food processing is a spectrum, this spectrum demonstrates certain thresholds of change, and the examples from corn flakes onwards indicate more chemically complex ingredients as well as advanced and mechanised methods of food manufacture. It is evident that food is becoming ‘increasingly synthetic’, a shift which Otter situates in the context of industrialisation and the transition from an organic to a mineral economy.<sup>3</sup> Whether this is a primarily positive development in reducing global food scarcity, or whether there are negative implications for health, is a vast and separate topic of discussion. I wish to focus on the semiotic implications: the synthetic nature of many modern foods, combined with advances in packaging materials and presentation, has led to food progressively resembling non-consumable objects, causing a shift in the ways in which individuals relate to it.</p><p>The specific domain of the confectionery industry has undergone similar transitions. Laura Mason discusses how the origins of sugar consumption, derived from the skill of refining cane juice, can be traced to India over two thousand years ago.<sup>4</sup> This was denoted by the Sanskrit words <i>sakkar</i> and <i>khanda</i>, which form the basis of ‘sugar’ and ‘candy’; both the words and the skill of refining sugar were transmitted westward across Persia and the Midd","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 3","pages":"107-126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12634","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45152125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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