Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, February 08, 2008

Friday Already

Wow, Monday to Friday in a flash. In between this post and the last I've been lecturing a throng of students on Marx and postmarxism, Naomi Klein, Guy Debord, Nietzsche, and shepherding a dozen students through their theses. Definitely teaching and blogging seem to draw on comparable resources and satisfy a comparable impulse, so that while I'm immersed in the one I scarcely even give a thought to the other. Maybe I should blog snippets of my lectures or something, or even podcast them here, for those days when lecturing trumps blogging... Otherwise, I've got a feeling that blogging might be a little sporadic in the middle of the week this term.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes! At a dinner a few evenings ago involving a number of your former students, we unanimously, geekishly, and enthusiastically agreed that should should podcast your lectures. I'm sure someone that's currently enrolled has a portable mp3 recorder of some sort...

Geoff said...

Even better, have your lectures transcribed (using something like Jott) from voice to text, which would then be passed to Twitter, which would allow me to have a streaming text-feed to watch in the corner of my computer at work.

I would also be happy with a podcast though.

Anonymous said...

I'm fairly certain there is a shiny, never-been-used mp3 device somewhere in that disaster zone you call an office.

VDT said...

Will you be able to find the time to blog about the issues raised in Jill Filipovic's AlterNet short article Dear Progressives: Stop Slamming Identity Politics

http://alternet.org/blogs/reproductivejustice/76382/

Robin said...

I completely understand this impulse. I blog substantive things over the summer because it's the way I get my brain going, but during the year when I'm teaching my brain is going already, and I don't feel the need (or have the time) to say anything with actual content online.

Which is why I'm always floored by your epic posts during the year. I don't know where you get it all from!

Dale Carrico said...

Will you be able to find the time to blog about the issues raised in Jill Filipovic's AlterNet short article Dear Progressives: Stop Slamming Identity Politics

No.

I strongly disagree that one properly describes social struggle to achieve equity for non-rich non-American non-white non-male non-straight people among others always as "identity politics" or that opposition to "identity politics" always amounts to a stealthy support of white-racist patriarchal capitalism.

My own opposition to identity politics arises from my strong investment in and engagement with gender theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and so on.

So, I disagree with Filipovic's claim about how this sort of discussion plays into whatever conservative "frame," but I approve enough with her larger feminist commitments that our difference of opinion on the question of framing here isn't the sort of thing I would normally bother to comment on.

I am especially hesitant to discuss this topic given that there is a separate ongoing debate that takes place here on Amor Mundi about the impact of "identity politics" on public technoscience discourse (which ends up meaning more particularly the impact of defensive marginal subcultural politics on technodevelopmental deliberation, where "marginal subcultural politics" is a nice way of describing the politics of membership organizations that edge too close too often to cults).

I think a discussion of "identity politics" as raised in the Filipovic piece would probably end up confusing the stakes of that other discussion -- and possibly encourage boring and idiotic opportunistic distortions from the Singularitarian and Transhumanist partisans who lurk here.

Well, I guess I found the time to blog the issue after all, simply in trying to explain why I didn't have the time to do it. I'm such a chatty cathy it's too easy to get me to explain myself even when I think there are more interesting things to do! :)

Anne Corwin said...

Re. the "identity politics" thing: I have noticed that even when a person explicitly states and explains that what they are talking about is not "identity politics" but something else (i.e., questioning the value of particular morphological norms), there's a tendency for some people to assume that the original person is "playing identity politics".

Which, of course, makes them feel justified in dismissing the content of whatever the person is saying.

Dale Carrico said...

I hear you, Anne.

By the way, I should have extended this paragraph of my reply:

I strongly disagree that one properly describes social struggle to achieve equity for non-rich non-American non-white non-male non-straight people among others always as "identity politics" or that opposition to "identity politics" always amounts to a stealthy support of white-racist patriarchal capitalism.

to better encompass my current preoccupations:

I strongly disagree that one properly describes social struggle to achieve equity for non-rich non-American non-white non-male non-straight non-typical people among others always as "identity politics" or that opposition to "identity politics" always amounts to a stealthy support of white-racist eugenic patriarchal capitalism.

I just haven't gotten into the habit of writing the more fullsome phrasing yet.

Jackie said...

O please podcast your lectures, Dale! I've had quite enough of John Searle for this semester (dropping philosophy and now just doing English/Rhetoric)

VDT said...

dale said:

Well, I guess I found the time to blog the issue after all, simply in trying to explain why I didn't have the time to do it. I'm such a chatty cathy it's too easy to get me to explain myself even when I think there are more interesting things to do! :)


Gotcha! ;)

Anonymous said...

I don't have much of an income, but I'd actually be willing to pay for recordings of your lectures.