May 24, 2010
"The result is an encounter with capitalism stripped of the resources made available by over a century and a half of Marxist scholarship. Meanwhile, the relentless global search for profit and the extraction of surplus value goes on, not least in the very places - universities - where poststructuralist scholars ply their trade. The constant hunt for revenue, the prostitution of research agendas to corporate concerns and visions of national ‘competitiveness’, and new forms of speed-up and deprofessionalisation are unintelligible without a firm grasp of the logics of capital.In a world increasingly subject to the workings of an informational and multinational mode of capitalism, characterised by flux and instability, hybridity and fragmentation, it is also hard not to see the poststructuralist dismantling of the subject, as in the widely influential writings of Laclau, Mouffe and Judith Butler, as unintentionally complicit with that world."

— Mark Laffey: The red herring of economism, p. 468 /via theguywhoinventedfire, zettelkasten

12:58am  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/626426987
(Notes: 24)
  
Filed under: academia capitalism identity philosophy marxism materialism discourse theory critique economics 
May 18, 2010
I don’t find this funny or clever at all. A hodge-podge of perspectives lumped under one self-righteous, third-worldist banner that I’m really getting tired of, especially after following the overblown outcry on the Egyptian twitterverse over @jmayton’s light-hearted (in bad taste? ill-advised? you be the judge) jab at Egypt’s dietary habits. [note: I have never read any of his articles & therefore don’t know if his critics already have gripes with him, but that’s besides the point.] I think there’s a real danger that leaving this kind of lazy identitarianism unchecked would leave our very just causes defenseless, shored up only with absolute tripe [whenever you speak of a cause, you’re not actually fighting for it; you’re creating a discourse around it in which a fight is legitimated] when we elevate ourselves - based on what? Our brownness? - as some kind of sanctum sanctorum, not to be touched, not to be part of normal human relation. Cultural appropriation by profiteering sharks is one thing; holding white people to impossible standards simply because they are white, or because they are “foreign” is just embarassing. They can ‘find themselves’ in their ‘ethnic’ doodads all they want, as long as it means I too can find myself in balkan beat, or celtic punk or viking metal. The crimes of orientalists do not give us a free pass to be assholes. Don’t be marginal. source

I don’t find this funny or clever at all. A hodge-podge of perspectives lumped under one self-righteous, third-worldist banner that I’m really getting tired of, especially after following the overblown outcry on the Egyptian twitterverse over @jmayton’s light-hearted (in bad taste? ill-advised? you be the judge) jab at Egypt’s dietary habits. [note: I have never read any of his articles & therefore don’t know if his critics already have gripes with him, but that’s besides the point.]

I think there’s a real danger that leaving this kind of lazy identitarianism unchecked would leave our very just causes defenseless, shored up only with absolute tripe [whenever you speak of a cause, you’re not actually fighting for it; you’re creating a discourse around it in which a fight is legitimated] when we elevate ourselves - based on what? Our brownness? - as some kind of sanctum sanctorum, not to be touched, not to be part of normal human relation. Cultural appropriation by profiteering sharks is one thing; holding white people to impossible standards simply because they are white, or because they are “foreign” is just embarassing. They can ‘find themselves’ in their ‘ethnic’ doodads all they want, as long as it means I too can find myself in balkan beat, or celtic punk or viking metal. The crimes of orientalists do not give us a free pass to be assholes.

Don’t be marginal.

source

9:00pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/610840038
(Notes: 47)
  
Filed under: culture racism discourse critique 
May 18, 2010
Slow Cinema vs Fast Films

“There’s an oppressive sense in which the long-take, long-shot, slow-camera-movement, sparse-dialogue style has become entirely routinized; it’s become a sort of default international style that signifies “serious art cinema” without having to display any sort of originality or insight. “Contemplative cinema” has become a cliche; it has outlived the time in which it was refreshing or inventive.”

8:28pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/610769355
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: cinema genre culture history art critique 
May 5, 2010
@IlllllllllllllI on Zizek at the movies.

“Zizek’s “ideology spotting” film critiques aren’t even clever anymore, it’s just the most bland “This thing you like is racist” garbage. And finding out The Hurt Locker is an evil fascist movie isn’t a revelation, it’s right there in the fucking movie. Zizek’s ostensible project, to kill our Big Other, is best accomplished when people fawn over how brilliant he is while he sucks a lot […] It’s probably tiresome to see someone always talking about how Zizek sucks, but it’s tiresome that he always sucks. […]

Instead of just asserting that Zizek sucks, I should be less cowardly and provide a concrete example: He routinely writes up these two or three paragraph discussions of some popular contemporary film, (recently Hurt Locker and Avater)…In them, he spends the first paragraph detailing the supposed reality of the film, ah wonderful aboriginals, ah soldiers with a heart, etc. In the second paragraph, he says no, that’s not right, it’s actually all racist and sexist and war-mad and super ideological. Which, of course, it is if you want to be like that about everything, but how boring and unuseful. It wasn’t interesting that Avatar was racist, it wasn’t interesting that Hurt Locker makes warriors into mushy fragile humans/victims. That’s the secondary content, of which Zizek is the tertiary, explaining how the small racisms / war-madnesses lead to our larger problem. But that’s only if ideology is experienced by audiences as ideology. It’s more interesting to ask about the non-racist content……and why a war-mad country might want to sit and see aboriginal people rise up and kill the metaphor of themselves. But even that’s not the useful stuff, because it would just trend back toward psychologism and easy bullshit about everyone’s “fascism”. The relevant ideology in Avatar was the same as in The Box, the reintegration of a lost technological people into techno-nature.

Anyway, Zizek takes the boring cultural studies moralist approach and never finds something interesting in the shit. After 2 paragraphs on this Hollywood movie, he namedrops some more-or-less obscure counter example(s) to “prove” his point. He wraps it up with something about the greatest, purest, most existing version of a type of ideology or ideological function……and closes it down with a repetition of the same banalities he wrote in the second paragraph. It’s just so unbelievably lazy.

Why not, if you’re actually interested, start with “Lebanon” or “Waltz with Bashir” and then merely comment on “Hurt Locker”? Why use another boring communist reference to link-bait your stunning four paragraph critique of the movie everyone has heard of? It’s so pointlessly /Zizekian/, a cheap shock, a handy knowledge of abstracted structural features & predictable center-left politics.”

9:56am  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/573102702
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: cinema ideology critique politics genre 
April 20, 2010
The collapse of the socialist project means the new militant is not the party sectarian but the NGO activist

A hodge-podge of positions I feel like commenting on, but maybe I should read his The Trials of the Diaspora to fill in the many gaps? For the Archive for now.

12:18pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/535556948
Filed under: politics resistance critique history