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 wall divides 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
“Nostalgia for a lost authenticity is a paralysing structure of historical...”
– John Frow
“Life itself is a creative construction, and there is a point at which a person’s...”
– Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, “Introduction: Forecasting Memory,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory
June 2011
3 posts
“Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which...”
– Gentrification and Its Discontents - Magazine - The Atlantic
“The same processes created—and, as Sorkin and Zukin would have it,...”
– Gentrification and Its Discontents - Magazine - The Atlantic
May 2011
5 posts
“As for “Hesher,” it’s a Sundance film, which means that it applies Hollywood...”
– The Front Row: Methods to Their Badness : The New Yorker
“There’ll be no repeal of the violations of civil liberties embedded in the...”
– “Bin Laden’s death will change nothing,” Crikey.
April 2011
4 posts
“According to the [Club Commission’s] report, Berlin’s clubbing...”
– Tobias Rapp, “Berlin, Techno and the Easyjet Set”
“Christian Metz was born in Béziers in 1931 and died in Paris in 1933.”
– A significant typo in a Routledge book about cinema. The next sentence, disappointingly, doesn’t say: “at the age of six months, Metz penned The Imaginary Signifier, his most famous work, before dying in obscurity shortly before his second birthday.”
“Synth-pop envisioned a music beyond domestic or religious architecture....”
– Faking It in Space: Musings on the Melodious Confluence of Computers and Humanity | Flaunt Magazine
March 2011
6 posts
“Ostalgie is therefore not simply a sense of a lack of something missing which...”
– Mmmhmm.