from Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory & Claims of Truth
July 15, 2010
July 3, 2010
David Harvey’s RSA Lecture on the crisis of Capitalism in animated form
June 20, 2010
RT @Naxos Toward Freedom written by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze http://is.gd/cVvt8
June 19, 2010
"One doesn’t need to invoke Derrida to know that reading a text is often a creative act, that we must constantly impose meaning onto the ambiguity of words."
— Jonah Lehrer (via xixidu + wildcat2030)
June 19, 2010
#worldcup links of interest
La Coupe du monde, une aliénation planétaire
The World Cup as War by Other Means
The World Cup as Oppressive Big Business
Has globalisation stolen the World Cup magic? via @mosabou
Quantifying the Performance of Individual Players in a Team Activity via @kremplo
South Africa: The myths and realities of the FIFA soccer World Cup via @linkssocialism
Football: a dear friend to capitalism via @pareidoliac @bjacobson
Tribes with Flags: Thoughts on the World Cup frenzy in Lebanon via clingtomymouth.tumblr.com
Minus the Shooting, philosophers & theoreticians blogging the games via @frieze_magazine
Coulibaly and the Humble Epistemology of Played Soccer via @bintbattuta
Football isn’t just about capitalism via @mosabou
The Unbearable Weight of World Cup History via @nextleft
Sociology of The World Cup – Goffmanian Dramaturgy and Narrative-Building via @pareidoliac
John Barnes: England won’t win until they embrace team ethic via @dougsaunders
President: FIFA will consider refereeing questions via @seppblatter
World Cup Patriotism in Berlin via @pareidoliac
What Can Soccer Tell Us About Open Societies?
A triumph for German diversity
World Cup for (Hitler and) Germany [in Lebanon]
Soccer is not a National Metaphor via @dougsaunders
They think it’s all existential via @versouk
An aesthetical and ethical discourse on the micropolitics of sports. via @hautepop
May 27, 2010
from ‘New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Some Comments, Clarifications, Explanations, Observations, Recommendations, Remarks, Statements and Suggestions)’
One of the defining features that is often given of cultural studies, on which it is proposed that everyone in cultural studies will agree, is that it is a politically committed field.2 It was certainly in political terms that Stuart Hall positioned his own activities as a teacher, writer and academic. Speaking at the landmark 1990 conference ‘Cultural Studies Now and In the Future’ of his time at the Birmingham Centre in the 1970s, Hall remarked that ‘Gramsci’s account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do… we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual’. And this is so even though, as Hall admits, the ‘problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found’ (Hall 1992a: 281). Now anyone attempting to translate this kind of politically committed role into the present historical conjuncture is immediately confronted by some rather difficult and challenging questions. Does the hope, for instance, that, in Hall’s words, ‘there could be, sometime, a movement which would be larger than the movement of petit-bourgeois intellectuals’, continue to be one we can actually carrying on ‘living with’, given that we currently occupy a period in which the victory of capitalism’s free-market economy and defeat of any political alternatives to neo-liberalism seem somewhat assured (1992a: 288)?
Even if the rise of such a movement is still considered to be a possibility, is any historical alliance of progressive forces today really going to be discernible as the kind of radical political project with which cultural studies, and the work of Hall and the Birmingham School in particular, has traditionally been associated: that of the British New Left and the ‘new social movements’ (feminism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, gay liberation and so on)? Or is it more likely to adopt the kind of ‘disorganised’, decentralised, multitudinous form that appears to characterise the new wave of large-scale, ‘anti-capitalist’ and anti-war protests that have emerged over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s? In which case, is the development of a new form of politics and a new political project not required if cultural studies is to retain its sense of political engagement in the twenty-first century - something perhaps more along the lines of that conceived by Agamben (1993), Derrida (1994) and Hardt and Negri (2004) in terms of the ‘coming community’, the ‘new international’ and the ‘multitude’ respectively? And is cultural studies something that can connect with or otherwise assist such a ‘movement of movements’ anyway? It certainly doesn’t seem to have had much success in this respect so far (as Jeremy Gilbert’s chapter in this volume makes clear).
Now, for many, the raising of such questions is no doubt challenging enough given the importance of Birmingham School, New Left, new social movements style politics to cultural studies’ sense of its own identity. Yet difficult though they may be, these questions still all have their basis in a fundamental premise which underpins cultural studies but which, despite (or more likely because of) this, too often remains unaddressed. This is the assumption that historical and social movements of some kind, whether organised or disorganised, recognisable by cultural studies as traditionally conceived or not, do indeed continue to be possible or at least desirable. In fact, we would go so far as to argue that the continuing resort on the part of much of the left in general, and cultural studies in particular, to such progressive historical narratives (even as, like Hall, they often simultaneously express certain reservations about the wisdom of doing so) is actually part of a far larger problem. It is a situation summed up most incisively by Wendy Brown, when she draws attention to the way in which, while many on the left have:
lost confidence in a historiography bound to a notion of progress or to any other purpose, we have coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going. Similarly, while both sovereignty and right have suffered severe erosions of their naturalistic epistemological and ontological bases in modernity, we have not replaced them as sources of political agency and sites of justice claims. Personal conviction and political truth have lost their moorings in firm and level epistemological ground, but we have not jettisoned them as sources of political motivation or as sites of collective fealty. So we have ceased to believe in many of the constitutive premises undergirding modern personhood, statehood, and constitutions, yet we continue to operate politically as if these premises still held, and as if the political-cultural narratives based on them were intact. (Brown 2001: 3-4)
It is consequently crucial, for Brown, that those of us who still consider ourselves as being of the left think about how we might ‘develop historical political consciousness in terms other than progress, articulate our political investments without notions of teleology and naturalized desire, and affirm political judgement in terms that depart from moralism and conviction’ (2001: 4). Brown gets right to the heart of the problem when she asks:
If the legitimacy of liberal democracy depends on certain narratives and foundational presuppositions, including progress, rights, and sovereignty, what happens when those narratives and assumptions are challenged, or indeed simply exposed in their legitimating function? What kinds of political cultures are produced by this destabilization of founding narratives and signal terms? … How do we live in these broken narratives, when nothing has taken their place? (2001: 14)
May 26, 2010
"Theory … is won as the result of a process that begins when consciousness first experiences its own terrible ossification in the general reification of all things under capitalism; then when consciousness generalizes (or classes) itself as something opposed to other objects, and feels itself as contradiction to (or crisis within) objectification, there emerges a consciousness of change in the status quo; finally, moving toward freedom and fulfillment, consciousness looks ahead to complete self-realization, which is of course the revolutionary process stretching forward in time, perceivable now only as theory or projection."
— Edward Said (quoted in bell hooks, belonging: a culture of place, pp. 98-99) /via scottneigh
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
May 10, 2010
from ‘Knowing Capitalism’ by N. J. Thrift, p. 48
May 1, 2010
from ‘Informal learning in the workplace: unmasking human resource development’ by John Garrick
April 19, 2010
Marx on Russia
“In 1881 Marx wrote a letter to Vera Zasulich, an important Russian follower, that addresses the question of theory and prediction when it comes to thinking about the future course of history. In particular, he denies that his theories have determinate predictive implications for the development of capitalism or socialism in Russia. Here is a link to the letter, and below are a few paragraphs.
The issue is an important one: did Marx think of his body of knowledge as constituting a general predictive theory? And the letter clearly implies that he did not.
The letter is interesting in several respects. First, it explicitly rejects the notion that Marx’s economic and historical theories are suited to the task of identifying the necessary or inevitable course of historical development. It summarily dismisses the idea of a necessary sequence of modes of production. Instead, Marx shows himself to recognize the contingency that exists in historical development, as well as the degree to which history creates new conditions in its course that influence future developments.”
April 10, 2010
The Interpassive Subject by Slavoj Zizek
”[…] If we radicalize in this way the relationship of substitution (i.e. the first aspect of the notion of fetishism), then the connection between the two aspects, the opposition “persons versus things,” their relation of substitution (“things instead of people,” or one person instead of another, or a signifier instead of the signified…), and the opposition “structure versus one of its elements,” becomes clear: the differential/formal structure occluded by the element-fetish, can only emerge if the gesture of substitution has already occurred. In other words, the structure is always, by definition, a signifying structure, a structure of signifiers which are substituted for the signified content, not a structure of the signified. For the differential/formal structure to emerge, the real has to redouble itself in the symbolic register; a reduplicatio has to occur, on account of which things no longer count as what they directly “are,” but only with regard to their symbolic place. This primordial substitution of the big Other, the Symbolic Order, for the Real of the immediate life-substance (in Lacanian terms: of A — le grand Autre — for J — jouissance), gives rise to $, to the “barred subject” who is then “represented” by the signifiers, i.e. on whose behalf signifiers “act,” who acts through signifiers…
Interpassivity
Against this background, one is tempted to supplement the fashionable notion of “interactivity,” with its shadowy and much more uncanny supplement/double, the notion of “interpassivity.” That is to say, it is commonplace to emphasize how, with new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering into a dialogic relationship with it (from choosing the programs, through participating in debates in a Virtual Community, to directly determining the outcome of the plot in so-called “interactive narratives”). Those who praise the democratic potential of new media, generally focus on precisely these features: on how cyberspace opens up the possibility for the large majority of people to break out of the role of the passive observer following the spectacle staged by others, and to participate actively not only in the spectacle, but more and more in establishing the very rules of the spectacle… Is, however, the other side of this interactivity not interpassivity? Is the necessary obverse of my interacting with the object instead of just passively following the show, not the situation in which the object itself takes from me, deprives me of, my own passive reaction of satisfaction (or mourning or laughter), so that is is the object itself which “enjoys the show” instead of me, relieving me of the superego duty to enjoy myself… Do we not witness “interpassivity” in a great number of today’s publicity spots or posters which, as it were, passively enjoy the product instead of us ? (Coke cans containing the inscription “Ooh!Ooh! What taste!”, emulate in advance the ideal customer’s reaction.) Another strange phenomenon brings us closer to the heart of the matter: almost every VCR aficionado who compulsively records hundreds of movies (myself among them), is well aware that the immediate effect of owning a VCR, is that one effectively watches less films than in the good old days of a simple TV set without a VCR; one never has time for TV, so, instead of losing a precious evening, one simply tapes the film and stores it for a future viewing (for which, of course, there is almost never time…). So, although I do not actually watch films, the very awareness that the films I love are stored in my video library gives me a profound satisfaction and, occasionally, enables me to simply relax and indulge in the exquisite art of far’niente — as if the VCR is in a way watching them for me, in my place… VCR stands here for the “big Other,” for the medium of symbolic registration.
Is the Western liberal academic’s obsession with the suffering in Bosnia not the outstanding recent example of interpassive suffering? One can authentically suffer through reports on rapes and mass killings in Bosnia, while calmly pursuing one’s academic career… Another standard example of interpassivity is provided by the role of the “madman” within a pathologically distorted intersubjective link (say, a family whose repressed traumas explode in the mental breakdown of one of its members): when a group produces a madman, do they not shift upon him the necessity to passively endure the suffering which belongs to all of them? Furthermore, is the ultimate example of interpassivity not the “absolute example” (Hegel) itself, that of Christ who took upon himself the (deserved) suffering of humanity? Christ redeemed us all not by acting for us, but by assuming the burden of the ultimate passive experience. (The difference between activity and passivity, of course, is often blurred: weeping as an act of public mourning is not simply passive, it is passivity transformed into an active ritualized symbolic practice.) In the political domain, one of the recent outstanding examples of “interpassivity,” is the multiculturalist Leftist intellectual’s “apprehension” about how even the Muslims, the great victims of the Yugoslav war, are now renouncing the multi-ethnic pluralist vision of Bosnia and conceding to the fact that, if Serbs and Croats want their clearly defined ethnic units, they too want an ethnic space of their own. This Leftist’s “regret” is multiculturalist racism at its worst: as if Bosnians were not literally pushed into creating their own ethnic enclave by the way that the “liberal” West has threated them in the last five years. However, what interests us here is how the “multi-ethnic Bosnia” is only the latest in the series of mythical figures of the Other through which Western Leftist intellectuals have acted out their ideological fantasies: this intellectual is “multi-ethnic” through Bosnians, breaks out of the Cartesian paradigm by admiring Native American wisdom, etc., the same way as in past decades, when they were revolutionaries by admiring Cuba, or “democratic socialists” by endorsing the myth of Yugoslav “self-management” socialist as “something special,” a genuine democratic breakthrough… In all of these cases, they have continued to lead their undisturbed upper-middle-class academic existence, while doing their progressive duty through the Other. — This paradox of interpassivity, of believing or enjoying through the other, also opens up a new approach to aggressivity: what sets aggressivity in motion in a subject, is when the other subject, through which the first subject believed or enjoyed, does something which disturbs the functioning of this transference. See, for example, the attitude of some Western Leftist academics towards the disintegration of Yugoslavia: since the fact that the people of ex-Yugoslavia rejected (“betrayed”) Socialism disturbed the belief of these academics, i.e. prevented them from persisting in their belief in “authentic” self-management Socialism through the Other which realizes it, everyone who does not share their Yugo-nostalgic attitude was dismissed as a proto-Fascist nationalist.”
April 8, 2010
CTheory Interview > Archaeologies of Media Art
“Everyday consumer media (e.g. mobile entertainment), curating practices, representational techniques, and spatial modes of organizing media can borrow heavily from history. I like the idea of a time-machine, or a rewiring of some of the connections of the past and the present, in order to come up with something new. History becomes an archive of sorts, a form of database, that fits the logic of digital culture and Web 2.0 modes of production that are reliant on archives and databases. It forces us to think about the ontology of archives as places where history unfolds, but also twists and turns, becomes a complex set of effects and repercussions.
The archives that allow media archaeological creations are, however, not restricted to what exists. Various discursive positions and imaginary media are displacing notions of media from the traditional broadcast- or apparatus-centered views. Again, with institutions this is an agenda that has spread outside the academia to the work of artists such as Zoe Beloff (http://www.zoebeloff.com) and writers such as Eric Kluitenberg, who has promoted imaginary media through the Debalie venue in Amsterdam (http://www.debalie.nl/dossierpagina.jsp?dossierid=10123). Indeed, one could see this interest in imaginary media as a continuation of some of Foucault’s ideas relating to the primacy of the discursive instead of just the apparatus, but also as a new cultural historical credo of writing neglected histories. Facetiously, perhaps media archaeology is the “queer theory” of media history: queering media, making the object of media studies unfamiliar and hence expanding its field to include queer practices, discourses, objects. Through media archaeology, the contexts, objects, and processes of media studies have increased explosively and to that I would like to add how they have questioned notions of the temporality of media culture; instead of a linear, progressive time of media, does it follow cycles or other modes of repetition? Or should we think of the time of technology as based on variations and percolations instead of arrows or cycles, as for example Michel Serres suggests? [9]
In other words, could media archaeology become posthuman or non-human through adopting and investigating temporal processes that are either too quick or too slow for the human senses? This means looking at the microtemporalities of technical media in terms of how, in a condensed fashion, they mediate human culture, as well as observing the longer durations that escape the grasp of human senses.
[…]
GH: Bringing this back into artistic practice, does media archaeology find resonance with the media arts since both fields have a history of praising the brilliant-but-uncompleted project? Do both fields glorify the prototypical? JP: Regarding artistic methodology, pointing towards the brilliant-but-uncompleted or unrealized project is a nice way of framing it — as long as we analyze the framework we use to judge things as incomplete or unrealized. I love the work done in the context of imaginary media and bringing back obsolete media into our discursive and practical framings, but the notion of obsolescence begs the critical question: obsolete only in relation to the established? Obsolete only as a reaction to the mainstream? If we define obsolescence as something that has fallen out of fashion or has become unwanted, unusable, or outside the mainstream then this definition relies on the constitutive mainstream itself. What we have to realize first is that obsolescence seems to be a key logic of capitalist production anyway — a logic which entails that of continuous production of the new through the production of obsolescence as well. Obsolescence does not just happen; it is produced as part of the consumer cultural logic. The enormous piles of waste and ecological crisis are an index of that kind of logic of obsolescence. Because of this, there is a danger of it serving reactionary and hegemonic definitions, where it is only through that negation from the mainstream that the forgotten becomes defined. That is why I find value in imaginary media projects that displace our normal ways of approaching what is media and explore media as intensities, sensations, the unthought of. In short: media beyond the representational. We should not only offer representations of imaginary media, but also focus on such affects and percepts (to put it in Deleuze-Guattari vocabulary) that engage sensations in us in ways that are not familiar, like a becoming-insect or becoming-other of our sensorium. I am not only interested in obsolete media but also in such non-representational, “off the radar” media projects in which obsolescence can itself carry potentialities not yet perceived” /via @juspar
April 4, 2010
Material Conditions of Philosophical Practice > Planomenology
“Materialism in Marx’s sense is neither a metaphysical nor an epistemological doctrine; it is not a philosophical doctrine or theory in any ordinary sense. Rather, it is a meta-philosophical doctrine about the relation between philosophy and its material conditions of possibility. In this regard, both the content of philosophical discourse and the methodological form of that discourse must be referred to the conditions under which philosophical practice occurs. Material conditions in this regard can begin quite narrowly: philosophy requires various material and institutional supports, from universities and publishing houses down to brains and paper. But these conditions, of course, never exist in isolation, and depend upon a certain mode of production that not only conditions their genesis, but their distribution, maintenance, etc. Ultimately, philosophical practice depends upon a broad economic, political, and social condition that enables it to occur, whatever its function within society may be. […]
Because philosophy always operates under a specific material condition, materialist philosophy must be attentive to the specificity of its relation to this condition. This relation is not necessarily manifest in theoretical content, but it certainly is in the practice through which this content is produced. For example, as a graduate student at a university, I have a specific relation to the political-economic mode conditioning my philosophical work: I take out loans, I pay tuition, I work, I have limited resources whose use is determined by administrators with whom I have limited contact, etc. The central concern of materialism in this regard is not the content of one’s position, which becomes relatively equivocal, but the practical form of its production. The content would become a concern if it were used to justify a particular practice of philosophy. It is on this basis that Marx so strongly condemns all varieties of philosophical idealism, especially Hegel, which in his eyes amount to an apologetics for idealism about philosophy, or the thesis that the practices conditioning philosophical thought are either no concern for philosophy, or must necessarily be as they are for philosophical activity to proceed (Hegel would advocate a variant of the latter).
The relation between philosophical practice and material condition is one in which the former is either complicit with and supportive of the latter, or indifferent (which amounts to passive complicity), or in which the former actively contests or challenges the latter to some degree. Materialist philosophy must first of all recognize the nature of its own situation in relation to its material condition, and address the thereby (often incidentally) politically committed character of its practice, no matter how apolitical its theory. (Here we should specify that this politically-inflected character is not unique to philosophical practice, but applies to productive practices writ large, including those of other theoretical disciplines like the sciences.) And secondly, it must evaluate whether or not this commitment ought to be maintained, or if on the other hand a change in practice is warranted.”
via federicoariasr
March 27, 2010
"Thinking about the present can be a difficult, disorienting and sometimes even dangerous task. Lacking the perspective afforded by hindsight, acts of interpretation can be made extremely problematic. What one assumes in the present to be a self-contained truth may, in time, reveal itself as merely one in a vast number of interconnected historical realities. Today, we live in a culture of immediacy, in which the speed of communication is arguably valued more highly than its content. Online, in print, and on TV, our knowledge of the world is constructed from shifting, indistinct fragments, its complexities always remaining just beyond our grasp. A general failure to contextualise – that is, to imbue one’s reading of the world with a sense of one’s own place in that world – may in years to come be viewed as the intellectual bane of our time."
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