Though the two lectures comprising Pierre Bourdieu’s short work On Television (1996) more or less exclusively focus on news programming, and predate the blogosphere, if not the internet — which is important to the extent that so much of what he has to say here concerns ownership of the means of information production, — the [...]
In a thought-provoking post on I cite, Jodi Dean describes the proliferation and popularity of ‘tag clouds’ as capturing “the shift from message to contribution characteristic of communicative capitalism”. That is, in place of meaning and context, which in actuality govern discourse, tag clouds display information in terms of repetition, frequency, and intensity. “The meaning [...]
“I was convinced we’d have a revolution in [the] US and I decided to be its leader and prevent it. I’m a rich man too and have run with your kind of people. I decided half a loaf was better than none – a half loaf for me and a half loaf for you and [...]
Squatter City has a post up describing one Miami group’s success in solving two not-unrelated problems: homelessness and foreclosure. “A brilliant program from a Miami group vets homeless families and then moves them into foreclosed housing. The program is, at least technically, illegal. But no arrests have been made, and it seems a clearheaded way [...]
Location: The Change You Want To See, Brooklyn, NY Address: 84 Havemeyer Street, Storefront, Brooklyn, NY Date: 17 December 2008 @ 7.30 PM – 10.30 PM Over the past two years, Web 2.0 technologies have matured and so have the methods activist use to employ them. In 2008, activists from around the world used Web [...]
If there was ever any doubt as to the nature of the relation between HTS units and counter-insurgency operations, last week’s leaking of the Human Terrain System manual has firmly settled the question: “HTTs will use the Map-HT Toolkit of developmental hardware and software to capture, consolidate, tag, and ingest human terrain data. HTTs use [...]
In the line of Kerry Howley’s spot-on debunking of the Libertarian philosophy, Will Wilkinson gives a succinct, reasonable dismissal of the Libertarian reduction of all political concerns to questions of ‘property rights’. Todd Seavey continues to argue that libertarianism just is the view that the only legitimate function of the state (if it has any [...]
In the 90s, when multiculturalism had the Right on the ropes, racism, so the story goes, was forced to move between-the-lines (of populist conservative discourse). As Žižek observes in The Universal Exception: “In the election campaigns of Jesse Helms, the racist and sexist message is not publicly acknowledged — at the public level, it is [...]
While Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón) does in some sense offer a peaceful, hopeful, and politically progressive message, its expression is nonetheless complicated by a utopian, transcendental vision – namely that ‘bare life’ – the ‘miracle of life’ – transcends politics and partisanship alike. This is made iconically clear in the dramatic scene [...]
Review: Emily Deprang, “Confessions of an Ex-Protester,” Texas Observer, 16 November 2007. * Has ‘political resistance’ ever so openly reveled in its own naivety – or, for that matter, mistaken it for a form of critique? “When I said I was willing to be arrested, what I really meant was, ‘arrested.’ Arrested for the experience, [...]
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