Michael Goddard
My research broadly falls under three key areas of transnational cinema, popular music and media theory.
In terms of the former, I have especially developed a strong profile in European cinemas, focusing on Polish and Eastern European cinemas. This is evident from my numerous book chapters and journal articles in this field, including my articles for Studies in French Cinema and Framework, as well as being asked to contribute a chapter on the Polish New Wave to the Blackwell Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (2012). My international reputation in the field was further developed through my co-editorship of the Studies in Eastern European Cinema that quickly became the leading journal in this field. It is also apparent in the edited publication Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester, 2014) based on the conference I co-organised. This transnational focus also informed my monograph on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, Impossible Cartographies (2013), which was the first comprehensive academic work in English on this important filmmaker.
In terms of popular music studies, I have written a series of publications on post-punk and industrial music, including a journal article for Angelaki on the Slovenian group Laibach. As an indication of the impact of this research, I was invited on this basis to participate and give a plenary address at the 30 years of Laibach and NSK symposium in Trbovlje, Slovenia, and subsequently provided liner notes for the band’s deluxe box set release of their early recordings by the Vinyl on Demand label. I also organised the Messing up the Paintwork international conference on The Fall (2008), which led to a successful edited volume and subsequently continued this line of research through the organisation of the Noise, Affect, Politics conference (2010) which was truly international with participants from Brazil, Singapore, Japan, the US, the Netherlands, France and Canada. This event led to two successful book publications with Bloomsbury that have had a strong impact in the field of sound studies and are definitive publications on noise.
Finally I am a media theorist, especially in the fields of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as in digital media. In terms of the former, this methodology informed several of my publications, most notably in the special “Unnatural Ecologies” issue of Fibreculture I co-edited with Jussi Parikka which has been widely cited and has had a significant impact on the field. In media archaeology, my most significant contribution is my recently published article for New Media and Society, which looks at media archaeology as a materialist method of media research. The article critically engages with media archaeology as a set of research methods, and investigates its potential value for engaging with Internet research, in particular bringing out the political stakes of media archaeology as a methodology. Related to this I have written several articles based around Italian post-autonomist media theory, especially the work of Franco Berardi, whose writings I have also translated. In particular I have written about his use of cinema and video art as means of diagnosing contemporary forms of mediated subjectivity, as was evidenced in my article for the journal Subjectivity. I have been invited to present my media research in Brazil, the US, Canada, and Germany, as well as in the UK.
In terms of the former, I have especially developed a strong profile in European cinemas, focusing on Polish and Eastern European cinemas. This is evident from my numerous book chapters and journal articles in this field, including my articles for Studies in French Cinema and Framework, as well as being asked to contribute a chapter on the Polish New Wave to the Blackwell Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (2012). My international reputation in the field was further developed through my co-editorship of the Studies in Eastern European Cinema that quickly became the leading journal in this field. It is also apparent in the edited publication Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester, 2014) based on the conference I co-organised. This transnational focus also informed my monograph on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, Impossible Cartographies (2013), which was the first comprehensive academic work in English on this important filmmaker.
In terms of popular music studies, I have written a series of publications on post-punk and industrial music, including a journal article for Angelaki on the Slovenian group Laibach. As an indication of the impact of this research, I was invited on this basis to participate and give a plenary address at the 30 years of Laibach and NSK symposium in Trbovlje, Slovenia, and subsequently provided liner notes for the band’s deluxe box set release of their early recordings by the Vinyl on Demand label. I also organised the Messing up the Paintwork international conference on The Fall (2008), which led to a successful edited volume and subsequently continued this line of research through the organisation of the Noise, Affect, Politics conference (2010) which was truly international with participants from Brazil, Singapore, Japan, the US, the Netherlands, France and Canada. This event led to two successful book publications with Bloomsbury that have had a strong impact in the field of sound studies and are definitive publications on noise.
Finally I am a media theorist, especially in the fields of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as in digital media. In terms of the former, this methodology informed several of my publications, most notably in the special “Unnatural Ecologies” issue of Fibreculture I co-edited with Jussi Parikka which has been widely cited and has had a significant impact on the field. In media archaeology, my most significant contribution is my recently published article for New Media and Society, which looks at media archaeology as a materialist method of media research. The article critically engages with media archaeology as a set of research methods, and investigates its potential value for engaging with Internet research, in particular bringing out the political stakes of media archaeology as a methodology. Related to this I have written several articles based around Italian post-autonomist media theory, especially the work of Franco Berardi, whose writings I have also translated. In particular I have written about his use of cinema and video art as means of diagnosing contemporary forms of mediated subjectivity, as was evidenced in my article for the journal Subjectivity. I have been invited to present my media research in Brazil, the US, Canada, and Germany, as well as in the UK.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (25)
Uploads
Books: Monographs by Michael Goddard
rise to both militant political groups ranging from urban
guerrilla groups to autonomist counterculture, as well as
radical media, including radio, music, film, video, and
television. This book is concerned with both of those
tendencies considered as bifurcations of radical media
ecologies in the 1970s. While some of the forms of media
creativity and invention mapped here, such as militant
film and video, pirate radio and guerrilla television, fit
within conventional definitions of media, others, such as
urban guerrilla groups and autonomous movements, do
not. Nevertheless what was at stake in all these ventures
was the use of available means of expression in order to
produce transformative effects, and they were all in
different ways responding to ideas and practices of
guerrilla struggle and specifically of guerrilla media. This
book examines these radical media ecologies as guerrilla
networks, emphasising the proximity and inseparability of
radical media and political practices.
Books: Edited collections by Michael Goddard
Author Bios:
Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College in Washington.
Daniel Cookney is Lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Salford, UK.
Kirsty Fairclough is Director of International and Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, UK.
Michael N. Goddard is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film, Television and Moving image at the University of Westminster, UK.
YouTube playlist for "Resonances":
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxtNSBUcdJtC0c2C3snL60u32Brp7kySh
Endorsements:
“Resonances carries its readers from the ideas of Theodor Adorno to 'Hi-Fi Wives,' Russian punk and 60s rock. If you want to know what Iannis Xenakis, Eric Clapton, and the 'Filthy Turd aesthetic' have in common, this is the book for you! Handsomely illustrated and extensively documented, Resonances is a must-read volume for modernists and postmodern cultural critics alike.” – Michael Saffle, Endorsement
“'That's not music, it's noise!' The contributors to this book ask us to think again. They reveal that noise can prove as stimulating a part of sonic organization as melody and harmony-the distorted rock guitar being one example among many. These engrossing essays cover a remarkable variety of musical practices, exploring noise as both accident and deliberate design, and building theories about noise that set the agenda for future debate.” – Derek B. Scott, author of Sounds of the Metropolis (2008) and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010).,
“This collection is a massive achievement in laying the groundwork for a new way of thinking about things musical. Its scope is large - Hendrix, Xenakis, deafness, production aesthetics, pleasure, Russian punk - and essays impress in both their attention to detail and the breadth of their conceptual scope as we move from questions of aesthetics to detailed close reading. It is a study which succeeds as both music scholarship and cultural contextualization, particularly in relation to artists in other media (Ballard, Artaud) and key scholars (Attali, Adorno, Benjamin). And although it is hard to photograph noise, the book's photos find some excellent visual analogues.” – Allan F Moore, Professor of Popular Music, University of Surrey, author of Rock: the Primary Text and Song Means,
“From overviews of specific artists--Lou Reed, Einsturzende Neubaten, Diamanda Galas, Filthy Turd--to theorizing about the sonics of feminism, computer sounds, turntablism, and composition, this timely book resituates noise not as Jacques Attali's societal 'herald of change' but as a vital and everyday part of the new media landscape. It's a great addition to any serious sound scholar's library.” – Gina Arnold, Adjunct Professor of Rhetoric at University of San Francisco and author of Route 666: On The Road To Nirvana
“ The collection itself is a diverse mix...Resonances is fairly highbrow. The book's language is intensively scholarly, and its appeal mostly academic.” – Guy Crucianelli, Pop Matters!
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/reverberations-9781441196057/
YouTube Playlist for Reverberations:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxtNSBUcdJtC1stHokLyzoAvXcQgU0cp_
Endorsements:
“"With a fantastic range of topics, the editors have produced a strong collection that extends well beyond sound studies. The collection includes a wide range of writers, and offers just what we need in order to understand contemporary media and aesthetics: theoretical problematisation. Start from noise, with Reverberations, and find brilliant cartographies of noise in aesthetics, the social, and philosophy." - Dr Jussi Parikka, Reader in Media and Design at Winchester School of Art, author of Digital Contagions and Insect Media” –
“Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Paul Hegarty are three exceptional individuals ... [Reverberations] contains material of interest even to conservative musicologists, although its primary
importance lies in its various attempts to theorize noise-and noise both as a category in and of itself, and in terms of its relationships to a great many fields of inquiry and expression ... I recommend Reverberations for its novel insights into aspects of sound we all too often simply despise or dismiss out of hand.” – Michael Saffle, Virginia Tech, USA, Journal of Musicological Research
Journal Articles by Michael Goddard
most profound effects. What is less frequently remarked on in Bifo’s work is that the diagnosis of these mutations of subjectivity are frequently carried out in relation to the artistic cartographies generated by both film and media art, with a tendency to favour the former. For example, there are frequent references in his work to Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977) and Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003), to give only two examples. This article will focus specifically on his use of cinematic cartographies, by which I mean the ways cinematic works provide spatio-temporal mappings of particular political, subjective and affective conditions.
cursory examination of their most recent recording Anthems, a collection of their musical work from the 1980s to the present. What other rock group would include in their ‘‘greatest hits’’ album not only an impressive collection of ‘‘original’’ Retro-Avant-Gardist artworks but also an historical-philosophical essay situating the group in relation both to the history of the break-up of former Yugoslavia and the history of the avant garde, furthermore claiming for Laibach a crucial role in both? Of course, Laibach should not be understood as a simple rock band but rather as a multimedia art collective using rock and pop music as a medium; an arena for investigating the relations between art, ideology, popular culture andtotalitarianism.
This essay will aim to show the singularity of Laibach’s project, arguing that Laibach made use of the contradictory context of former Yugoslavia and the emergent Slovenian state in order to interrogate not only totalitarianisms such as state socialism and fascism but also the totalitarian dimensions of late capitalism and its global popular culture. Furthermore it will explore the often-cited affinities between this project and the theoretical work of Slavoj Zizek, whose thought emerged from the same cultural milieu and shares many common features with Laibach. However, this essay will also aim to extricate Laibach from
this Zizekian shadow, suggesting that their project corresponds less to Zizek’s Lacanian–Hegelian framework than to a Deleuze and Guattarian one of a directly political minor art operating through ‘‘repetition-for-itself’’ and ‘‘schizoanalysis.’’
Book Chapters by Michael Goddard
rise to both militant political groups ranging from urban
guerrilla groups to autonomist counterculture, as well as
radical media, including radio, music, film, video, and
television. This book is concerned with both of those
tendencies considered as bifurcations of radical media
ecologies in the 1970s. While some of the forms of media
creativity and invention mapped here, such as militant
film and video, pirate radio and guerrilla television, fit
within conventional definitions of media, others, such as
urban guerrilla groups and autonomous movements, do
not. Nevertheless what was at stake in all these ventures
was the use of available means of expression in order to
produce transformative effects, and they were all in
different ways responding to ideas and practices of
guerrilla struggle and specifically of guerrilla media. This
book examines these radical media ecologies as guerrilla
networks, emphasising the proximity and inseparability of
radical media and political practices.
Author Bios:
Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College in Washington.
Daniel Cookney is Lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Salford, UK.
Kirsty Fairclough is Director of International and Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, UK.
Michael N. Goddard is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film, Television and Moving image at the University of Westminster, UK.
YouTube playlist for "Resonances":
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxtNSBUcdJtC0c2C3snL60u32Brp7kySh
Endorsements:
“Resonances carries its readers from the ideas of Theodor Adorno to 'Hi-Fi Wives,' Russian punk and 60s rock. If you want to know what Iannis Xenakis, Eric Clapton, and the 'Filthy Turd aesthetic' have in common, this is the book for you! Handsomely illustrated and extensively documented, Resonances is a must-read volume for modernists and postmodern cultural critics alike.” – Michael Saffle, Endorsement
“'That's not music, it's noise!' The contributors to this book ask us to think again. They reveal that noise can prove as stimulating a part of sonic organization as melody and harmony-the distorted rock guitar being one example among many. These engrossing essays cover a remarkable variety of musical practices, exploring noise as both accident and deliberate design, and building theories about noise that set the agenda for future debate.” – Derek B. Scott, author of Sounds of the Metropolis (2008) and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010).,
“This collection is a massive achievement in laying the groundwork for a new way of thinking about things musical. Its scope is large - Hendrix, Xenakis, deafness, production aesthetics, pleasure, Russian punk - and essays impress in both their attention to detail and the breadth of their conceptual scope as we move from questions of aesthetics to detailed close reading. It is a study which succeeds as both music scholarship and cultural contextualization, particularly in relation to artists in other media (Ballard, Artaud) and key scholars (Attali, Adorno, Benjamin). And although it is hard to photograph noise, the book's photos find some excellent visual analogues.” – Allan F Moore, Professor of Popular Music, University of Surrey, author of Rock: the Primary Text and Song Means,
“From overviews of specific artists--Lou Reed, Einsturzende Neubaten, Diamanda Galas, Filthy Turd--to theorizing about the sonics of feminism, computer sounds, turntablism, and composition, this timely book resituates noise not as Jacques Attali's societal 'herald of change' but as a vital and everyday part of the new media landscape. It's a great addition to any serious sound scholar's library.” – Gina Arnold, Adjunct Professor of Rhetoric at University of San Francisco and author of Route 666: On The Road To Nirvana
“ The collection itself is a diverse mix...Resonances is fairly highbrow. The book's language is intensively scholarly, and its appeal mostly academic.” – Guy Crucianelli, Pop Matters!
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/reverberations-9781441196057/
YouTube Playlist for Reverberations:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxtNSBUcdJtC1stHokLyzoAvXcQgU0cp_
Endorsements:
“"With a fantastic range of topics, the editors have produced a strong collection that extends well beyond sound studies. The collection includes a wide range of writers, and offers just what we need in order to understand contemporary media and aesthetics: theoretical problematisation. Start from noise, with Reverberations, and find brilliant cartographies of noise in aesthetics, the social, and philosophy." - Dr Jussi Parikka, Reader in Media and Design at Winchester School of Art, author of Digital Contagions and Insect Media” –
“Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Paul Hegarty are three exceptional individuals ... [Reverberations] contains material of interest even to conservative musicologists, although its primary
importance lies in its various attempts to theorize noise-and noise both as a category in and of itself, and in terms of its relationships to a great many fields of inquiry and expression ... I recommend Reverberations for its novel insights into aspects of sound we all too often simply despise or dismiss out of hand.” – Michael Saffle, Virginia Tech, USA, Journal of Musicological Research
most profound effects. What is less frequently remarked on in Bifo’s work is that the diagnosis of these mutations of subjectivity are frequently carried out in relation to the artistic cartographies generated by both film and media art, with a tendency to favour the former. For example, there are frequent references in his work to Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977) and Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003), to give only two examples. This article will focus specifically on his use of cinematic cartographies, by which I mean the ways cinematic works provide spatio-temporal mappings of particular political, subjective and affective conditions.
cursory examination of their most recent recording Anthems, a collection of their musical work from the 1980s to the present. What other rock group would include in their ‘‘greatest hits’’ album not only an impressive collection of ‘‘original’’ Retro-Avant-Gardist artworks but also an historical-philosophical essay situating the group in relation both to the history of the break-up of former Yugoslavia and the history of the avant garde, furthermore claiming for Laibach a crucial role in both? Of course, Laibach should not be understood as a simple rock band but rather as a multimedia art collective using rock and pop music as a medium; an arena for investigating the relations between art, ideology, popular culture andtotalitarianism.
This essay will aim to show the singularity of Laibach’s project, arguing that Laibach made use of the contradictory context of former Yugoslavia and the emergent Slovenian state in order to interrogate not only totalitarianisms such as state socialism and fascism but also the totalitarian dimensions of late capitalism and its global popular culture. Furthermore it will explore the often-cited affinities between this project and the theoretical work of Slavoj Zizek, whose thought emerged from the same cultural milieu and shares many common features with Laibach. However, this essay will also aim to extricate Laibach from
this Zizekian shadow, suggesting that their project corresponds less to Zizek’s Lacanian–Hegelian framework than to a Deleuze and Guattarian one of a directly political minor art operating through ‘‘repetition-for-itself’’ and ‘‘schizoanalysis.’’
This paper will argue that these sonic technologies, alongside more (audio)visual ones such as flickering fluorescent lights, video, and the television sets that seem to only play Invitation to Love, are crucial to the world of Twin Peaks, and constitute this world as both a communications network with portals to the unknown, and an accumulation of recordings of ghosted voices and entities, perhaps finding its ultimate expression in the backwards reprocessed speech in the Black Lodge. This lodge can be understood as a space in which there are nothing but recordings, albeit now on a cosmic/spiritual/demonic level. Using a media archaeological approach to these devices in the series, it will argue that they were already operating by a media archaeological logic, generating the world of Twin Peaks as a haunted archive of sonic and other mediations.
Grace Kingston has mined shared data and responded aesthetically to such questions in her latest project – Here you are. In this paper she will discuss her deployment of the mining, imaging and social politics revolving around these data spaces, where privacy and anonymity are assumed but poorly understood. Michael Goddard will respond to Grace’s project as the making visible of the invisible penumbras or noise underlying the contemporary networked production of subjectivity. Such data visualisation aesthetics will be presented as the obverse of data mining for commercial and surveillance purposes as, instead of searching for particular subjective contents to track and exploit, it reflexively makes visible the very forms through which this circulation takes place."
Building on published research into noise scenes, specifically those associated with noise musics on the fringes of Flying Nun in New Zealand and the New York No Wave scene, and my current project that is a cross cultural mapping of the music scenes in Manchester and Porto Alegre, this paper will explore the worlds of noise music beyond locally specific music scenes. While noise and industrial musics have typically been excluded from considerations of world music, this is somewhat surprising considering the strong elements of exoticism and eclecticism, that can be found in the music of Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, for example, or more recently William Bennett’s Africa-noise project, not to mention the pioneering of independent modes of global distribution. This paper will argue that industrial noise musics are ‘world musics’ in a more fundamental sense, in that they investigate noise phenomena as essentially prior to stable sounds and significance, and are therefore concerned with world forming. This is both in the sense of how seemingly chaotic noise can be formed into specific soundworlds, and the ways in which this is expressive of specific, often post-industrial, environments. The worlds of industrial and noise music are therefore concerned with modes of environmentally situated world forming, even as they transcend identifiably geographical locations in unpredictable crossings of appropriated forms, styles and aesthetic procedures. This will be examined with reference to a range of examples highlighting the eclecticism of industrial musics including Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca.
While only the latter film is strictly science fiction, this talk will argue that all three are dystopian visions of an exhausted society presented as in ruins, and with a strong resonance to 1980s Polish sci fi films such as the work of Piotr Szulkin. The question raised in different ways and by markedly different means by all these films is what is the future of a society with no future whether imagined as an alien planet, an industrial microcosm, or an all too real high rise apartment block? This talk will discuss these examples within this dystopian context with reference to Franco Berardi’s positing of a world ‘after the future’ and use these examples to investigate what happens when a formerly progressivist political system whether socialist or capitalist has lost any relation to futurity.