February 2012
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The Crisis of the Early 21st C. Marxian... →
Link to the Gerard Dumenil and Domininique Levy pdf …
“That capitalism underwent a new structural crisis about three decades after the crisis of the 1970s, under circumstances evocative of the Great Depression, raised numerous interrogations. The purpose of the present study is to summarize our own interpretation, and discuss a set of other analyses of Marxian inspiration. Marxist...
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#Marx in Grundisse... a family and value...
(Just as a Manchester family of factory workers, where the children stand in the exchange relation towards their parents and pay them room and board, does not represent the traditional economic organization of the family, so is the system of modern private exchange not the spontaneous economy of societies. Exchange begins not between the individuals within a community, but rather at the point...
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#Marx...
The function fulfilled by the capitalist is no more than the function of capital – viz. the valorization of value by absorbing living labor – executed consciously and willingly. The capitalist functions only as personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified.
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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...