Offering a critical analysis of the UK political system, Tragedy of Riches argues that politicians over the past twenty years have changed our economic destiny for the worse. The corresponding demise of ideology means that there can be no great improvement in the British economy without fundamental political change. Stephen Barber introduces the concept of the `mixed economic settlement'; the argument that the policy mix in which Europe and the United States operates is forged in three contrasting forms of liberalism to have emerged in the post-war West: economic, welfare and social liberalism. He describes how our single-minded pursuit of prosperity has constrained politics from being a force for good. The book argues that the present economic policies of the UK government are unsustainable and, if they are to tackle the difficult issues of modern society, politicians and communities alike need to face up to this truth.

"London Eyes provides paths through the city, chancing upon those stories that ultimately have the potential to change London, to see it with new eyes, casting new shadows and seeing new stories open up at many turns. This collection has at its heart a joyous fascination with the city and the texts, images and films that have contributed to our ideas about London. It was a wonderful opportunity to stumble upon some new panoramas." Film Philosophy

London incessantly generates and incites cultural responses, pre-eminently in the interconnected domains of literature and film. This book demonstrates that those responses have been sustained as vital experiments and engagements in configuring the city and its inhabitants. Including essays by prominent cultural, literary and film historians this volume forms an original and incisive contribution to ongoing debates about the city's intricate cultural history and its construction through both language and image, as a crucial site of identity, desire, exile and displacement.

Gail Cunningham is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University. Her recent publications include Houses in Between (CUP, 2004) Anna Lombard (Birmingham University Press, 2002) and He-Notes: Reconstructing Masculinity (Palgrave, 2000).

Stephen Barber is a Professor of Media Arts at Kingston University. His most recent publications include The Vanishing Map (Berg, 2006), Hijikata (Creation, 2006) and The Art of Destruction (Creation 2004). He has been awarded international prizes and awards for his work by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Getty Program, the Ford Foundation, the DAAD Berlin Artists and Writers Programme, the Annenberg Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Japan Foundation, the British Academy, the Daiwa Foundation, the Saison Foundation, and the London Arts Board.

Stephen Barber takes the reader on an extraordinary journey from LA to Tokyo via Europe. He carries only a crumpled map in his pocket, a map which plots a horrifying past, a disappearing present and a future collapsing into banality. A virtual reality flight across this territory reveals the surfaces of things, a landscape made by war and technological advances. Coming back to earth and to his own body, Stephen Barber follows the map from city to city. He discovers how cities, once densely layered with a civilization's history of follies and obsessions, are increasingly oblivious places, accelerating the erasure of their own histories, forgetting themselves. Barber's journey becomes a profound meditation on the future of the city and the role of memory in our lives.Dazzlingly written, erudite, and by turns funny, elegiac and horrific, The Vanishing Map explores what cities were, are and will be. Deeper than this, it questions how memory - personal, urban, national and global memory - can survive.

This book shows how political inaction has shaped the politics, economy and society we recognize today, despite the fact that policymakers are incentivised to act and to be seen to act decisively. Politicians make decisions which affect our lives every day but in our combative Westminster system, are usually only held to account for those which change something. But what about decisions to do nothing? What about policy which is discarded in favour of an alternative? What about opposition for naked political advantage? This book argues that not only is policy inaction an overlooked part of British politics but also that it is just as important as active policy and can have just as significant an impact on society. Addressing the topic for perhaps the first time, it offers a provocative analysis of 'do nothing' politics. It shows why politicians are rarely incentivized to do nothing, preferring hyperactivity. It explores the philosophical and structural drivers of inaction when it happens and highlights the contradictions in behavior. It explains why Attlee and Thatcher enjoyed lasting policy legacies to this day, and considers the nature of opposition and the challenge of holding 'do nothing' policy decisions to account.

In the final part of 'Tokyo Trilogy', the gorgeous media provocatrice Angeliko Slavsko returns to the tsunami-hit megalopolis to team up with her gang and instigate an all-out confrontation.

A Sinister Assassin contains original translations of Antonin Artaud’s last writings and interviews, most never previously available in English. A Sinister Assassin presents translations of Antonin Artaud’s largely unknown final work of 1947–48, revealing new insights into his obsessions with human anatomy, sexuality, societal power, creativity, and ill-will—notably, preoccupations of the contemporary world.   Artaud’s last conception of performance is that of a dance-propelled act of autopsy, generating a �body without organs� which negates malevolent microbial epidemics. This book assembles Artaud’s crucial writings and press interviews from September 1947 to March 1948, undertaken at a decrepit pavilion in the grounds of a convalescence clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the southern edge of Paris, as well as in-transit through Paris’s streets. It also draws extensively on Artaud’s manuscripts and original interviews with his friends, collaborators, and doctors throughout the 1940s, illuminating the many manifestations of Artaud’s final writings: the contents of his last, death-interrupted notebook; his letters; his two final key texts; his glossolalia; the magazine issue which collected his last fragments; and the two extraordinary interviews he gave to national newspaper journalists in the final days of his life, in which he denounces and refuses both his work’s recent censorship and his imminent death.   Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Stephen Barber, A Sinister Assassin illuminates Artaud’s last, most intensive, and terminal work for the first time.  

Following England's future corporate and digital disintegration, and the fall of its cities, a hallucinatory conflict - inspired and propelled by the history and traces of 1970s punk rock and the spectres of Jimmy Saville and Peter Sutcliffe, the 'Kings of Leeds' - erupts between the South and the North, so virulent and all-engulfing that only fragments of its memory can survive.

Controlled atmosphere infrared furnace setup, operation, theory and troubleshooting for LCI model LA-309P model Lab furnaces with PLC. IR thermal processing.

FRACTURED EYE is new large-format annual film journal, edited by well-known authors Stephen Barber and Jack Hunter, who between them have produced around 50 books on global cinema and cultural history. FRACTURED EYE does not concern itself with either "mainstream" or "cult" cinema, but rather takes its cue from Amos Vogel's seminal 1974 study Film As A Subversive Art. Subjects covered by FRACTURED EYE Volume One include illegal film pornography in the 1970s, execution film documents of WW2, film documents of extreme performance art, subversive film documentaries, unfilmed surrealist film scenarios, revolutionary Japanese cinema of 1969, the origins of film projection technology, films of urban demolition, surgical films, and various works of renegade, politically prohibited or transgressive cinema. The book is heavily illustrated with unusual and often disquieting photographs, and is recommended for adult readers only. Subjects covered include Vienna Aktion Cinema, Tokyo 1969, Tatsumi Hijikata, Pierre Guyotat, Koji Wakamatsu, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Skladanowsky Brothers, Georges Franju, and much more.

With a foreword by former BBC political editor and Ambassador to Washington Peter Jay, this collection of essays examines the geo-political and economic implications of the City of London's financial markets in a globalised world. Exploring globalisation, the growth of China and India, terrorism, corporate social responsibility, the powerful foreign exchange markets and questions of democratic control, this book is lively and stimulating.

"The Screaming Body gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects and his conception of surrealist cinema. It examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. The book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording "To Have Done with the Judgement of God-an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art.

From the narrow alleyways of the Golden Gai to the flashing ads and jumbotrons of the Shibuya street crossings to the skyscrapers of Shinjuku and the cartoon billboards of the Akiba, Tokyo is an intensely visual and mesmerizing city. In the most innovative account of Tokyo's urban sensations since Roland Barthes' "Empire of Signs," Stephen Barber in "Tokyo"" Vertigo" probes the many ways in which Tokyo projects and hides itself, focusing upon its filmic, photographic, and media cultures as well as its extraordinary urban history of destruction and reconfiguration. Dividing his analysis into three parts, Barber first interrogates the disparate urban zones of Tokyo, from the districts of Shinjuku and Shibuya to the desolate peripheries where the megalopolis falls apart. He then examines Tokyo's sexual and media cultures, through which the city's compulsive fascinations and obsessions exert their power. Finally, he looks at the ways in which European culture collides with Tokyo's urban formations, often generating unprecedented hybrid images and texts. An anti-guidebook that intimately reveals the visual culture of this city in constant flux, "Tokyo Vertigo "includes original photographs by Romain Slocombe and a range of photographic art-works from the 1950s to the 2010s that exemplify the intensity and spectacle of the city.

Berlin's unique history of conflict, violence, and transformation has created an arena of extraordinary urban surfaces, from which the present-day city and its layered, wounded past are projected simultaneously. In "The Walls of Berlin," acclaimed cultural historian Stephen Barber""explores the intimate connections between those surfaces and the works of art and film that have both incised Berlin's urban screens and been inspired by them.
Drawing on a vast range of material--from the first films of Berlin in the 1890s to the city's place in contemporary digital art--the book takes the form of a series of image-propelled journeys across the face of Berlin and through its urban histories, excavating the ricochets among the city, art, and film. In Barber's hands, Berlin's walls become apertures that mediate the city's preoccupations and manias, damage and scars, strata and outgrowths, sexual obsessions, and urban vanishings. "The Walls of Berlin" is a rich cultural history of the city's memories--as well as its acts of forgetting--that illuminates overlooked spaces and the sensory presences that inhabit them.
This is the first truly innovative look at Berlin since Siegfried Kracauer's classic "Streets of Berlin and Elsewhere, " and it will be essential reading for anyone engaged with the transformations of contemporary cities as well as for readers and visitors enthralled by Berlin's astonishing surfaces.