Worth watching:
The Hopper Question – December 14, 2010
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article12141001.aspx
Is he a cliché? That’s the question you keep coming back to when you look at the paintings of Edward Hopper. On the face of it, the current show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time,” doesn’t help answer the question. The show gives us paintings like “Soir Bleu” from 1914. We’re at a café in France somewhere. Patrons sit at the tables. Right there in the middle, facing us, is a clown. He is wearing a white, frilly get-up and his face is painted white, too, with red lips and a couple of red stripes down the eyes. He is smoking a cigarette.
This may, in fact, be the sad clown we’ve all heard so much about. I’ve toyed with the idea that “Soir Bleu” is making fun of itself. Or maybe it is making fun of us, the viewer?
But, no. Hopper is a painter without any sense of humor, which is a troubling fact. He paints without wit, without self-awareness. We may have to accept the fact that Hopper painted the sad clown smoking a cigarette in the café because he felt it to be a poignant scene. He was so moved by the depressed clown that he went and painted one of the silliest paintings of the era.
News about News
That news should evolve fast is not surpprising as our means of producing information evolve. I am noticing big developments.
Look at this one
Alive in Afghanistan
Alive in Afghanistan is an independent, non-partisan project, formed in response to the huge success of Alive in Baghdad and Alive in Gaza and the result of the hard work and collaboration of many partners and individuals. Alive in Afghanistan empowers Afghan citizens to participate in society by reporting on their political process. Alive in Afghanistan is launching in time for the August 20th presidential elections so that people across Afghanistan can report fairly on the elections and related events through SMS, email, and the web.
And this, globalpost.com/
Heard about this in an excellent podcast from NPR Fresh Air Listen to this for great insight into the war, (and its stupidity -Walter).
Origins of Psybernet
I was searching for something and a Zine I wrote in 1994 popped up.
http://www.psybernet.co.nz/zine11.txt
Brings back a lot of memories and I see the origins of many of my current perspective on psyche & cyberspace were there right then.
--++-=<*>****>>>>>0<<<<<****<*>=-++--
Text is evocative:
'With jaws the size of a truck, the dinosaur munched the man and
swallowed him.'
Did you see that! It cost Spielberg millions to do that.
Text is cheap.
--++-=<*>****>>>>>0<<<<<****<*>=-++--
My Tweets 2010-11-08
- Facebook & helicopter parenting http://bit.ly/au9gHr #
- But it's easier to hit the x on he'll than to type an apostrophe. RT @OpenParachute: “@sneak: Dammit iPhone, when I say 'hell' I mean it.” #
- Find Out Who is Not Following You Back on Twitter. http://tinyurl.com/unffnd #
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Mark Poster
I thought there would be someone doing something like this. Dubious though I am of it.
Mark Poster – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Mark Poster (born 6 July 1941) is a Professor Emeritus of History, Film and Media Studies, and the Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1968, and his research interests include European Intellectual and Cultural History, Critical Theory, and Media Studies. He is known for applying the ideas of French theorists (including Althusser, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault) to the new media (including databases, hypertext and the internet). He seeks to politicize the issue of the use and development of the Internet by emphasizing the possibilities of the Internet for liberatory political change, while acknowledging the existence of a deep digital divide, as well as the interests of transnational corporations and national governments.[1]
Information Age?
This essay makes good sense to me, digitalisation will not of itself foster feminism, liberation, equality or revolution. However there is something missing in this piece too. What IS the impact of the information … er, revolution? is there a shift in the relationships of production? Is whatever it is significant at all when it comes to a Marxist conception of history. Has anyone really examined this fully, I bet they have.
It is important to be able to see all of history as a history of class struggle, makes sense to me. Of course there is ajso a history of the relationships of reproduction (perhaps what the essay below is about.) And there are cultural forces, racial, religious and generational forces. The art is to be able to see what, at any time is “primary”. Even if the history if information from language to the Internet is not “primary” what is its nature? The distribution of the means of information, the ability to have mass peer to peer communication… what does it all mean.
Interesting (see previous post) where Trotsky notes that the revolution in Russia was won by the group that had dialectical materialism, not just bombs. It is important to get all this right.
Class, the Digital, and (Immaterial) Feminism:
Immaterial feminisms have emerged as part of the digital movements of “new economy” and “network society” in order to help capital eliminate old ideological fetters of gender that stand in the way of the expansion of capitalist production and the intensification of the exploitation of labor for profit. By “immaterial feminisms” I mean the network of feminisms—from “cyberfeminism,” to feminist theories of “immaterial labor,” “(im)materiality,” and “new materiality,” to “network feminisms,” “digital feminism” and “technofeminism”—which, as a species of new economy theory, ideologically displace the relation of gender to class, labor, exploitation, and the social relations of production in capitalism by positing a constitutive change in the wage-labor/capital relation brought on by the innovations of “new technologies,” the growth of the service industries and of “knowledge work” (i.e., “immaterial labor”). This is another way of saying that the role of immaterial feminisms in history is to represent as “radical,” “innovative” and as “progress” for women toward human freedom what capital is economically compelled to do to temporarily stave off declines in profit.
Leadership in a Networked World
Leadership in a Networked World http://peggyholman.com/leadership-in-a-networked-world/
Red Green?
Trotsky’s Views On Dialectical Materialism:
Pragmatism, empiricism, is the greatest curse of American thought.
I have added the tags “emergence, coherence” to this post as the “dialectics” in materialism foreshadows these conceptions. It is so unfashionable to see a big picture, it is in the ruling class interest to obscure that there is a big picture, or to make it appear that it is a static one, “human nature”, “reality”. Dynamic processes are not discovered through looking at the trees, one must see the woods.
Dialectical materialism gets a lot right when it comes to seeing the big picture. Much of the language is dated and some of the science was current at the time, but has been superseded (as one would expect in a dynamic world).
I’ve found the work of John Bellamy Foster was able to re-kindle a sense of the value of dialectical materialism – or to put it another way: ecology.
Marx’s Ecology – Monthly Review Press:
MARX’S ECOLOGY Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster
More from him here:
Blargh
The earlier unnamed black images were surprisingly unconsciously reflective of the Christchurch earthquake, it seems obvious now. This simple doodle with paint, completed in the week after the earthquake, equally unconsciously, in retrospect, is exactly what post earthquake tiredness and malaise was like for me. I heard many people say they were tired, and felt like zombies, even, especially if there was no major damage or fear.