February 2012
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What if passion exists...
We know the old refrain sung by famous authors, passion no longer exists, it was killed by woman’s liberation, the consumerist hedonism, that makes the universe liquid (Bauman) and breaks the most sacred bonds. The exactly opposite these might be advanced: #Bruckner…
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3D printing, it's uses within the spectacle a...
“In the second room were numerous articles on shelves in plastic containers.
Stein pointed. ‘Read the inscription on that-aloud please.’
‘The Winsom Throw Away Shirt.’
‘Fine, there is an article from the age of intranscience. A shirt your wore once and threw away. If you wore it for more than eight hours it fell to pieces on your body.’
[…]
‘You...
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“…nature is not a model to be followed but a toolbox or a storehouse of invention, as ha been voiced since the nineteenth century in the context of biology but also that of experimental work in the the technological discourses….” Insect Media…introduction.
Once you begin to consider nature in these constructivist terms then it is inevitable that as the manipulation...
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General notions of production found outside the borders of political economy are extremely vague. Any activity that results in a positive outcome at all is , to a certain extent, productive. Within the framework of political economy, however, this concept is given a precise and non-arbitrary content. To produce is to bestow a certain amount of human labour on an ensemble of products in order to...
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“There is no longer an elsewhere. Because of this, the ‘strategic’ model is also...”
– Michel de Certeau (via alucidwake)
nice pertinent quote from @alucidwake…
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Poem: Communism (1958) by Franco Fortini
I was a communist throughout. Justly though, the other communists looked askance at me. I was a communist despite their certainties, despite my doubts. Justly they did not see themselves in me. . They would not admit my discipline. My centralism seemed anarchy to them. My self-criticisms contradicted theirs. Special communists cannot be: to think so is not to be so. . Justly they did not see...
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Ah the Delight . . . By Franco Fortini
Ah the delight of dawn! Over the grassy lawn the spark of silk, of silk spat out by some small spider to be the breeze’s pawn. A distant siren whines from the freeway. Sun shines! What a Sunday, what peace! An old man’s tidy peace, his favorite hour of all. The ants march on in rows. They’re off to do who knows what harm to the ripe pears … Such sun now on the wall! The...
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Media Archaeology is thus really a fashion, something inordinately hyped to sell more books, music, clothes, etc… […] Meanwhile, Zielinski is always (if he still uses the label) explicitly not a media archaeologist but a Media (an)archaeologist, a practice which has been increasingly one of biographing the anarchic margins of western thought and knowledge. [Baruch Gottlieb]
Menotti...
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draft notes on the destiny of the jurist(media)
I’ve been wondering recently whether a modification isn’t required in my understanding of Georges Dumezil and his definitive ideological analysis of Indo-European mythology, specifically of the concept of political sovereignty which has three poles, the king, the jurist and the warrior. For whilst I have always tended to accept the proposition put forward by Deleuze and Guattari that suggests...
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“Communism can only be equated with planning to the extent to which it is firstly...”
– (A. Negri, 1979) … nice from partitaimaginaria:
“So what do post-structuralist/cultural thinkers bring to the geography party?...”
– Sounds like there might have been a bit of a ding-dong about post-structuralism on the Critical Geography Forum mailing list. This defence by Jonathan Cloke (Loughborough) made some practical rejoinders.
[via @demilit] (via hautepop)
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#Harman speaking with Latour
“…I usually don’t like correlating ontological positions with political ones. I usually hate it when people do that, when people assume that relationality means progressive left-wing politics and substance means oppressive reactionary politics…. i was a bit careless in the manuscript in equating ontological democracy with political democracy…”
Thinking I was...
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the anti-social...
CP “I would like you to explain your concept of community(which can range all the way from the micro-community of lovers to the universal community of spirit in Christianity) How could the coming community go beyond this exclusivity?”
JLN “I want to stress that I don’t like to use the term ‘community’ without certain precautions. It has come to connote very...
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Testing for the Marxian-Classical Criterion of... →
…. “Okishio’s Criterion of Technical Choice”, that is: at going prices and real wage, the new technology is more profitable than the one prevailing at the previous period. Park’s conclusion is that the test is negative: “It casts doubt about the validity of Okishio’s criterion of technical choice”. In our opinion, this conclusion is not convincing....
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#ranciere “…led me to search in the history of the working class movement for the reasons for the ambiguous or failed encounters between workers and the intellectuals who had come to visit them or educate them or be educated by them…” (2004)
a strange statement, this from a text where the spectacle is referenced against theatre and interestingly both Debord and Brecht...
January 2012
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“It is critical that the euro zone members actually develop a clear, simple, firewall that can operate both to limit the contagion and to provide this sort of act of trust in the euro zone so that the financing needs of that zone can actually be met.”
The IMF speaking like a Science Fiction character….
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2012/NEW012812A.htm
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the #spectacle form from the inside...
‘You have to assume that you don’t have rational consumers. Faced with complex decisions or too much information they default…’ Martin Wheatley.
That the spectacle believes in irrationality is hardly news of course, still as the above quote from one of the UK’s financial regulators demonstrates that it now no longer believes in rational choice is rather a critical...
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#brecht spring 1938
Today, Easter Sunday morning
a sudden snowstorm swept over the island
between the greening hedges lay snow. My young son
drew me to a little apricot tree by the house wall
away from a version which I pointed at those
who were preparing a war which
could well wipe out the continent, this island, my people, my
Family
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#brecht epitaph 1919
Red Rosa now has vanished too.
Where she lies is hid from view.
She told the poor what life is about
And so the rich have rubbed out.
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Quotes from #Ranciere “as the opposite of the passive spectacle in the texts of Guy Debord….” “the concept of the spectacle implies that images are no longer doubles of things but. but the things themselves, the reality of a world in which things and images are no longer able to be distinguished. Whenever the the image no longer stands opposite the thing, form and...
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Franco #Fortini ... Looking Back
I have worked all these years, have seen the seasons change little behind window panes, working for the car, for papers, doctors, for food and the house. Doing not what I ought to have done, but neither what I should have done; not with the slow mind of the wise, nor with bright eyes, nor with a glad heart.
But the dark water beyond the future, the still lake that lies unvisited there, of that I...
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#Serres - from The Origin of Geometry
What we have left of all this history presents nothing but two languages as such, narratives or legends and proofs or figures, words and formulas. Thus it is as if we were confronted by two parallel lines which, as is well known, never meet. The origin constantly recedes, inaccessible, irretrievable. The problem is open.
I have tried to resolve this question three times. First, by immersing it...
fakedaniels asked: Cheers. Is that Fortini the Hamburger trans. or is it from the Carcanet?
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Translating Brecht ... Fortini
All afternoon
a thunderstorm hung on the rooftops,
then broke, in lightning, in torrents.
I stared at lines of cement, lines of glass
with screams inside them, wounds mixed in and limbs,
mine also, who have survived. Carefully, looking
now at the bricks, embattled, now at the dry page,
I heard the word
of a poet expire, or change
to another voice, no longer for us. The oppressed
are...
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“Systems of representation have become consumer objects; they function almost according to the throwaway logic of fads and tissues” Lipovetsky
Philosophical moments on the network should all be read carefully through the mirror of the above proposition.
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It is not often that the real effectivity of artistic methods can be successfully tested. Most one experiences at best agreement (‘Yes you can show me the way it is with us’), or that one has given ‘initiative in some direction or other…. #Brecht
For someone with a background in a discipline which ascribes what is at times an excessively high value to proofs and testing...
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To discipline mimicry, to exhibit -
[held still in its formal death -]
the stamp of its ancient subjection ,
and at the same time to imitate
the violence and lament of violence
Undergone. This I think, I have sought
to do in my verse, and this is
connected with my Judaism
Franco Fortini —- poem from Fortini-Cani Straub and Huillet …
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We had a hard time getting our film passed. Going out of the building we did not hide our esteem for the acute censor. He had penetrated far deeper into the substance of our artistic aims than our most well-wishing critics. He had read us a little lecture on realism. From the standpoint of the police.
Brecht writing on Kuhle Wampe in the 1930s
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In the 1980s a Canadian researcher said “Today credit cards constitute one of the most serious threats to fundamental rights and liberties. Insofar as they enable service companies to gather, process and disseminate increasing amounts of information on people, their behaviours, their tastes, etc… the posses highly sophisticated means for increasing control over private individuals thereby...
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@MODERN1ST ...
Armand Mattelart has a long and different body of work, with a style of cultural production that is rare in these days but which we need to use. Interestingly I think he is a rare case of a writer and researcher who makes more sense reading backwards from the present backards.
What to recommend then -
The Globalization of Surveillance - Mattelart (2011) The Information Society – Mattelart...