February 2012
33 posts
2 tags
5 tags
The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress -... →
According to the Lef editors, Constructivist tselesoobraznost’ concerned itself with the material form of things not only in relation to technical problems of utilitarian form (“the laws of exterior design”) but also in relation to the new socialist economy (“the demands of economics”) and the need to appeal to consumer desire (“the mysterious taste of the...
5 tags
1 tag
4 tags
Fredric Jameson - Berkeley Avenali Lecture Series →
“The Aesthetics of Singularity” Tuesday, February 28, 2012 6 p.m. | International House, Chevron Auditorium
Follow-up Panel Discussion with Fredric Jameson Wednesday, February 29, 2012 12–2 p.m. | Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
Panel Discussants: Whitney Davis (History of Art), Martin Jay (History), and Colleen Lye (English) Moderator: Robert Kaufman...
4 tags
[lbo-talk] Language & Wolf Children, was RE: (The... →
Susanne Langer has a fine analysis of a “Wolf Child’ ‘discovered’ in France in the 1790s. The physician who took the young boy (around 18) into his home had a utilitarian conception of language and what motivated it. The by had come to love milk, and the physician tried to get him to say “milk” in order to get milk. Total failure. Then the boy became ill and...
3 tags
5 tags
Zone Styx Travelcard →
Pop music as we understand it simply did not exist in 1932, and we have no right to blindly assume it will continue to exist as we know it indefinitely. At almost every level the means to produce, distribute, obtain, and consume/absorb (and then discuss/dissect) art has been transformed in the last half century.
I’ve been thinking about this, and the relationship between pop music as an...
6 tags
3 tags
3 tags
After Space Invaders - Have a Good Time →
Amis and his lifelong comrade Christopher Hitchens…wrote, in effect, the same paragraph, about, respectively, the introduction of Space Invaders and the destruction of the World Trade Center:
The main innovation of Space Invaders was as follows: it gave you real drama on the screen. Who cares whether you can eliminate dots with an electric tennis ball? So what if you can knock down ten...
3 tags
"Consumption" - David Graeber →
But when a 16-year-old girl writes a short story about forbidden love between Kirk and Spock, this is hardly consumption anymore; we are talking about people engaging in a complex community organized around forms of (relatively unalienated) production.
Slash fiction as model of post-capitalist labor. Actually, “Slash Fiction as Model of Post-capitalist Labor” would be a pretty good...
2 tags
Watch
2 tags
The truths Labour must face to regain credibility... →
Remember that the word “socialism” was first used in the 1820s. It was designed to attack the power and rural riches of the aristocracy and the landed gentry, and to support the spread of wealth through manufacturing and through financial institutions with diverse owners – aka banks. Only when Marx came along and distorted our language and our thinking did the meaning of...
2 tags
Uninterpretative: Unified (Gar)Field Theory →
Which, of course, means that Garfield itself is the story of a cat who does not exist, fantasizing about a life which is not real. And if Garfield is an absence, then he is an absence that dreams in a particular, dilapidated house.
4 tags
4 tags
Predictive analytics and information camouflage –... →
Williamson’s describes the interpretive work we perform on ads as simultaneously work on the self.
Nothing [in the ad] even ‘says’ that Catherine Deneuve is ‘like’ Chanel no. 5, or that they have a similar aura. We are given two signifiers, and required to make a ‘signified’ by exchanging them. The fact that we have to make that exchange, to do the linking work which is not done in the...
3 tags
4 tags
Reading Like a Loser – The New Inquiry →
Bull’s solution, and the central claim of Anti-Nietzsche, consists of a startling statement: One can only sidestep Nietzsche’s strategy by “reading him like a loser.” Here Bull begins a sort of thought experiment, although it’s far from an arid theoretical exercise — at times its tone approaches that of Swiftian satire. To read Nietzsche like a loser, Bull reasons, is not to reject his...
2 tags
A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That's... →
We’re at the start of a revolution in the ways marketers and media intrude in — and shape — our lives…. And it is performing a highly controversial form of social profiling and discrimination by customizing our media content on the basis of marketing reputations we don’t even know we have.
Have to admit I hadn’t really thought about this....
5 tags
n 1: Concerning the Violent Peace-Police →
Gandhian strategies have not historically worked in the US; in fact, they haven’t really worked on a mass scale since the civil rights movement. This is because the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as “violence.”
4 tags
Trying to assemble some kind of coherent thoughts about flat affect in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Houellebecq’s Whatever, and Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel. Well, Tao Lin does flat affect to an almost parodic extent (but not actually parodic, as that would imply some kind of external standpoint from which to draw a contrast between his affectlessness and something...
1 tag
Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges'... →
Hedges quoting Derrick Jensen:
If you live on Ogoni land and you see that Ken Saro-Wiwa is murdered for acts of nonviolent resistance, if you see that the land is still being trashed, then you might think about escalating. I don’t have a problem with that. But we have to go through the process of trying to work with the system and getting screwed. It is only then that we get to move beyond it....
4 tags
nursewithwoundlist replied to your link: Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges’ Columns - Truthdig
Moreover, insurrectionists like most black bloc types have no interest in boring old John Zerzan. Terrible article.
Yes, I should have pointed out when I linked to it that the entire article is a load of crap. Hedges knows absolutely nothing about Black Bloc history or tactics and...
1 tag
Thirty More Years of Hell →
While a liberal looks upon the New Deal and Great Society generation as a pantheon of benevolent patriarchs, I see a bunch of technocrats who slapped together a crude simulacrum of social democracy and called it “free-enterprise.” Just as in the submerged state of 2012, they did their best to make the government’s hand all but invisible, all the while using the machinery of the Cold War to purge...
6 tags
Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges'... →
Groups of Black Bloc protesters, for example, smashed the windows of a locally owned coffee shop in November in Oakland and looted it.
You know who owns “locally owned businesses”? Capitalists. But the criticism of vandalism against small businesses actually prevents thinking about what “small businesses” are. I think the coffee shop Hedges is talking about here is a...
4 tags
5 tags
You know how according to the previews every episode of House is the most SHOCKING episode EVER? It occurs to me that Gossip Girl has actually been following a policy of making each episode less shocking than the last. Not in the sense of the diminishing returns of repeatedly attempting to be shocking, but by actually continually dialing down the scandal and reducing the stakes. Aside from being...
4 tags
WatchM.I.A.’s new video.
2 tags
4 tags
The other interesting thing about Vorticist Britney Spears was the experience of spending an afternoon making the macros. When the connection between Britney and vorticism occurred to me, I looked through BLAST for quotes and through Britney fan sites for pictures and then started trying to fit the text on the pictures. This meant trying to find an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of text in an...