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“State of Exception : Justice League :: Homo Sacer : Hot in Herre” — outstanding!
March 2005 Archives
East/West
Points to the nation
North/South
Cut the connection
Apropos of nothing in particular (actually, straight from the depths of shuffle-mode): Icehouse’s Cross the Border (mp3), from 1986.
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This shingles thing is the worst — after a nice respite in which I was able to rally for lunch with S, CC and C (and getting funny “Laclau/Mouffe = Ben/Glory” goss), it’s really laid me out for longer than I expected. Neuralgic pain is the Phantom Menace. Now I’m really behind with stuff. Dunno how this BlogTalk thing is going to work out for me.
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Must… not… blog… about… kitten.
But who else is going to perch on my shoulder, purr and read Lacanian social theory with me? (God knows I haven’t been able to do much else, and I need the company — my theoretical universe has always been instinctively Deleuzian by default, but I’ve recently wondered whether all this “positive proliferation” schtick might be a tad one-dimensional. But it’ll probably just remind me that Lacan Pisses Me Off.)
But why apologise for cat-blogging, anyway? As I sort of hinted to Jean a year ago, Grant Morrison’s The Filth is all about how “‘I Love My Cat’ narratives are sometimes the best narratives there are”. As a counterpoint to what I understand of Jean and Mel’s recent work on “deheroicising” mundanity in cultural studies, I’d say that “everyday” resistance is eminently political, and that this is a problem only if one retains an implicitly vanguardist and molar model of “politics” — something I think both “consumption as empowerment” and “anti-heroics of the mundane” narratives implicitly do.
I think everyday resistance can serve as a pointer for a molecular reformulation of “politics” per se. It’s not heroic, but like The Filth’s Greg Feely, an ordinary, “sentimental” cat-lover and occasional transdimensional agent trying to negotiate his traumatic imbrication in the system, neither does its domestic everydayness need to know its place via a domesticating reinscription of private/public, which (correct me if I’m wrong) is what a “deheroicising” cultural studies might implicitly do. This is why the occasional inter-species transgressions of touchy-“feely” cat-blogging are important. And that’s kind of what my Master’s thesis is about. Emphasis on “kind of”.
[ songs, health, work, cat, cultural-studies, resistance, politics, public-sphere ]
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Deborah and Ilaria went to this art/politics conference in January. How cute is the colour coding?
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“Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We’ll host your media forever — for free.”
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An E-Mail Interview with Brian Holmes conducted by Marion von Osten
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I’ll be going, simply to see Dave crush ideology in the egg(categories: social-movements politics)
The relative radius of the corners is all important, and what makes these stripes cool.
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Just don’t take the rhetorical ploy in the first paragraph seriously: “When the ‘material girl’ is heralded as subversive and all the Marxists are tenured, we truly have entered the age of the ‘virtual reversibility of signs of subversion…’”(categories: ethics politics negri bordieu beasley-murray post-political habermas civil-society public-sphere)
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An anticapitalist Euro-art extravaganza… I think. This stuff has an odd tone.
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Interesting, despite some fairly simplistic-looking disavowals of Heidegger and Schmitt.
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How much of this is about the positive and normative enshrinement of identities? And will observations like this just encourage more white, liberal handwringing, calls for “better representation”, etc, but without coming to grips with how power operates in general?
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The tech venture capitalist visits a social centre — intriguing!
A resftful weekend does wonders.
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I’ve just realised that Flyboy hasn’t been on my blogroll for the last couple of years. (Must have fallen off when I made the transition from Blogger to Movable Type.) You probably didn’t notice, but sorry anyway, dude. <sheepish>Anyway, folks, he comes highly recommended, for what it’s worth.</sheepish>
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Why does my university library require electronic swipe cards to walk through the front fucking door? And why are the overdue fines $5 a fucking day? It’s worse than the video store from hell.
A missive from the University of Technocracy, Sydney
And if the last post didn’t convince, I’m now officially falling apart. I’ve been throwing up in my sleep, my wrist is shot to hell, I’m constantly queasy, and now I’ve fucking got shingles. I guess this is what happens when I keep telling people I’m fine after someone ups and dies on me, not to mention with two important freelance jobs ballooning, and my Masters thesis beginning to kick in. Christ. How’s my Blogtalk paper going to fit in to this mess?
[ technorati tags: stress, death, work, health, shingles, vomiting, thesis ]
Something I wrote in an email to my brother a second ago:
I’m over Australian design culture. There’s this cliche now that we’re pretty up there in terms of global design culture, which is true, but fuck, it’s all about street art and the illustrative, which (in the hands of Eastern suburbs design-yuppies) becomes such an individualist, artwank kind of discourse. It’s all about stylistic mannerisms — there’s almost zero critical methodology that it’s almost criminal.
That’s the thing — there’s so much rhetoric about collaboration and collectives and shit in contemporary designy circles, but basically it’s a cover for free-floating mini-entrepeneurs on the make, regurgitating the markers of street culture to ape sound-system and posse-based subculturality for the interests of global capital, or at least to fund your stupid club night for the faux-hawk/trucker-crap crowd. At least we should be fucking honest about it.
We can came out with all sorts of rhetoric about how the “street-culture-isation” of design somehow de-institutionalises it, but that’s just a superficial evasion of the actual exercise of power. I’m not talking about how “evil advertising appropriates subcultures”, which is banal, but the actual ethics of how one contributes to a culture of design practice. As a relatively non-ethical design practitioner myself who occasionally flirts with street art aesthetics, I don’t have answers, but I’ve had it up to here with the smug celebrations of Australian designers being “in front”. Designers? Fucking hate them.
[ technorati tags: design, culture, power, subcultures, institutionality, australia ]
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Menu items for all, not just the rich!
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“CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library.”
“If you are an alien, how come you sound like you’re from the North?”
“Lots of planets have a North.”
Nice. But despite the perfect casting of toothy Billie Piper as the new companion Rose, the new Doctor Who seems a little too fresh for my liking. What happened to the mood? Doctor Who always seemed to dramatise the aesthetics of overreaching imperial hubris that’s gone to seed, or uncanny, evacuated spaces. Now it’s all sun and busy shopping malls — and not a quarry in sight. Hmmph.
And the title sequence? Like the Sylvester McCoy-era, its dependence on faithfully modelled 3D spatial representationalism misunderstands what was so good about Doctor Who title sequences until the ’80s: the fact that the “video tunnelling” effect was an abstract and tangential manipulation of signal, a kind of pure visual anamorphosis. Sigh.
[ technorati tags: doctor-who, tv, billie-piper, science-fiction, motion-graphics]
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“Superman says YOU CAN SLAP A JAP with war bonds and stamps!”
It’s always nice to discover that people are modelling your t-shirts on Flickr… You too could look this, uh, spunky by buying some of my merchandise :) I’ve added some extremely overdue items, like this:
[ technorati tags: flickr, antipopper, merchandise, tshirts, self-promotion ]
After a decade away, I’m back on a university campus, and besides being quite fucking exciting — you enter a room filled with lots of hard-to-find books! you take the books out of the building! you don’t pay anything at the counter! — it’s also creepy just to walk around and see how stuff has changed. Just a surface sweep has signalled to me that the higher education sector really is in the last phase of mutating from a crumbling colonial tower into an autonomic, credentialist zombification market, almost completely flattening any tangential potentials that might have flourished in the interregnum. I can smell the corporatisation process. I had some things to say about this ten years ago:
While a programme of “pure self-defense” can often be radicalising, this is less and less the case with “students as students” in the 1990s, because nowadays, students are increasingly invited to complicitly associate their very presence in universities with the internalisation of a ruthless user-pays ideology that encourages a blase kind of docility, which only occasionally extends itself into consumer outrage (and that is often directed against anything that isn’t “good value”, e.g. “wasteful” attempts at non-vocational, participatory and critical teaching, or even general non-curricular activities, radical or not).
But the point, as always, isn’t to get defensive about “attacks on the university”, whether they be from the government, big business or weirdly nostalgic right wing think-tanks, because the machinations that count — i.e. the collusion between the first two — are remaking “the university” in their image. It’s not so much about defense as intervention — doing something different:
Rather than merely saving us from discrete attacks by the forces of darkness, “successful” actions must break the university’s autonomic, zombie-like streak, allowing more people to actualise more collective, political potentials within its walls, and lessening its ability to manufacture tools for capitalist world domination.
Okay, I’ll stop quoting myself now — it’s embarrassing.
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Looks like I’ll probably be presenting at BlogTalk Downunder — yay! I hope to see some of you there.
[ technorati tags: university, education, corporatisation, activism, blogtalk ]
