Posts Tagged ‘biopolitics’
Monday Morning Links!
* My superhero identity has finally been scooped.
* Lots of people are sharing this one, on hyperexploited labor in the academy: Truman Capote Award Acceptance Speech. As with most of this sort of adjunct activist some of its conclusions strike me as emotionally rather than factually correct — specifically, it needs to find a way to make tenured and tenure-track faculty the villains of the story, in order to make the death of the university a moral narrative about betrayal rather than a political narrative about the management class’s construction of austerity — but it’s undoubtedly a powerful read.
* I did this one already, but what the hell: Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes.
* Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA’s lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx’s own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
* Bring on the 403(b) lawsuits.
* On being married to an academic.
* It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe: Nobel academy member calls Bob Dylan’s silence ‘arrogant.’
* Eugenics and the academy. Racism and standardized testing. Whiteness and international relations.
* Language Log reads the bookshelf in the linguist’s office set in Arrival (out next month!).
* After years of neglect, public higher education is at a tipping point.
* Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of The 13th.
* Springsteen and Catholicism.
* White masculinity as cloning.
* Parenting is weird. If God worked at a pet store, He’d be fired. Part Two. It’s a mystery!!! Wooooooooooh! The Fox and the Hedgehog. Science and technology have reached their limit. Self-destructive beverage selection: a guide. Motivational comics. Has the media gotten worse, or has society? Understanding the presidency. The oldest recorded joke is from Sumeria, circa 1900 B.C. There’s a monster under my bed.
* Tenure Denials Set Off Alarm Bells, and a Book, About Obstacles for Minority Faculty.
* Trump’s Milwaukee Problem. Let’s Talk About the Senate. From Pot To Guns To School Funding: Here’s What’s On The Ballot In Your State. Todd Akin and the “shy” voter. The banality of Trump. The latest polls indicate the possibility of a genuine electoral disaster for the GOP. A short history of white people rigging elections. Having not yet won it back yet, Dems are already getting ready to lose the Senate (again) in 2018. The Democrats are likely to win a majority of House votes, but not a majority of House seats. Again. Today in uncannily accurate metaphors. This all seems perfectly appropriate. Even Dunkin Donuts is suffering. But at least there’s a bright side. On the other hand.
Slavery: Colorado
Yes, you read that right. There is a vote on slavery in 2016. The Colorado state constitution currently bans slavery and “involuntary servitude” … except if it’s used as punishment for a crime. This amendment would get rid of that exception and say that slavery is not okay, ever.
* And so, too, with the new civic faith enshrined in Hamilton: we may have found a few new songs to sing about the gods of our troubled history, but when it comes to the stories we count on to tell us who we are, we remain caught in an endless refrain.
* Speaking of endless refrain: Emmett Till memorial in Mississippi is now pierced by bullet holes.
* District Judge John McKeon, who oversees a three-county area of eastern Montana, cited that exception this month when he gave the father a 30-year suspended sentence after his guilty plea to incest and ordered him to spend 60 days in jail over the next six months, giving him credit for the 17 days already served. His sentence requires him to undergo sex offender treatment and includes many other restrictions.
* On Anime Feminist. (via MeFi)
* Today in the Year of Kate McKinnon: ten minutes of her Ghostbusters outtakes.
* Jessica Jones’s Second Season Will Only Feature Female Directors.
* I don’t really think they should do Luke Cage season two — or Jessica Jones for that matter, as Daredevil proved already — but just like I’d love to see a Hellcat series with Jessica Jones as a supporting player I’d love to see Misty Knight guest starring Luke Cage.
* The Case against Black Mirror. I haven’t been able to tune in to the new season yet but the backlash surprises me. This was one of the best shows on TV before! What happened?
* Famous authors and their rejection slips.
* How much for a hotel on AT&TTW? AT&T to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion.
* “This is still the greatest NYT correction of all time imo.”
* This is [chokes] great. It’s great if they do this.
* This, on the other hand, is unbelievably awful: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war. Everyone involved in trying to claw back this money should be ashamed of themselves.
* Gee, you don’t say: U.S. Parents Are Sweating And Hustling To Pay For Child Care.
* I’ve discovered the secret to immortality.
* And there’s a new Grow game out for that mid-2000s nostalgia factor we all crave. Solution here when you’re done messing around…
No, YOU’RE Procrastinating: Wednesday Afternoon Links!
* We just landed a spacecraft on a comet for the first time. Here’s why it matters.
* Capitalism and the space program.
This is no accident. The same contradictions that have divided human aspiration from human achievement, producing growing hunger and want in a world with the technological means to solve both, paralyze the reach of humanity into the solar system. The task to reclaim space as humanity’s birthright is inseparable from that necessary to oppose war and conquer want and deprivation. In other words, it is the fight for socialism.
* Theory and Event‘s special supplement on Ferguson and “Disposable Lives.”
* Interview with Sherryl Vint on science fiction and biopolitics.
* College Athletes of the World, Unite. Ladies and gentlemen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
* This is a great TNI interview on California, “the carceral state.”
If we believe that the prison system is broken, then we must also believe in its ability to be fixed. Here we can see how the PIC keeps functioning through the rehearsal of the “broken system” narrative. As Angela Davis and many others have argued, it is precisely through reform that the prison-industrial complex expands. We can see the materiality of this expansion through the mandatory increase in police in schools through Proposition 47.
* Wisconsin woman said this week that she may have to file for bankruptcy because she was taken to an out-of-network hospital after having a heart attack, but now she owes more than $50,000 more than she would have if she had been taken to a hospital less than half a mile away.
* I was fired for sending a letter to the League for Innovation in the Community College, criticizing the Moraine Valley Community College administration for treating adjunct faculty as a “disposable resource” and the “chilling effect” on adjuncts who lack job security.
* Can White Teachers Be Taught How to Teach Our Children?
* America’s workers steal more than its shoplifters.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Man Points Rifle At Teen Daughter After Game Of Battleship Goes Bad.
* And again. To limit divorce settlement, conservative billionaire argues that he got rich through luck.
* And again. Maryland School Board Asked To Recognize Muslim Holy Day, Strikes References To All Religious Holidays Instead.
* Pretty good fan pitch for what The Force Awakens should be about.
* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary: Domino’s founder turning FL town into unconstitutional contraception-free ‘Catholic enclave.’
* And Christoph Waltz has been stealing my bit.
Sunday Morning Links
* Call for applications: The 2015-16 postdoc seminar at Rice, “After Biopolitics.”
* In the absence of sparrows: the front page story says you’ve been missing since / November 22, 2012. Everything else it doesn’t say. / In the absence of sparrows: you simply wandered off, past the Sunoco, pockets stuffed. / The door to your apartment is open still—
* Together, these forums, initiatives, and spy teams constitute a sustained effort to suppress meaningful resistance to the university’s privatization program by placing strict boundaries on dissent. Policing Civility.
* Elsewhere in campus civility: The Pentagon Is Giving Grenade Launchers to Campus Police.
* Hence I propose that, roughly speaking, one’s privilege level correlates with the likelihood that expressing anger will make people take your concerns more seriously rather than less — or at the very least, that it will prompt a reaction to you as an individual rather than triggering an immediate generalization about your demographic profile. This is one of the most intimate and insidious things about privilege dynamics: even the right to express perfectly natural and justified human emotions can’t be taken for granted.
* The Paris Review interviews Ray Bradbury.
If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
* …and translates Umberto Eco.
They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence. Schulz’s children are not a sly instrument to handle our adult problems: they experience these problems according to a childish psychology, and for this very reason they seem to us touching and hopeless, as if we were suddenly aware that our ills have polluted everything, at the root.
* God, I wish these J.G. Ballard books for children were real.
* Previously unknown final chapters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
* Detroit’s Under-Funded Fire Departments Use a Soda Can For a Fire Alarm.
* Gape in amazement as The New Yorker‘s famous fact-checkers seriously drop the ball.
* Vox gets nostalgic for the 1994 AT&T “You Will” ad campaign.
* As fast-food workers demonstrate nationwide for a $15 hourly wage, and congressional Republicans fight off a $10 federal minimum, little SeaTac has something to offer the debate. Its neighbor, Seattle, was the first big city to approve a $15 wage, this spring, but that doesn’t start phasing in until next year. SeaTac did it all at once. And, though there’s nothing definitive, this much is clear: The sky did not fall.
* Profiles in courage: Obama to delay his big move on immigration until after election.
* Saving some time before the next invasion.
* Not really how it’s supposed to work: An atheist airman at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was denied re-enlistment last month for refusing to take an oath containing “so help me God,” the American Humanist Association said Thursday.
* Peace activism vs. environmental activism.
* Geographers prove no one likes the Jets.
* Female privilege is real: Sharks nine times more likely to kill men than women, study says.
* The eight white identities. I’m not 100% clear on the daylight between White Traitor and White Abolitionist, but otherwise it seems to taxonomize approaches to white supremacy I see on the Internet all the time.
* Could it be possible that police departments are lying when they say suspects handcuffed behind their backs are shooting themselves in the chest with hidden weapons that were somehow not found when they were searched? Truly, a bold provocation. Perhaps it will always be a mystery.
* Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once.
* And: you fools: every day is Bill Murray Day.
Monday Morning Links
* There’s always money in the banana stand: After closing 50 schools, Chicago Public Schools has proposals for 31 new Charter Schools. This is how much your kid’s school’s budget has been cut (state-by-state averages). “The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students.”
* Fiduciary duty: Shareholder sues IBM for spying on China, wiping $12.9B off its market cap.
* Can Science Fiction Survive in Saudi Arabia?
* Incarceration rate per 100,000 Black males in South Africa under apartheid (1993) 610: 851. Incarceration rate per 100,000 African-American males in the United States under George W. Bush (2001) 611: 4,848. The Bush tag is such a redding herring there. This is a bipartisan consensus.
* What crimes did prisoners commit?
Almost two-thirds of court admissions to state prison are for property and drug offenses, including drug possession (16 percent), drug sales (15 percent), burglary (9 percent), and auto theft (6 percent).
Then, she says, the prosecutor began rattling off names and showing photographs of people, asking about their social contacts and political opinions. Olejnik guesses he asked “at least 50 questions” in that vein, compared to the four about May Day. That’s when she shut down, refused to answer, was found in contempt of court, and was sent to SeaTac FDC.
* Texas Judge Who Resigned After Allegedly Colluding With Prosecutor Now Running For Prosecutor.
* If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding, We’d Ground Our Fleet. How NY Times Covers Yemen Drone Strikes.
* A Tale of Two Cities: America’s Bipolar Climate Future. New York City and New Bern, North Carolina both face the same projected rise in sea levels, but while one is preparing for the worst, the other is doing nothing on principle.
* Scientists Turn Their Gaze Toward Tiny Threats to Great Lakes.
* Iowa Republican’s 2-year investigation finds no statistically significant evidence of voter fraud.
* There’s always money in the banana stand, part two: Highest paid college presidents.
* Two House Democrats Lead Effort to Protect For-Profit Colleges, Betraying Students and Vets.
* Son of a: A New Study Suggests That People Who Don’t Drink Alcohol Are More Likely To Die Young.
* The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder.
* Postscript on the Societies of Control, life insurance edition.
* I’ve been saying this for years: Online advertising has a fraud problem. Millions of ad impressions are being served to bots and non-human traffic, and ad tech companies are doing little to stop it.
* The Kellers are caught up in a little-known horror of the U.S. housing bust: the zombie title. Six years in, thousands of homeowners are finding themselves legally liable for houses they didn’t know they still owned after banks decided it wasn’t worth their while to complete foreclosures on them.
* True crime: 100 cited in Wisconsin probe of illegal ginseng harvesting.
* The Walker miracle: The U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday that 4,420 people in Wisconsin filed initial unemployment claims during the last week of November. That is more claims than the next two highest states combined: Ohio with 2,597 and Kentucky with 1,538.
* Israel, BDS, and delegitimization. ASA Members Vote To Endorse Academic Boycott of Israel.
* The Pope: Not a Marxist!
* What does it mean to be privileged? It means not having to think about any of this, ever.
* Public Influence: The Immortalization of an Anonymous Death.
* And how Arthur C. Clarke responded to crackpots.
Monday Links
* A tale that grew in the telling: The Hobbit is officially a trilogy. Oh, all right, I’ll allow it.
* 84-minute David Foster Wallace TV interview from 2003. Go ahead, I’ll be here when you’re done.
* Symbolism a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Ancestry.com is claiming Barack Obama is descended from the first slave in America—on his mother’s side.
* Postscript on the Society of Control: Twitter can predict when you’ll get sick a week before you do, with 90% accuracy.
* Just remember, the Koch brothers can buy anything, but they can’t buy science.
* What everyone is linking today: How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance.
* Predatory For-Profit Colleges Pay Executives Based On Corporate Profitability, Not Student Outcomes. Meanwhile, 86% of these companies’ revenue is coming from the federal government.
* A proposed court-supervised agreement filed today will ease restrictions for transgender people born in Illinois to obtain new birth certificates that reflect their correct gender.
* The People of the Future have finally come to collect Chris Marker. Rest in peace.
* And today in obscenity: Sexual Assault Victims Charged Up To $1,200 In Wisconsin For Cost Of Their Rape Kits. That’s not okay at all.
‘The Need for Dissatisfaction Is Implicitly Recognized by Keynesian Economics, Which Sees the Capitalist System as Threatened by the Possibility of Individual or Collective Satisfaction, Manifest as a Demand Shortfall’
Depression is the iconic illness in this respect. Indeed, we might say that if ‘immaterial’ labour is now the hegemonic form of production, depression is the hegemonic form of incapacity. Typically, depression is characterized by a lack of any clear clinical definition; indeed it is often defined as anything that can be treated with anti-depressants. [5] Depression is just sheer incapacity, a distinctly neo-liberal form of psychological deficiency, representing the flipside of an ethos that implores individuals to act, enjoy, perform, create, achieve and maximize. In an economy based in large part on services, enthusiasm, dynamism and optimism are vital workplace resources. The depressed employee is stricken by a chronic deflation of these psycho-economic capacities, which can lead him or her to feel economically useless, and consequently more depressed. The workplace therefore acquires a therapeutic function, for if people can somehow be persuaded to remain in work despite mental or physical illness, then their self-esteem will be prevented from falling too low, and their bio-psycho-economic potential might be rescued. Many of the UK government’s strategies for reducing incapacity-benefit claims and health-related absence focus on reorienting the Human Resources profession, such that managers become better able to recognize and support depressed and anxious employees. Lifting the taboo surrounding mental illness, so as to address it better, has become an economic-policy priority.
William Davies, “The Political Economy of Unhappiness.” Via Marc Bousquet.
Optimistic theorists of cognitive capitalism, such as Hardt and Negri, believe that the positive externalities or spill-over effects associated with immaterial production create the conditions for a new commons. Efforts to measure and privatize human, intellectual and cultural resources must ultimately fail; the hegemonic character of immaterial labour means that the most valuable economic resources are becoming socialized, despite the best efforts of capital to prevent this. The proposition I wish to investigate here is in some ways the inverse: while policy-makers, doctors and economists seek to contain the negative externality of unhappiness as a measurable psychological deficiency and economic cost, it has inherently political and sociological qualities that lend it critical potential. One contradiction of neo-liberalism is that it demands levels of enthusiasm, energy and hope whose conditions it destroys through insecurity, powerlessness and the valorization of unattainable ego ideals via advertising. What is most intriguing about the turn towards happiness amongst political elites and orthodox economists is that it is bringing this truth to the fore, and granting it official statistical endorsement. Even a cursory examination of the evidence on unhappiness in neo-liberal societies draws the observer beyond the limits of psychology, and into questions of political economy.
