event mechanics

I have finished a first draft of a journal article derived from my PhD; it is primarily focused on the concept of homosociality that I use and expand in the context of actual experience.

More work needs to go into the introduction section. I’d be keen to hear from others who have not read my PhD as there is a danger of not explaining points/examples/arguments enough or too much with the whole dissertation in the back of my mind.

I have decided to ramp up my quasi-scholarly work of producing articles. Expect anywhere between a few to several articles to appear over the next several weeks.

It is available here.

I have retained the Endnote fields as it is a work in progress.

Lastly, please do not cite without permission. More than likely in the atemporal database of the internet someone will find this blog post in the future and download the article. If it is published I shall make a note of the publication location here so you can find the final version of the article.

My mate Clif on Insight in an episode about Sexual Consent

One of my students found this MA thesis by Matthew J. Aslaksen submitted to the Bowling Green State University August 2006. From the abstract:

I have argued that emo represents challenge to conventional norms of hegemonic middle-class masculinity, a challenge which has come about as a result of feelings of discontent with the emotional repression of this masculinity. In this work I have performed multiple interviews that include both performers and audience members who participate in this type of music. The questions that I ask the subjects of my ethnographic research focus on the meaning of this particular performance to both the audience and performers. In an attempt to further clarify the meaning of this form of expression, I draw upon the works of gender theorists such as Judith Butler R.W. Connell as well as several popular music theorists such as Mimi Schippers. Overall I hope to show the greater significance of emo as a shift in masculine expression by that is very thoroughly based in the middle class.

I am due back in Sydney in less than a week and I start teaching summer school the day after I return. Most of my summer reading has involved getting up to speed on readings for the course. The course reader has been printed incorrectly, so there are various missing pages in a few readings (including three readings where every second page is missing!!!!!).

I have almost finally finished Eve Sedgewick‘s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. I read the first couple of chapters for my diss to understand the homosocial relations in modified-car culture. The rest appeared, and has turned out to be, extremely hard going. I thought I’d better read the whole book if it was going to be a core text in the unit. Other work on modified-car culture and gender examined how the culture basically became the domain of men, however, this is not enough to account for how it is masculine. Combined with some of Sedgwick’s work with Silvan Tomkins notion of affect I began moving towards an anti-psychoanalytic conception of gender to help understand the intersection of gender and enthusiasm. The central concept is the ‘challenge’, which I define as a rearticulation of the contingency at the heart of a problem. Other ways to talk about similar contingencies is in terms of ‘risk’ or ‘risk taking’ and virility or the capacity to act (enter Spinoza). Instead of a ‘relational’ conception of gender, I was trying to figure out something like a ‘processual’ conception. Could the masculine dimensions of the enthusiasm of modified-car culture be defined in terms of the way contingencies are processed? The affective consistency in the passage from the virtual to the actual…

I have almost finished Deleuze’s book on Nietszche. It is a very impressive little book! I have read barely any Nietszche so I don’t know how much of a ‘buggery’ Deleuze’s argument is. Reading the ‘primary’ works that Deleuze draws on, not only with this book, but in general, is a serious amount of work. I also finished reading Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime to properly understand the brief mention of his notion of enthusiasm.Howard Caygill’s Kant Dictionary was instrumental as a quick reference guide when delving into Kant’s texts. It lead me back to Lyotard’s Differend for my dissertation. (I read a lot of Lyotard as an undergraduate!) I rad a couple of paperbacks my mum bought me for Christmas; she knows I will finish them in a day so then she can read them, lol.

Lastly, I have begun reading Alain Badiou’s Being and Event. It is remarkable how similar his conception of the ‘situation’ is to how I imagine Deleuze’s notion of the event. Plus, if Deleuze was seeking to understand the nonhuman or alien of the human in the human, then Badiou’s philosophy of the ‘one’ seems to smuggle in an assumed anti-human phenomenology of human ontology. Is there one ‘one’? For Deleuze there were both virtual and actual multiplicities…

So I have finished the final draft of the essay for the art exhibition catalogue. It is for Swedish artist Karl Tuikkanen. I am awaiting to hear what he thinks!

Here is the final draft of the essay: phallic appetition. I use the ‘money shot’ to think about the relation between gender (derived from the quasi-Deleuzian Zizekian reading of the phallus) and what Whitehead calls ‘appetition‘ to develop a notion of ‘phallic appetition’. Thanks to Nina over at Infinite Thought for helping me out with some initial thoughts on the ‘money shot’.

The concepts used and argument developed in the brief essay are pretty ‘hard core’ (lol!!), but I think this is what Karl was after. Comments and critiques welcome.

Please note this is very much still a draft however, and depending on Karl’s comments I may actually delete this post and repost another version of the essay.

I haven’t quite figured out how to make anxiety and stress productive instead of depressive yet. Yesterday was a bad day for me.

I had chopped up the previous version of the diss and extracted the relevant bits for the next chapter. This basically involves most of the discussion of the development of the Street Machining scene in the 1980s with examples of the 1970s and present day scenes so as to compare. 43000 words into about 17000 words worth of argument. The shock of 130 scrollable pages on my computer screen was very different to the elation of finishing a chapter over the weekend. Too much, too much. Last night I got it down to 32000 words just by chopping out all superfluous discussions and references (to works by Whitehead and Deleuze mostly).

Lost my temper and exhausted my patience during a discussion of the new RTA advertisements on Larvatus Prodeo. The following is a less angry version of my comments. I was seething with some old-fashioned class hatred. In general, there is not enough class hatred. My nouveau bourgie intellectual lifestyle certainly would make me a target. Yesterday, however, I could’ve led a revolution.

I can’t believe that the soft liberal left would be so stupid as to allow themselves to be interpellated in the exact same way that the reactionary right is interpellated. The soft liberal left hate hoons. Hoons are loud and aggressive young men who seemingly don’t give a shit about anyone else and apparently cause all the accidents within the system of automobility. This is a mystified belief because as I have argued in my academic writing the statistics just do not support such a conclusion. However, the ads are a brilliant example of the left being manipulated through what I have called the ‘biopolitics of the sign’. (I discuss this in my diss, read Baudrillard through Foucault!) The advertisement has been constructed not to actually change road user behaviour, on the contrary, as one commentor on LP put it:

The purpose of the ads is to demonstrate to the community that the state government is sincerely concerned about road safety.

Demonstrating one is sincerely concerned about a problem and actually solving the problem are two separate things.
Well done, you stupid bourgie fucks.

Beyond the abject stupidity of the welcoming reaction to the ad given to it by the soft liberal left is the stupidity of the ad itself. The question of masculinities is an interesting one, and demonstrates the further stupidity of commentors over on LP. The ads basically seem to be drawing on decade old research that sought to connect a ‘protest masculinity’ of young working class men with particular anti-social driving practices. Besides the actual sexual reference, within neo-Freudian discourse (with a bit of Lacan and D&G) the Phallus is the overcoding signifier that organises the rest of the patriarchal Symbolic order. So the ad is reinscribing dominant gendered power relations by framing acts of stupidity in terms of a lack of access to material resources and opportunities because of a lesser position within the Symbolic order. This is the exact same disabling position that is allegedly meant to produce protest masculinities. Hence, the circuit is reproduced (if you believe this neo-Freudian bullshit). Well done, you stupid bourgie fucks.

The ad doesn’t function to change the subjectivities of the alleged target population. The problem with the ad is that it functions within a particular discourse and does not pertain to the reality of the situation. The RTA site states that the ad is meant to combat ‘youth speeding’.

Our aim is to make speeding socially unacceptable
In NSW speeding is a factor in about 40 per cent of road deaths each year. This means more than 220 people die each year in NSW because of speeding.

In addition to those killed, more than 4000 people are injured in speed-related crashes each year. The estimated cost to the community of speed-related crashes is about $500 million a year.

The ‘Speeding. No one thinks big of you’ youth speeding campaign is one part of our effort.

Doing 200 km/h on the spot while doing a burnout is not speeding. Not stopping for someone a a crosswalk to cross the road is not speeding. Drifting around a corner and arcing it up is not speeding. Most practices depicted in the ad are examples of an activity called ‘hooning’. ‘Hooning’, according to the QLD police service’s own statistics, accounts for less than one half of one percent of all accidents. There is a disjunction between the over-representation of young men in road safety statistics and the peanuts who go around doing burnouts and acting like hoons.

YOUNG MEN DO NOT CRASH AND DIE IN LARGE NUMBERS BECAUSE OF THE ACTS THE SAME OR SIMILAR AS PERFORMED IN THE ROAD SAFETY ADVERTISEMENT.

‘Speeding’ is a discursive statement, in Foucualt’s parlance, meaning ’speeding’ is a particular discourse event within language that is differentially repeated in various ways. So ’speeding’ is also present as actual ’speeding’, ‘hooning’, and all types of the other forms of practice that ‘bad’ drivers are described as.

‘Speeding’ is meant to refer to a certain kind of selfishness by which road users refuse to participate as members of traffic. ‘Traffic’ is a contemporary equivalent of the ‘panopticon’ based around controlling vectors of movement rather than distributing populations wihtin spaces through technologies of visibility. We internalise various technologies of social control organised around immanent queueing systems (this of course is some of the good stuff from my actual dissertation). Where ever there is a queue, the social technology of ‘traffic’ is in effect. These stupid kids doing burnouts and shit are being used to discipline the rest of you so you embody the social expectations of the queue whenever you are part of traffic (wherever it is, shopping centres, phone lines, some other bullshit). It has nothing to do with saving p-platers’ lives, but acting on the punitive glee the stupid bourgie fucks have for those who don’t ‘queue’ in ‘traffic’. Yes, go forth and be good ‘road users’ in every queue, especially the queues produced through the false scarcity and modes of distibution of resources within capitalism…

Bad driving is driving in such a way to not leave enough of a gap between cars, going faster than the flow of traffic, not entering and leaving the flwo of traffic properly, not being aware of other cars and the non/existence of ‘gaps’ in traffic (ie blindspots), etc. Did the ad combat any of these things? No. Waste of money. Well done, you stupid bourgie fucks.

Tackle the actual problem not segment a targeted population (p-platers) to produce a media apparatus to capture the affective interest of another population (stupid bourgie fucks) for political gain.

back to the diss…

My mate Clif, who wrote his PhD on gender and surfing, has written a series of posts on the recently premiered Bra Boys film and the phenomenon of the Bra Boys in general. His most recent post is a scathing critique of the film after Clif attended the premiere.

At the end of the film a raffle was held to raise money for a bus to bring disadvantaged kids from the Western Suburbs to the beach. The very same crew the Bra Boys have intimidated, bullied and ridiculed over the years. It’s a nice gesture I guess. But I can tell you, I wouldn’t want my kids looking up to these blokes as ‘role models’ or ‘mentors’. Their take on life is pretty fucking skewed and ugly, even though they want us to think otherwise. Maybe they should take the money they raised for the bus and travel out to the Western Suburbs and live with the kids there for awhile. I think they have more to learn than the kids they want to ‘help’. It would actually do the Bra Boys good, and show them how Maroubra ain’t that bad after all.

The westies versus surfers battles have raged since the late-1960s and 1970s in Sydney. Clif’s above remark reminds me of some of my work in my PhD. As I have found in my archival work looking at the magazines that serviced modified-car culture of 1970s the Panel Vanning movement is interesting. It folded the ‘hot rodding’ and ‘street machining’ techniques developed by Western suburbs’ hoons into the quasi-bohemian lifestyle of the Eastern and Southern suburbs’ surfers and vice versa. Both the surfers and the westies shared a desire for an increased mobility which was literally represented by the Panel Van. Now it seems this has become the inverse, at least for the surfing cultures. Panel Vanning is a cultural manifestation of the same desire for mobility that politically mobilised various labour movements around the world in the 1970s. The desire was to escape from the different labourist social contracts that protected local labour but also stifled productivity and bottom-up creativity. In affluent societies, such as Australia’s, the joy of mobility needs to be opposed to the violence of localism.

EDIT 15/03/07: Oh there have been some developments over on Clif’s blog. A few of the ‘locals’ have got restless and left comments. Then there is a comment that is absolutely hilarious. I think it is a good reminder that we should never take ourselves too seriously…