Posts Tagged ‘Badiou’
Weekend Mega-Links, Please Use Responsibly
* In 2015, we will open applications for Tiptree Fellowships. Fellowships will be $500 per recipient and will be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Tiptree mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators.
* It’s a small exhibit, but I really liked A Whole Other World: Sub-Culture Craft at the Racine Art Museum, as well as the Consumer Couture exhibit running at the same time.
* A new economics paper has some old-fashioned advice for people navigating the stresses of life: Find a spouse who is also your best friend. Hey, it worked for me!
* I went off on a little bit of a tear about dissertation embargoes and grad-school gaslighting the other day: part 1, part 2. Some “highlights”:
* Next week in DC! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs. A Future Tense Debate.
* Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine? NPR has the official odds.
* What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?
* Shields said these perceptions of race were the focus of his work and he aimed to deconstruct them through imagery that reflected a striking role-reversal. Not only do the individuals in this particular lynching image reflect a distinct moment or period in history, they are positioned as opposing players in a way that delivers a different message than those previously shared. This one of a cop is amazing:
* 19 Pop Songs Fact-Checked By Professors.
* So, going by (17) and (18), we’re on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.
* New Grads Can’t Really Afford To Live Anywhere, Report Finds.
* Uber hard at work on effort to replace drivers with machine.
* Uber: Disability Laws Don’t Apply to Us.
* The prison-industrial complex, by the numbers. Cleveland police accept DOJ rules you can’t believe they didn’t already have to follow. Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration. The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration. How to lock up fewer people. The Myth of the Hero Cop.
* Science Fiction: For Slackers?
* Presenting Matt Weiner’s wish-list for the final season of Mad Men.
* How to be a fan of problematic things.
* Bernie as the official opposition. And then there’s the issue of the bench.
* A new day for the culture war, or, the kids are all right.
* Can Americans update their ideas about war?
* “I often wonder if my forefathers were as filled with disgust and anger when they thought of the people they were fighting to protect as I am.” Would you like to know more?
* The Political Economy of Enrollment.
Now, the UC administration claims that the cost of instruction is greater than in-state tuition. But these claims are at best debatable and at worst simply not credible, because as Chris Newfield and Bob Samuels have shown they include research and other non-educational expenses in order to inflate the alleged instructional cost. (It’s gotten to the point that, as Samuelsobserves, the administration literally claims it costs $342,500 to educate one medical student for one year.) According to Newfield, a more reasonable estimate of the cost of instruction for undergraduates would be somewhere between 40-80 percent of the administration’s figures. Even using the higher rate, then, the administration still generates a net profit for every extra student they bring in.
* UW System faculty’s role in chancellor picks could be diminished. Also let’s make tenure not a thing. Also, no standards for teachers, just while we’re at it.
* Meanwhile, Wisconsin to burn $250M on famously losing basketball team.
* Board of Governors discontinues 46 degree programs across UNC system.
* How Poor And Minority Students Are Shortchanged By Public Universities.
* How NYU squeezes billions from its students—and where that money goes.
* What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled.
* Midcareer Melancholy: life as an associate professor.
* A Top Medical School Revamps Requirements To Lure English Majors.
* Academia and legitimation crisis. This situation (and distrust/abuses from both sides) is going to get worse yet.
* Parenthood (and especially motherhood) in the academy.
* On opposing capitalism on its good days, too.
* This supposed opposition serves the interests of both sides, however violent their conflict may appear. Helped by their control of the means of communication, they appropriate the general interest, forcing each person to make a false choice between “the West or else Barbarism”. In so doing, they block the advent of the only global conviction that could save humanity from disaster. This conviction—which I have sometimes called the communist idea—declares that even in the movement of the break with tradition, we must work to create an egalitarian symbolisation that can guide, regulate, and form the stable subjective underpinning of the collectivisation of resources, the effective disappearance of inequalities, the recognition of differences—of equal subjective right—and, ultimately, the withering away of separate forms of authority in the manner of the state.
* Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red.
* Stunning photos of the California drought.
* The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever.
* Why Are You Still Washing Your Clothes In Warm Water?
* Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context.
* Carbon Nanotubes Were An Ancient Superweapon.
* Amazon rolls out free same-day delivery for Prime members.
* Breaking: The Web is not a post-racial utopia.
* Breaking: it’s all downhill from 29.
* Horrible: DC to Begin Placing Ads on Story Pages. Even more horrible: the end of Convergence is the dumbest universal reboot yet.
* The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares. Interesting, but really flattens a lot. It’s not geography that constrains kids’ futures, it’s class.
* The World Cup and prison labor. The World Cup and slavery. The World Cup and total universal corruption.
* They say Charter Cable is even worse than Time Warner. I don’t believe such a thing is possible.
* Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany.
* U.S. Preparation Lagging to Battle Potentially Devastating EMP.
* The Ethical Game: Morality in Postapocalyptic Fictions from Cormac McCarthy to Video Games.
* 10 bizarre baseball rules you won’t believe actually existed.
* So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European…
* Timeline of the American Transgender Movement.
* Judith Butler: I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.
* The PhD: wake up sheeple! Still more links after the image, believe it or not.
* Muppet Babies and Philosophy.
* Broken clock watch: Instapundit says fire administrators to fix higher ed.
* Became self-aware, etc: campus climate surveys said to be triggering.
* Penn State administrators announced Wednesday that a fraternity that maintained a well-curated secret Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious, naked women will lose its official recognition until 2018, pretty much ruining senior year.
* The Proof That Centrism is Dead.
* Understanding Sad Girl Theory.
* Dialectics of union activism. I’ve been really fascinated by what’s been going on at Gawker Media.
* Someone Has Done A Statistical Analysis Of Rape In Game Of Thrones.
* The arc of history is long, but that Florida community college will no longer force its students to practice transvaginal ultrasounds on each other.
* Trigger warnings, still good pedagogy, still bad administrative policy.
* A fetish is born: Porn actors must wear protective goggles during shoots.
* Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels.
* This roundtable from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, and others on sexism and comedy is pretty dynamite.
* The age of miracles: New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function.
* How to Bash Bureaucracy: Evan Kindley on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic.
* Teaching pro-tips from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
* Moore’s Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations.
* The morality of robot war. Counterpoint: Killer robots will leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’ warns professor.
* Parental leave policies don’t solve capitalism. You need to solve capitalism.
* The Nuclear Freeze campaign prevented an apocalypse, so can the climate movement.
* Honestly, you get used to the taste after a while.
* And at last it can be told! The real story behind the Bill Murray movie you’ve never seen.
The Philosophy Beat
Speaking of definitive takedowns, Alex Galloway may have just posted one for speculative realism/OOO at An und für sich.
I cite this as a textbook example of the liberal bourgeois position that people from the likes of Zizek to Carl Schmitt have called “depoliticization and neutralization.” It shows Harman’s anti-political position quite clearly. Today we might even call this an anti-badiousian position (although Harman of course has no interest in being badiousian in the first place!). The reason is because he has no opposition to the state of the situation. By his own admission, he only expresses revulsion *after* the confrontation with the state has taken place, after he witnesses the excesses to which the state will go to hold on to power. That’s a classic case of liberal neutralization (“don’t rock the boat,” “we just need to go along to get along,” “this is the best of all possible worlds,” “ontology shouldn’t be political,” etc.). This is thus not a political desire of any kind, merely an affective emotional response at the sight of blood. But such palpitations of the “sensitive” bourgeois heart, no matter how reformed, do not a politics make.
By contrast, Badiou’s position is so useful today because he says that it’s all about the *first* antagonism, not the last. To be political means that you have to *start* from the position of incompatibility with the state. In other words the political is always asymmetrical to the state of the situation. The political is always “trenchant” in this sense, always a “cutting” or polarization. Hence the appeal of Badiou’s “theory of points” which forces all of the equal-footed-objects in OOO into a trenchant decision of the two: yes or no, stop or go, fight or retreat. Hardt and Negri say something similar when they show how “resistance is primary vis-a-vis power.” For his part Harman essentially argues the reverse in this interview: ontology is primary (OOO “is not the handmaid of anything else”), power is secondary (Mubarak), resistance is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab Spring). Yes we should applaud the Spring when it arrives, Harman admits, but it’s still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows where.
If you’re still skeptical just use the old categorial imperative: if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman, the revolution would never have happened. That’s political neutralization in a nutshell. In other words there is no event for Harman. And here I agree with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s recent characterization of Tristan Garcia’s ontology, modeled closely after Harman’s, as essentially a treatise on “Being Without Event.”
Badiou v. Nancy re: Libya
How can you of all people fall into this trap? How can you accept any kind of ‘rescue’ mission being entrusted to those very people for whom the old situation was the good one, and who absolutely want to get back into the game, by forcible means, from motivations of oil and hegemony? Can you simply accept the ‘humanitarian’ umbrella, the obscene blackmailing in the name of victims? But our armies kill more people in more countries than the local boss Gaddafi is capable of doing in his. What is this trust suddenly extended to the major butchers of contemporary humanity, to those in charge of the mutilated world that we are familiar with? Do you believe, can you believe, that they represent ‘civilisation’, that their monstrous armies can be armies of justice? I am stupefied, I must confess. I ask myself what good is philosophy if it is not immediately the radical critique of this kind of unreflecting opinion, moulded by the propaganda of regimes such as our own, which popular uprisings in regions strategic for them have put on the defensive, and which are seeking their revenge.
Alain Badiou responds to Jean-Luc Nancy on the question of Libya.
Sunday!
Sunday!
* Your attention please: Arlen Specter would like you to know he is not a loyal Democrat.
* ‘The Politics of Climate Hacking: What happens if one country decides to start geo-engineering on its own?’
“This is not at all hard to do,” Granger told the audience, declaring that “a single large nation”—especially a nuclear power, which might act with relative impunity—could easily exercise the option. A run of bad news from the climate scientists might convince a government that the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet was accelerating, and that Earth’s low-lying areas were facing an imminent rise of 3 feet or more in sea level. “If, say, a Huckabee administration suddenly woke up and started geoengineering the planet, what could anybody else do about it?” Morgan asked. (One could equally envision a left-leaning, low-lying European nation with the same inclination.) Geoengineering “turns the normal debate over climate change on its head,” he and some co-authors wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. Getting nations to agree to cut their greenhouse pollution has proved to be the ultimate free-rider problem, as the biggest nations must all cooperate or the planet will keep getting warmer. The Pinatubo option creates the opposite dilemma: As the discussions in Lisbon made clear, any of a dozen nations could change the global temperature all by itself.
It’s becoming increasingly clear, I think, that international political actors view geo-engineering as the option of first resort; there are still no serious coordinated efforts to reduce carbon emission, so radical a dereliction of duty as to amount to a suicide pact—unless they’ve convinced themselves they can jury-rig some ad hoc solution as the crisis escalates.
* See also: the world, 4 degrees warmer and An Introduction to Global Warming Impacts: Hell and High Water. All via MeFi.
* Alain Badiou on the communist hypothesis.
“But that reduces your communist adherence to nothing more than a faith! Rather than look at its practical impact upon the twentieth century, you just say, ‘Oh, well, that wasn’t pure, it wasn’t true to the idea, but I know the idea itself remains right.’ That’s a form of faith.”
“Maybe, but faith is a great thing sometimes.”
* Does DC own Superboy again? Via io9.
* Join Alex Greenberg on a trip to the retro-future.
Gerry Canavan 