29 October 2006
why feuerbach is god, ho ho
'Unlike Hegel, for Feuerbach, love (rather than society-sanctioned marriage) is a partnership of equality (and not simply the fusion of heterosexual partners). Pulling 'man' out of the mire also entails rescuing woman. Feuerbach's feminism is therefore quite consistent with his 'properly' universal humanism: 'Whereas with the ancient philosophers love was an illegitimate child begotten with the concubine of nature, with modern philosophers it is the legitimate daughter of their philosophy. Woman has been accepted into the community of the spirit; she is the living compendium of philosophy.' (Feuerbach, 'Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development')' - It's an exclusive clip from the long-awaited forthcoming film: PigHD - when thoughts go bad!
28 October 2006
laibach
Laibach are coming to London on November 25th. I'll be there of course, in my best
cosmos and history
There's a giant slew of free Badiou-related pieces over at the gloriously-titled Cosmos and History site: 'The Praxis of Alain Badiou'.
The issue includes a tribute to Sam Gillespie, whose absence scarcely gets any easier to deal with as time goes by.
The issue includes a tribute to Sam Gillespie, whose absence scarcely gets any easier to deal with as time goes by.
24 October 2006
affection
'Rationalist optimism is at the same time an infinite cruelty' - Deleuze, lecture on Leibniz, 22/04/80.
Meanwhile, Daniel feels that something is lacking somewhere. I would suggest that it's neither love, nor sex, but affection. I believe affection to be a genuinely revolutionary sentiment, as it depends not on the one who loves/fucks the other who, in turn, loves/fucks the other whilst all the time each is (really) thinking of themselves, but on a pure kind of ecstatic, expansive selflessness. It may well be a form of post-religious spiritual abasement that gauchely assumes it can fur up the circuits with a useless kind of joy, but it touches upon nothing of telos, marital or otherwise, and those ciphers of kapital from Sex in the City would never understand it. For what reason, other than affection, did Schreber offer up his adorned, unmanned body to the Godhead in a bid (the only one possible) to save humanity? His ribbons cost but a few pence, but his sacrifice was infinite.
It is the bourgeoisie, of course, those purveyors of pvc, alcoholic drinks and sex toys, who have 'drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation' (Communist Manifesto).
Long live chivalrous enthusiasm in the name of revolutionary affection! Death to egotistical calculation! Long live philistine sentimentalism! Let a thousand Schrebers bloom!
22 October 2006
children of men
An incredible vision of Britain not altogether so very far away, and close enough to be truly terrifying. The beaten up buses, the piles of rubbish, the burning corpses of farm animals, the grey tired whirr of a post-industrial landscape that never got round to clearing up its machinic residue. A countryside in flames and anomie, stalked by militant groups and robocops, fuelled only by disinformation and rumour...and soundtracked by Kode 9.
Children of Men is relentless: a war-zone between the mawkish sentimentality of a dying culture and the bleak prison of an island desperate to keep out the rest of the world. Scenes of torture and execution in out-of-town detention centres (Bexhill), cages for 'illegals' on the street, non-stop security alerts and passport checks, random terror attacks by unknown organisations. This is a world in which the majority of the globe has been vaporised by nuclear war, although dear old Britain has somehow survived - but only at the expense of turning into a fascist state. The Ministry of Art has saved Michelangelo's David, but his leg is prosthetic and its setting (a filmic fusion of the Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station, the latter complete with Pink Floyd Pig), is disturbing and out of public sight.
What is most intriguing about the premise behind the film (based on P. D. James's unusual venture into dystopia) is less the idea that humanity has somehow lost its fertility (although this is intriguing enough), but the vision of what this would do to our collective psyche: a species in meltdown, living with the revelation that all has come to nothing, and will go back to nothing in the space of a generation. Already animals are seeping back into colonised spaces (and Alfonso Cuaron matches Herzog in his ability to capture the silent menacing presence of creatures, from kittens to seagulls), waiting for this bipedal dodo-ish blot on the organic landscape to seep back into history.
The world may be mad, but we are insane.
19 October 2006
computer says no
Now, I love the internet almost as much as I love pork pies, my stuffed dog and the literature of Thomas Bernhard, but I have to say that the Blairite hyper-clunky bureaucratised infatuation with the internet as a tool for teaching and registration is SPREADSHEET PSYCHOSIS GONE MAD. The gleam of insanity in the brain of a lowly academic after 5.4 hours sat on yet another subcommittee (without even any tea or coffee)...I know! Why don't we pay a million trillion pounds to set up an on-line system to make everything easier ALL THE WHILE KNOWING THAT IT WILL NEVER EVER EVER EVER work properly (cf. the NHS).
Students are not registered; their courses are not properly listed on their 'personalised web package'. Part of the problem is you need to log onto the system in order to be told how to use the system. If no one tells you there even IS a system then you literally have no idea what you're doing or even what your name is.
My solution is to send out a TYPED letter to all students before they arrive with a date and a time on it. We meet them, you know, with our faces, make sure they know which classes they're taking, register them for the year and send back the names to the mysterious central committee who can then work out the human composition of the university body for themselves. De-centralisation! Anarcho-syndicalist efficiency! We wouldn't even need to discuss it in meetings! Let alone for a thousand mind-numbing hours in which you get so bored you start idly wondering who in the room, if forced, you would have sex with (in the end I went for the aged William Morris lookalike with the lisp. It was originally going to be the dance teacher - flexible - but she was way too in love with the agenda numbering system).
Students are not registered; their courses are not properly listed on their 'personalised web package'. Part of the problem is you need to log onto the system in order to be told how to use the system. If no one tells you there even IS a system then you literally have no idea what you're doing or even what your name is.
My solution is to send out a TYPED letter to all students before they arrive with a date and a time on it. We meet them, you know, with our faces, make sure they know which classes they're taking, register them for the year and send back the names to the mysterious central committee who can then work out the human composition of the university body for themselves. De-centralisation! Anarcho-syndicalist efficiency! We wouldn't even need to discuss it in meetings! Let alone for a thousand mind-numbing hours in which you get so bored you start idly wondering who in the room, if forced, you would have sex with (in the end I went for the aged William Morris lookalike with the lisp. It was originally going to be the dance teacher - flexible - but she was way too in love with the agenda numbering system).
17 October 2006
badiou interview
There's a previously unpublished interview with Badiou from February 2006 over at the wonderful Carceraglio that deserves a look:
'I think our situation is much more similar to that of the 19th century than to that of the 20th. Nearer Marx than Lenin, if you like, metaphorically speaking. Lenin was really the thinker of the new concept of revolutionary politics, with the idea that we could be victorious, that the revolution was a possibility. That's not exactly the situation today; the idea of revolution is obscure in itself today. But we can do as Marx did--it's a metaphor, an image. You have to think the multiplicity of popular experiences, philosophical directions, new studies, and so on. You must do these things as Marx himself did.'
'I think our situation is much more similar to that of the 19th century than to that of the 20th. Nearer Marx than Lenin, if you like, metaphorically speaking. Lenin was really the thinker of the new concept of revolutionary politics, with the idea that we could be victorious, that the revolution was a possibility. That's not exactly the situation today; the idea of revolution is obscure in itself today. But we can do as Marx did--it's a metaphor, an image. You have to think the multiplicity of popular experiences, philosophical directions, new studies, and so on. You must do these things as Marx himself did.'
15 October 2006
collapse journal
Everyone should order their copy of Collapse (already reviewed very prettily by Dominic). It's an astonishingly good-looking thing, permeated throughout with the aura of the limitless possibilities of literary and conceptual innovation (the rigour of 'amateurs in the true sense' as Robin puts it in the introduction).
'And how about the entire universe, can it be considered to be a computer? Yes, it certainly can, it is constantly computing its future state from its current state, it's constantly computing its own time-evolution!' - Gregory Chaitin, 'From Leibniz to Ω', Collapse, vol. 1, p. 47.
12 October 2006
anti-frieze
A curse on the art world!
Baudrillard ain't coming to Saturday's Frieze (14th) - consequently I have FOUR tickets for the day going spare, as I'm buggered if I'm going to spend my birthday looking at corporate gallery porn with no old French man to help the medicine go down. The tickets aren't refundable, obviously, because that would be appropriate and helpful.
SO - If anyone would like 1-4 FREE tickets for Frieze on Sat, email me. I suppose it'd had probably better be a London person as you'll have to get them off me personally tomorrow (Friday). They might as well have some use now I've paid for 'em.
Baudrillard ain't coming to Saturday's Frieze (14th) - consequently I have FOUR tickets for the day going spare, as I'm buggered if I'm going to spend my birthday looking at corporate gallery porn with no old French man to help the medicine go down. The tickets aren't refundable, obviously, because that would be appropriate and helpful.
SO - If anyone would like 1-4 FREE tickets for Frieze on Sat, email me. I suppose it'd had probably better be a London person as you'll have to get them off me personally tomorrow (Friday). They might as well have some use now I've paid for 'em.
08 October 2006
adolescents vs. teenagers
Recently, in comments, I was accused of being an 'unsexed eternal adolescent, an abstract conduit for infinite thought' who was now (apparently) having a hard time adjusting the really real world of real women and real men who have really real (er, finite?) thoughts (and presumably also a really real relationship to their bank balance/mortgage/blahblahblah). Far be it for me to side with Kant and suggest that the problem of reality is the very question we have to sidestep for fear of ending up once more in the wretched maw of the Manichean metaphysical machine (idealist! pow! empiricist! erk! bloodied heads litter the battlefield, Hecuba weeps for her sons, promising scientists that they were [note: this riff makes no sense unless you've recently read the A and B Prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason])
Obviously I am made rather happy at the thought of being an unsexed eternal adolescent, as its always struck me that adolescence is nothing other than the quest for truth, a project for which hating the world is the best precondition. Adolescence is the revelation that the world is wrong, corrupt and probably not made for us - it is also therefore the starting point for activisms of all kinds, and all manner of intriguing intellectual obsessions. The self-moulding of adolescents is frequently more interesting than the adulthood we later assume, sinking down into the soft arms of that other great misery, normality.
Teenagers (marketing subcategory, the grotesque 'tween'), on the other hand, are horrid. Or rather, are made horrid. Designed, literally, to proffer themselves to the consumerist cathode ray nipple in a self-abasing whine of boredom and the demand for constant stimulation, the 'teenager' is the sulky, sleepless subject supposed to do nothing other than get addicted to his or her playstation and fiddle about with his or her mobile phone. Teenagers are resentful, debt-ridden and fickle: in that sense, they are well prepared for their future economic roles as er, resentful (someone else is stealing my enjoyment: the tabloid mental jab - don't do anything! don't move! you might get caught!), debt-ridden (the geographical flexibility of the Baby Boomers becomes the financial lock-down of educational movement and the death of class mobility) and fickle (this one, this one, this one, the seriality of desire for the thing that no one wants).
Adolescence against teenagerism! (Particularly the kind of 'late teenagerism' that sees grown men and women abdicating all claim to rationality, the trauma of thought and the very possibility of truth in the name of a protracted, and expensive, solipsism).
Obviously I am made rather happy at the thought of being an unsexed eternal adolescent, as its always struck me that adolescence is nothing other than the quest for truth, a project for which hating the world is the best precondition. Adolescence is the revelation that the world is wrong, corrupt and probably not made for us - it is also therefore the starting point for activisms of all kinds, and all manner of intriguing intellectual obsessions. The self-moulding of adolescents is frequently more interesting than the adulthood we later assume, sinking down into the soft arms of that other great misery, normality.
Teenagers (marketing subcategory, the grotesque 'tween'), on the other hand, are horrid. Or rather, are made horrid. Designed, literally, to proffer themselves to the consumerist cathode ray nipple in a self-abasing whine of boredom and the demand for constant stimulation, the 'teenager' is the sulky, sleepless subject supposed to do nothing other than get addicted to his or her playstation and fiddle about with his or her mobile phone. Teenagers are resentful, debt-ridden and fickle: in that sense, they are well prepared for their future economic roles as er, resentful (someone else is stealing my enjoyment: the tabloid mental jab - don't do anything! don't move! you might get caught!), debt-ridden (the geographical flexibility of the Baby Boomers becomes the financial lock-down of educational movement and the death of class mobility) and fickle (this one, this one, this one, the seriality of desire for the thing that no one wants).
Adolescence against teenagerism! (Particularly the kind of 'late teenagerism' that sees grown men and women abdicating all claim to rationality, the trauma of thought and the very possibility of truth in the name of a protracted, and expensive, solipsism).
06 October 2006
pessimism of the general will, optimism of the general intellect
Week Two is over! Getting up at the gimcrack of dawn to make the 9 o clock lectures (with adequate time for photocopying), or even to write the 9 o clock lectures was beginning to take its toll yesterday, as people's faces and the background started going all gestalt and little black fuzzy animals began to emerge from the corners of the room. I don't think, even at my most debauched and benderish (a previous life now, sigh), that I have ever, ever been so exhausted. Still, eight hours proper sleep and the cycling through of the 15,000 dreams that I missed during the week later, and all is well again...
I think I have managed to convince my colleagues that I am both a) intellectually 'serious' and, more importantly b) pleasant to work with. It was possibly a mistake at colleaguey dinner last night to expound my anti-cinema theories and explain exactly why I thought the last Almodovar film was hideous misogynistic, reactionary tosh. But, er, I was very tired, and only wine could paper over the cracks in the bottomless pit of my sleep...drink, pig, ergh, pig, no pig! sleep, pig....
The students are wonderful and interested. And they talk to each other in seminars! And laugh at my jokes! And only three people have made the 'you....a lecturer?!' comment since I've been there (two members of staff and a mature student). Mind you, a couple more weeks of this, and any residual scintilla of youth will have been eradicated in my cold undying commitment to academia, and 5am showers. I can take the picture out of the attic and sell it to connoisseurs of the macabre.
Ironically enough, I have been roped into joining a centre for gender and sex or feminism or something studies. 'What are your particular interests?' the nice woman running the first meeting asked me. 'Er, well, I don't really work on feminism or gender. But, er, I have written a bit about pornography and er, female friendship.' It was the only thing I can think of. This is why I will be giving a paper on vintage pornography next semester to a group of people who will (hopefully) afterwards kill and eat me in some femme-hazing ritual. Oh dear. I suggested I could show some, but the response was not altogether encouraging. Perhaps I'll stick to freeze-frames on power-point. What's a power-point?
04 October 2006
always straining her eyes to the beams of the sun
Er, the new job appears to involve getting up at 4.15 am to write about Anaximander.
There may be a slight hiatus in the production of slightly squeaky polemic, or whatever it is, until I work out how best (or at all) to manage my time.
Just one thing, though, I love the way women in high heels walk on escalators, with the flat part of the shoe on the metal and the heels hanging over the edge. Heh, it so makes travelling in the early morning worth it.
Oh, IT, stop objectifying women...you know they don't even exist! And get some sleep...only five weeks 'til reading week...
