Rogueish

n 1: Concerning the Violent Peace-Police

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:35:59 -0800

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.”

Trying to assemble some kind of coherent thoughts about flat affect in Murakami’s Norwegian...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:01:35 -0800

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 else); Norwegian Wood isn’t exactly about flat affect, but rather a narrator who purports to have emotions but describes them to us with a cool distance; trying to figure out how exactly to position Houellebecq in relation to the other two.

Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:16:00 -0800

Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig:

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. We can’t short-circuit the process.

So, Jensen, exactly how many people do OPD have to kill before it’s OK to carry a shield or attempt to de-arrest your comrades?

nursewithwoundlist replied to your link: Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges’...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:42:00 -0800

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 advances a really stupid, ahistorical, absolutist theory of non-violence. And then he makes up shit about how Occupy Oakland insurrectionists “arrogantly dismiss Oakland’s African-American leaders” (when in fact one of the main reasons OO exists, at least in the form it does, is because there’s a history of insurrectionist types - not exclusively white by any means - making a conscious effort to work with African American community leaders, as in the protests that followed the shooting of Oscar Grant), while citing Derrick Jensen, most widely known for his racist fetishization of indigenous people.

Thirty More Years of Hell

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:22:39 -0800

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 labor radicals–McCarthyism’s real target–leaving us helpless after the onslaught began. They then told their children–the Boomers–to scorn these dirty reds, and to thank good ol’ American capitalism for the chicken in every pot.

Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:12:58 -0800

Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig:

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 Tully’s, a branch of a multinational coffee company, but it’s a franchise operation, so “locally owned” is technically accurate. The question is, are nominal owners of a franchise operation really owners of the means of production in a meaningful sense? It seems to me that the answer is no - the “owner” of a franchise is more like an employee who is given a bit more management responsibility so that the company can force them to take on significantly more risk. Smashing the windows of a Tully’s franchise, just like smashing the windows of a bank, may have some effect on the capitalist owners, but it will also have a significant effect on the employees, and that needs be taken into account. So it may well have been wrong to smash the windows of this coffee shop, but not because it is a “locally owned business”; in fact, quite the opposite.

So I guess when the X Factor said the winner would get a record...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:49:34 -0800

So I guess when the X Factor said the winner would get a record contract, what they didn’t say was that it would be a contract with Almighty Records.

You know how according to the previews every episode of House is the most SHOCKING episode EVER? It...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:17:00 -0800

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 set in high school where social ostracism and meanness can have a pretty big effect on your life, the early episodes presented the Upper East Side as a debuached world where one constantly risked rape, drug overdose, or imprisonment; now, the main risk seems to be that if Dan is seen to be dating Serena, his publishers may not take seriously his literary pretensions. Following the usual TV pattern for the escalation of debauchery and danger, by this point we should be seeing Georgina Sparks as some kind of fascist science villain constantly launching zeppelin attacks on Manhattan from her Salo-esque seraglio. Which is a show I would watch.

M.I.A.’s new video.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:50:28 -0800

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

M.I.A.’s new video.

I like this in part because of the nagging sense that it sounds...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:39:40 -0800

I like this in part because of the nagging sense that it sounds like something from the Final Fantasy V soundtrack.

The other interesting thing about Vorticist Britney Spears was the experience of spending an...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:42:00 -0800

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 image the composition of which was usually determined by the curves of Britney’s body; that is, it involved an odd sort of typographic eroticism. And a rather dubious sort of eroticism it is, too, as it involves me actively arranging meanings around a passive and mute young woman. This dubiousness is appropriate in a way, though, as the Britney/Vorticism connection lies in the relation between modernism, industrialism, and populism, which is not necessarily a combination that has been especially pleasant for the women caught up in it.

No Useless Leniency: Refusal of Work

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:24:05 -0800

No Useless Leniency: Refusal of Work:

Leopoldo Lugones’s short story ‘Yzur’ (from his 1906 collection Strange Forces) is a tale premised on the idea that monkey’s have refused language so they will not be forced to work. The narrator of the story evolves a theory that this initial refusal has led to a degeneration in monkeys, and he aims to demonstrate this by returning one to speech. He buys the animal Yzur from the circus and proceeds to his experiment.

Using methods to treat deaf-mutes the narrator laboriously tries to encourage the development of speech through physical manipulation and a system of association of vowels with food treats. This initial process takes three years and no word is uttered. What does happen is the monkey develops a contemplative sensibility, and the tendency to cry.

The narrator becomes more and more frustrated, deciding that Yzur can speak but is choosing not to. This is reinforced when the cook tells him the monkey has spoken a few words (although the cook can’t remember all the words, only bed and pipe). The next day the narrator, convinced the monkey is ironically taunting him, beats the creature violently and the monkey only sheds tears in silence.

Perhaps the most useful thing that came out of setting up the...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:13:00 -0800

Perhaps the most useful thing that came out of setting up the Vorticist Britney Spears tumblr is that I discovered that full scans of both issues of BLAST are online (Issue 1, Issue 2).

Photo

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:34:59 -0800

Photo

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:34:48 -0800

For some reason I have spent much of today gripped by a terrible...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:19:18 -0800

For some reason I have spent much of today gripped by a terrible desire to make a “Lena Katina? I barely know her” joke.

"I am so far advanced that I will have finished with the whole economic crap in 5 weeks’ time. And..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:14:19 -0800

“I am so far advanced that I will have finished with the whole economic crap in 5 weeks’ time. And having done that I shall complete the political economy at home and apply myself to another branch of learning at the Museum. It’s beginning to bore me.”

- Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1851

spitzenprodukte: On FULL COMMUNISM-cursory notes on the...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:26:42 -0800

spitzenprodukte:

On FULL COMMUNISM-
cursory notes on the evolution of a memetic non-demand.

You hear it everywhere, these days, if you walk within a certain activist milieu. It’s a token demand, a given. FULL COMMUNISM- I wouldn’t get out of bed for anything less. It’s a joke, a dumb joke. It’s a communist meme. Like all good memes, it’s pretty much devoid of meaning, in terms of content. But its use denotes something else– a Zizekian uber-demand, a demand which goes beyond. FULL COMMUNISM is both a lack, in a very real sense, but also a pointed lack, its very meaninglessness a cry for meaning.

On the fascinating UK ultraleft meme economy.

The rise of the data self < PopMatters

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:18:48 -0800

The rise of the data self < PopMatters:

But my suspicion is that this runs deeper — that data collection is slowly becoming the ideological basis of the self — what we regard as the real self. Data is the authorized way to pursue self-knowledge in the networked society; the other means are suspicious, deluded or outmoded.

I wonder how new this is, or maybe better, how different relationships to data are leading to different forms of the data self. So much of what Foucault writes about is to do with how data structures subjectivity (population statistics and governmentality, physiology and disciplinarity, confessional discourses and sexuality); but it’s certainly possible that these various relationships between data and the self are getting reconfigured by the internet generally, and social networking in particular.

From Ned's Review of Lana Del Rey

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:05:32 -0800

From Ned's Review of Lana Del Rey:

nedhepburn:

It sounds like the soundtrack to a James Bond movie directed by and starring twelve year olds.

In more “descriptions of Lana Del Rey that I think are supposed to be critical but which make me want to listen to her album” news.

(The rest of this review is sort of positive-ish although in the rather patronising “it’s for tween girls so let’s lower our standards” genre, of which I am not a huge fan).