event mechanics

So are fascinators the fashion embodiment of the bourgie interestingness? I love bourgies. Here is my hottie friend Amanda modelling her fascinator at the Glebe markets (yes, yes, it is like a bourgie fortress, protected by Greenpeace spruikers and Solidarity pamphleteers).

Back in 2004 at the Caulfield Thousand Guineas horse race, fashionista Milliner Melissa Jackson said:

“I think the fascinator serves a purpose for younger women who don’t feel comfortable in a hat or don’t have the budget to buy a hat but still want to wear some sort of headdress,” she said. “But I still think a hat really finishes an outfit off best.”

Jackson seems to frame it as an economic question, but it is actually the intersection of three series — ‘comfort’, economics, and ‘younger women’. It is a classic case of being cooler than capitalism, because the commercial interests are forced to (re)commodify something that has been (re)valorised by a new generation or population of teh hip bourgies. (The commodity as object = x of culture.)

I worked a full day today. 9 to 5. Setting up for the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Basically it involved moving several thousand books available for sale for the visiting authors who will be speaking. The books were in several hundred boxes. They had to be carried down two flights of stairs (which had to be taken at a jog two at a time so as maintain some rhythm) and arranged so as to be organised for display.

Again tomorrow, even longer, but less intense physical work.

It is like doing four consecutive gym sessions. Plus I rode there and back…

Bono was singing about writing a dissertation. A gloriously ambivalent love song to a dissertation.

I just cracked this sweet sweet chapter. Owned. I am writing myself a note to remember what allowed me to do it. (Gym says 98kgs, I says 18 hour days.) Pep talk in point form for future reference.

1) Take it easy. You have so much stuff. Too much. Remember that time when the woman said she would try to fit you into her schedule and her friend said, “I bet you’d fit in my schedule.” Don’t try to fit it all in. Be gentle.

2) Be simple. Don’t think too much about the huge amount of research you’ve done. You are not writing for me or someone like me who has read everything you have read. You are not writing odes to dead French men. You may not be writing philosophy. You are certainly not writing love poems. You are writing a demonstration.

3) Rhythm. An argument flows, it is not unveiled like a missing car in a magic trick, or delivered like a joke punchline Nike tick. You can dance, you got good rhythm. Watch. Dance.

4) Smarts. All sorts. Got it. Yummy. Shit is known like a biblical bad reputation. Relax, don’t do it, when you want to… create a plateau of intensity. So intense it is its own superstition.

5) This is not a Pete Townsend song. This is not kareoke. Sure, you built this diss on rock and roll, but just play the fucking game for once in your life, please. Be good to yourself, me.

So re-posting this because I sent off and received back the essay and made the changes as per reviewers’ suggestions, and sent it off again. Nothing was wrong with the essay, one reviewer just wanted more about what I call the ‘materiality’ of romance.

I follow Badiou’s definition of love (“What is Love?” essay) and then shift the focus to what I call the material process of romance. Badiou says there is an absolute disjunction between the (nominal) Two. I say hullabaloo to that and point out that the Two shares the contingency of the event of love. From this contingency Badiou argues that love is a process, which I agree with, but I call this heterogeneous material process ‘romance’ and save ‘love’ for the event itself. Romance is an “aleatory enquiry” (45) of “the world from the point of view of the Two, and not an enquiry of each term of the Two about the other” (49). The event of love itself is differentially repeated, and thus the wonder at the heart of love is also repeated. Differential repetition from Deleuze, etc, so repeating the conditions of wonder; that is, the problematic conditions of the event of love. The ‘complex’ side of things comes in due to the attention to contingency and the problematic conditions of the event. I also posit that romance is evidence of a creative material time of systems (ie duration).

I do all this through an exploration of the film Punch-Drunk Love (and this works surprisingly well, but I also introduce the other major transformative plot arc involving Barry Egan [Adam Sandler]) and I open the essay with the opening lines from Snow Patrol’s song which captures exactly what I am talking about:

For once I want to be the car crash,
Not always just the traffic jam.
Hit me hard enough to wake me,
And lead me wild to your dark roads.

My implicit goal is to provide the basis for a non-heteronormative reading of Badiou’s philosophy of love. To do this first I slip in a litte line about how the ‘Two’ is what Deleuze would call the quasi-cause (LoS, 33) of the event of love, for Badiou it is the “noemenal possibility [virtualite]” (51). It does not pre-exist the event, but is immanent to itself. Therefore, redefined as quasi-cause, the possibility of the Two opens up. Secondly, the main focus shifts from the post-evental turth procedure (of the truth of the Two encountering the world), to the differential repetition of the event by way of the maintenance of contingency and the wonder of this contingency. The wonder may be experienced as subjective, but the contingency itself is purely cosmic.

To expand on the materiality of romance I have added some of Badiou’s ideas from the Handbook of Inaesthetics regarding dance and theatre — to make a distinction between love (dance, virtual movement) and romance (theatre, assemblage) — and Deleuze’s The Fold regarding harmony — to draw a similar distinction regarding melody and harmony in light of the function harmonium in the film to reference the ‘infinite’ through the coalescence of the diegetic and nondiegetic soundtracks.

From Clif’s blog:

A very cool, and damn motivated and inspiring bloke, called Jack Manning-Bancroft is helping organise the above day. He writes: We welcome you all to this years Indigenous Carnivale. On Saturday the 26th of May it will be National Sorry Day. We will pay our respects to those who have suffered in the past, we will pay our respects to those who continue to suffer, and we will offer nothing but respect to each other. This is our arena. This is our community. This is our time.

Running alonside Carnivale is it’s big brother AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience) – where Jack’s helping me to do some mentoring work. It’s a mentoring program that works with High school Indigenous students. All of the profits from Carnivale will go to its big brother AIME.

Music Acts include: The Herd, Radical Son, Saving Grace, Japa Boys, Indigie Femme, Aunty Wendy’s Mob, Emma Donovon, The Street Warriors.

There is also an art exhibition: Divided we Fall is an exhibition to be curated by leading Indigenous artist Bronwyn Bancroft, and supported by Sharmilla Wood and Andrew Dowding. Divided we Fall will feature artworks from mainly Aboriginal artists working in both urban and rural settings. On one level the cross-section of work demonstrates that Aboriginal art and culture is not homogenous or static, but dynamic and diverse.

Carnivale will run from 3pm till 10pm @ Sydney University’s Manning Bar. The Event will be held on all three levels.

It is an all ages event! Tickets can be purchase @ all Moshtix outlets and from Access which is on the middle level @ Manning @ Sydney University. It’s only $10 !!

I am going.

At it again. It is where its at. The at to the it et al (multiplcity).

Today the scales at gym told me I weigh 100kg, which is of course nonsense as my body mass fluctuates quite a bit depending on what I have been doing (but only by 2 or 3 kgs in a weekend). I am close to getting to my 100kg goal before going home in early June.

This bloody chapter… Am I wrong to try to bring so much stuff together? Thornton’s subcultural capital read through Bourdieu’s practical knowledge i the context of what Moorhouse calls ‘know how’ = a practical knowledge of the capacities of the scene that is potentialised as it is in-acted. I have coined the neologism ‘in-action’ to describe the process of integration of what Whitehead calls prehensions, specifically conceptual prehensions (knowledge), in relation to the events of action that I am talking about. Of course I decide to talk about all this using historical examples, so enter Foucault and his archeological method which is problematic for only dealing with ruled-based configuations of discourse rather than the mediations between abstraction and experience through affect of ‘practical knowledge’. WTF has this got to do with modified-car culture? lol…

Five songs to keep me going tonight:

5) “Dream Operator” Talking Heads, True Stories
4) “We Built this City” Starship
3) “Anyway you want it” Journey
2) “Dammit” Blink 182
1) “Finish Line” Snow Patrol

NTEU is having conferences in each State and Territory over the next couple of months for casual academics. Sign up for the conference here. They also have an online survey which I have just filled out and here is the response to one of the questions:

It is almost as if the university thinks that casual academic staff are being done a favour by being ‘given’ employment. This is complete and utter bullshit. The university very well knows that the excess labour of casual staff and the insecurity of their workplace conditions can be used to control the staff and maintain invisible workplace relations. Ideas are not separate from their material conditions of circulation be they books or in the bodies of academics. The insecurity of casual academics directly impacts on the security of knowledge.

The bourgeois middle-class credentials of academics is put on display not through cultural performances of class, but through the dire material conditions of their younger ‘colleagues’. No one is going to die (except mental health issues and suicides) and I eat and pay my rent, but I survive because I am fueled purely by the burning contempt I have for those who clearly do know better.

Indeed, the only good thing about this state of affairs is that such workplace conditions are having the effect of producing a generation of extremely angry young academics who have the determination to survive. Every single one of my academic friends is concerned about this, even those who are ‘lucky’ enough to be on ‘full time’ three year post-doc contracts. How stupid are universities and managerial staff if they don’t think an entire generation of militant academics is going to come back and bite them where it hurts?

The Invisible has an interesting soundtrack. One of the songs is Snow Patrol’s “Open Your Eyes” (from the Eyes Open album) The particular emo poetics that defines the premiss of The Invisible can be deduced from the key lines of Snow Patrol’s song:

I want you so much to open your eyes,
Because I need you to look into mine.

Such a poetic may indicate new constellations of youth. When some smart little cookie figures out how to properly translate Foucault’s archeological method into a Cultural Studies context and goes looking for ‘statements’ in the archive of popular culture one such example may be of so-called teenage rebellion or as I prefer to think of it the alienation of youth. The alienation of youth is not an alienation at all, but part equal measures an ‘escape’ built into the capitalist system to capture the youthful exuberance of young people and the opposite of an escape and that is an enduring stand against the system to paradoxically produce a little piece of the world removed from the rest. Of course ‘youth’ is not a typological category or identity but a process whereby new subjects are fashioned from those assessed to be old enough to assume the ‘freedom’ of adulthood. Being an adult is hence presented as a ‘good’ thing, which is a complete joke once the current normative life trajectory is taken into account (born-child-youth-youngadult-middleadult-oldadult-retired-dead). ‘Youth’ is a singularity that expresses the demarcation of a threshold in this process and which is distributed across a family of statements pertaining to youth culture.

The Invisible has been panned by basically everyone, but from what I know about the film (which is little) it may present an attempt to rearticulate in cinema form the next iteration of youth. The plotline has the makings of a Shakespearean-scale tragedy, involving the contingencies of conspiracy, near misses, traitors, heartbreak, and love, it is a pity that the writers couldn’t have been a little more restrained with the moralizing overcoding. Everything is about the choices made by some stupid kids. Why are these kids burdened with the responsibility of a neoliberal performance-based decisionist rationality when they are immersed in the punitive reality of ungracious adults and a system that does not allow them to make their own mistakes? This is where I think the film may go wrong. Instead of framing it in terms of “real selves” as “invisible to others, one due to his untimely death and the other due to the neglect she’s endured since the death of her mother” why not frame it in terms of the utter poverty of a culture that does not have the confidence or the generosity to allow kids to problematise their own errors in their own ways?

This is what is truly invisible: technologies of visibility that allow kids to see themselves in the world in ways that do not conform to the expectations of a society for which they are being fashioned as subjects. Do adults punish kids with their own stupidity and inability to make a better world? This is to read the Snow Patrol song not as a lament about a friend or loved one, but, even though it refers to a second person ‘you’, it is a lament about one’s self. As if How to open one’s eyes to one’s self not as an autonomous being separate from the world, but as a rich and problematic fold of the world. To give one’s self a perspective on the world by giving one’s self a perspective on one’s self. I know I shall be forever grateful to my parents for allowing me to make my own mistakes and then supporting me when I inevitably did.

(Is it possible for Snow Patrol to get any cooler than they already are? The video of Open your Eyes is from Claude LeLauch’s C’était un rendez-vous the same film that inspired the Getaway in Stockholm people to make their film (as I discovered when I interviewed Mr A in Stockholm). I think the Snow Patrol people must be car dudes considering how much of their music is car related!)

Now, if only I could sleep…

outfit

From Friday night.

More fun was had.

Outfit was a complete success

Images from my mate Peter, see some more on my flickr.

Last night I went out with some crew to a place in the Sydney CBD called Retros. I like the skanky university pubs better compared to the sleeker, massive and more mainstream city clubs, but it was like a double retro flashback. Double flashback not only because of the music (refrains galore, blocks of affect) but cause it was like I was 18 or 19 and back home going out with the dudes in my suburb. I would wear a suit (I had 5).

Had a good walk home for some supplies and then pushed on to St Peters to pick my bike up before riding it home again. A good 2.5 hour transverse of the city. No gym today.