Saturday, 12 September 2009
Attention Prisoners of Gravity: The Polymath, Or The Life And Opinions Of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman
"The Polymath isn't about just [Delany's] sex life, but a good chunk of it is and it all relates to his writings. Take for example an early scene in which he is reading, to an audience, the opening paragraphs of his 1966 short story, 'Aye and Gomorrah' (which first appeared in fellow science fiction author Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology, Dangerous Visions). The story begins in France in a pissoir and Delany describes this as 'an early attempt to deal, in a highly coded fashion, with homosexuality.' That it involves a public restroom invokes the obvious autobiographical element.
"This is also true for Times Square Red Times Square Blue. In this nonfiction opus, Delany argues that 'cleaning up' Times Square and turning it into Disneyland is not a good thing because, once upon a time, people from different races and classes, normally kept separate, met and interacted in the only social situation available to them and that was the porn theaters. Delany is one of the few writers alive who can explicitly describe the public sex, involving himself and others, that went on in these venues and work it into an essay about the infrastructure of cities.
"But all of his metaphors aren't carnal. The ruined and mostly abandoned city in Dhalgren (a book that is the science fiction equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses) was inspired by the real burned out inner cities he knew from life. He explains that the reasons for making the gender of certain characters ambiguous in Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (1984) was because he once lived in a hotel with several transsexuals and it drove him crazy, at first, when he couldn't discern the sex of some of the people in the elevator with him.
"Besides his writings, Delany also discusses his life and his family's history. His grandfather was a freed slave, a cousin was killed by the Klan, his two famous aunts (who both lived to be over 100) organized a picket line at a movie theater showing Birth Of A Nation in 1924. Chip has much to say on the subject of racism, comparing the attitudes of white students towards Paul Robeson at Columbia Law School to the skinheads who dragged James Bird Jr. to his death as he was chained to the back of their truck."
"Sexuality & Science Fiction 101" by Michael D. Klemm
"Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation has acquired the rights to The Forever War, an award-winning 1974 novel by science fiction author and MIT writing professor Joe Haldeman. The film will be directed by Ridley Scott, whose last science fiction films were Alien and Blade Runner. The producers are now searching for a writer.
"In Haldeman’s novel, a physicist is drafted into a long-fought war against an alien race, where distant battlegrounds are reached by faster-than-light travel. The battles are short, bleak affairs against an uncommunicative enemy, with frequent casualties. When he returns, the protagonist finds that the world has changed in his absence.
"Basically, The Forever War is 'all about Vietnam,' said Haldeman, a draftee who served in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1968. 'I didn’t sit down and make a chart or anything,' he said, 'but the [Vietnam] war was my model. The book won a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award, two of science fiction’s most coveted honors.
Prof. Haldeman’s Novel ‘Forever War’ Picked Up By 20th Century Fox Film
By Michael McGraw-Herdeg
Health Care Scare USA and Fox News: The New Liberals C
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Health Care Reform Is the Matrix | ||||
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Health Care Hell-Scare - Die-agnosis: Mur-DR | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Barney Frank's Town Hall Snaps | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Fox News: The New Liberals | ||||
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Tuesday, 8 September 2009
My heretical thoughts for today
I am a bonafide cat lover, and Zeus is in the veterinary hospital today, so in his absence I will pay tribute by dispelling a few misconceptions thanks to The Pinky Show:
Q: What is The Pinky Show?
Q: Is making animated episodes the only kind of work you cats do?
A: No, actually we do lots of other things too, thank you for asking! The Pinky Show is a multi-aspect educational project - our activities also include the production of site-specific art, collaborating on community-based education and media activism projects, maintaining a fact sheet library, organizing online cultural programming, blogging, and some other stuff. Contrary to popular misconceptions, cats are really hard working! The form is always changing, but our goals remain the same.
Q: What is The Pinky Show?
A: The Pinky Show is the original super lo-tech hand-drawn educational TV show. We focus on information & ideas that have been misrepresented, suppressed, ignored, or otherwise excluded from mainstream discussion. Pinky presents and analyzes the material in an informal, easy-to-understand way, with helpful illustrations that she draws herself. Episodes are available on the internet for free at www.PinkyShow.org.
Derridata, thanks for the tip off about Mutually Occluded. I can't comment here on whether Pinky's reflections on institutionalization and productivity dovetail with that in any way, or are more exclusively along the lines of Ivan Illich and Andre Gorz. Here's an indicator though of why a search engine society may not be a happy alternative.
If you think that is difficult to work out, try getting your head around the choice of imagery by AIDS activists in Germany:
Derridata, thanks for the tip off about Mutually Occluded. I can't comment here on whether Pinky's reflections on institutionalization and productivity dovetail with that in any way, or are more exclusively along the lines of Ivan Illich and Andre Gorz. Here's an indicator though of why a search engine society may not be a happy alternative.
If you think that is difficult to work out, try getting your head around the choice of imagery by AIDS activists in Germany:
Unfortunately I can't find Juan Davila's Stupid As a Painter to do a comparison, but I have it on good authority that Kerry Stokes bought that particular work. Oh the irony, it is so appalling....
Friday, 4 September 2009
The necessary inertia of philistine invention
I was looking back on my earlier "Melissa Gregg" post, and it got me thinking about possible positive connotations to the Foucauldian "technologies of the self" I had referenced there in only a fairly negative way. Suddenly I remembered Thomas Osborne. His work is highly attractive to me as it marks an escape from the cul de sac I see the aforementioned Harman and his defenders in the blogosphere trapped in, and the same might be said of their detractors, at least to the extent that they too play the game of subjectivism: i.e. this is at base a struggle to decide who has a monopoly on the creative energy needed to avoid disenchantment of the world. It logically follows, according to the fatuous standard of reasoning favoured by this select group of speculative realists, that those with the highest [sic] productive output have the requisite enthusiasm, meaning their opponents can only be parasites (or rather, "vampires").
Osborne in effect simply refuses these oppositions. Although the logic behind his argument is too complex to detail in full here, I can at least mention how Osborne speaks in terms of "philistine invention" rather than "creativity", and why the meaning and value of inertia, in his estimate, must also be rethought:
"One might observe at this point that not the least thing about the activity of inventiveness is that it is difficult, and that because of this one cannot necessarily see it happening at the time. Inventiveness is more often than not untimely –hence the critical import of the verdicts of posterity and, correspondingly, the necessity of a certain ‘negative’ aesthetics of creativity, the humility of acknowledging that even in acknowledging creativity itself we do not know what creativity is as such. What looks like inertia for some comes to a more objective, later generation as evidence of a breakthrough. And what might seem like a breakthrough can come to seem just like further inertia when viewed from a later more objective perspective. So, in the terms given currency by Stanley Cavell, it is precisely acknowledgement rather than knowledge that is the only orientation we can take towards inventiveness itself. In the light of history, in the light of reflection, the experts can tell us that Cezanne was a subject bearer of various powers of inventiveness. But was he a creative person? No matter. Such a question is an irrelevance, an effect only of our psychologism."
Suffice to say, this discussion becomes suffused with irony when speculative realists start to defend themselves by resorting to psychologism! Is a little methodological consistency simply too much to ask for? Speaking as someone who was trained as a sociologist, I can at least console myself with Osborne's observation that "sociologists make better philistines than most". I can't expect "philistine invention" to feature in the aforementioned epistemic wars. Part of the problem here is the medium of the blogosphere itself, the "clusterfuck" immediacy of which has proven especially receptive to that theoretical imbroglio known as "cultural studies"- an anti-discipline defined in part by consciously distancing itself from sociology.
But even in cultural studies circles there is growing recognition of the virtue of a sensibility somewhat comparable to "inertia", as Osborne defines it; in these rare cases it is acknowledged in all but name that Weberian disenchantment is a product of the increasing rationalization of academic labour. There is a difference though in the academy because the problem is not so much that academic journals are adapting to the shortened economies of attention that blogging and Google searching have accustomed readers to, but rather how academics are routinely expected to "multitask". Irrespective of the medium they engage with, (books, print journals or e-journals), what is greatly diminished is the reading time, (i.e. the inertia), required to evaluate and respond to the work of other scholars. To be sure, the fast food analogy Bowles uses to make her point is already familiar from Fuller's book on the transformation of universities by "knowledge management" principles, but it would go against the grain were a cultural studies scholar to cite a sociologist. In any case, her point still appears valid, and also further ratifies Ben Agger's argument that the "publish or perish" mentality is really a symptom of what he calls "fast capitalism".
I'm puzzled, however, why some bloggers (again, as referenced in my Melissa Gregg post) would attempt to present necessity as something of a virtue i.e. when you are destitute because of precarity you are obliged to keep moving, but this mentality merely engenders the dilemma Simmel once described:
"The frequent changes in fashion constitute a tremendous subjugation of the individual and in that respect form one of the necessary complements to social and political freedom."
There may be one final twist to this tale. By extension Osborne teaches us that a careful reading is necessary to understand that creativity is more than just an ideology. Indeed, this is his primary justification for rejecting the category of creativity and replacing it with the more inertia ridden idea of inventiveness. For an example of a contrasting perspective though, one need look no further than Ben Watson's rush to judgement:
"So I was forced to leap up and seize the microphone to voice my criticism of the way French philosophy, ever since Kojeve's lectures on Hegel, has hobbled along with a flawed dialectic; Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Badiou...they're compromised rubbish, and for very concrete reasons: France having had the most reactionary Communist Party on the planet...craven aspiration to bourgeois academic fame; the inability to think beyond the mind/body dualism of Descartes...which dualism immediately manifested in the conference as a stand-off between explanations of spectral music as a result of 'nature' or science'."
Osborne in effect simply refuses these oppositions. Although the logic behind his argument is too complex to detail in full here, I can at least mention how Osborne speaks in terms of "philistine invention" rather than "creativity", and why the meaning and value of inertia, in his estimate, must also be rethought:
"One might observe at this point that not the least thing about the activity of inventiveness is that it is difficult, and that because of this one cannot necessarily see it happening at the time. Inventiveness is more often than not untimely –hence the critical import of the verdicts of posterity and, correspondingly, the necessity of a certain ‘negative’ aesthetics of creativity, the humility of acknowledging that even in acknowledging creativity itself we do not know what creativity is as such. What looks like inertia for some comes to a more objective, later generation as evidence of a breakthrough. And what might seem like a breakthrough can come to seem just like further inertia when viewed from a later more objective perspective. So, in the terms given currency by Stanley Cavell, it is precisely acknowledgement rather than knowledge that is the only orientation we can take towards inventiveness itself. In the light of history, in the light of reflection, the experts can tell us that Cezanne was a subject bearer of various powers of inventiveness. But was he a creative person? No matter. Such a question is an irrelevance, an effect only of our psychologism."
Suffice to say, this discussion becomes suffused with irony when speculative realists start to defend themselves by resorting to psychologism! Is a little methodological consistency simply too much to ask for? Speaking as someone who was trained as a sociologist, I can at least console myself with Osborne's observation that "sociologists make better philistines than most". I can't expect "philistine invention" to feature in the aforementioned epistemic wars. Part of the problem here is the medium of the blogosphere itself, the "clusterfuck" immediacy of which has proven especially receptive to that theoretical imbroglio known as "cultural studies"- an anti-discipline defined in part by consciously distancing itself from sociology.
But even in cultural studies circles there is growing recognition of the virtue of a sensibility somewhat comparable to "inertia", as Osborne defines it; in these rare cases it is acknowledged in all but name that Weberian disenchantment is a product of the increasing rationalization of academic labour. There is a difference though in the academy because the problem is not so much that academic journals are adapting to the shortened economies of attention that blogging and Google searching have accustomed readers to, but rather how academics are routinely expected to "multitask". Irrespective of the medium they engage with, (books, print journals or e-journals), what is greatly diminished is the reading time, (i.e. the inertia), required to evaluate and respond to the work of other scholars. To be sure, the fast food analogy Bowles uses to make her point is already familiar from Fuller's book on the transformation of universities by "knowledge management" principles, but it would go against the grain were a cultural studies scholar to cite a sociologist. In any case, her point still appears valid, and also further ratifies Ben Agger's argument that the "publish or perish" mentality is really a symptom of what he calls "fast capitalism".
I'm puzzled, however, why some bloggers (again, as referenced in my Melissa Gregg post) would attempt to present necessity as something of a virtue i.e. when you are destitute because of precarity you are obliged to keep moving, but this mentality merely engenders the dilemma Simmel once described:
"The frequent changes in fashion constitute a tremendous subjugation of the individual and in that respect form one of the necessary complements to social and political freedom."
There may be one final twist to this tale. By extension Osborne teaches us that a careful reading is necessary to understand that creativity is more than just an ideology. Indeed, this is his primary justification for rejecting the category of creativity and replacing it with the more inertia ridden idea of inventiveness. For an example of a contrasting perspective though, one need look no further than Ben Watson's rush to judgement:
"So I was forced to leap up and seize the microphone to voice my criticism of the way French philosophy, ever since Kojeve's lectures on Hegel, has hobbled along with a flawed dialectic; Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Badiou...they're compromised rubbish, and for very concrete reasons: France having had the most reactionary Communist Party on the planet...craven aspiration to bourgeois academic fame; the inability to think beyond the mind/body dualism of Descartes...which dualism immediately manifested in the conference as a stand-off between explanations of spectral music as a result of 'nature' or science'."
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