antipopper

• The State of Exception, the fuck-up, the superhero
  “State of Exception : Justice League :: Homo Sacer : Hot in Herre” — outstanding!
  (tags: agamben comics juridicality theory superheroes ketamine batman)

*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 ]

• KLARTEXT!
  Deborah and Ilaria went to this art/politics conference in January. How cute is the colour coding?
  (categories: conference aesthetics politics art activism)
• Ourmedia
  “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.”
  (categories: grassroots distributed media vernacular-creativity)

• Participatory Design Research
  (categories: participatory-design ethnography research design)
• Co-research: the making of alternative knowledge
  (categories: co-research ethnography narrative-therapy therapy research)

• atelierEUROPA: The Spaces of a Cultural Question
  An E-Mail Interview with Brian Holmes conducted by Marion von Osten
  (categories: brian-holmes labour work immaterial-labour multitudes)
• OTHER WORLDS: Social movements and the making of alternatives — 28th-29th April, 2005
  I’ll be going, simply to see Dave crush ideology in the egg
  (categories: social-movements politics)
• danah bowd on SXSW and marginalized populations
  (categories: marginality sxsw power digerati elites)

The relative radius of the corners is all important, and what makes these stripes cool.

• Jon Beasley-Murray: Ethics as Post-Political Politics
  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)
• The Society of Control
  An anticapitalist Euro-art extravaganza… I think. This stuff has an odd tone.
  (categories: art anticapitalism critique theory)
• The metamorphosis of Telos
  Interesting, despite some fairly simplistic-looking disavowals of Heidegger and Schmitt.
  (categories: piccone telos heidegger schmitt democracy liberalism politics theory)
• SXSW: Blogging While Black
  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?
  (categories: blogging race sxsw culture difference politics representation)

• Joi Ito’s Web: The Italian squat scene
  The tech venture capitalist visits a social centre — intriguing!
  (categories: joi-ito italy squat social-centre indymedia)

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