So I got my art exhibition essay in yesterday. On time too, which made the organisers happy. They are also happy with my approach, which was basically a Deleuzian take (although I don’t reference or mention Deleuze in the essay) on Weber’s conception of ‘charisma’ placed in the context of the disciplinizing function of the system of automobility and the post-industrial cultural economy of contemporary car culture. ‘Charisma’ was as close as I could get (within the word limit restrictions) to what I call ‘enthusiasm’ in my dissertation. It was my first piece of commissioned writing work not for car magazines and I enjoyed writing it. I got to dip into a world I know very well and frame a ‘problem’ and then address it. It is quite different to most of the writing that appears here, and quite different from my dissertation writing for that matter. Something like a cross between my diss writing and my magazine writing. Same sense of irreverant Gen-Y/X humour and hopefully the charm of my magazine writing but with the scholarly erudition and complexity of my diss work. They said they are going to do an edit, and hopefully when they have a ‘catalogue’ version I’ll be able to put it up here.
On another front, Gleebooks is hopefully going to have recordings of the events available online very soon. Another fellow and I have been working on getting this sorted. I am not sure how access is going to work yet. I think it may only be the very big events that are made available and perhaps to the general public. However, I am pretty sure because of the bandwidth issues they will eventually only allow access to Gleeclub members. I am pushing for full video productions and pay-per-view downloads (to cover costs), but this is a long way off. I see this as an extension into the online realm of Gleebooks institutional infrastructural role in the literary, publishing and political scenes in Australia (ala ‘scene’ from Landry’s _Creative Cities_). It will happen eventually (yes, technological determinism!).
Lastly, I have finally got a copy of Deleuze’s The Fold (and Two Regimes of Madness) some weeks ago. I am not sure what I have been doing until now, but it is somewhat embarrassing to have not read The Fold and yet have ‘event’ in the title of my blog. I offer this ignorance as evidence of my autodidact status. I’ll repeat something I wrote a while ago: If I ever supervise someone writing a ‘Deleuzian’ thesis then I’ll know where to direct them in terms of reading. Yep, I have learnt the hard way. I’ll have to write something later, I guess, on the movements (the event!!) of the ‘event’ between The Fold and The Logic of Sense. This problem is far too great for my little peanut brain, yet it could probably be considered the problem in and with Deleuzian philosophy. It would have to address the specific relation of the ‘screen’ or ‘grid’ (of The Fold) in relation to language (of The Logic of Sense). I have another quick post on this, a question.
[As a sidenote, I raised the possibility of a seminar or even a masterclass on the ‘event’ with some other postgrads, it generated some interest. The previous idea regarding some sort of unofficial seminar-type event on the assemblage may be best folded (lol!) into a seminar on the event. I am thinking of something like 4 or 5 sessions. With the first session on the theory of the event (from Deleuze and from which most of the following largely derive), and the other sessions being sessions on examples of the event at work. So, for example, second session could be the event in Foucault’s ‘eventalizing’ methodology, third session could be Virilio/Wark’s notion of ‘media event’ vs Dayan & Katz’s ‘media event’ vs Baudrillard’s ‘non-event’, fourth session on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage, maybe fifth session on Badiou’s notion of (and perhaps also Zizek’s reading of) ‘evental truth’. Heidegger should probably be in there too, but I have never read any of his work. I would really like to organise something, but I am totally against it with diss writing. Maybe next year when I am a phd. Very ambitious and, yes, there would be a ‘book’ of readings that would go into hundreds of pages. Might as well not be half-arsed about it.]