event mechanics

Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one’s own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be “blamed” for one’s own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external “evil.”

There are a few different conceptions of ressentiment and its wikipedia page is pretty good at outlining the different definitions. As the above brief description explains, ressentiment is a projection onto the world of a painful relation of one’s self to one’s self. Most people have focused on the question of identity, of the distribution of ill will and the construction of the ‘external scapegoat’. Deleuze isolates three characteristics of Neitzsche’s ‘ressentiment’:

Deleuze interpreting Nietzsche’s conceptualization of ressentiment discusses three characteristics. First, there is the inability to admire, respect or love. Second, there is passivity. Third, there is the imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities and perpetual accusation. (Deleuze, 1983).

I have encountered ressentiment in myself a number of times and I have documented it here in different ways. Here are the top posts from my blog. There are many other instances on the topic, but not in such a sustained way. It shows that I have not really changed the way I understand ressentiment.

1. Singular Complementarity, June 17, 2005

In this post I discuss how falling in love is not a relation between two people, but the folding of two already infinitely folded zones of intensity/sensation. In the second half of the post I warn of a danger.

There is a gamble in the meeting-gesture. This, of course, is the danger.

There are folds that are so worn and habitualised they become creases that scar the surface and will never be sufficiently folded in any other way again. They are the dead areas of the surface and within such proximities there is only darkness. Even if such dark areas are already infinitely folded they operate as blunt surfaces or jaggard formations of folds. These surfaces can become weaponised gestures that are weilded when the soft comfort of complementary folding becomes the acrimony of the crease. Each gesture ceases to be a meeting and becomes an attack of weaponised surfaces. The brightness of midday is eclipised by the shadows that form at dusk. In the end, the surfaces can be so dark even the attacks become empty and instead it simply becomes the meeting of shadows. However, here and now nothing is final.

Joy can only be reclaimed by a gesture, a meeting that forms complementary folds at the speed of sensation. If all one ever brings are weaponised surfaces that are blunt and jaggard and which carry the expectation of an anxious folding to be wrought upon and by the Other so as to render a complementarity, then joy is short lived. Eventually all that is left is a blunt and jaggard surface.

Rather than the meeting of supple folds, a love born of ressentiment is born of complementary dead zones of intensity. People turn these hard jaggard surfaces of themselves to the world as a defence. The only antidote is more love and the strength and courage to envelope an other’s folds into the supple folds of your heart.

2. Now, letting go, July 5, 2005

This post was inspired by pretty epic breakup (got dumped in the US) and the song Mr Brightside by The Killers.

Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
‘Cause I’m Mr Brightside

The Killers track captures in a beautiful lyrical manner the required disposition for engaging with the world again after having one’s heart broken and allowing one’s self to refold the world into one’s self anew. I am currently listening to this track on repeat as a kind of hipster mantra for warding off feelings of ill will. In the post I use the analogy of the Adam and God ‘just touching’ image of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and offer a somewhat heretical reading. What if Adam was ‘letting go’ of God? Anyway. ‘Letting go’ is a process:

Sure, part of you dies, and it is gone forever, only to be resurrected in un/pleasant dreams. But there is a joy in ‘letting go’. There is. The world is refolded into one’s self. Instead of a short circuit of desire between your self and an other, the circuit opens up to the world. Another part of the world is born and that is what needs care. The eager to-come of Destiny that never does, for it is always becoming on the bright side of our souls. [...]
The pain of letting go and the necessary disaffection that allows one’s self to let go of one’s past copy. We are always somewhere in between. Between two copies of ourselves. Letting go of you means letting go of my self. [...]
To allow ourselves to refold the world into our selves again. This is what I now welcome and care for, like a wandering stranger whom I have chanced upon: the new stranger of my self in the world.

Wow, that last sentence is killer. I am a pretty good writer sometimes!

3. produce openings on the world October 27, 2007

I return to the common theme here of welcoming the world into myself, producing openings on the world. I draw on the famous symptomology of post-war US culture David Riesman of three ‘character’ types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. Riesman’s three character types are interesting because of their processual nature; they are not innate traits, but capacities of subjectivity evident only through interaction. I have large block quotes from the text to describe what these are, but the relevant bit is towards the bottom of the post, where I describe a woman of ressentiment:

Sometimes the clash between characters exists in a single person. How to produce openings on the world that aren’t filtered through the tortured, guilt-ridden ‘gyroscope’ of the ‘inner-directed’ character? It requires so much work and patience. Sometimes too much. Sometimes it is necessary to give up and accept the fact that being ‘inner-directed’ produces a resource of a sort of strength, which is entirely destructive, but which at least allows the person to exist in the world and continue struggling in impossible situations. When all recourse is exhausted then it is terribly sad especially when beautiful and intelligent people lock away the world from themselves and will never know what it means to be part of something much larger. It is terribly sad when someone becomes this character, and cannot face the world.

I do offer a description of a kind of feminist Übermensch (for purely selfish reasons, because they are as sexy as fuck):

There is nothing sexier than a woman who knows her place in the world. This does not mean she subjugates herself to patriarchal norms. Rather she uses that knowledge to orientate herself in creative and life-affirming ways. Normally this requires an infrastructure of education or the grace of intuition.

4. she left the bit with the most toast crumbs, September 5, 2009

In this post I explore the more complex problem of producin new openings on the world so as to enable new foldings of the world to ‘take’ or ‘develop’

Anyway, the counter-intuitive point I have been trying to think through is the way the development of new intimacies can awaken both old and new estrangements. Folding new and exciting elements of the world into the composition of my subjectivity has somehow made me reassess my solitary existence as instead being one of loneliness. When you meet new people or rediscover old friendships you are not simply becoming intimate (at whatever degree from romantic to almost sibling-like and everything in between) you do not simply form a relation with a person as an object, but a person as a fold of the cosmos and folds of folds, whole universes of meaning.
All of this has happened over a matter of weeks and is a bit surreal, so I have come to a number of tentative, but nevertheless sufficient stop-gap conclusions.
1. The miasma of estranged intimacies and intimate estrangements I am currently experiencing is a powerful force. ‘Miasma’ in the sense of the ancient Greek ‘pharmakon’ (from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived), which can be both poison and medicine depending on the measure. Ethically I need to harness this force and use it to soberly affirm something good in the world. In this circumstance, the ‘good’ is mostly personal in character.
2. I need to be brave to affirm this force. I am brave, almost to the point of stupidity sometimes, so that is ok.
3. I need to learn to appreciate new estrangements and new intimacies whatever their composition, both the potential (that is, imagined future states of) disappointment and excitement are part of this. I am trying to do this through measures of active ‘letting go’ and ‘embracing’, rather than a paranoid-reactionary ’slipping by’ or ‘clingingness’.

There is a complexity to this process, one that requires care and, above all, patience, to let the other person or people fold the world in their own time.

5. letting go, embracing, the world

So most recently, how to ward off my own ressentiment:

I am pretty hardcore when it comes to enduring what life throws my way. It is easy when I feel contempt for most of the world and all the stupidities that it contains. I guess it is easier to think about what I won’t do.

I offer a list of axioms for warding off ressentiment, the full descriptions of each of these are in the blog post:

I won’t stop falling in love.
I won’t stop rolling the dice.
I won’t fret about not understanding.
I won’t stop inviting people into my world.
I won’t stop listening to special songs.
I won’t stop writing my poem.

What I have forgotten about ressentiment is the temporal dimension. There is a contradictory movement of dispising the present while being incapable of imagining the future or past, because any kind of temporal relation is derived from a projection of the present, ie ‘This painful present will continue” “This present is a repetition of the past, nothing changes.” This is why it is so hard to imagine a new opening on the world and a different way of relating to the world, because you become literally locked in time.

To break free of ressentiment means to break time itself; to go to war against all possible futures and all possible pasts that suck life out of itself.

Here is the original image on Flickr of a presentation by Christian Fuchs at The Internet as Playground and Factory conference.

I wonder where Christian is on McKenzie Wark‘s diagram of what Jodi Dean called his Grand Unified Theory.

Wark’s diagram represents social classes/subjectivities not in relation to the means of production, but in relation to the labour of capitalising on opportunity.

What happens, or what does not happen, should be what concerns us: philosophers sometimes pride themselves on their ignorance of world affairs, again like watered-down Heideggarians, no matter how hostile they think they are to him, pretending that all that history and politics stuff is so, like, ontic, we’re working on something much more important here.

Nina over at IT writes on what she calls the dialectic of nature, which I read as a critique of the recent internet-based philosophical movement towards some kind of realism.

Of course the ontological precedes the political, but philosophers can never have a properly ‘ontological’ discourse. Badiou is kidding himself with maths. I don’t understand why apparently intelligent people with some understanding of what they are talking about actually want to return to some sort of bullshit ‘realism’ with the implicit goal of being ‘ontologically democratic’.

FUCK OFF!

Most of the discussions are frightfully self-referential and pedantic, as if describing exactly what someone else says with a slight variation to agree or disagree with one’s own position is an activity that can be described in anyway approaching philosophy.

CONTEMPT!

Show me what it does, otherwise it is like any other hype-event alienating me from my precious reading time.

This is interesting and a little upsetting. I have just become aware that Gavin Atkins of The ShadowLands blog on the Asian Correspondent news service site posted a blog post containing what, in my relatively educated, but non-’legal expert’ opinion, is a defamatory imputation that damages the reputation of myself and, what is the most upsetting, my mother. Here is the original blog post:

An article by Ross Gittins suggesting university students are not worthy welfare recipients has predictably not been well received in some quarters.

You might find the first paragraph of this rebuttal somewhat peculiar:

“I was helped out by my folks for the final year and a half of my PhD in a direct way. My mum also used to send me cash every now and then during my candidature so I could buy some broccoli.”

until you look it up.

Here is my response I just posted to the comments:

Hi Gavin,

That is my blog you link to.

My mother actually sent me money to buy vegetables, which she called ‘broccoli money’ as a play on my childhood dislike of broccoli. She did not send me a little cash every now and then so as to buy drugs.

To put it mildly, I don’t really appreciate the imputation of your blog post. Perhaps you should read another blog post of mine to help you understand the possible implications:
http://eventmechanics.net.au/?p=1134

I would’ve commented earlier, but my blog software only picked up your trackback now. I understand the cut and thrust of blogging sometimes has untoward effects, so I’d appreciate you keeping this post but appending a comment that clarifies that my mother did not provide me with money to buy drugs. This way those who have already read the post will know you were only joking.

Thanks.

Bloggers or journalists who bridge the gap between new and old media should really become more aware of legislation and common law pertaining to questions of defamation.

EDIT 20/10/09: Looks like the Asian Correspondent is recruiting high class bloggers like JF Beck RWDB who also took a shine to one of my posts.

EDIT 20/10/09: Gavin has apologised, so I am content.

I missed my blog’s birthday yesterday!

It is five years old!

Hurrah!

Of course it has been reshelled once, when I moved from blogger to wordpress a couple of years ago, but most of the content is there.

The title of this post from a poem I am working on. For me it expresses the way we form relations with the world around us both in terms of intimacy and estrangement. What follows is an improvised meditation on the way I am trying to grapple with a feeling of loneliness and relations of different intimacies and estrangements with the world, through Deleuze’s concept of the ‘fold’.
One of the most useful concepts in the complete Deleuzian armoury is the post-Kantian conception of the fold. The two main ways the concept has been understood is to think the fold as one way to grapple with the complexity of the event and the second is to rethink subjectivity as an extension of the cosmos. To combine them: We are each an event; that is, a fold of the cosmos that ‘develops’ (‘develop’ in the sense of an old analogue photograph would develop) complex intimacies and estrangements with the world as the lived duration of our existence. In different ways, we welcome and refuse, back and forth, over and over, various elements from our existential ecology on various levels that begin with the pre-personal all the way through to the most arcane and perverse fantasy.
A fold is not just a spatial gathering, each fold has a temporality. This is where it gets crazily complex. Derrida’s concept of hauntology captures some sense of the way we relate with folds that have endured long before we ever came into proximity to them. They have an existence that haunts the present with the duration of what has already been. Similarly the Derridean notion of the ‘to-come’ captures some sense of the way we sometimes come into proximity with events that have started happening but have not yet ‘developed’ into such a form that is definite. There is a sublime power of hope in the gap between the eventual and the event. The complexity arises once you realise that the temporality of events follows no discernable pre-established order, and certainly not some echo of socialised modernist, familial or ‘adult’ temporalities. The future of one event is already situated in the past of another of a different temporal scale and rhythm. Then you introduce the power of imagination motivated by the sublime hope of the eventual to embrace or discard various potentialities between events, and the distinctly human capacity to intuitively apprehend the patterns of potential and turn them into possibility…
Tonight I am thinking about the fold in terms of intimacy and estrangement, because as I have been writing a book review with all my tools of scholarly practice, my music, my apartment and my cigarettes to keep me company, I couldn’t help but feel the gnawing sense of loneliness encroach upon what is my relatively solitary existence. Solitariness has been discussed by various commentators as the withdrawal of communal efficacy in the day to day lives of most people; this has never much concerned me, community in and of itself is pleasant but often feels like a distraction. Instead of a simple dialectic of public-shared and private-restricted as being able to define the relation between solitariness and loneliness I have realised that I am very good at managing various configurations of intimacy and estrangment with the world around me. Recently there have been some disruptions to this, and I am trying to figure out what the implications are, of how much of the flow I should be going with.
For example, many of my friends and colleagues have noted that I share a lot about my life either on this blog, or my Facebook account, or now on Twitter. Some even imply that I overshare. But my sharing is a performative feint. What I share is view on some events of my life — what Deleuze in his book on Foucault would call the production of a visibility. (Very simplisitically, oversharing then is a kind of overexposure.) The composition of my sharing produces a kind of matrix of intimacy and estrangement in relation to and from me. On an affective level, I work to implicate readers in the event of my to-ings and fro-ings. I have often experimented, especially on Facebook, with different types of status update. All this may seem a little bit demented, even sociopathic, and maybe it is, but it developed almost as an accident of always being both remaindered as ‘other’ but included as ‘us’ at the same time. Lived experience is very different however, because it is not merely reportage on events, but the real engagement with future compositions of intimacy and estrangement with as-yet indiscernible folds of the world.
Anyway, the counter-intuitive point I have been trying to think through is the way the development of new intimacies can awaken both old and new estrangements. Folding new and exciting elements of the world into the composition of my subjectivity has somehow made me reassess my solitary existence as instead being one of loneliness. When you meet new people or rediscover old friendships you are not simply becoming intimate (at whatever degree from romantic to almost sibling-like and everything in between) you do not simply form a relation with a person as an object, but a person as a fold of the cosmos and folds of folds, whole universes of meaning.
All of this has happened over a matter of weeks and is a bit surreal, so I have come to a number of tentative, but nevertheless sufficient stop-gap conclusions.
1. The miasma of estranged intimacies and intimate estrangements I am currently experiencing is a powerful force. ‘Miasma’ in the sense of the ancient Greek ‘pharmakon’ (from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived), which can be both poison and medicine depending on the measure. Ethically I need to harness this force and use it to soberly affirm something good in the world. In this circumstance, the ‘good’ is mostly personal in character.
2. I need to be brave to affirm this force. I am brave, almost to the point of stupidity sometimes, so that is ok.
3. I need to learn to appreciate new estrangements and new intimacies whatever their composition, both the potential (that is, imagined future states of) disappointment and excitement are part of this. I am trying to do this through measures of active ‘letting go’ and ‘embracing’, rather than a paranoid-reactionary ‘slipping by’ or ‘clingingness’.

I recently had a discussion with a mate over some beers about intellectual property. My mate was worried that I ‘give away my ideas for free’ on this blog. My mate intimated that there are examples where ideas that at the very least had been ‘inspired’ by my writing on here was actually finding its way into other people’s work. My mate would not elaborate with examples. This is a very serious matter within academia because it goes to the heart of what an academic or scholar is meant to do. It really doesn’t worry me, in the way my mate was talking about it, however. Beyond professional contempt, and even the ethical question of using someone else’s labour for your own purposes, is a bigger problem for me that bankrupts intellectual culture.

My immediate response to my mate was to point out the difference between having the capacity to create and being able to think an idea. Most people who have read a bit of Deleuzean philosophy or maybe some of the secondary literature will be able to understand the sort of posts I write on here and that my mate was talking about. Being able to think ideas and understand the arguments developed here on my blog is of course what I hope will happen. Otherwise there would be little point!

Sure I’ve taken the time to read half a library’s worth of books, as have most people of a similar age with a scholarly disposition, not because I want a job out of it*, but because I actually enjoy reading. I find almost nothing as pleasurable as engaging with the challenge posed by the text; yes, I am an epic geek. (That is what I find so frustrating with some contemporary philosophy in particular, it valorises obvious ideas and seems content to dress up regurgitation. The challenge becomes a bullshit rhetoric of defending a position or term, rather than working towards something.) I feel sorry for those people who do not experience this pleasure (and I meet these people everyday!) as books provide a near infinite resource. When it is someone who has read a whole bunch of stuff, then reads my blog and finds the arguments or points made worthy enough of being included in their own work, but keeps this connection to themselves, I feel there is a far more profound problem than some bullshit to do with whose ideas are used by whom and when.

Intellectual practice is always distributed across many acts of creative thought. Inspiration can come from anywhere. It seems to me that the ‘paranoid’ academic misses out on this. To appropriate ideas is not inspiration, there is little transformative potential in appropriation. An appropriated idea is liquidated of the capacity to bridge between thinkers and the virtual structures of thought assembled by the thinker-architect and the power of their imagination. Imagination is like a muscle, it needs to be exercised, otherwise it atrophies.

*That is not to say that I don’t want to have a proper punt at academia at some point and for me to do that I need to publish. I have started this process of churning out journal articles.

I had a look on my server’s site stats to have a look to see how many people downloaded the draft article I uploaded on homosociality and found it remarkable how may visits I have from not only non-Australian locales, but non-English speaking places, too.

Russia? Ukraine? What?

From an interview at Tsunami Magazine with Richard Kingsmill:

Well, just because something is being played everywhere else on mainstream radio, does that mean that it doesn’t deserve a place on Triple J? Deserve the airtime?

Well, we’ve got a brief; we’ve got a charter that says that we should provide young Australia an alternative to what they’re getting elsewhere, to a certain degree. That’s a big part of our charter – that we don’t just mimic what is already out there in the marketplace. Mind you, it’d be good if commercial stations that get new licenses could also abide by that…but that’s another conversation point.
Coming back to those artists that are being played on commercial stations elsewhere: Kanye West, Lily Allen, Ladyhawke, Cut Copy, the Presets…all of those acts were started by Triple J. All of those acts got their first airplay on Triple J. All of those acts have had absolute consistent airplay on Triple J – every one of their songs have hit the mark, and we’ve played every single album they’ve put out, or tracks thereof. Now, with the Sneaky Sound System stuff, we didn’t support them in the beginning. We felt like that band was going to go somewhere else. That band was designed for commercial radio. There was no need for us to go there.
So anyone that criticises us for not playing them – just because they’re Australian, just because they’re independent: fuck you.

Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time has been criticised by various people for the lack of female vocalists. My friend Mel Campbell writing for the awesomely titled The Enthusiast described it as an embarrassing shortcoming. Mel argues that there is a “danger [...] that people use these lists to create an imaginary musical landscape that subtly omits the contributions of women.” And extends this critique to isolate a further “danger [...] that radio music directors can look at these lists and think, ‘Clearly people don’t want to hear songs by women.’” Mel then analyses the distribution of female workers across the main organisational structure of the expanded Triple J enterprise, which includes radio, magazine, television, but curiously no web? The organisational structure of a given istitution that serves as part of a scenes infrastructure is important. Various popular culture and music scholars have highlighted the importance of various kinds of businesses in the consiution and robust survival of a given scene.

I want to draw a connection between the critique of the most recent Hottest 100, mostly from the Left, and the more common critique of Triple J, mostly from the Right, that argues that Triple J is ‘out of touch’ with youth. I thought someone needed to defend Triple J. Firstly, the critique of the gendered nature of the Hottest 100 of All Time is problematic, not because it is wrong, but because I so far haven’t read anything that goes far enough. The Hottest 100 of All Time is merely symptomatic, the structural conditions of the social milieau to which Triple J mostly belongs needs to be critiqued. Secondly, the naysayers who argue that falling listener share in the radio ratings is evidence of a failure of Triple J and key Triple J personel is essentially flawed. I don’t think the people that make such criticisms are stupid, they just have accounted for the shifting terrain of the media landscape and how young people use various mediums to get their media.

Considering I cracked 30 earlier this year, I can’t be considered youth anymore or even young adult. Kate Crawford’s book Adult Themes explored the problematic location of people like me that haven’t yet assumed the specific roles associated with being ‘adult’ and yet retain tastes and cultural practices that are more ‘youth’ than ‘adult’. It means that I am writing about Triple J not as part of their target audience, but from somewhere on the periphery. I grew up listening to the Jay’s, my listening practices began just after they became a national radio network. I can distinctly remember laughing with my brother as the old Triple J announcer/personality and ‘resident dag’ Maynard Crabbes offered commentary while Pseudo Echo’s Funky Town played: “Guitar solo! weeeEEEheeEE” “Synth solo! waaAAAhaaaAA”

I spent many nights of my youth with the radio on as I drifted off to sleep. It was my connection to a world bigger than the comfortable and loving surrounds of the familial home and mainstream tastes of my mates that I with which I grew up. It was an opening on a world that I had little idea about. At this particular point in time, Triple J was almost solely a radio station charged with the responsibility of providing an alternative to the commercial radio stations. Various youth subcultures were given ‘air time’ and the more generalist shows played music that was at the time literally ‘alternative’ to the other radio stations and often produced by ‘independent’ record labels.

The alternative music generes were almost always collapsed into ‘alternative rock’. ‘Indie’ music hadn’t yet become a genre and actually referred to the structural conditions of music production. Now ‘indie’ is a genre, as is ‘alternative’. The structural conditions of the production of music has largely been elided as the big labels realised they could buy or create boutique labels in house for the purposes of capturing a slice of the various indie/alternative niche markets. This quasi-Marxist critique of the relation between Triple J and the music scene needs to be revisited in light of the Unearthed competition, created largely in response of the Indie-fication of the mainstream.

As Will Straw and other popular music scholars have argued there has long been a gendered binary within popular music between a feminised ‘pop’ and a masculine ‘rock’. The ‘games of distinction’ belonging to rock that valorised masculine cultural qualities of music, such as toughness, loudness, frankness, etc. were mapped on to the genre of indie/alternative as signifiers of the separation from the feminised ‘pop’ mainstream. (This argument is not entirely accurate the ‘mainstream’ side of the genedered binary had the big hair/cock rock bands of the 1980s and early 1990s.)

If we follow the post-structuralist feminsts in their separation of gender and biological sex in the production and distribution of difference throughout cultural formations, then the problem with the Hottest 100 becomes slightly different. The Hottest 100 of All Time is explicitly sexist due to the lack of female vocalists and preponderance of all-male ensembles. It would seem that Triple J remains properly configured around the sexist binary that defines appreciation of indie/alternative popular music. But if the question is posed in terms of gender and non-hegemonic masculinities, then the critique of the sexist character of the Hottest 100 of All Time loses some of its sting. A simple perusal of the list will demonstrate what I am getting at.

The other potentially more damning critique is that Triple J is ‘out of touch’ with its target audience of youth. Ratings figures are mobilised to demonstrate Triple J’s falling share of the radio listener pie (hmmm, tasty!). Radio listeners? How much of the Triple J enterprise is focus on the radio? If the Jay’s have lost some of the percentage share of the radio listeners in their target markets, then this is good thing. Listener numbers have been dropping for years, which is why ethically bankrupt people are on mainstream radio to try to grab attention anyway they can.

Triple J should be understood as a brilliant example of an old media model adapting to the new media landscape. I have often listened to podcasts, particularly of the nightly current affairs show, Hack. They have expanded into television with Triple J TV. Are the ‘ratings’ for these other media ‘channels’ taken into account when Triple is critiqued rather simplisitcally in terms of raw radio listener numbers? Nope. The other radio stations are dying slowly and fucking painfully for the rest of us mildly-sane people. The expansion of the Triple J brand into cross-media opportunities afforded by ‘new media’ is a very interesting model for the rest of us who may work in an old media industry who has yet to grasp the distributed character of brand management. The biggest success story is Triple J’s Unearthed competition. It largely uses popular music radio’s ‘old media’ function to valorise some music over others through exposure connected with the ‘new media’ function of connectivity. One of my students from a few years ago was in a band that won the NSW section of the competition and I witnessed exactly what happened in terms of exposure and new opportunities.

The contemporary Triple J has a strong and resonant identity across Australia, if not the world. Triple J is an icon of popular music and youth culture. It has inherited a cultural values and practices that emerged when a radio station was merely a radio station. There is a burden of cultural inheritance that has stumped many a canny media operator, my own experience is in the magazine industry certainly supports the thesis that many managers don’t really know what to do, even yet, after 10-15 years of the net. Triple J is not just a radio station, yet it has reinvigorated the best elements of the function of a radio station in different ways across a number of media channels.

Earilier discussion here, here and here.
It is clear that in his book Prince of Networks on Bruno Latour and on his blog, Harman is trying to make room for a concept of time as a series of cinematic-instants. He argues against an allegedly Bergsonian conception of time in Deleuze’s work that is organised around duration. One of the things that struck me about Reassembling the Soical was its distinctive Deleuzian tone. From Latour’s Reassembling the Social:

A terminological precision about network
The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago. And yet the tradition in which we use it remains distinct in spite of its possible confusion with two other lines. One is of course the technical networks—electricity, trains, sewages, internet, and so on. The second one is used, in sociology of organization, to introduce a difference between organizations, markets, and states (Boyer 2004). In this case, network represents one informal way of associating together human agents (Granovetter 1985).
When (Castells 2000) uses the term, the two meanings merge since network becomes a privileged mode of organization thanks to the very extension of information technology. It’s also in this sense that Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) take it to define a new trend in the capitalist mode of production.
But the other tradition, to which we have always referred, is that of Diderot especially in his Le rêve de d’Alembert (1769), which includes twenty-seven instances of the word reseaux. This is where you can find a very special brand of active and distributed materialism of which Deleuze, through Bergson, is the most recent representative. (129)

This is here as a note to which I shall return to try to answer the question, If Harman presents a Heideggerised Latour, what would be a Deleuzian Latour?