event mechanics

Serious issues with my hosting company regarding my server space. It has been a bit annoying, but they have excellent service and I think they had to reinstall wordpress for me. Anyway, now I have a proper MySQL server, and I can have a blog roll again, woot!

Look to your right! Hurrah!

Oh, and I am in marking hell at the moment. One student got 15%, another 90%. Go figure…

Story is now available for viewing through the NineMSN video player page for the story.

From the Sunday website:

There is a perception, peculiar to fans of talkback radio, that car hoons have taken over the streets of our capital cities, conducting illegal races that endanger the lives of ordinary motorists and road users.

Then, so the story goes, they post videos of their outrages on the internet to demonstrate their contempt for society. Governments and police forces have responded with targetted operations seeking to disrupt and disperse groups of car hoons that gather in suburban carparks to indulge their passion for modified cars.

There is evidence that P-plate drivers are over-represented in the nation’s road toll statistics but it’s arguable whether the street racers and the young drivers dying on our roads are in fact one and the same.

A Sydney academic has studied modified car culture and found that the car hoons actually make up less than 1 per cent of road fatalities, yet millions of dollars is being spent on high profile police campaigns around the country.

Dr Glen Fuller, a former street racer, has told Sunday these campaigns and operations, will do little to prevent death and serious injury on our roads, and serve only to further marginalise young people. Draconian measures such as crushing the cars of repeat offenders will heighten tensions with police and create local folk heroes amongst the hoons.

Dr Fuller has called on governments to give up high profile anti-hoon operations in favour of educating drivers that a hoon is anyone who believes the road is there for their exclusive use.

I am an educated fool, in a Socratic fashion of course…

Hopefully they’ll put some video up at some point.

For those that are interested, some of my published academic writing, and my various blog posts on hoons.

So I’m on TV again about ‘hoons’. This Sunday. From what I could infer from the tone of voice of one of the producers (or production assistants) it may not be all sweetness and light for me. Hmmm…

At least they know I have passed my PhD now.

I think I’ll have to repost a link to my article here on Sunday.

At the very least it should be interesting to see what happens.

I seem to be doing a lot of rushing about without getting much done at the moment.

We have moved into our new digs in Annandale. The place is almost set up. House warming BBQ some time soon.

My parents were over last week for my graduation. They were quite ill most their stay, which was unfortunate. We went out to dinner a few times and they got to see the new place.

I have done none of my own work over the last month. This is starting to annoy me. I think if I don’t secure some sort of academic job, then I shall forsake academia for some other industry. As I have previously written, I don’t think I need an academic job to produce my next series of publications. I just need money for rent and what not. Anyway, there are a few jobs (and a fellowship) I am applying for. Maybe something will pay off…

I need to get back into a rhythm so as to start writing properly again.

Dreamworks has bought the rights to the Ghost in the Shell franchise. Hmmm… What is to come of my favourite Deleuze-and-Guattari-citing, massive-robot, sexy-cyborg work of Japanese popular culture? A 3-D live action thiller apprently. Ok… Live action rhizomes? The ‘ghost’ and the ’shell’ correlate with what Deleuze described as the incorporeal and corporeal dimensions of events. For example, the ‘Laughing Man’ only makes sense as an event. What is cool about GitS is that much of the time is spent exploring the metaphysical problematic of events in a futurstic virtualised world as much as it is about chasing down the bad guys, etc.

I am feeling a little bit swamped at the moment.

I put my notice in two weeks ago on my flat and I am moving into A.’s place. We are looking for something together for us and B. We think we have found a realy nice place. Fingers crossed. A. got notice about three weeks ago; the owner of her rental is selling. She gets 60 days. I had moved my computer and work stuff over about six weeks ago and have basically been living here since then.

Tuesday week (22/04) I graduate. My folks are coming over, and maybe my big brother if he feels up to it. He has been having another rough time of late. This has been a bit stressful. It will be cool if he can make it.

On Friday, after we viewed the property we are hoping to rent, A. was involved in a car crash. A young bloke drove through a stop sign and A. crashed her brand new MY08 Subaru Forester with 1800 kms on the clock into the side of his car. No one was hurt too badly. I banged up my knee a bit.

Lastly, on the work front. Lot’s happening. More on this later. Nothing fun. I have figured out that 2% of students cause 98% of problems. Managing the 2% takes up most of my time. Lots of marking. I am thinking that in terms of an academic career I need to get a book contract. I don’t really need an academic job for this. Academic work is fine, but the employment conditions are nonsense. So I might be trying to get work elsewhere in the future, doing work that doesn’t operate according to silly sessional contracts and/or which can be relied on the whole year. Now I am living with others who rely on me to make sure I pay my rent and have money for food and other such luxuries. During the teaching session this is fine.

The utter stupidity of the casual teaching system in the tertiary education sector needs to be rethought. 12 month contracts with a certain contact hour/teaching load that are staggered (some signed at the start or halfway through the year) should replace sessional casual contracts. Sessional contracts should be banned because they force workers to have 3 or 4 half-time jobs to produce a tapestry of incomes of various durations.

Oh, and I have been a shithouse friend to most of my friends lately. I promsie to be a better friend very shortly when a lot of this calms down a bit.

From the emerging hoopla round this book, “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States,” comes this comment:

Derrida himself (or itself) lamented the “turning into method” of his more ethereal “movement” of de-construct-ing. Americans try to get things done with things. It is much like French versus American porno—in the French version a naked man scales a 40 story building and appears, uninvited outside the window of a naked woman, who, being French, invites him in for coffee, whereupon, to the consternation of horny Americans viewing in some French hotel, the two of them proceed to talk about the meaning of life for an hour and a half (where’s the sex, the practical Americans lament!!!). In the American version, pumping rapidly reaches it unoriginal conclusion, unencumbered by feeling, sensation, reaction, subjectivity, objectivity, -tivities of any sort. Cusset and Fish, both, would have been wiser to put all this de-ing of things into a cross-cultural porno perspective. It both simplifies while bringing out the essence.

Hilarious!

I would like to know what Cusset has to say about the material reception and circulation of some of Deleuze’s ideas in the US. All the current bullshit in the comments to the Stanley Fish New York Times blog post on the topic about deconstructionism — or a group of people called ‘decons’ (what? the fools leaving comments can’t spend an extra 1.7 to 3.1 seconds writing ‘deconstructionists’?)– is a typically American way to talk about poststructuralism. Derrida? Very narrow utility and writing doesn’t inspire me into thought, but his concepts have their strengths. So do those of Deleuze and Foucault, who also happen to be in the title of the book. Deconstruction is not poststructuralism. It shits me to read critical comments from intellectually myopic Americans about some stupid grad course they took 10 years ago. Decons… Fuck. They are seemingly oblivious to Fish’s point about their conceptual-discursive tools constructing them.

Is anyone going to this? I wish I could go to ask some pointed questions about Massumi’s work as Bell has this critique. Bell doesn’t seem to understand what Massumi means by ‘incorporeal’, or how when paired with ‘materiality’ we should actually, first, turn to Foucault’s work to understand what is meant, and then to Deleuze’s work on ’sense’ and the ‘event’. However, Massumi’s book is very difficult forthose without the required reading resources and instead of the ‘incorporeality of the concrete’, Massumi may have better been served by explaining the ‘concrete of incorporeality’ first.

Date: Thursday 3 April

Venue: Seminar Room 2.330, Level 2, Building 10, UTS.
Walking from Central Station along Broadway (heading west), turn right after the UTS Tower on to Jones Street. Building 10 is then on your left.
Entry is free and there is no need to RSVP

TIME: 4.00 – 6.00

Philip Bell (Media and Communications UNSW)
‘Failing ‘Theory’: The neo-Psychology of Cultural Studies’

Abstract: I argue that many of the central postulates and most popular arguments of Anglophone Capital T-Theory fail as realist Psychology and/or as coherent meta-theory. Some are idealist and ontologically fanciful to the point of incoherence. Students of ‘post-disciplinary’ Humanities need to be given conceptual tools with which critically to confront these intimidating modes of analysis.

Bio: Philip Bell is Emeritus Professor of Media and Communications at UNSW. He has published widely (over more years than he cares to remember) on Australian media and on methodological issues in the Social Sciences

The logic of “[Number of] [things] you must [activity] before you die” is found in books (about films, music, etc.) and magazines, and is a wonderful indictment of bourgeois life. ‘Must do before you die’ is a translation of ‘your life is meaningless… unless you do these things’.

The ‘must’ is meant to be read as a directive, or ‘command’ as psychoanalysts say, but it can also be read as a pleading, like a little kid begging for some sticky sugared preservatives in the shape of sub-tropical fruit. This sort of desperation opens up a savage existential chasm that operates on my guilt; I really can’t resist it. To the bourgies living in the existential desert of their own lives, I would be the one to say, “Oh, ffs… Let them eat cake.”

As Mel notes, the cultural activities and ‘things’ in this list seem to be an expression of strict bourgeois taste and correlative social formations. She argues that what the magazine article misses are the simple pleasures in life, or rather the meaning produced within situations that does not come from how exotic the ‘thing’ is. This is a kind of bottom-up valorisation of events that in turn relies on valorising a certain social machinery of valorisation. It needs a mobile disposition for selecting worthy moments from the everyday and an ethics of cultivating the way such moments accelerate and carry you along, so the everyday folds into itself and crosses some sort of threshold felt in the body and remembered in its emphemerality.

I wonder if anyone would attempt to complete the 20 things on the list? Or would they suffer a worse fate than simply holding onto the list as a hopeless goal and that is to make it halfway through the list only to realise that their activities are fueled by the paranoia of having lived a worthless life? By pursuing such monumental cliches that their life becomes a monument to this meaningless paranoid will-to-meaningfulness.

The logic of the recent film The Bucket List is a dramatisation of exactly this process. Both of the terminally-ill men who seek to complete the must-do’s on a list of must-do-before-we-die’s realise what they actually find worthy in life after all their fantasies have been realised. (Of course, Morgan Freeman’s character can’t complete his real dream of becoming a university professor because he has devoted his life to his family…)