event mechanics

Marking again. Working full time and marking sucks. Marking like a bastard to get it done before marks are due in. Like a BASTARD! I take a 2nd/3rd year essay with me wherever I go in case I get stuck in a queue or something and can mark for simple thing like punctuation, structure, etc. I’ve got a week left to do it all.

Just had one of my first year students answer a question that asked them to “comment on the intersection of [two theories]” exemplified by a newspaper article they were given two weeks before the exam.

The student’s first line is: “I’m not sure there is much to comment on the intersections between [two theories].” [sic]

Oh dear…

EDIT: Later the same day…

Just had another cracker.

Part of the question: “In your answer, refer to how the construction of the religious ‘other’ might be functioning in…”

Part of the answer: “The religious ‘other’ can be described as any religion who on the census form would need to choose the ‘other’ box due their religion not being one of the options.” [sic]

Oh dear…

EDIT 27/11/08: Still marking. Another cracker, made me chuckle!

“Two types of globalisation — I’ve forgotten Damn! But 1: creates no individualism. Takes away ‘rights’ and we all becoming one. The other is the opposite.” [sic]

Yep…

I am not sure about the protocol for this, probably not that ‘professional’, but I am not that professional anyway (allegedly). Considering I post the worst of my feedback I think it is only appropriate to post something from the other end of the spectrum. The below is an email a student sent me and I have removed her name. I feel happy to have had some really good students who understand they need to mobilise their own enthusiasm for intellectual and scholarly development to achieve their best.

I just wanted to take some time and e-mail you to say thanks for a great (l33t) semester in Consumer Culture. It truly has been a great subject, and I really enjoyed researching and writing my assessments, which makes the semester that much better.

I’m sad that I won’t be seeing you around next year, I guess after having taken three classes with you over the last couple of years your classes have become a large part of my definition of ‘uni time’, and are classes that I think I have become so comfortable in that it started to feel like a group of friends rather than a lecture and listen session.

I have taken a lot from your teaching methods… which I think in my first class with you (English, Text and Writing) was very different to the experiences I’d had with other tutors.. but the more classes I took with you (Contemp. Pop. Cultures & Consumer Culture), the more I realised that you invest your interest in students that invest interest in their own work -and that is just fantastic, and helped me realise that the more interest I invest in my work the better quality work I will produce. Most of all though your classes were FUN, and with some topics that could inititiate argument, you kept thinkgs light and energitic. I think that UWS really needs more tutors like youself Glen.

Having said all that though, I wish you all the best in your new job with those Ford Magazines, I guess with a car-fanatic boyfriend I might see your name here and there quite often?

I am still awaiting the official feedback from the university, but I am stoked to have had some of this more personal feedback.

A quick note about a problem that has emerged again in my students’ essays. I encourage students to search the massive online journal databases to find material for their essays. Other students have also figured out that books can be read through Google Books and even Amazon.com. A minor problem that I am seeing is that students are treating these sources as online publications. From my perspective, they are not online publications. M/C Journal is an online publication while The British Journal of Criminology, for example, while it may appear online through the journal databases, is not an online publication. TBJoC is a print publication distributed online as a PDF (and potentially via one’s printer). On the other hand, online news sources are a good example of the sort of confusion that emerges. Media institutions like the ABC has its own online news stream and newspaper publish articles online, and these should be treated as online publications.

Students referencing lecture notes has been a problem in almost every course I have tutored or taught. Lectures are meant to be a condensed presentation of a given topic or problematic that is congruent with the aims and outcomes of the course. One of my problems is that I often try to discuss far too much material, and I am trying to figure out ways of avoiding this. I like the 2 hour lecture format, and when I have run 3 hour seminars for ultra-condense MA or summer school courses I have often presented a 2 hour lecture that synthesizes 3 one hour lectures.

But I have been thinking about why students reference lectures. I think it may be because they do not understand that the lecture is a presentation of a whole bunch of other people’s ideas and arguments. Perhaps they believe that the lecturer has come up with all the ideas they are presenting? I don’t know. Very rarely have I actually discussed my own research and this has been for mixed results. In my classes this week I may remind students that lectures are meant to be a prompt to follow up other material. For this to happen I will be extra diligent providing references in the lecture summaries I post online for the unit I am teaching. This has come up because I have started marking essay plans from my first year students, and of the students who have actually made a pretty good effort, most reference the lecture notes for whichever week and correlating essay topic question they have chosen to write about.

I am writing the next lecture for the unit Consumer Culture to be delivered on Thursday and I have been thinking about Lazzarato’s event-based conception of consumption and the relation between consumers and worlds. I found these great store displays while doing the weekly shop yesterday that’ll hopefully allow me to discuss the aesthetics of consumption, less in terms of branding (that comes later in the course), but more in terms of the production of ‘worlds’.

Lazzarato’s use of ‘world’ does not literally mean some sort of terraforming exercise, but more in the sense of territorialising exercise. The world is an event and it could be of a ‘large’ or ‘small’ extension. The above image captures mere fragments of sense (perspective on self-identity), that could be assembled into a lifestyle, an event of a larger extensive and intensive scale.

The constant process of the consumer market to inflect becoming through ‘choice’ relies on a singular habitus, which may involve multiple identities. In other words there is only a single order of difference, rather than a second order difference of difference; the virtual and the actual are in a near constant relation with differences manifest between virtual-actual relations over time (generational change) and location in the networks of capital distribution.

One of the implications of this world-building thesis is that the ‘grid’ of sense that frames the world in the processual character of perspective can change and mutate with the flux and fashions of consumer culture. Surely advertising, as a communicative apparatus of capture, best succeeds when it works to create new possibilities in the lives of consumers. Not material possibilities in some quasi-Marxist sense, such as entrepreneurial opportunity, but possibilities for what can happen in the world. (This is what Deleuze and Guattariu meant when they lamented in WiP? how advertising has taken over the production of concepts.)

What does all this mean? Think about how a new product comes on the scene. The product is advertised not simply according to capacities or qualities that the object has, but the advertisements serve as a discourse-based incorporeal infrastructure for a ‘world’ within which those qualities and capacities matter. The advertisements serve as quasi-cause for this ‘world’ as it reconfigures what matters, and consumers take note and begin working towards this mattering, then the world within which the consumer subject and commodity object exist does matter as such. The incorporeal (sense, event, world) has material effects, or rather the effect of the incorporeal is material in nature.

This is not simply about what matters in the world as some kind of social sensory filter; these material reconfigurations guide people in the world and show new potentialities for (consumer-based) action. Think of the new rage amongst tech-geek minded inviduals for sub-notebooks (ASUS Eeepc, etc.), they are not as capable as other computers according to the prior discourses and worlds within which computers mattered (not as fast, not as powerful, etc.); yet, they are bought because they can ‘do’ things that these other computers can’t do. So what? They are fulfilling a need in the market for ultra-portables and constant ‘switched-on’ net-based interface, surely? Yes, they are. But they are also educating and habitualising a new cohort of consumers of what is now possible in terms of the mobility and connectivity afforded by sub-notebooks. An actual world is produced that accelerates the tendency towards the ubiquity of mobility and connectivity…

I bring all this up because Negri and Hardt in Empire discuss how politics should be understood as the production of new possibilities. If this is so, then the advertising-based communicative apparatus of capture is currently the most efficient form of politics.

I have finally started rewriting and editing large sections of my dissertation for the purposes of producing journal articles. The impetus is actually the course I am teaching this semester as the co-cordinator of the unit, Jame Arvanitakis, demanded I include some of my writing in the reader! I didn’t really have anything suitable already prepared except in dissertation form. So this is only a good thing as it it is forcing me to reassess some parts of my thesis and streamline the argument and evidence for an article-length publication.

The most useful part of my research is the section on the history of the Summernats and the commodification of enthusiasm in the scene of modified-car culture. The main problem at the moment is how to condense the material from my dissertation. It takes me the first two chapters of my dissetation to introduce the concept of enthusiasm and then a further three chapters to outline the shift I want to focus on in the article. This is about 55,000 words. So I need to extract a 8,000 word version. Fun times!

In the unit I am teaching this semester I set a chapter by Lazzarato on Political Entrepreneurs as one of the readings in the week’s class on post-marxist conceptions of consumption. From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life was also set as a secondary reading.

It was a fascinating experiment from the point of view of teaching as it was the first time I had ever set a reading or been involved in a class where I didn’t have a good sense of how the tutorial classes were going to play out. I found it much easier to pay attention to student presentations, where instead of a sense of professional duty, it was a genuine sense of interest that held me captivated. Discussions often went in unpredictable and interesting directions. Is this what is feels like to have a good teaching experience?

I had great fun talking about McDonald’s ‘Happy Meals’!

Kim has an interesting post on the right to privacy over at LP and mentions defamation. Over the fold is the outline of the lecture of defamation I gave for the journalism course I taught last semester. This post should not be considered legal advice and if you are facing defamation proceedings or wish to instigate them, then I suggest you consult a lawyer. The authoratative text on this in Australia is Mark Pearson’s “The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law” (3rd ed, 2007).
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Marx’s conception of the commodity in part is concentrated on the idea that the surplus value extracted from the labour of workers is obscured through processes of commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism occurs when consumers believe that commodities are objects in their own right, and the value of a commodity is calculated relative to the rest of the ‘market’. For example, when you purchase something relatively expensive, like an electronics item or whitegoods, you do some market research and figure out what different models offer in the way of features compared to their price. You don’t calculate the value according to the character of the labour used to produce the item, the environmental impact of the item’s manufacture or constituent components. In my Consumer Culture classes for this week I challenged students to ‘think like marxists’ and figure out ways to combat commodity fetishism. Obvious examples include Fair Trade coffee and No Sweat shoes.

As a thought expereiment I asked the class what they would do if they had a barcode scanner that could scan bar codes and instead of telling you the price, it would provide you with all the relevant information regarding the manufacturing and labour practices of the company that produced the barcoded item. This was only a thought experiment until a student pointed out to me that her phone can read bar codes (here is a blog post on it that I found via a google). The phone can link a barcode to a url. What if concerned consumers made a wiki to report on the labour (and perhaps environmental) practices of companies that could be accessed by other consumers in shopping centres and the like simply by scanning a barcode (or UPC)? Would be people do it?

My students suggested that some would but others would find the process too time consuming, and because time is money, they don’t want to waste their time. I suggested to them that considering that they are all ‘workers’ to some extent, that they would benefit from only purchasing products that guaranteed sufficient workplace-based labour rights and relations.

Slashdot has got around to linking to OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) a brain-computer interface. Reviews of the NIA have been floating around for a while. The review on hothardware.com is interesting because in the introduction the impact of the device is framed in terms of existing interface devices:

When we first heard of OCZ’s interesting “brain-computer” interface a couple of years ago, we couldn’t help but have visions of The Matrix. The very notion of controlling a computer with the mind conjures up images of exotic, fictional technologies from sci-fi movies. We were also slightly skeptical about the NIA’s ability to improve our gaming experience, even if it were to work as advertised. Don’t get us wrong, controlling the computer hands-free with our mind sure sounds neat, but we really like our mice, keyboards and gamepads. Perhaps we’re old fashioned but there is at least one member of the HotHardware team that thinks the keyboard and mouse are the only input devices you will ever need, well at least for the foreseeable future.

I find this interesting because it indicates the emergence of a gamer habitus (albeit PC gaming). This section from the conclusion also reminds me of a section from Jennifer Daryl Slack’s essay on The Matrix and ‘becoming-adolescence’:

While we spent most of our time testing the NIA with fast FPS games where response time is of the utmost importance, it can be just as useful in other genres. In a RTS, you could use the NIA to bind build orders and unit commands. With a RPG, you can finally launch magical abilities the way they were meant to be cast, with your mind. The NIA is certainly not limited to games either. The highly versatile configuration utility and driver software allow the NIA to be used in any environment, including the Windows desktop. The NIA could become the center of your experience or it could just as easily act like a third hand, it’s up to you.

Unfortunately, the NIA isn’t without caveats. Before you can enjoy the unique gaming experience provided by the NIA, you’ll need to slog through day upon day of training to build up your skill with the device. Thankfully, training often involves nothing more than playing games. This is definitely the hardest game controller to master on any platform. The need to calibrate before each session is also a bit of a drag. However, if you persist, you’ll be rewarded with a truly unique experience. How many people can claim they won a game of Pong without using their hands or feet?

Training is not meant to be something that takes ‘days’. From Slack’s essay:

Learning With Eyes Closed
Resisting the prison of the everyday Matrix requires knowledge, information, and training. Education is generally acknowledged here to be crucial. One has to know how to fight, how to fly a helicopter, how to leap from one tall building to the next in a single bound, and so on. Members of the resistance acquire this knowledge plugged into a computer downloading programs. In his initial training session Neo is hooked up to learn in this fashion. In this fantastically speeded up and transformed version of neurolinguistic programming, a mind not only learns, but a body becomes something knowledgeable. In this way, Neo learns Kung Fu in a matter of mere moments. Then strapped into their chairs, he and Morpheus fight in virtual space. In this fight, we witness the transformation of Neo from a skinny, night-owlish computer hacker to a trim, muscular; and extraordinarily skilled Kung Fu artist. One does not need to learn the old way, where learning Kung Fu involved a lifetime of discipline and effort, of training and apprenticeship, of success and failure. One learns by sitting back and letting the machine do the work.
[...]
[Learning] in The Matrix happens to you, almost without exertion. You sit passively in a chair and the learning comes to you. What remains of exertion is slight. Downloading is exhausting, both on the mind and the body. Tank takes Neo through ten hours of “training” at his first session and is impressed by Neo’s endurance, declaring with delight, “he’s a machine.” But what we see is Neo sitting in a chair, eyes closed, getting “jolted” with knowledge. He has sort of a momentary hangover afterwards that doesn’t appear to be particularly taxing or to have any long-term effects. (pp. 18, 20)