May 2012
6 posts
“Society is now posited, by each individual, as a mere ‘constraint’...”
– The grumpiness of Cornelius Castoriadis (May 1989).
“Hoarding controls the promise of value without enjoyment; consumption promises...”
– “Cruel Optimism,” Lauren Berlant
“In depressive dramas our students are likely to oscillate between two roles. On...”
– “Teaching/Depression” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
“All of the hustling that goes on amongst the working and non-working poor and...”
– Affect & the Politics of Austerity: An interview exchange with Lauren Berlant
This is not unrelated to the post below from Ehrenreich…
Al Jazeera English: Preying on the poor →
“And these new team players from the “gray backwaters” of Mongolia, Romania,...”
– Ugresic, The Ministry of Fear.
A prodigious rant. Unfortunate that her excellent use of italics hasn’t come across from the ebook…
April 2012
1 post
“Facebook is a lot like identity performance offline — our online and offline...”
– Nathan Jurgenson, “Picture Pluperfect”
I read Jurgenson’s essay shortly before starting to mark first-year sociology essays. In these, students were asked to relate their experience to the concepts of risk, individualisation and globalisation.
It is striking how many of them have...
March 2012
3 posts
3 tags
“The film that I was supposed to make was to be a positive example of an...”
– (East) German director Thomas Heise on his film Erfinder 82 (Inventor 82), made under “instruction” by GDR authorities at Babelsberg in 1982. His previous works were banned. The print of Erfinder 82 was destroyed.
“One will have observed that it is difficult, initially, to distinguish the preview...”
– Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”
February 2012
5 posts
“If we consider the conditions in which the work of the majority of humanity,...”
– Info-Labour
“When we move onto the sphere of info-labour there is no longer a need to have...”
– Info-Labour Franco Berardi (Bifo)
The New Inquiry: Against Ted →
thenewinquiry:
By Nathan Jurgenson
When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart?
Started as a one-off conference nearly 30 years ago, the TED (“Technology, Entertainment and Design”) phenomenon has grown to two large annual…
“Kurekhin began to formulate his famous thesis: “Reading the correspondence...”
– Alexei Yurchak, “A Parasite from Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin Proved That Lenin Was a Mushroom,” Slavic Review, 2011.
January 2012
4 posts
“the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege.”
– Slavoj Žižek · The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie: The New Proletariat · LRB 26 January 2012
“My emphasis is on cinema as shared fantasy and social myth. In that sense...”
– J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties
(Via Jessica Winter)
“What it all comes down to, after all the shouting and the cheers, is the man at...”
– Insider Baseball by Joan Didion
“American reporters “like” covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on...”
– Insider Baseball by Joan Didion.
December 2011
1 post
“Think of the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy...”
– Freud
November 2011
3 posts
“Like freedom, hope, despite false ideological depictions of it in romanticized...”
– Adrian Johnston
“The anemic humanism of tepidly moderate leftists has proven itself to be...”
– Adrian Johnston
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics report on Household Income and Distribution...”
– No, no. Nothing to protest here. Via.
October 2011
8 posts
“As Freud feared, Jung and his mythological mumbo-jumbo proved to be a rallying...”
– Jungian Complexes at the Multiplex | marksimpson.com
“The revolution” does not exist. It is not a horizon to be struggled toward, and...”
– Letter from Oakland
“An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and...”
– Letter from Oakland
“On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect of all...”
– LENIN’S TOMB: On consensus
“Economists using the income-compensation technique are aware that it could...”
– New Left Review - William Davies: The Political Economy of Unhappiness
“One contradiction of neo-liberalism is that it demands levels of enthusiasm,...”
– New Left Review - William Davies: The Political Economy of Unhappiness
“For example, commentators tie themselves in knots over whether it is a social...”
– McKenzie Wark at VersoBooks.com
Watch“December 24 - Frost’s Bitter Grip,” from Lawrence English’s album The Peregrine. Based on the book by J.A. Baker of the same name.
September 2011
7 posts
“Immigration debates…still provided [a] kind of ‘White governmental...”
– Ghassan Hage, White Nation, 1998.
Same as it ever was…
“Paranoia has three classical components. The paranoiac has located a fault or...”
– Anders Behring Breivik and the logic of madness | Darian Leader | Comment is free | The Guardian
Primitive Accumulation; Or, A Virtual Read-In on... →
This is basically a one-stop shop for all your London riot needs…
“The highlight came on Saturday night with the lighting of the so-called Burn Out...”
– Lunapark Berlin: theme park event lets residents rail against tourists
“The Trouble With Tourism Tour was led by a Northern Irish guide called Finn...”
– Lunapark Berlin: theme park event lets residents rail against tourists
“the refugee represents such a disquieting element in the order of the...”
– Agamben from Means Without Ends, quoted in Rothenberg’s The Excessive Subject.
I’m no Agamben buff, but the relevance of this quote to topical Australian political debate seems glaring. The inability to move beyond the deadlock of “offshore” and “onshore”...
August 2011
11 posts
“In the cafe culture of upmarket bookshops, in the cultural promotion apparatus...”
– John Frow, “On Literature in Cultural Studies”
“the more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and...”
– Grunge nostalgia: Why we should let Kurt Cobain rest in peace. - By Simon Reynolds - Slate Magazine
WatchJust watched Jodi Dean on the Communist Horizon (via Mark). An uncommonly intelligent and insightful Q&A session follows her talk. Good job everyone.
I find such discussions compelling, but never quite know how to integrate them in my own work about East Germans and communism. I think it’s fanciful to claim that all East Germans who have some fond remembrance of the GDR are politically...
“…focusing on the technologies that enable interconnectedness misses the...”
– Bernard Keane in Crikey.
5 tags
Wall of words: the Berlin Wall fifty years on |... →
literarypiano:
“Like the concrete wall, the word walldivides Europe linguistically. Some European languages, like German and French, form their words for wall from the Latin murus. So the German for Berlin Wall is die Berliner Mauer. English, Irish, and other languages use another Latin word, vallum, a more military word which means a rampart. In Irish it became fál, and its possessive form...
“It’s an age-old argument – one that most will never change their views about –...”
– Dan Hancox in an excellent piece discussing London riots with grime MCs. m.guardian.co.uk
“The more collectivist the phenomenon (both in itself and for itself), the more...”
– potlatch: London riots: the limits of Left and Right
“The absurd claim that cyclists, who very rarely cause even minor injuries, are...”
– Vélorutionary? | Radical Philosophy
“The young people of the banlieue simply wanted to say (to adopt a slogan from...”
– London? Remember Paris? An apposite quote from a Zizek interview I read a few years ago in Soft Targets.
“I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but...”
– This is Michel Foucault, quoted by Conall Cash in an exemplary review of Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival. Goes to the heart of calling this blog what it is called.
July 2011
3 posts
“But telling the climate impacts stories — making the climate connection to...”
– climate code red: How not to engage the community: the politics of 5 June