Axylus

"Does the struggle against the ‘becoming business’ of the university not require us, too, to have the..."

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:04:20 -0400

“Does the struggle against the ‘becoming business’ of the university not require us, too, to have the courage to try out and put to the test new economic, legal and political systems and models for the production, publication, sharing and discussion of knowledge and ideas; and thus to open ourselves to transforming radically the material practices and social relations of our academic labour?”

- Gary Hall, “Pirate Radical Philosophy”

Photo

Sun, 06 May 2012 16:08:51 -0400

Patrick Stewart as Lenin (from this video).

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:08:07 -0400

Patrick Stewart as Lenin (from this video).

A review of Byung-Chul Han’s Transparenzgesellschaft.

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:27:19 -0400

A review of Byung-Chul Han’s Transparenzgesellschaft.

Happy birthday FiRE! Celebrating five years of being awesome. Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:10 -0400

Happy birthday FiRE! Celebrating five years of being awesome.

Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment is a mass based women’s organization serving New York City and its surrounding areas. We are dedicated to global and local Filipina and Filipina American issues. We believe that class oppression is inextricable to the struggle of women; therefore we support and create women’s initiatives by fostering leadership, building alliances and mobilizing our immigrant and native-born community through critical education and learning. We are an anti-imperialist formation working in solidarity with the National Democratic movement of the Philippines. We connect the Filipino diaspora to the women’s struggle in the Philippines by organizing across class, gender, sexual identity, and age lines. Bringing woman-born and woman-identified people together, we challenge pervading stereotypes by creating self-defined Filipina identities.

If you’re in New York, check out their upcoming events.

8-bit Graduate Center

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:58:00 -0400

8-bit Graduate Center

Me participating in a performance project by Jens Reulecke.

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:05:57 -0400

Me participating in a performance project by Jens Reulecke.

background image is by flickr user kainet (BY-SA).

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:58:48 -0400

background image is by flickr user kainet (BY-SA).

"As a modality of representation and act of protest adopted by the recent student demonstrations..."

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:32:00 -0400

“As a modality of representation and act of protest adopted by the recent student demonstrations against the privatistic restructuring of the university, it is this potential of unmarketable knowledge represented by the humanities and the social sciences to which the Book Bloc referred. From Rome to Madrid to London, the chosen ‘Books’ were classics of literature, of philosophy, of sociology and political theory, ones well-known in every corner of the so-called Western world. Book Blocs are a Manifesti of protest but also shields to stave off the destruction of higher education and its pure reduction to a commodity; they are invitations to subversion and weapons of critique. Thus, the student movements in Europe showed that education and knowledge are qualitative and collective resources which increase individual and collective consciousness, and that they are very effective fuel for igniting the fire of protest.

Against the commodification of higher education which promises to turn them into nothing but exploited workers and limited and atomised individuals, students, lecturers, all the people who have been involved in the insurgent protests of the last years have demonstrated that critical thought has not been neutralised and is still a central motor of action. Cogito, ergo insurgo!

”

- Sara Farris, “Cogito ergo insurgo: The Italian University: Laboratory of Crisis and Critique”

Typology of Scholars

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:30:06 -0400

Typology of Scholars:

The Encyclopaedist
The ‘Scientist’
The Unnoticed Genius
The Put-Downer/Climber
The Self-Seller
Big Fish in a Slimy Pond
The Snob
The Colonialist
The Politician
Lord of the Manor
The Borrower
The Turbo-Prof
The Thin-Skinned
The Best Friend
Bitter and Twisted
The Intellectual Hit-man
The Legendary Piss-Pot
The Name-Dropper
The One in the Position of Superior Knowledge
The Chardonnay Socialist
Doceo, ergo Pedicabo
The Petty-Bourgeois Life-Styler
The Businessman
The Onion-Grower
The Seducer
The Grantsman
The Wordsmith
The Networker
The Impact Tart
The Morally Superior Drop-Out
The Solar-Arse, or, the One With the Sun Shining out of his or her Arse

Photo

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:57:46 -0400

Das Känguru eifert David Graeber nach.

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 09:30:06 -0400

Das Känguru eifert David Graeber nach.

Adrienne Rich, “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:00:05 -0500

Adrienne Rich, “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

List, psyche & society

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:30:00 -0500

[I’ve had this fragment of a blog post saved for over a year now. Recently The Awl ran this piece, 127 Reasons Why We’re Fascinated By Lists, and I figured I might as well put this out there, since it’s kind of uncanny how much overlap there is between the two pieces.]

Lists are hot shit. Umberto Eco likes lists so much, he curated an exhibition about them at the Louvre. And he’s not the only listphile around. Think of popular blogs like A List Apart, Lifehacker or 43Folders that promise to increase your productivity by teaching you how to dump the content of your mind onto a list en route to Getting Things Done (to use the trademarked phrase). Or consider that popular blog posts often have titles like “10 Ways to Write Compelling Blog Posts” or “15 Tumblr Themes You Will Love.” The so-called “listicle” is the go-to genre for online writing.

I spent the better part of a summer a few years ago becoming “more productive” by, ahem, procrastinating, setting up ever more sophisticated systems for keeping lists. (It wasn’t all for naught; my wiki has become an important part of my writing process.) If Eco’s, the blogosphere’s and my own obsession can be taken to indicate some kind of broader social trend—and I think it can—then listmania might be worth some further inquiry.

One popular hypothesis these days is that we have become “shallows” incapable of sustained engagements with a subject. Through endless web-browsing and multitasking we have rewired our brains in such a manner that we lack the ability, on a neurological level, to dwell on a subject long enough to immerse ourselves. We can only ever briefly take note of things before moving on to the next item in our feed reader or the next tweet or email. In other words, we can no longer form thoughts in paragraph form—in which case we would formulate complex relationships between entities through prepositions, verbs, adverbs, etc.—and instead, our minds are only capable of processing lists. A list does not express relationships between list items. It concatenates items, one damn thing after the other. I’m not going to rehearse the criticisms of this hypothesis. It is unsatisfactory as analysis, but it captures aspects of a typical subjective orientation in our time.

In his essay “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’,” the great Sigmund Freud makes this observation:

If I distrust my memory … I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing. In that case the surface upon which this note is preserved, the pocket-book or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible. I have only to bear in mind the place where this ‘memory’ has been deposited and I can then ‘reproduce’ it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory.

There’s a lot here that I can only start to unpack. The ellipsis omits the further observation that “neurotics” are even more likely than “normal people” to exhibit this kind of mistrust of their memory—and thus, a penchant for writing lists. What, then, is the neurosis that I and the lifehackers on the web suffer from? What lies at its root?

Eco states that “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” This indicates that time is the crucial issue: time to work through the past, time to live in the present, time to produce in the future. Lists are retentive—in the Freudian parlance, extensions of our “mnemonic apparatus”—or protentive—tools to develop plans for the future.

[end of fragment]

This image is part of the performance art project The Production...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:46:21 -0500

This image is part of the performance art project The Production of Space by Jens Reulecke, in which I participated.

excess of positivity

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:52:14 -0500

excess of positivity

Fund this great project printing beautiful posters for the...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:51:11 -0500

Fund this great project printing beautiful posters for the Occupy movement.

"Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to..."

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:23:04 -0500

“Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.”

- The Social Graph is Neither

champagnecandy: fantagraphics:alaina: “Do you have any books...

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:25:47 -0500

champagnecandy:

fantagraphics:alaina:

“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”

one of Flannery O’Connor’s drawings from high school or undergrad, which will be included in this forthcoming book devoted exclusively to her artwork.

y’all. Flannery O’Connor made comics. my day is awesome now.

Video

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:26:06 -0400