Posts Tagged ‘Marxism’
Midweek Links
* Erik Loomis is being targeted by prominent figures on the right in what has to be the most ludicriously unfair, bad-faith attack I have ever seen.
* Walker declares state of emergency in Wisconsin due to snowstorm.
* Guide to Answering Academic Job Interview Questions.
* Argument Over Sandy Hook Shooting Ends in Gunfire. Why Won’t We Talk About Violence and Masculinity in America? Gun Violence In American Schools Is Nothing New. Top Conservative Publication: Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School. Weaponize the husky twelve-year-olds. Virginia Republican Legislator Actually Wants To Require Concealed Weapons In Schools. The Arms Race of Stupid.
* I can’t help wondering if the bullets of Sandy Hook Elementary will be for Obama what the snarling dogs and high-pressure fire hoses of Birmingham, Alabama, were for John F. Kennedy in 1963: the human tragedy that will force him to take a political risk, simply because it is right.
* Conservative Historian Warns Obama and Democrats are ‘Much More Radical’ than Marxists. So much more radical. So much more.
* Best Astronomy Images of 2012. (Keep scrolling past the image for more links.)
* Wayne State faculty gives OK to union leadership to call strike if necessary.
* Terrible person to teach terrible class at terrible university.
* News from Nerdistan: What Frodo would have looked like as Gollum. Joss Whedon wanted the Wasp and an extra villain in The Avengers. Tolkien vs. technology. Someone at Disney is already trying to lay the groundwork for a second sequel trilogy after Star Wars 7-9. Nearby Tau Ceti may host two planets suited to life. Netflix Instant Adds a Bunch of Fake ‘Arrested Development’ Shows and Movies. LEGOs run the world now.
* It’s time to start asking serious questions about the safety of lube.
* Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
* Petraeus Scandal 2.0. Nothing about sex, so no one will care.
* Matt Yglesias has the most logical incoherent “think piece” you’ll read on Society Security today. Money doesn’t magically become not-money when it’s spent by retirees.
* Plans to avoid the fiscal cliff cut government more than the fiscal cliff. Why, it’s almost as if this whole debate is total bullshit!
* Shale Oil Might Be Less Awesome Than We Think. From a personal perspective, I doubt that’s possible.
* Top 20 most valuable college football programs all made at least $24 million in profit last year, according to Forbes. $200K Average Salary for Asst. Football Coaches in Major Programs. Bill Introduced for IRS to Collect Student Loan Payments.
Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said he supported the bill, arguing it could “nearly eliminate student loan default.”
* But the reinvention conversation has not produced the panacea that people seem to yearn for. “The whole MOOC thing is mass psychosis,” a case of people “just throwing spaghetti against the wall” to see what sticks, says Peter J. Stokes, executive director for postsecondary innovation at Northeastern’s College of Professional Studies. His job is to study the effectiveness of ideas that are emerging or already in practice.
* The Wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon is Emitting a Mysterious Substance Into the Gulf of Mexico.
* Quentin Tarantino Says Drug War, Justice System Are Modern Day Slavery.
* Apocalypse and Revelation Are the Same Word.
* And life’s not all an endless series of miserable atrocities: Found: Whale Thought Extinct for 2 Million Years.
‘Not That the World Will No Longer Suck, But That It Will No Longer Suck in This Particular Way’
These contradictions don’t show that ideology is “irrational” — the problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too many reasons supporting their views. Žižek argues that these piled-up rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on.
A similar sense that something else is going on always strikes me when I read a review of Žižek’s work in the mainstream media. (A recent example is John Gray’s review of two of Žižek’s books in the New York Review of Books, to which Žižek has responded.) Now academics are always ill-used in the mainstream press, particularly if they deal in abstract concepts and refer to a lot of European philosophers. Yet there’s something special about the treatment of Žižek. In what has become a kind of ritual, the reader of a review of Žižek’s work always learns that Žižek is simultaneously hugely politically dangerous and a clown with no political program whatsoever, that he is an apologist for the worst excesses of twentieth-century Communism and a total right-wing reactionary, both a world-famous left-wing intellectual and an anti-Semite to rival Hitler himself.
The goal is not so much to give an account of Žižek’s arguments and weigh their merits as to inoculate readers against Žižek’s ideas so they feel comfortable dismissing them. To find left-wing thinkers and movements simultaneously laughable and dangerous, disorganized and totalitarian, overly idealistic and driven by a lust for power is to suggest: there is no alternative.
Adam Kotsko spins some recent blog and Twitter observations into review-essay gold in the Los Angeles Review of Books with “How to Read Žižek.”
Žižek does not hold out the utopian hope of eliminating all conflict — in fact, he believes our supposedly “post-ideological” era is blinded by the truly utopian hope that all genuine conflicts might be resolved, allowing the system of liberal-democratic capitalism to go on more or less forever. What Žižek hopes for, in tracking down the contradiction at the heart of our society and identifying with the class that embodies it, is not that the world will no longer suck, but that it will no longer suck in this particular way, that we will no longer be stuck in this particular vicious cycle, that we can somehow find a way to stop frantically grasping at rationalizations for our self-destructive fixations and do something else — in short, to jolt us into the realization that there is an alternative.
Marxism and New Media Video Files!
Better late than never, (most of the) video files from the Marxism and New Media 2012 conference we held at Duke this January are finally available at iTunesU.
Saturday!
* Today, Trina is one of approximately 470 prisoners in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. I was pretty cranky about this the other day on Twitter with respect to the Mitt Romney bullying story (on which subject fellow UNCG MFA alum Steve Almond gets biblical here).
* Brazilian politicians and journalists were not placated. “We’re going to show this gang that they can’t come down here and create whatever environmental mess they want,” Carlos Minc, a co-founder of Brazil’s Green Party and environmental secretary of Rio state, told the newspaper O Globo. “I want to see the CEO of Chevron swim in that oil.” Great!
* The free market as more efficient than central planning, case 751.
* All of the current administrative solutions are perverse and/or unsustainable. Public universities cannot solve their financial problems by raising tuition even more quickly in the face of the tuition bubble, the student debt bubble, public anger after decades of similar annual increases at 3-4 times inflation, a pro-education president who is campaigning to punish tuition increases with further funding cuts, and mounting damage to an entire academic generation symbolized by the recent tripling of the number of PhDs on food stamps.
* Funny how this works: Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband.
Marissa Alexander unsuccessfully tried to use Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law to derail the prosecution, but a jury in March convicted her of aggravated assault after just 12 minutes of deliberation.
* A quick note from Jameson about base and superstructure.
* The Lego Lord of the Rings Videogame Is Really Happening. I’ll take one of each applicable video game system, please.
* Wes Anderson Tumblr blogs. It’s early going, but “Directed by Wes Anderson” may eventually be your winner here.
* And I’d have paid good money to see a Maurice Sendak Avengers.
Quote of the Day – 2
[All] conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must always be painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.
—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Quote of the Day – 1
Modern American conservatism nearly always specifies the defense and preservation of capitalism as one of its central goals—logically enough, on one level, since capitalism is the economic status quo in the US today. Yet such conservatism is thus structured on an immense self-contradiction. For capitalism is itself the most thoroughly disruptive, the most emphatically anti-conservative, social force in the history of the world: a truth integral to the thought of Burke, for whom conservatism was by definition the defense of a pre-capitalism old order against the revolutionary innovations of the new middle-class regime. Capitalism, after all, is the force that razes historic buildings in order to construct shopping malls, that prizes “growth” over stability, that destroys traditional ways of life wherever there is money to be made by doing so. It melts into air all that was apparently solid, as Marx and Engels observed. In some instances, accordingly, it may well be a left-wing, anti-capitalist position that is in one sense most genuinely “conservative.” In his noel Saints and Scholars, the Marxist author Terry Eagleton gives this line to the Irish revolutionary-socialist leader James Connolly: “Revolution isn’t a runaway train; it’s the application of the emergency brake.”
—Carl Freedman, The Age of Nixon
Capitalism as a Very Bad Way of Organizing Communism
Aaron suggested on Twitter the other day that David Graeber was threatening to eclipse Žižek as the go-to theorist of the revolutionary left. We’ll have to see about long-term sustainability—is there a Graeber bubble?—but in the short term at least it definitely seems possible. Today, he’s talking to Rebecca Solnit in Guernica.
Communism is the basis of all sociology and it’s the basis of cooperation. Within a capitalist corporation, someone says, “Lend me a wrench,” and someone asks, “Yeah, what do I get?” You assume that the idea of each according to his or her abilities, each according to his or her needs—in solving a problem—is actually the only thing that works. And in situations of disaster, there are often communistic notions of improvisation, where you basically exchange hierarchies and all of a sudden all those things that are luxuries that you can’t afford, you have them in an emergency. So I think we need to think of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism. Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.
But how do we get to “communism” via someone who doesn’t like Marxists and doesn’t really want to talk about Marx?
Marxism and New Media Continues Saturday!
Marxism and New Media continues at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke all day Saturday. I’ll be moderating the Games and Virtual Worlds panel at 1:30:
* Stephanie Boluk (Vassar College), “State of Play: Procedural Love and Ludic Labor”
* Alenda Chang (University of California, Berkeley), “Land’s Labors Lost: Farm Games and the Counter-Pastoral”
* Kenneth Rogers (University of California, Riverside), “Technologies of Management: Digital Labor, Human Capital, and the Attention Economy”
* Braxton Soderman (Miami University), “Benjamin and Brecht Play Chess: Critiquing the Industry of Innovation in Contemporary Game Production”
Other panel themes include collective production (9 AM), political economy (10:40 AM), cognitive capitalism (3:30 PM), and of course the keynotes (5:30 PM).
Follow @gerrycanavan and watch hashtag #mnm2012 for periodic updates. Hope to see as many people out today as we had yesterday! It’s been great so far.
Marxism and New Media All Day and Tomorrow!
Continuing my recent theme of really unreasonably busy days, I’m spending nearly all of today and tomorrow at the Marxism and New Media conference organized by Duke Lit grad students (myself among them!). The full schedule is at the link; today’s themes include the Arab Spring, Occupy, labor and class, embodiment, queer theory, art, and more…
I’m tweeting when I can at @gerrycanavan, hashtag #mnm2012.
Reminder: Marxism and New Media Begins Today!
In the unlikely event you haven’t already seen my email, Twitter, and Facebook exhortations, remember that Marxism and New Media 2012 begins today with two events:
2 PM: Kick-Off Workshop: “Mediating Autonomia: Newness and Critique” (Friedl 225, Duke East Campus)
6 PM: U.S. Premiere of Marx_Reloaded and director Q&A (Richard White Lecture Hall, Duke East Campus)
In between these events there will be a Donald Pease Jr. lecture “Pip, Moby-Dick and Melville’s Novel Governmentality,” also in Friedl 225 on East Campus. Hope to see you!
This Week at Duke: Marxism and New Media!
The Marxism and New Media Conference organized by graduate students in Duke’s Program in Literature is finally upon us! The conference will take place this Thursday, January 19, through Saturday, January 21. A wide variety of events will take place over the three very full days of the conference, including the U.S. premiere of the documentary Marx_Reloaded, and we hope you’ll be able to attend a lot of them, as well as to help us get the word out by forwarding this information to appropriate listservs and to anyone you think might be interested.
Marxism and New Media was organized in an effort to increase dialogue between new media theory and Marxian political critique, as well as highlight the ways in which this work is already very much in communication. The conference has received generous financial support from many institutions across campus: the Graduate Program in Literature; Art, Art History, and Visual Studies; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; the Duke University Center for International Studies; the Department of English; the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image; the Duke University Graduate School; Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC); Information Science + Information Studies; the Institute for Critical Theory; the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; Marxism and Society; the Office of the Provost; and the Program in Women’s Studies.
A full, up-to-the-minute schedule can be found at http://marxismandnewmedia.wordpress.com. An abbreviated schedule follows below. Thanks for helping us get the word out and see you at Marxism and New Media 2012.
See you soon, the Organizers
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19
2 PM: Kick-Off Workshop: “Mediating Autonomia: Newness and Critique” (Friedl 225, Duke East Campus)
4 PM: Donald Pease Jr. lecture: “Pip, Moby-Dick and Melville’s Novel Governmentality” (Friedl 225, Duke East Campus)
6 PM: U.S. Premiere of Marx_Reloaded and director Q&A (Richard White Lecture Hall, Duke East Campus)
FRIDAY, JANUARY 20
All panels on Friday are in John Hope Franklin Center 240 on Duke’s Central Campus.
8:00 AM Breakfast and Coffee
8:30 AM Opening Remarks from Mark Hanson and Fredric Jameson
9:15 AM Panel #1 Media Activism
11:00 AM Panel #2 Labor and Class
12:30 PM Lunch and Lunchtime Seminar: “The Tea Party, Obama, and the Politics of Occupy: A Conversation with Donald Pease, Jr.”
2:00 PM Panel #3 Emergent Bodies and Embodiments
4:00 PM Panel #4 Queerness
6:00 PM Panel #5 Art
8:00 PM Dinner
SATURDAY, JANUARY 21
All panels on Saturday are in John Hope Franklin Center 240 on Duke’s Central Campus.
9:00 AM Panel #6 Collective Production in New Media
10:40 AM Panel #7 New Political Economy
12:30 PM Lunch
1:30 PM Panel #8 Games and Virtual Worlds
3:30 PM Panel #9 Cognitive Capitalism
5:30 PM Keynote Addresses [Alex Galloway (NYU); Ricardo Dominguez (UCSD); McKenzie Wark (The New School)]
7:30 PM Closing Remarks from Katherine Hayles
8:00 PM Dinner
Wednesday Night!
* Duke Lit is now advertising for a one-year postdoc in Marxist theory.
* Jim Henson, 1969: How to Make a Muppet. Also on Muppetwatch: A 1979 profile of Henson in anticipation of The Muppet Movie.
* The secret history of “Mahna Mahna”: “How a ditty from a soft-core Italian movie became the Muppets’ catchiest tune.”
* “Ninety-Nine Weeks”: an Occupy Wall Street fairy tale from Ursula K. Le Guin. Here’s another.
* More on the extraordinary syllabi of David Foster Wallace.
* Almost literally the least they could do: Davis Will Drop Charges Against, Pay Medical Bills of Pepper Spray Students.
* I’ve seen this movie: The Air Force “has asked industry to develop a new heat and motion sensor capable of detecting enemy gunfire from 25,000 feet over the battlefield — and then swiftly directing a bomb or missile onto the shooter.” I believe Terminator suggests the name HKs…
* The full congregation of Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial Baptist Church voted Sunday to prohibit the church pastor from legally marrying anyone until she can legally marry same-sex couples under North Carolina law.
* Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman say their poli-sci model shows the Affordable Care Act will be upheld. Scott Lemieux says there’s no reason to think they’ll confine themselves to precedent and that it still all comes down to what Anthony Kennedy has for breakfast.
* Mother Jones reads Newt Gingrich’s dissertation.
* Google greets Thanksgiving (outside the US) with the mother of all interactive doodles.
* Massachusetts becomes 16th state to protect transgender people from discrimination. Google benefits now include transgender employees.
* Honestly, anyone who invested a dime in Groupon should have their investing license taken away. This thing was barely ever a company.
* And speaking of obvious scams: Is a Law Degree a Good Investment Today?
CFP: One Week Left for ‘Marxism and New Media’ Submissions!
There’s one week left to submit an abstract to the “Marxism and New Media” conference, January 20 & 21, 2012. Details here!
