Thursday, May 15, 2008
MUTO
(0) MundiMoot
California Overturns Gay Marriage Ban
[I]n view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.
Full Decision Here
Yay. Back to grading now.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Design for Living
I'll be teaching my first graduate seminar next academic year at the San Francisco Art Institute. I'm really excited about it. Here's the course description:
(3) MundiMoot
We find ourselves in a world we make, and find that we are made and unmade in the making of it. What are we to make of the abiding artifice that is "the political"? What are we doing when we are doing design and what do we do when we discern that design has designs on us?
In this seminar we will think design as a site through which politics are done, but typically done by way of the gesture of a circumvention of the political. At the heart of this disavowed doing of politics we will contend with a perverse conjuration of "the future." The good life is a life with a future, and it is to the future that design devotes its politicity. The species has a future, too, and its City demands design most of all.
We will survey the biopolitical field of design's futurisms through an engagement with selections from Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Jacques Ranciere, and Mike Davis and then direct our attention very specifically to the perverse futurological de-politicizations investing three contemporary design discourses: democratization through social software coding (Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Henry Jenkins, Michel Bauwens), fairness through Green design (David Holmgren, William McDonough, Michael Braugart, Janine Benyus), and emancipation through eugenic biomedical "enhancement" (C.S. Lewis, Slavoj Zizek, Nicholas Agar, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Kaushik Sunder Rajan), as well as some of their points of inter-implication (Katherine Hayles, Eugene Thacker, Bruce Sterling).
We will conclude the seminar with a symposium directing these discursive lenses onto aesthetic, curatorial, practical, and collaborative objects and events.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Sorry, Guys
Updated and adapted from a few comments in a still-thriving thread in the Moot
It's not really true to say that I focus on transhumanists to the exclusion of other topics here on Amor Mundi. What I "take on," if one must call it that, is what I call technocentric superlativity, under which I subsume transhumanisms, singularitarianisms, corporate-militarist futurologies, "liberal" eugenicisms, and various other techno-utopianisms.
Depending on when you dip your toe into the water, it will sometimes seem that one particular variation of superlativity or other gets the brunt of my critical energies, but I don't think it's right to say that transhumanism is really my central concern.
It's certainly true that Amor Mundi has, among other things, taken up a position in the online niche market for exposure and analysis of certain Robot Cult foolishness, and I think this is a perfectly legitimate and useful service as far as it goes. The small Robot Cult groups nattering on the internet deserve exposure however marginal they are -- once upon a time Neoconservatives were comparably fringe, after all, and look at all the damage those dumb cocksure boys-with-their-toys ended up doing. But it is as a kind of particularly clarifying reductio of the technocentric superlativity that prevails in many more mainstream neoliberal, technocratic, eugenic, and reductionist mainstream developmental discourses that transhumanism seems to me a particularly useful and illuminating target of critique as well.
This is a blog and the shape of the conversation is articulated in no small part by the objections and concerns raised by its conversational partners in real time. There are a number of earnest to cynical Robot Cultists lurking and posting in the Moot, and for better or worse my blog reflects my efforts to engage with their expressed concerns. Lately, organizational insiders and PR hacks have been flinging random anonymous vitriolic poop on the walls of the Moot in the effort to see what sticks -- how on earth could anybody ever think of transhumanists as a cult when they behave this way? -- and so I am beginning to police some repeat offenders at the moment although I hope a balance will eventually be struck that keeps both criticism and substance high. But be all that as it may, in the larger context of my writing and teaching it is quite easy to see that my critique of superlativity and focus on technodevelopmental social struggle is scarcely reducible to lambasting transhumanists.
No small part of the confusion at hand arises in my view from the way that transhumanist-identified people themselves seem eagerly to assume the mantle of a "movement" and a general "we" whenever it suits their ambitions, but then to disdain any number of particular positions that get expressed by exemplars of the movement when it suits their vanity. Transhumanists rise and descend to levels of generality, "technicality," inclusivity, and exclusivity at the drop of a hat and all incredibly opportunistically. However edifying it may be to them, none of this is particularly compelling or even coherent to those of us who are not already sympathetic to their general take on things and observing the spectacle they are making of themselves critically.
To be blunt, transhumanism doesn't have enough of a history, a wide enough membership, nor an archive of adequate accomplishments to demand respect in the face of these sorts of shenanigans. It isn't "terminological imperialism" as one critic objected to my criticism of positions actually affirmed under the heading of transhumanism even though he himself -- who also ascribes that label to himself -- disapproves of them. I am just trying to make sense of what you people are saying and what you are up to and to connect what you are doing to its larger contexts in a critical way, and you freak out nine ways till Sunday.
A marginal movement with a hundred members and a hundred "versions" (yes, I exaggerate a tad to make a point) is an incoherent mess, and it is plain to see that all these deep "variations" are no barrier to general identification once the critics turn their heads again and the "movement" flies its freak flag in the club house (I speak as someone with more than one freak flag to fly of his own, so don't mistake the actual target of my criticism here).
There is no more commonplace strategy among kooks, paranoids, cultists, and such than to project their own extremity onto those who are simply observing it and testifying to what they see. Some of the suave cynical PR shills of the Robot Cult organizational archipelago tossing brickbats into the Moot these days are now rather desperately accusing me of being a cult-figure because I blog under my actual name and seem to mean what I say despite the fact that they literally have facile pontificating would-be gurus making public pronouncements about technological "transcendence" in "The Future" by means of "The Way" which I critique, obviously enough, as hyperbolic and authoritarian nonsense. They would accuse my low-traffic rather academic blog of being "cultlike" despite the fact that they literally have membership organizations to whomp up enthusiasm and donor-monies for, filled with True Believers endlessly testifying to "We Transhumanists" this, "We Singularitarians" that, and on and on.
Terrified at the prospect of actual sustained critical scrutiny, they now imply that any engagement with transhumanism itself compels one into the position of being a closeted Robot Cultist oneself, one who needs to shut up forthwith with the criticisms or risk exposure as such. Or they insinuate that there is something "immoderate" or "bizarre" about tarring transhumanism or singularitariansim or techno-immortalism generally with the kooky cultism of a few nonrepresentative bad apples, when the obvious question is why the presumably "good apples" of these movements fail to police more judiciously the bizarre and immoderate things said and done in the name of their own "movement," why the "non-cultists" are so blandly unconcerned about the cranks and True Believers among them.
The devastating truth remains that one simply doesn't need to join a Robot Cult to advocate the progressive democratization of technodevelopmental social struggle nor to champion consensual prosthetic lifeway diversity. That even the "good" "reasonable" "moderate" Robot Cultists do so anyway is a problem for them, one that is very likely insurmountable, and, I might add, a source of endless comedy gold for their sensible critics.
Transhumanism just doesn't stand up to scrutiny as an autonomous "viewpoint" -- and as a sub(cult)ural tendency it is mostly just an extreme and symptomatic expression of more prevailing hyperbolic technocratic reductionist eugenic techno-utopian strains in neoliberal and neoconservative developmental discourse.
Sorry, guys, that's the way it looks to me. I've said why in countless well-reasoned arguments elsewhere that you can all take or leave as you will. I never expected Robot Cultists themselves to take these interventions particularly to heart, obviously.
(15) MundiMoot
It's not really true to say that I focus on transhumanists to the exclusion of other topics here on Amor Mundi. What I "take on," if one must call it that, is what I call technocentric superlativity, under which I subsume transhumanisms, singularitarianisms, corporate-militarist futurologies, "liberal" eugenicisms, and various other techno-utopianisms.
Depending on when you dip your toe into the water, it will sometimes seem that one particular variation of superlativity or other gets the brunt of my critical energies, but I don't think it's right to say that transhumanism is really my central concern.
It's certainly true that Amor Mundi has, among other things, taken up a position in the online niche market for exposure and analysis of certain Robot Cult foolishness, and I think this is a perfectly legitimate and useful service as far as it goes. The small Robot Cult groups nattering on the internet deserve exposure however marginal they are -- once upon a time Neoconservatives were comparably fringe, after all, and look at all the damage those dumb cocksure boys-with-their-toys ended up doing. But it is as a kind of particularly clarifying reductio of the technocentric superlativity that prevails in many more mainstream neoliberal, technocratic, eugenic, and reductionist mainstream developmental discourses that transhumanism seems to me a particularly useful and illuminating target of critique as well.
This is a blog and the shape of the conversation is articulated in no small part by the objections and concerns raised by its conversational partners in real time. There are a number of earnest to cynical Robot Cultists lurking and posting in the Moot, and for better or worse my blog reflects my efforts to engage with their expressed concerns. Lately, organizational insiders and PR hacks have been flinging random anonymous vitriolic poop on the walls of the Moot in the effort to see what sticks -- how on earth could anybody ever think of transhumanists as a cult when they behave this way? -- and so I am beginning to police some repeat offenders at the moment although I hope a balance will eventually be struck that keeps both criticism and substance high. But be all that as it may, in the larger context of my writing and teaching it is quite easy to see that my critique of superlativity and focus on technodevelopmental social struggle is scarcely reducible to lambasting transhumanists.
No small part of the confusion at hand arises in my view from the way that transhumanist-identified people themselves seem eagerly to assume the mantle of a "movement" and a general "we" whenever it suits their ambitions, but then to disdain any number of particular positions that get expressed by exemplars of the movement when it suits their vanity. Transhumanists rise and descend to levels of generality, "technicality," inclusivity, and exclusivity at the drop of a hat and all incredibly opportunistically. However edifying it may be to them, none of this is particularly compelling or even coherent to those of us who are not already sympathetic to their general take on things and observing the spectacle they are making of themselves critically.
To be blunt, transhumanism doesn't have enough of a history, a wide enough membership, nor an archive of adequate accomplishments to demand respect in the face of these sorts of shenanigans. It isn't "terminological imperialism" as one critic objected to my criticism of positions actually affirmed under the heading of transhumanism even though he himself -- who also ascribes that label to himself -- disapproves of them. I am just trying to make sense of what you people are saying and what you are up to and to connect what you are doing to its larger contexts in a critical way, and you freak out nine ways till Sunday.
A marginal movement with a hundred members and a hundred "versions" (yes, I exaggerate a tad to make a point) is an incoherent mess, and it is plain to see that all these deep "variations" are no barrier to general identification once the critics turn their heads again and the "movement" flies its freak flag in the club house (I speak as someone with more than one freak flag to fly of his own, so don't mistake the actual target of my criticism here).
There is no more commonplace strategy among kooks, paranoids, cultists, and such than to project their own extremity onto those who are simply observing it and testifying to what they see. Some of the suave cynical PR shills of the Robot Cult organizational archipelago tossing brickbats into the Moot these days are now rather desperately accusing me of being a cult-figure because I blog under my actual name and seem to mean what I say despite the fact that they literally have facile pontificating would-be gurus making public pronouncements about technological "transcendence" in "The Future" by means of "The Way" which I critique, obviously enough, as hyperbolic and authoritarian nonsense. They would accuse my low-traffic rather academic blog of being "cultlike" despite the fact that they literally have membership organizations to whomp up enthusiasm and donor-monies for, filled with True Believers endlessly testifying to "We Transhumanists" this, "We Singularitarians" that, and on and on.
Terrified at the prospect of actual sustained critical scrutiny, they now imply that any engagement with transhumanism itself compels one into the position of being a closeted Robot Cultist oneself, one who needs to shut up forthwith with the criticisms or risk exposure as such. Or they insinuate that there is something "immoderate" or "bizarre" about tarring transhumanism or singularitariansim or techno-immortalism generally with the kooky cultism of a few nonrepresentative bad apples, when the obvious question is why the presumably "good apples" of these movements fail to police more judiciously the bizarre and immoderate things said and done in the name of their own "movement," why the "non-cultists" are so blandly unconcerned about the cranks and True Believers among them.
The devastating truth remains that one simply doesn't need to join a Robot Cult to advocate the progressive democratization of technodevelopmental social struggle nor to champion consensual prosthetic lifeway diversity. That even the "good" "reasonable" "moderate" Robot Cultists do so anyway is a problem for them, one that is very likely insurmountable, and, I might add, a source of endless comedy gold for their sensible critics.
Transhumanism just doesn't stand up to scrutiny as an autonomous "viewpoint" -- and as a sub(cult)ural tendency it is mostly just an extreme and symptomatic expression of more prevailing hyperbolic technocratic reductionist eugenic techno-utopian strains in neoliberal and neoconservative developmental discourse.
Sorry, guys, that's the way it looks to me. I've said why in countless well-reasoned arguments elsewhere that you can all take or leave as you will. I never expected Robot Cultists themselves to take these interventions particularly to heart, obviously.
I'm So Tired
Apart from some minor skirmishing in the Moot, I'm too tired and frazzled to post much that is new these days. It's end of term and things are a bit overwhelming at the moment. More to come soon, I promise.
(1) MundiMoot
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Today's Random Wilde
I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community.
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man -- or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
(10) MundiMoot
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community.
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man -- or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
A Secular Pentangle
A student from my Aesthetics and Politics course at Berkeley (hey, Raul!) snapped the chalkboard while I was lecturing about rationality and secular pluralism and forwarded the image to me. It amuses me to realize that, contrary to those who would decry secular outlooks as nothing but atheism, I seem to be offering the bolstering reassurance that, no, it's just witchcraft.
For an inkling of the lecture that accompanied the image, here are some blog-posts that have nibbled around the edges of what I talked about in that lecture…
Technoethical Pluralism
Is Rationality Always Instrumental?
Many of the Faithful Are Really Just Aesthetes
Moralizing Isn't Politics
Disability Discourse As Moralizing
(3) MundiMoot
For an inkling of the lecture that accompanied the image, here are some blog-posts that have nibbled around the edges of what I talked about in that lecture…
Technoethical Pluralism
Is Rationality Always Instrumental?
Many of the Faithful Are Really Just Aesthetes
Moralizing Isn't Politics
Disability Discourse As Moralizing
Dr. Lloyd Miller Helps Make Amor Mundi More Positive
words put together but not mixed
(0) MundiMoot
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
My Despotism
I'm very happy to play host to comments that disagree with my posted observations and arguments and, heaven knows, I enjoy my share of snark, and the give and take of contentious, even testy, debates. I publish rather longform blog-posts (well, when time allows) here, and my debates in the Moot are often even longer still. I find this sort of thing provocative and clarifying, and usually fun. Although they both seem to me profoundly wrongheaded and annoy me to no end sometimes, both the bioconservative John Howard and the transhumanist Michael Anissimov, for example, have lately engaged with me and other commenters here in lengthy and passionate debates that have been illuminating in many ways, whatever their downsides.
However, the simple fact of the matter is that this isn't exactly an enormously high-traffic blog, and the conversation of the cohort of smart and accomplished people who enjoy what I talk about here enough to return regularly (none of whom, I hope, agree with me on close to everything) seems to me to get derailed or altogether stymied sometimes by anonymous sniping that makes no discernible contribution to the conversation of Amor Mundi on its owns terms. My own style is acerbic and I enjoy the occasional rant, and so it has always seemed only fair that I would welcome a fair measure of the same in response.
The simple fact remains, however, that I have attracted a handful of trolls who seem to have the inclination to vandalize the conversation that can take place here otherwise. I realize that I should have expected this, since Amor Mundi has become, among other things, one of the places online in which one finds a serious and ongoing online critique of certain Robot Cult discourses, subcultures, and organizations of a kind that otherwise receive only the sustained attention of their own already-fervent membership.
Although the Robot Cult organizations of the so-called transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, liberal eugenicists, and techno-immortalists remain, for now, quite marginal in the overall institutional scheme of things, they certainly do have the sub(cult)ural and organizational energies to provoke a few overenthusiastic True Believer types in the full-froth of futurological faith into dive bombing into the Moot and dropping dumb insults, unsubstantiated assertions, and highly sophisticated rhetorical gambits along the lines of "I know you are but what am I" all the live-long day, with the consequence that the more edifying company that gathers here tends to quiet or make way for more congenial climbs.
From now on, in light of all this, my responding to comments in the Moot will take one of three forms (only one of them new): [1] I will respond to content, [2] I will ignore content, or [3] I will delete content. You should regard deletion as a real response, with a definite message it's sending.
Even the most egregiously offending commenters have sometimes posted material from which I've benefited and so I am not banning anybody in particular from Amor Mundi, but only content that fails to pass muster on my terms. It's my blog. This salon is taking place in my elegantly appointed suite of rooms, as it were, and anonymous jackholes who think it's cute to swoop in uninvited and poop on the lampshades aren't welcome. I don't have any obligation at all to provide a forum for Robot Cultists or those who want to ridicule the good people who happen actually to like reading and conversing with one another in the Moot.
Don't like it? Fly. It's not like anybody here will miss you.
(4) MundiMoot
However, the simple fact of the matter is that this isn't exactly an enormously high-traffic blog, and the conversation of the cohort of smart and accomplished people who enjoy what I talk about here enough to return regularly (none of whom, I hope, agree with me on close to everything) seems to me to get derailed or altogether stymied sometimes by anonymous sniping that makes no discernible contribution to the conversation of Amor Mundi on its owns terms. My own style is acerbic and I enjoy the occasional rant, and so it has always seemed only fair that I would welcome a fair measure of the same in response.
The simple fact remains, however, that I have attracted a handful of trolls who seem to have the inclination to vandalize the conversation that can take place here otherwise. I realize that I should have expected this, since Amor Mundi has become, among other things, one of the places online in which one finds a serious and ongoing online critique of certain Robot Cult discourses, subcultures, and organizations of a kind that otherwise receive only the sustained attention of their own already-fervent membership.
Although the Robot Cult organizations of the so-called transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, liberal eugenicists, and techno-immortalists remain, for now, quite marginal in the overall institutional scheme of things, they certainly do have the sub(cult)ural and organizational energies to provoke a few overenthusiastic True Believer types in the full-froth of futurological faith into dive bombing into the Moot and dropping dumb insults, unsubstantiated assertions, and highly sophisticated rhetorical gambits along the lines of "I know you are but what am I" all the live-long day, with the consequence that the more edifying company that gathers here tends to quiet or make way for more congenial climbs.
From now on, in light of all this, my responding to comments in the Moot will take one of three forms (only one of them new): [1] I will respond to content, [2] I will ignore content, or [3] I will delete content. You should regard deletion as a real response, with a definite message it's sending.
Even the most egregiously offending commenters have sometimes posted material from which I've benefited and so I am not banning anybody in particular from Amor Mundi, but only content that fails to pass muster on my terms. It's my blog. This salon is taking place in my elegantly appointed suite of rooms, as it were, and anonymous jackholes who think it's cute to swoop in uninvited and poop on the lampshades aren't welcome. I don't have any obligation at all to provide a forum for Robot Cultists or those who want to ridicule the good people who happen actually to like reading and conversing with one another in the Moot.
Don't like it? Fly. It's not like anybody here will miss you.
Today's Random Wilde
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
(0) MundiMoot
Nurse With Wound Helps Make Amor Mundi More Positive
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Today's Random Wilde
[A] community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
(3) MundiMoot
Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics
Students in my Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics course at Berkeley are hard at work on their take-home finals these days. They are answering a question of their choice from each of the two parts below, A and B, and then tailoring the many prompts available in the questions they have chosen into the basis for strong claims they substantiate in five pages or so of close reading of texts from the class. It's been an enormously rewarding course, very provocative and also clarifying to my own thinking. Many of the themes from the course reappear in the consummating exam, of course, and so I thought it would provide an interesting glimpse into the work that has preoccupied most of my attention these last few months, a glimpse readers of Amor Mundi would not really have otherwise, since I spend so much of my time here squabbling with bioconservatives and techno-utopian idiocies and the cult formations that encrust them like barnacles.
PART A
Question One:
Bill Brown writes of "the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut." Jeanette Winterson begins her own account of an education into visual art by telling a story that seems to complement Brown's in key respects: "I was wandering happy, alone… when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on." Brown draws on such experiences to flesh out his sense of the thing as distinct from the object. "These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're 'caught up in things' and that the 'body is a thing among things.'" As for Winterson, it would seem for Brown that aesthetic encounters have something to teach us, especially when we are unprepared for them. What are the politics of this aesthetic education for Winterson and Brown? Do they seem to follow the same route from their initial encounter? Do the politics of this encounter differ or do they resemble the political education attributed to the "realist" art object in some of the Marxist aesthetics we read early on in the term? Assume a perspective on one of these questions, and make a claim that you substantiate with close reading of relevant passages from the texts.
Question Two:
Identify what looks to you like a key difference in the way Simon Frith and Iain Chambers document possible forms of political commitment in popular art practice and popular culture. What political significance attaches to this difference in your view? Substantiate your claim with close reading of relevant passages from the texts. In highlighting this difference you may (or may not -- it's entirely up to you) choose to point to the way in which you find in this difference an echo of a difference between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno reflected in their writings "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Culture Industry."
Question Three:
Name a way in which the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differs in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Make an argument about the key political significance that attaches in your view to this differing treatment of spectatorship in these texts and then substantiate your claim through readings of relevant passages from both texts.
PART B
Question One:
Charity Scribner proposes that in Joseph Beuys' Economic Values a collection of objects memorializes a State while Rey Chow proposes that in Lao She's story "Attachment" a collection of objects threatens a State. A work of Stately memory, it would seem, confronts a work of non-Stately priorities; and an uneasy past confronts an uncertain future. But how different, finally, do you think these projects of collection really are, how different do you think the works of collection they are documenting really are, how different do you think their politics really are? Does it matter that in each of these essays the State under scrutiny is at once an example, however flawed, of "actually-existing socialism" as well as a failed or tyrannical state? Substantiate your claim with close reading of the essays themselves.
Question Two:
The paradox of Luis Bunuel's film The Milky Way is that it denounces religious, philosophical, political, and artistic zealotry, but at the same time it embraces religious mystery, philosophical passion, political idealism, and artistic imagination. Does the film provide a clear path or even clues that might help us along the way toward reconciling this paradox? Is it possible in the terms of the film to embrace mystery without feeding tyranny? Provide your answer through close readings of scenes in the film itself or through an examination of what you take to be the film's larger narrative, formal, logical, or tropological structure.
Question Three:
In Mythologies, Barthes claimed "to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." How does his sarcastic truth differ from the fidelity of "blasphemy" Donna Haraway claims to express in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs'? When Haraway announces in her opening sentence that the project of her Manifesto is "to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," it would seem that she is using myth in a different way than Barthes does. Or is she? Choose at least two moments in Haraway's Manifesto that seem to you to illustrate how her ironic cyborg mythologizing either is essentially continuous with or significantly different from the demythologizing drive of Barthes's project.
(0) MundiMoot
PART A
Question One:
Bill Brown writes of "the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut." Jeanette Winterson begins her own account of an education into visual art by telling a story that seems to complement Brown's in key respects: "I was wandering happy, alone… when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on." Brown draws on such experiences to flesh out his sense of the thing as distinct from the object. "These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're 'caught up in things' and that the 'body is a thing among things.'" As for Winterson, it would seem for Brown that aesthetic encounters have something to teach us, especially when we are unprepared for them. What are the politics of this aesthetic education for Winterson and Brown? Do they seem to follow the same route from their initial encounter? Do the politics of this encounter differ or do they resemble the political education attributed to the "realist" art object in some of the Marxist aesthetics we read early on in the term? Assume a perspective on one of these questions, and make a claim that you substantiate with close reading of relevant passages from the texts.
Question Two:
Identify what looks to you like a key difference in the way Simon Frith and Iain Chambers document possible forms of political commitment in popular art practice and popular culture. What political significance attaches to this difference in your view? Substantiate your claim with close reading of relevant passages from the texts. In highlighting this difference you may (or may not -- it's entirely up to you) choose to point to the way in which you find in this difference an echo of a difference between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno reflected in their writings "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Culture Industry."
Question Three:
Name a way in which the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differs in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Make an argument about the key political significance that attaches in your view to this differing treatment of spectatorship in these texts and then substantiate your claim through readings of relevant passages from both texts.
PART B
Question One:
Charity Scribner proposes that in Joseph Beuys' Economic Values a collection of objects memorializes a State while Rey Chow proposes that in Lao She's story "Attachment" a collection of objects threatens a State. A work of Stately memory, it would seem, confronts a work of non-Stately priorities; and an uneasy past confronts an uncertain future. But how different, finally, do you think these projects of collection really are, how different do you think the works of collection they are documenting really are, how different do you think their politics really are? Does it matter that in each of these essays the State under scrutiny is at once an example, however flawed, of "actually-existing socialism" as well as a failed or tyrannical state? Substantiate your claim with close reading of the essays themselves.
Question Two:
The paradox of Luis Bunuel's film The Milky Way is that it denounces religious, philosophical, political, and artistic zealotry, but at the same time it embraces religious mystery, philosophical passion, political idealism, and artistic imagination. Does the film provide a clear path or even clues that might help us along the way toward reconciling this paradox? Is it possible in the terms of the film to embrace mystery without feeding tyranny? Provide your answer through close readings of scenes in the film itself or through an examination of what you take to be the film's larger narrative, formal, logical, or tropological structure.
Question Three:
In Mythologies, Barthes claimed "to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." How does his sarcastic truth differ from the fidelity of "blasphemy" Donna Haraway claims to express in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs'? When Haraway announces in her opening sentence that the project of her Manifesto is "to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," it would seem that she is using myth in a different way than Barthes does. Or is she? Choose at least two moments in Haraway's Manifesto that seem to you to illustrate how her ironic cyborg mythologizing either is essentially continuous with or significantly different from the demythologizing drive of Barthes's project.
Del the Funkee Homosapien Helps Make Amor Mundi More Positive
Monday, April 28, 2008
Supreme Sophisticate
[via ThinkProgress]
Every Movement Conservative's favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia appeared on 60 Minutes last night. Here he is playing high-school debate team word games around the subject of the Constitutionality of torture. Like most conservatives he seems to think there's something clever and even cute about these sorts of antics. This is the country we live in now. Smell it.
(0) MundiMoot
Every Movement Conservative's favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia appeared on 60 Minutes last night. Here he is playing high-school debate team word games around the subject of the Constitutionality of torture. Like most conservatives he seems to think there's something clever and even cute about these sorts of antics. This is the country we live in now. Smell it.
LESLIE STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person -— if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?
SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.
STAHL: Well I think if you’re in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody –-
SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you? What’s he punishing you for? … When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?
The Vandermark 5 Helps Make Amor Mundi More Positive
Today's Random Wilde
[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them.... The industry necessary for the making of money is also very demoralising. In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One's regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.
(1) MundiMoot
