The Queen presents the 1966 World Cup to England Captain, Bobby Moore (National Media Museum @Flickr Commons)
As Europe looks forward in anticipation to this summer’s Euro 2016 tournament, Sports Management masters student Leslie Crang invited academics, students and fans to consider the enduring legacy of England’s biggest footballing victory, the 1966 World Cup.
The 30th July 2016 will represent 50 years since England won the biggest prize in international football, an event that captured the imagination of not only football fans, but of an entire nation, a nation for whom the next 50 years would see significant political and cultural transformation.
The event, held at Birkbeck’s Bloomsbury campus, traced the impact of the World Cup win and its influence on life since; from the rise of commercialism in football and its attendant celebrity culture, to the challenges of articulating national identity in the wake of decolonisation and significant social change.
The audience were also treated to an exploration of cultural artefacts from the win, such as the first ever football song ‘World Cup Willie’, whose eponymous cartoon Lion helped England supporters sing ‘He’s tough as a lion and never will give up’.
Speaking at the event, Director of the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre, Sean Hamil said: “It’s a great chance to bring people together to talk about the win not only as a sporting event, but their own experiences of the cup and the way in which it has influenced their own lives and those around them.”
The shadow of 1966’s legacy
A diverse and engaged audience shared a wealth of differing experiences, from those that have grown up in the shadow of 1966’s legacy, to those who were there at the time. In an open discussion that benefitted from Birkbeck’s burgeoning international cohort, perspectives from Germany, India, Guyana and Nigeria enriched the lively debate and alluded to the global importance of the cup and its ability to influence domestic and international politics, society and identity.
With the EU ‘Brexit’ referendum due to take place on the 23rd June 2016, consideration was made to the potential impact of sport as a vehicle for resurgent nationalism and of its possible influence on the forthcoming referendum. Indeed, there has been some debate as to the influence of 1966’s victory on British politics and the cup’s ‘feel good’ factor; Labour’s win at the 1966 general election followed England’s triumphant victory over West Germany, whilst a loss four years later at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, also against West Germany, saw Labour lose the 1970 general election.
The final England group game will take place on the 20th June against Slovakia and, as the England team fight to keep themselves in Euro 2016, the nation will head to the polls three days later to decide its own European fate. Coincidence or not, the close proximity of the two major national events will undoubtedly play a role in shaping the future of England over the next 50 years.
The event served as precursor for a one-day academic symposium, hosted by Senate House Library on the 3rd June, exploring how England’s triumph in the 1966 World Cup marked a turning point for role of sport, and in which Leslie Crang presented his fascinating work. Birkbeck’s Sport Business Centre offers a wealth of courses exploring the world of sport.
On 8thJune Birkbeck Politics staff discussed the UK’s EU referendum, looking at what has happened so far and what may yet take place on the 23rdJune.
The panel began by looking into why the UK was having a referendum, discussing the many hidden and not to hidden factors behind it. These stretched from Cameron’s gamble, that a referendum would cure the short term threat of UKIP and unhappiness in the Conservative party, to the long term distrust towards the European Union project in the UK, harking all the way back to Britain’s campaign of attempted sabotage of the project in the 1950s and reluctant joining in the 1970s.
Reflecting on the campaign so far, the panel spoke of how referenda are, by their nature, proxies for all sorts of other subjects. The EU referendum is actually about immigration, democracy and sovereignty. Despite their popular appeal, they can also be anti-democratic in focusing so narrowly on a single decision, and pursuing a seemingly simple answer to what are complicated issues.
There was also concern at the low level of debate and failure, on both sides, to engage with facts or global realities, from international trade to the modern mass movement of people (see the Treasury Committee reportherethat similarly complained of the ‘inconsistent, unqualified and, in some cases, misleading claims and counter-claims’ made by both sides).
The panel also reflected on how different views of the EU split different parts of England and the United Kingdom-creating what has been called aDisunited Kingdomof intentions and support. What would happen if Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain but England and Wales wished to leave? It could all get complicated andthis paperspeaks of some of the profound constitutional consequences. But do referenda’sever solve an issue(think Scotland in 2014)? The panel thought it is unlikely to be the last EU referendum the UK has.
In terms of the voting itself, the polls so far show a knife edge result,resting on the margin of error. To find out what our panel thinkwillhappen on the 23rdJune (and why José Mourinho’s views could prove decisive) listen to the podcast below.
This post was contributed by Noah Angell, co-director of the upcoming film Lux Imperium. A work in progress of the film will be introduced at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) Amateur Cinema Night on Saturday 18 June. Book your free place here.
Lux Imperiumis a new film and research project by Noah Angell and Francis Gooding. This afternoon session will introduce the project, before expanding its scope to look at amateur film in relation to cinema and examine some contemporary vernacular films drawn from online sources.
The home movie camera first became available to the public in the same decades that saw the unraveling of the British Empire. While using this technology to record their private lives, amateur filmmakers throughout the British colonies were also unwittingly capturing the biggest empire in history in free fall. Composed from hundreds of home movies and privately edited amateur films made during the dissolution of the British Empire, Lux Imperium reanimates these documents of late colonial vision and imperial collapse, showing the last days of the Empire from an intimate and wholly unseen perspective.
The ubiquity of privately-made moving images in the era of smart phones, Youtube, and mobile broadband makes the history of vernacular film a pressing contemporary issue that this work will imaginatively and critically explore.
For the session held at BIMI on the 18th of June, Francis Gooding will give his paper, ‘The Visual Vernacular: 6 note on amateur film’, which provides a formal framework for distinguishing amateur film as a cinematic language that is distinct from other modes of cinematic production.
This will be followed by a screening and discussion of in-progress edits of Lux Imperium and its source reels – private films from the colonies, recording the British colonial classes’ vision of events and daily minutiae, with subject matter ranging from anti-Imperial uprisings to colonial gardening.
To conclude the session, Angell and Gooding will speak about contemporary amateur film, showcasing and analyzing vernacular film practice taken from Youtube, Vine and Instagram. Moving images are now an everyday mode of processing and preserving experience, and homemade films are now a critical tool in the constitution and cohesion of online communities who are geographically dispersed or otherwise isolated. Online spaces which traffic in moving images are frequently used to publicly document, present and define both political events and the private self, and also as a space of play.
Lux Imperium is based on material uncovered and first digitized as part of the BFI-hosted Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire project (www.colonialfilm.org.uk). By recognizing the importance of home movies within the visual history of colonialism, Lux Imperium will further develop the ideas and research of the original Colonial Film project.
A work in progress of Lux Imperium will be hosted by BIMI at the Birkbeck Cinema (43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD) on Saturday 18 June 2016 at 2pm. Book your free place here.
This post was contributed by Kojo Koram, PhD student in the School of Law. Kojo attended the Focus on the Funk event in May 2016.
On the 20th-23rd of May 2016, a community of academics, activists and artists met at Birkbeck School of Law under an invitation to ‘Focus on the Funk.’ Over three days, the likes of Gayatri Spivak, Alicia Garza, Nina Power and Lewis Gordon all took up the task of trying to think through ‘the funk’.
Law and funk
We felt fortunate to have attracted such a cast of speakers, considering how unappealing the prospect of joining a law school threatening to ‘get funky’ must have appeared upon first reading. ‘Law’ and ‘Funk’ are understandably imagined as diametric opposites; the transgression implicit in bringing them together being what initially excited us as organisers. Funk most immediately invokes a genre of music, yet the notion of ‘the funk’ transcends this particular expression, its musical form being just one manifestation of the condition of the ‘funk’.
Etymologically, the word ‘funk’ derives, in part, from the obsolete Flemish word fonck meaning ‘disturbance’ or ‘agitation’ (citation from Oxford Dictionaries). This understanding of ‘funk’ synthesised with another definition – as ‘a strong smell’ – to become the common shorthand for the atmosphere of the jazz clubs of the early twentieth century. In these clubs, the funk denoted not just the musical corruption of classical European melodies occurring on stage but a particular orientation to life that could be found everywhere in these clubs. Here, one could encounter ‘the funk’ of life. When a particularly agitated form of rhythm and blues music emerged in the 1970’s, it was christened as ‘funk’ but it hadn’t invented the idea, rather fully realised it in musical form.
So while our reference to ‘the funk’ did not only mean music, we did attempt take the music seriously. We were concerned with what law sounds like, starting not with the harmony or even silence of law within lives that rarely encounter its force but with the crescendo that greets subjectivities over-determined by law. (For further on the relationship between law and music, and the role of sound in law, see James E. K. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi.(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015)).
In response we turned to funk, which, as a music genre, de-emphasised the melodic in favour of bringing forward that which was buried underneath, the hypnotic bassline and the interrupting, staccato drumbeat. Funk music begins with the background mess of song and then, crucially, stays with it, sustaining the failure of the soothing melody to emerge and, instead, forcing artists to express themselves from inside the groove. The result is often vocalised through a scream.
Funk as a prism
To employ ‘the funk’ as a prism to examine questions of politics and philosophy offered a challenge particularly apt for our turbulent times. We were awed at the vigour with which this challenge taken up by our guests. After an introduction by the organisers, in which we performed our manifesto outlining future plans for a different way of philosophising about law, Gail Lewis and Nina Power began with a dialogue illustrating how law’s claim to public order is haunted by ungrievable lives such as Sarah Reed’s. (See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?(London: Verso 2009)). Their talk exposed the sacrificial piling of bodies upon bodies that guarantees received notions of law and order.
Then we welcomed an activist roundtable as Rupinder Pahar from the London Campaign Against State and Police Violence, Adam Elliott-Cooper from #RhodesMustFallOxford and Alicia Garza from #Blacklivesmatter illustrated the interconnection between epistemological and state violence across the Black Atlantic. (See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1993))
Next Kerem Nisancioglu, Brenna Bhander and Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman dismissed any myopic suspicions that thinking through the funk was to indulge in particularism. Rather than avoid ‘universal’ topics, this panel confronted them, compelling the audience to re-read received notions of sovereignty, property and reason. Doyens of modernity like Thomas Hobbes and Francis Galton were immersed into the funk, re-emerging as figures other than what they were, now finding the funk to be stuck to them.
Friday closed with Sarah Keenan, Stephanie Bailey, Taylor Le Meel and Karen Mirza generously talking us through the Art System from the perspective of the ‘Wretched of the Screen.’ Sarah Keenan sported a Vernon Ah Kee designed t-shirt with the words “Australia drive it like you stole it”, as she spoke about a recent unsanctioned installation which saw the projection onto the walls of Australia House of faces of refugees killed in Australian offshore detention. Both evenings were filled with wonderful cinematic and visual art exhibitions offered by our collaborators from the Serpentine Gallery, which continued into Sunday.
#BlackLivesMatter
The auditorium was at its most full on Saturday morning, perhaps evidence of Friday’s success, but more plausibly the result of Gayatri Spivak joining us to converse with Oscar Guardiola-Rivera on ‘The Politics of Deconstruction.’ Spivak guided the audience in revisiting her engagement with Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, whilst tying her comments into the wider themes of the conference, advocating a way of reading described as ‘funky, not straight…an on-beat, off-beat, back-beat structure.’
We returned from lunch to celebrate the 70th Birthday of Paget Henry, with Lewis Gordon, Julia Suárez Krabbe and Nadine El-Enany honouring Henry by engaging with topics of such as race, rights and stunted moments of rebellion.
Later Alicia Garza, the co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, returned to the stage to take up the task of explaining what law sounds likes when you must affirm your very existence through opposition to it? What does law sound like when its ordering is predicated on your arbitrary execution? And, perhaps more importantly, what response is available to you to make yourself audible over the violence of such a law? Alicia implored the audience to respond with a fearless and furious love. Alicia’s herstory of #BlackLivesMatter reminded us that the hash-tag that captured a movement, that captured a moment, initially began life as a love-letter. #Blacklivesmatter was the sound of black love and to a world producing harmony through the negation of that love: it sounded like a scream.
Once the audience finished giving Alicia an extended standing ovation, Lewis Gordon lived up to his reputation as ‘the closer’ with a keynote that executed a nuanced synthesis of the themes that had emerged over the conference. Lewis tied together issues of challenging legal violence, decolonising the curriculum and shifting the geography of reason whilst also transforming the stage into a makeshift drum-kit. His masterful musicianship and critique offered an embodiment of relationship between a political and philosophical commitment to ‘the funk’ and its musical manifestation.
Taking legal theory into a funky atmosphere
Ultimately, we spent a remarkable three days trying to extend Beckett’s embrace of the ‘mess’ of life towards a philosophical understanding of life’s ‘funk’. We took theory to school with the musicians, a move that appears curious in our age of fetishized disciplines. Modern European philosophy emerged interwoven with music, the Kantian imperative towards autonomous, universal human subjectivity finding expression through the overtures of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (For further on the relationship between European classical music and philosophy, see Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007))
Conversely, the African-American musical tradition, beginning from an understanding of modernity as catastrophe, would mutate these classical musical phrasings in the atmosphere of the jazz club. What would it mean to take legal theory into that funky atmosphere? To make law answerable to a tradition that responds to legalised structural violence with song; to enslavement with a call to ‘wade in the water’, to an unfair criminal justice system with a defiant cry that ‘we gon’ be alright’?
Our meeting was the beginnings of an exploration such questions. However, to begin with a ‘focus on the funk’ is to begin with failure and, in that sense, we met knowing that our collective ambitions had always, already failed. Yet in the embrace of that failure, we will persist in building our intellectual community, both inside and outside the academy. And we will try to fail better, each time we meet.
To conclude the session, Angell and Gooding will speak about contemporary amateur film, showcasing and analyzing vernacular film practice taken from Youtube, Vine and Instagram. Moving images are now an everyday mode of processing and preserving experience, and homemade films are now a critical tool in the constitution and cohesion of online communities who are geographically dispersed or otherwise isolated. Online spaces which traffic in moving images are frequently used to publicly document, present and define both political events and the private self, and also as a space of play.