Trying to find a post on Mel Gregg’s blog, I came across this! How Awesome. I so am Fox Mulder.
| You are 43% geek | |
You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.
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Yeah… Riots.
Some dudes stacked it in a stolen car. (Didn’t they know that coppers have to call off chases if they drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road? Awesome tactic.) Anyway, so there were allegedly riots. The SMH ran with the below picture. I would to, otherwise all you see are empty streets and a couple of dickheads. Where are the hundreds of people? Maybe they are confusing ‘people’ with ‘people seen.’ A bit like confusing ‘page loads’ on a website for ‘actual visitors.’ Talk it up SMH. Maybe everyone was at Tropfest? I believe the ABC more then the SMH.
NSW police superintendent John Sweeney, from Macquarie Fields, said the situation was tense but police remained in control at all times.
“We did not engage this conflict,” Supt Sweeney said.
“It started in response to a fire, however police were met by two groups within the community who took it upon themselves to hamper police in their work.”
Oh, so police fight fires now? Anyway, here is some video. The Sky TV reporter contradicts Sweeney. ‘Police were in riot gear ready to go at the first sign of trouble,’ and ‘when the police left the tension died down.’
Here is something sensible, but the award for the smartest-person-on-the-night goes to this local:
“They’ve been taunting the cops all day long to come and they’ve succeeded and the pigs are f—ing stupid, man. If only they knew that the only way to prevent this happening is if they didn’t take the bait. My mates wanted me to help them hurt a couple of pigs, but there’s no way. I don’t want to go back to jail.
“For the past 12 years the cops have been coming here throwing blokes into the back of paddy wagons and taking them on joy rides where they beat the shit out of them. It’s no wonder everyone who lives around here hates the f—ing cops.”
Nerding it up tonight. Taking it easy. Went out last night to celebrate one of my mates, Matt Tilbrook, submitting his Ph.D. during the week, and tomorrow is Tropfest. Matt is a superstar science dude (here he is winning some shit, pg 4). For as long as I have known him — since the start of high school — he has always been a maths and science wiz. His thesis was in material science and the research project involved making ceramic-metal composites, bashing them repeatedly with an $80,000 hammer and then mathematically modeling the crack formation/propagation (sidetrack: Deleuze, LoS, the ‘crack up’!;). “Cyclic Fatigue in Functionally-Graded Interfaces.” It took him about 4 years and is 480 pages. That is hardcore. He published 9 articles during those 4 years and it looks as if he might be heading overseas to take up one of the three postdocs on offer or changing gears and turning to industry for something more exciting. He is going to do whatever he does exceptionally well.
So. Tonight. Spiderman is on the telly. Classic nerd-made-superhero goodness. Just finished watching it. The flick holds a special place for me. I once took an art-house-foreign-film loving girl on a date to the Innaloo megaplex. We saw the first film. It was a moment, I think, for both of us. Later on, we saw the second film. Feelings of nervousness, apprehension, and excitement resurfaced with the sequel. We were, by then, a ‘couple,’ but seeing Spidey 2 felt like we were out on a date again. The first film was our second date. The first date had been to an art exhibition opening. I am a child of the suburbs and I find it hard to tolerate the pretensions perpetually on exhibition from sections of the ‘art’ scene. The rendezvous with Spidey was an opportunity for me to show her a whole different map in the street directory. It was (allegedly) her first time to a non-independent cinema. First time. Crazy! Megaplex and Spiderman. Popcorn and frozen Coke. ‘Here I am.’ There I was. Memories. Now I even go to Tropfest! haha… Move on.
On revisiting Spiderman this evening I got another impression. The Spiderman franchise is well known. Sam Raimi is a fuckin legend. He would have to be to buck the trend of spectacularly shithouse sequels (S = 7.4, while S2 = 7.9). I used it as my main example in the ‘sequels’ paper I wrote in Sweden…
Anyway, that is besides the point. The tagline for the flick — With great power comes great responsibility — is bloody interesting. Of course the film can be read as an allegorical warning for the US administration… But what about us mundane peeps? The ones with no ‘great’ power? There is much talk of becoming a ‘man’ throughout the flick; what sort of ‘man’ will you become? What if we are all posed as-per-Spidey in a posture between various tensions and forces? An experimentation. Finding a processual balance. Go with the to and fro flow through the rhythms of urbanity, through the too-human rhythms of love and loss, through the rhythms of responsible affirmation or negation. “It’s all I have to give,” he says to Mary-Jane in the end (friendship). Give all you have to give and keep on swinging. Even the final showdown with the Green Goblin is premised as an ethical problem. The ethics of Spiderman. Cool…
Mel Gregg posted this to the CSAA email list. It is a speech delivered by a humanities academic to a Quadrant dinner reprinted in The Australian newspaper. Danny replies to Mel’s post in his usual bitingly accurate manner.
[;; Just like Yogie, the brown bear, here is "Wink, the brown eye" ;;]
Besides the modernist implications of ‘new’ in the ‘New Humanities’ tag — harking back to a time when time was actually history and not a contemporaneity that must scream past these ‘Old Humanities’ types like a mum’s taxi load of schoolkids withering in 40 degree Australian summer heat and annoyed their sticky hands are away from their Playstation toggles — I take it as a compliment that I don’t do any of the things listed by Associate Prof.essor of His.tory and Pol.itics at Uni.versity of Woll.ongong, Greg.ory Mell.euish (who is perhaps bitter that he has not moved into a Professor-of-History-and-Politics ivory tower at an established sandstone university? As if I give a fuck, but for some people ‘another tug in the listless bourgeois circle jerk’ is far more important than fucking). He writes:
Compare some of the key characteristics of cultural studies and the New Humanities.
The focus is on popular culture and everyday life.
You don’t need to be able to read a language other than English.
You don’t need to know about any society other than your own.
You don’t need to know anything about any time except the present.
You don’t need to know anything about religion.
I am not sure what he is ‘comparing’ this list of attributes with? Perhaps it is a fossilized, that is to say, hypostatic fine old-wine conception of how successfully successful humanities graduate can be plugged in to the contemporary colonial war-machine. Where we become evil Time Lords with the ability to disseminate the ideals determined by our own language, society, historical period and religion so they can be rough cut and sowed throughout time and space as if they were western democracy’s wild oats in our weaponised testical-Tardis. I apologise for not being part of this atemporal global sex machine that happily goes around fucking every fold that doesn’t immediately collapse and smooth itself out in the face of world war four’s faciality — Double-Yah! Yah! Yah! All such yes-men are paranoid Swedes. Yah! Apologies to the Swedes.
I can speak car-dude, so maybe that rules me out? Plus my archival work on hot-rodding goes back longer than 30 years. I am not stupid enough to even think about religion, so that one is cool. And! My own society? I wish! “Welcome to Glenselvania Waters — my own society.” Isn’t that a computer game already or what? (Of course it would rock to have one’s own society. Imagine the currency!?!? In celebration, I would have the face of anyone who died in the struggle to make this a better world, like all those right-wing politicians and academics, but only on bills larger than 100 Glenjamins, because only people with bills larger than a 100 in their platinum-card-filled dead-baby-seal wallets would give a fuck about fallen right-wing comrades.)
Besides the fact we work to resist the constitution of micro-social colonial-machines, I wonder why the old-fart refusal of ‘Contemporary Humanities’ (much more accurate than ‘New Humanities’) sparks up such ire in the eye of the contemporary ‘new’ breed of academics?
Anyway. Reading such vitriol can feel like you snuck into a metal-working shop where a 100 boilermakers have 9″ grinders on 100 pieces of conduit and you are afflicted from all sides by ultra-hot sparks of molten metal as if it were biodegradable confetti being flung at your newly married person as you exit the dainty overfilled church of John Howard’s nuclear family wet dreams where everyone is a nun wedded to conservatism as if you were in the MIDDLE of the bourgeois circle jerk parading as a hentai-specialist amateur internet porn star rendered comically caricatured big-eyed anime with wide-eye fascination and soon to be pink-eye infected as a Quadrant dinner load of semen flicks across your face missing the unsteady, but ready glass under your chin. The order: Be a good humanities academic! Not just a good academic, but an academic of the ‘good’ humanities. The right humanities. Make sure to catch the molten-metal/biodegradable-confetti/groaning-cum as it is sparked/thrown/jerked-off over your now inscribed soul. Have the Old Humanities found themselves a ready Other not just to fuck from behind and from the inside in impregnating old-school colonising glee, but cum over in right-eous ecstasy, right down to the last groaning orgyasmic shudder that ripples through the crowd at such Quadrant dinners when they attempt to out-wankerise themselves by giving each other a hand coming to rhetorical terms with the screaming-mum’s-taxi-load-of-kids contemporaneity and ‘Contemporary Humanities’? Today. “It doesn’t matter!” Maybe? Who knows? You get the itch from the clap. At least an itch to start a heroic feel-good-movie slow clap. Clapclapclapclapclapclap. Salute! Be upstanding to the outstanding one-eyed love-beast of Old Humanities’ one-eyed world view. Cheers, yeah. *Chink* Good speech! Bravo! *Chink* Cheers, yeah. Now drink that sticky glass.
Gulp!
I’ve got the A-Team tv show theme song playing, maybe just in my head, no, through the computer. Safe! Rock and roll. Go team! w00t!
Anyway. Both sides have their drawbacks. We argue the grass is greener on our side, but the Old Humanities think we are smoking it. Perhaps all the old-school old-boy back-patting is perhaps evidence — in an Empire-esque Negriandhardt-ish the revolution-has-already-happened or is-happening sort-of-way (but not ‘happening’ like the dude down at the Glebe markets wearing the t-shirt advertising The Motorcycle Diaries thinks the revolution is “happening, man” and a totally excellent situation to pick up first-year middle-class USyd Arts students to teach them how to fuck like animals on ekkies and half a coin of speed while all three of them listen to 180bpm happy hard core through three separate Christmas-gift iPods) — of the tremendous impact of ‘Contemporary Humanities’ on the contemporary humanities because it is, in fact, contemporary, and the back-patting is actually sorry souls SOSing each other as their already-dead-but-don’t-know-it-yet collectivity of corpses are ridden with the cancer of right-eousness that particularly afflicts their bellicose lungs and they are actually attempting to rattle loose and hock up a loogey, but only gives them the sour and slightly salty metalic taste of bewildered satisfaction and a 1000 plateaus of past Quadrant dinner masturbatory hentai semen.
I think that is my take on the situation. Their colonial-love-machine loves the smell of discursive napalm in the morning, but don’t realise that it is they who are slowly getting toasted-old-school-anthropology-sacrifice-on-the-spit-turning-roasted by the liquid-fire on-fire Contemporary Humanities.
Gun gansta-sideways.
*Bookah!*
[;; Wink exits stage left-field in slow motion to a crazily-obscure crazy-hip shuttle-bug tune that Tarantino will use in his 4th film or, at least, to the soundtrack of his teeth brushing in the morning as he mouths off to the mirror hiding his medication ;;]
[Fade to painted black.]
(in reply to sdv’s post in the comments here.)
Steve,
My use of ‘choice’ was rather banal, and quite possibly ‘wrong’(!!), and comes from the Laerke paper:
“The axiomatic choice of the more geometrico for Badiou is a site for an event popping out of emptiness, an ‘absolute beginning’ on the order of emptiness.” 91-92
What was I talking about? There is never a choice _between_ differences before a choice conjugates differences into the less-different of resemblances and identity games — thus producing a number of examples of what I called a singular thread of difference (in my other reply to the questions, here). I am deriving that position from Difference and Repetition, AO and ATP.
The Dogmatist makes the act of choosing (conjugation-resemblance-selection) easy and equivocates everything into prior refusal/acceptance categories of the initial axiomatic of refusal/acceptance (‘absolute beginning’), which, indeed, after the absolute beginning of the initial axiomatic, has nothing to do with the singularity of any on-going current or to-come future eventuality. Once a choice has been made, for Badiou that seems to be it, done, no more, you are set. From Badiou (again quoting from the Laerke paper, pg 91-92):
“This is why I have a concept of absolute beginnings (that which necessitates a theory of the empty) and of singularities of thought which are incomparable in their constitutive gestes (that which necessitates a Cantorian theory of the plurality of types of infinitude). Deleuze has always maintained that by doing that, I fell back into transcendence and into the equivocity of analogy. But if it is in fact necessary to sacrifice immanence and the univocity of Being (which I do not believe, but it is not important here), for a political revolution, for an amorous meeting, for an invention of the sciences, or for a creation of art to be thought as distinct infinities, under the condition of dividing and incomparable events, I will do it. [...] If, against the ascesis of the fold it is necessary to maintain that the fidelity to an event is the militant
recollection, the transition of which remains obscure, and to reduce it to its actuality as a generic multiplicity having no virtuality beneath it, I will do it. I do it.”
If the virtuality of the various machinic-assemblages that produce the dogmatist’s subjectivity are closed off, blocked, or potentiality exhausted by a reactionary actualisation — they are already-always actualised as part of a state of affairs that includes the selection of a singular thread of difference derived from an axiomatised choice that has already been made (rather than in the process of being made, which is quite different) — then the ‘militant recollection’ is exactly a re-collection of those specific intensities that enable the reproduction of the dogmatist. Hence, one would end up as a cloned re-collection of the intensities of Zizek 
.
I am working on a longer post that looks at the difference between Badiou’s conception of Love compared to some stuff from Deleuze. Thinking about ‘love’ is probably a luxury that cannot really be afforded at this stage, but I find it fascinating. One quote from Deleuze kind of relates to where I am coming from:
“Love’s a state of, and relation between, persons, subjects. But passion is a subpersonal event that may last as long as a lifetime [...], a field of intensities that individuates independently of any subject. Tristan and Isolde, that may be love. But someone, referring to this Foucault text [Uses of Pleasure], said to me: Catherine and Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, is passion, pure passion, not love. A fearsome kinship of souls, in fact, something not altogether human.” (“A Portrait of Foucault” Negotiations, pg 116)
I am not a regular dreamer. I don’t mean in terms of not being a garden variety utopianist. Nor do I mean my dreams are so crazy that surrealist Dali would’ve been shocked into a soberiety of normativity. I mean I don’t regularly remember dreaming. Well!! I was rudely awoken far too early this morning by a dream I was having. I am sure many of those who were slaughtered in the classic 80s schlock A Nightmare on Elm St film series would’ve loved the ability. It is an ability I didn’t know I had. I don’t think it is actually an ability, but it is a very bizarre experience.
It must have something to do with a book I am reading, which I heartily recommend to EVERYONE (well anyone interested enough to read my blog!). It is called 101 Reykjavik, by Hallgrimur Helgason. And, no, I have not been smoking crack and playing word games with the graffiti in the public toilets. It is a novel, thus:
Hlynur is a true product of our postmodern global culture. Well beyond slackerdom, he lives at home with his mother and depends on social welfare. He’s a quick-witted and articulate young man, and there’s nothing wrong with him — other than a total lack of ambition, an off-kilter sense of morality, and a nagging set of existential woes.
An Icelandic novel. It reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Every sentence is an idea that explodes. The text is an expressive incendiary. It is like each of my thoughts had become a pyromaniac in the fireworks factory of my imagination.
I was hooked from the first page; in fact, hooked from the very first word: “Anyway.” Ha! Those who have spoken to me in person, or online via MSN or something, will probably have figured out I deploy ‘anyway’ as a discursive segway enabling device. Change the topic. Anyway…
Hlynur’s utter lack of ambition and ambivalence to the conditions of his “existential woes” resonates with me. One of the recurring problems I have with living in this world is the massive gap between being ‘successful’ and doing what is possibly the right thing to do. They are not the same thing. The tension between a fear of sliding up/down the social mobility snakes and ladders game and the horrific violence wrought upon the world through our very ‘success’ is literally unthinkable (in the sense that no matter how much we would like to be able to subtract the externalities of a situation away from the situation itself to decide on the ‘truth’ the event evelopes (as Badiou would have us do), the global complexities always elide a ‘universally’ sufficient or even competent understanding).
There is no better example than the current state of global politics in western democracies. In most countries half of the population realises that the current state of affairs just cannot continue while the other half are locked in a mindset that privileges the most successful and efficient facilitators of the current global quagmire.
This book is one expression of being in-between and not really knowing what to do about it (a bit like having both Blogger and Haloscan comments on a blog:). I think there are many people of my generation who feel like this. It is the near-pathological social lethargy experienced at a time when ‘urgency’ has become a fashionable academic buzzword for those who flirt with an ethical radicalism, or it is the compulsion to do something — that something needs to be done — in the face of the horrific stupidity of the world around us. I often feel both tendencies at the same anxiety producing time.
Anyway, I am going back to bed 
. And, thank you, Helene, for giving me this book.
From dread, walking (relating to my previous K-Punk and Microcosmographia of Cunts posts):
Rather idiocy than dogmatism
See you there, yeah?
Well Dogma.
K-Punk’s latest post is a manifesto for stupidity rendered radical. He completely ignores the situatedness of what Badiou conceptualises as an ‘event’ while embracing the universality of what Badiou calls a ‘truth.’ He expresses the paranoid desire of a free floating dogmatist-machine that populates the assemblage of K-Punk. He is subtracting the world from itself before he has encountered the event, and such a closing down and closing off is silly. From an interview with Badiou:
“For complex reasons, I give the Good the name “Truths” (in the plural). A Truth is a concrete process that starts by an upheaval (an encounter, a general revolt, a surprising new invention), and develops as fidelity to the novelty thus experimented. A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity (which I call his generic humanity). To become a subject (and not remain a simple human animal), is to participate in the coming into being of a universal novelty. That requires effort, endurance, sometimes self-denial. I often say it’s necessary to be the “activist” of a Truth. There is Evil each time egoism leads to the renunciation of a Truth. Then, one is de-subjectivized. Egoistic self-interest carries one away, risking the interruption of the whole progress of a truth (and thus of the Good).”
The subject of truth to an event is immanent to the event itself. A fidelity to a truth stems from the descision to bare witness to its inherent ‘infinite’ and ‘universal’ singularity of the event. Anything else is an Evil. If K-Punk lives and thinks by the non-evental axiom of ‘dogmatism’ he ceases to be open to the constant, complex flows in which he is bound. The possibility of an event — determined by the fidelity to a singular truth it envelopes — is continually displaced by a rabid and subtractive ‘egoistic self-interest’ overcoding of the world.
Or there is another possibility. K-Punk is already the subject of a truth-event. What are the conditions of this event? No idea; he doesn’t say. However, he does proffer an axiom:
“Briefly, it involves commitment to the view that there are Truths. One can add to this, the view that there is a Good.”
Which, if you subtract all the ‘radical’ hubris of K-Punk’s writing, leads me to believe that his ‘event’ is reading Badiou. So what we have then is K-Punk’s fidelity to the Truth of ‘Truths’ and the Good of a ‘Good.’ Let’s call this the Badiouist fallacy, the adherents of which I can only imagine will increase in number as ‘Badiou’ inevitably garners more fan-boys. The fallacy involves subtracting the opinion from the event of ‘Badiou’ until all we are left with is ‘Badiou’ itself. In other words, the world is subtracted and what is left is a mere caricature. Although there is nothing specifically Evil about the axiomatisation of this fidelity…
The problem remains of the specific construction of K-Punk’s dogmatism, he writes:
No, I am not tolerant.
No, I do not want to ‘debate’ or ‘enter into
dialogue with’ liberal democrats, PoMoSophists, opnionists, carnalists, hedonists, mensheviks, individualists….
No, I don’t respect you, nor do I solicit such respect for myself from you.
The defenders of tolerance, debate, dialogue and respect advertise their bourgeois credentials with such advocacy. I’m sorry, apolologists for exploitation of labour, but, no, I don’t see it as my duty to provide the enemy with a space to express itself. You already have the global videodrome, the judiciary, the police, the psychiatric establishment and the most powerful armies of the world on your side. If that isn’t enough, you could always make the effort to build your own profile and audience so you can add to the chorus of approval for the Satanic-worldly. (Too much like hard work? Thought so.)
Be under no illusions: differends, incommensurability, language games, forms of life, very far from disrupting the Dominant Operating System are that operating system in person. Zizek is right about Rorty being right: for all their apparent philosophical wrangles, the political upshot of the theories of Derrida and Habermas (and one can presumably add in Lyotard here) is exactly the same: defence of the liberal values of respect for Otherness etc etc.
Yes, I want to leave all that behind. One of the scandals of Badiou’s thought is to announce the blindingly obvious: difference is not suppressed by the established order, it is its banal currency. Fragmentation, deconstruction, cut-up are the very stuff of which mediocracy is made.
The key point K-Punk makes is that “difference is not suppressd by the established order, it is its banal currency.” I whole heartedly agree with him here. Capital’s banal currency of ‘difference’ is actually one of Deleuze and Guattari’s points: “capitalism forms with a general axiomatic of decoded flows. [...] The axiomatic itself, of which States are models of realization, restores or reinvents, in new and now technical forms, an entire system of machinic enslavement. [...] Capital is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones.” (ATP, pg 453, 458, 463, orig. ital.).
The voice of resistance is an expression that counter-actualises the ‘realization’ of these flows — so it is, first, coded with a meaning, and then, secondly, creates a plane of transcendence through the overcoding function of the ditribution of difference in horizontal and hierarchical relations of power. However, Badiou’s ‘militant’ progresses from specific, material situations that locks on to a novelty — a multiple marked, i.e. coded, by a differential relation — introduced into the world by way of the event. The error of K-Punk’s thought is to think ‘difference’ in such a naive, molar way, as if he has no choice in the matter. His master, Badiou, already separates different truth-events into those belonging to science, art, love and politics. Further, Badiou takes it to the molecular level:
“Indeed, the function that assigns to every mutlitple the degree of intensity of its appearing is fundamental a differential function. It identifies a given multiple through the systematic comparison of the intensity of its appearing-in-the-world (its being there) with the intensity of all the other multiples that are co-present in the world. That this comparison is ultimately quantitative (an order of degress) conforms to everything that science (precisely) tells us: the correlation of worldly phenomena with the purity of their being is marked by the necessity of measurements.”
– Alain Badiou (2004) “Afterword” Think Again, pg 234, orig. ital.
K-Punk appears to confuse his simulacrum of fidelity — the ‘dogmatism’ refrain — with the a-nihlation and refusal of difference — the welcoming of an entropic equilibrium. On the contrary, difference must be systematically measured and selected. A choice has to be made; choosing the radicalism of ‘Badiou’ does not necessarily lead to the absurd relief of not having to make anymore choices. The belief in a single choice allowing for the dismissal of difference itself is utter nonsense. A refusal to be complicit in the machinery by which ‘capital’ deterritorialises and conjugates decoded flows is understandable, but this machinery is quite separate from difference itself. Difference itself is in-different to itself.
You get my drift?
“In Marx, time begins to come into view as the measure of labour (a Hegelian step forward with respect to the deficiencies of modern science), but, step by step, as the course of class struggle and the abstraction of labour asserts itself, time increasingly becomes interior to class composition, the the point of being the motor of its very existence and of its specific configuration. The process develops so that the maximal temporalization of the labour process (and of the production process) leads to the maximal re-appropriation of all the spatial conditions of existence. When work has become mobility, pure and simple mobility — when, that is, it is time pure and simple — then it is the possibility and actuality of the constitution of the world. O’Connor and Hossfeld, Paul Virilio, Jean-Paul de Gaudemar have all recently come to this awareness in writings of various degress of importance — an awareness which is alone adequate to the development of mature capitalism: mobility comes to be the very definition of the proletarian class today.”
– Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, pg 35-36.
“Work has become mobility.” I wonder what Negri means by this? I have a good idea, but it is not clear in his text. What he is trying to do in this text (the first part of Time for Revolution originally published in 1981) is anticipate and counter the tendencies highlighted here by McKenzie Wark:
“If there is a reason why the left appears to be struggling to keep up with the pace of change, it may be that the forces traditionally identified as ‘left’ no longer represent the frontline in the class conflict that, in Marxist thinking, determines the forward movement of history. Much of the agenda of the left seems either to be about resisting change completely or accommodating to it in ways that preserve the interests of certain constituencies, particularly those skilled workers in manufacturing and in the white collar public sector that belong to left wing unions.”
– Celebrities, Culture and Cyperspace, pg 277-278.
What I don’t understand is Negri’s use of the term ‘mobility.’ It is certainly related to the rise to dominance of the ‘service industry’ over the manufacturing sector. The translator to Time for Revolution, Matteo Mandarini, makes the point in an enlightening footnote to his introduction:
“The dominance of the service sector over manufacturing in many pf the most advanced capitalist economies is evidence of how the difference in the cycles of production and reproduction increasingly fall away, ot how their priority is inverted, so that ‘so-called reproductive sectors now take on a central role’ (Negri, Macchina tempo, p. 211). The claim is not that manufacturing disappears in postmodern, post-Fordist production practices: ‘Quantitative indicators cannot grasp either the qualitative transformation in the progression from one paradigm to another or the hierarchy among the economic sectors in the context of each paradigm.’ What is meant is simply that: ‘Today all economic activity tends to come under the dominance of informational economy and to be qualitatively transformed by it’ (Hardt and Negri, Empire, pg 281, pg 287-288).” — Matteo Mandarini, pg 267, fn 22.
So what I am thinking about is the link between ‘mobility’ and the ‘informational sector’ in the context of the shifting sands (or not) of ‘left’ theory, or maybe just ‘left’ appreciations of the contemporary.
Strong and weak techno-utopiasts have really focused in on the ‘informational sector’ side of these tendencies (e.g. Wark’s book). My interests — the car stuff and mobility — are a lot more ‘material.’ It is not as if materiality itself has ‘vanished into air’ just because the ‘immaterial’ modes of reproduction have become dominant. Part of the argument I develop in my thesis is that there is a gap between Negri and Hardt’s argument to do with the relation between biopolitical reproduction and the dominance of the informational sector, or, rather, there is a gap in the prevailing approaches to the problems they isolate. My argument is that the material circulation of labour — that is, the mobility of labour — also needs attention. For it is here that car culture and panics over road safety become sites of contestation over the biopolitical reproduction of mobile subjects, and panics over ‘p-platers’ are specifically panics over the successful incorporation of ‘youth’ into these regimes of mobility. The road safety and licensing industries are perceived to have failed in their specific task to reproduce docile mobilised subjects and is where my thesis is ‘political’ in the traditional cultural studies sense.
It is very weird, because little attention has been paid to these (at first glance, very narrow) issues within cultural studies, but at the same time my argument is somewhat obvious and, beyond the near-fetish for techno-utopian understandings, the issues themselves — automobility, incorporation into regimes of flexible labour, spatial governmentality, etc. — are the basis of contemporary everyday life.
Edit: I started writing a response in the comments section to Christian‘s question (posted in the comments), when I realised my question was far too long and better served in the main-post field.
Christian asks, “I thought the question of mobility was old news?”
Watchew talkin’ bout Christian?
Let me open with a quote from Virilio:
“The first important revolution on the technical plane is that of transportation, which favors an equipping of the territory with railroads, airports, highways, electric lines, cables, etc. It has a geopolitical element. The second revolution which is almost concomitant, is the transmissions revolution, including Marconi, Edison, radio, television. From this point on, technology is set loose. It becomes immaterial and electromagnetic.”
He then goes on to say there is another revolution, of miniaturisation. This third revolution produces a ‘hyper-active man.’ My interest, for this post, are the first two revolutions. Virilio is wrong to suggest that technology becomes immaterial and electromagnetic without qualifying the fact that such transmission technologies were added to the technologies of transportation, but did not completely replace them. We still have technologies of transportation, and I will take this as being obvious. What we are left with is a hybrid form. ‘Mobility’ now, in the most general sense, is both material and immaterial.
Part of your question, Christian, relates to the usefulness of my questions. Hasn’t mobility been done before? Short answer: not really. The question of ‘material’ mobility has not been sufficiently answered, and I would even go as far as to suggest the right sort of questions have not even been asked properly yet. There has been far too much focus, ironically, on the static elements of mobility — the ‘to’ and the ‘from’ and even the ‘passing through’ — but not much on mobility itself — the ‘passing.’ Only very recently come in for serious attention. John Urry has written a book on mobilities and Vincent Kaufman has published a much needed, but rather disappointing, book on the concept of ‘motility‘ (mobility potential) and there are others.
What is also very interesting about your question, Christian, is that you imply there is a ‘new.’ The funny thing about the ‘new’ is that it is pretty subjective. If you invert Virilio’s revolutions, every ‘new’ person who comes in to the world by being born into an advanced capitalist country undergoes these revolutions all over again. They need to be conditioned, like the rest of the urban biomass (including us), to accept the conditions of automobility and whatever. Damn near every person in every western country has to undergo this process. The transport and media transmission revolutions for every human being are almost concomitant and they are continually ‘new.’ That is the starting point of my argument regarding the p-platers, etc.
There is another thread to your question: that ‘mobility’ is not contemporary, i.e. it is ‘old.’ (Now I know how repressed old men feel going through a middle-age crisis, haha;) Cultural Studies’ relentless fascination with the contemporary is carry-over from its anthropological influences. However, the problem then emerges, how do you define the contemporary? What is the limit of contemporanaiety? The first, obvious answer is the ‘now,’ what is currently happening. Although, if you want to get a grasp of the emergence of the contemporary — what I have been doing with the Van Wheels and archival Street Machine research — then it is necessary to trace the contemporary back to when it was ‘new.’ That is, how long has the ‘contemporary’ existed? Virilio locates the emergence of the first revolution in transportation more than 150 years ago and just because it emerged 150 years ago does not mean it is not part of the ‘contemporary.’
What I still don’t understand is what Negri means by ‘mobility,’ as he seems to equate mobility with time; maybe he means some sort of Bergsonian proletariat? Dunno?
Oooh, House of Flying Daggers beckons!
Today I went through every single thing I have written for my PhD over the last two years or so, synthesising everything that is at least half-useful, which is about 63,500 words and 180 pages. Now I’m scared, because that means I must have written about twice that on stuff that is entirely useless and not related to my thesis, including other writerly activities like non-related papers and blogs…
I imagine that the figure of 63,500 odd words should be chopped in about half (maybe a bit more than half) considering its half-usefulness, meaning I have only 45-50,000 words to use. Hmmm, shithouse. The problem is that the 63,500 word sum of writing does not include any interview or ethnographic work. The word count is going to explode when I include this stuff.
To any PhD’ers out in the blogoshpere reading this, how long do you imagine your thesis will be?
