April 09, 2015
April 09, 2015
George H. Seeley
_______________________ Manifesto For Zombie-CommunismOxana Timofeeva
(....)..................................................... What is to be done? On Chto DelatThe border between hope and despair is very subtle. There can be a moment where they are almost indiscernible, but right after this moment – when THIS is not only undesirable, but impossible, and absolutely unbearable, – in brief, when hope slips away, or rather leaps into despair – there is a point of no return. Only those who are desperate are ready to die in this struggle – not because they hope for a better future, but because they cannot stay in the present. Desperation simply means that things cannot stay like this. And here is the difference – until there is no hope, true revolutionary action is postponed.
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e-flux conversations
Russian artist collective Chto Delat's exhibition, “Time Capsule. Artistic Report on Catastrophe and Utopia,” at KOW in Berlin, is a must see. Whereas most Europeans are mired in controversies over what forms the coming catastrophes might take, to Chto Delat, the apocalypse has already transpired. We are past the tipping point; the “revolution” already happened--it was however not a progressive one. “We lost,” they state in their press release. ...via Jodi Dean _______________________
(....)In the diffuse world of the post-Fordian economy, calls for acceleration feel a bit quaint: the infrastructure is still standing, but capitalism as we knew it is a thing of the past. Under the twin blades of financialization and what is called “the sharing economy,” capital has emancipated itself from the social––which is not to say it did away with work, just the need to pay formal salaries. As for the State, at the moment, its main function is simply to guarantee that credit is converted back onto cash payments, no matter how much misery such conversion elicits. Ironically, as the new Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis put it, it became the Left’s task to arrest capitalism’s free-fall in order to buy time to formulate an alternative––since at the moment the Left remains “squarely defeated,” any upheaval would end up in fascism.
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Arthur Streeton
b. April 8, 1867
Three Poems_______________________ Reading Topographies of Post-Postmodernism:
Maxine Chernoff
conjunctionsInvention...(more)
Maxine ChernoffThe sentimental is a rumor,“Daylight disbanded the phantom crew.”
—Edith Wharton
Inexorable memory
of cottonwood seed
left in its husk, of
a grief spent down to dust.
No question arched
towards lucidity, its quivers
oil- and water-worked.
How we land is
called the drowning.
We launch paper boats
into reluctant space,
speak of containment
as if it were a plan.
Your last avowal
has left the station.
There you stand,
without a witness,
consigned to speak as
words lift off the page.
Review of Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism by Jeffrey T. Nealon
Laura Shackelford
electronic book review
(....)_______________________Post-Postmodernism joins other recent attempts to reflect back on Jameson’s Marxist project and historical materialisms, more broadly, as a means to look forward and more effectively unfold new kinds of reading more responsive to the present, somewhat altered historical situation and its forceful, biopolitical modes of power. It introjects and creatively recombines Jameson’s reading practices with those that Christopher Nealon, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jane Tompkins, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, Theodor Adorno, and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively, recommend and/or practice. Its analyses selectively draw upon a remarkably eclectic, broad-ranging grouping of leftist theorists, including those featured in the collection rethinking A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (in which an earlier version of the first chapter of the book appeared).
Importantly, its diagnosis of an emergent post-postmodernism, which it adeptly locates in and across cultural and economic practices as varied as “classic rock,” literary studies, Las Vegas, Don DeLillo novels, the corporate university, and conceptual poetry, serves as a productive, open-ended provocation to rethink literature, literary studies, and poetics—in their current relationships to capitalism, their abilities to re-engage the present terrain, and what that might do for the left. Post-Postmodernism tracks the “material links between literary works and their institutional and commercial context,” pursuing “the networks within which writing is located,” the places, purposes, and operations of literature and literary and cultural studies in their complex relations to emergent media, social, and economic systems, a preoccupation Daniel Punday suggests is a “condition of this post-postmodern moment” (“Looking for Writing After Postmodernism”). With this emphasis in mind, I recommend engaging Post-Postmodernism as a much-needed provocation, taking up, even taking liberties with Nealon’s invitation to participate in “periodizing the present, a collective molecular project that we might call post-postmodernism”....(more)
Conspiracy
1910
George Seeley
1880-1955
Embracing Indecision – Free Improvisation and Ethics as Action
Elke Schwarz
“Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living”, John Cage once famously quipped. I hadn’t really given this line much thought until I watched a friend perform with his ensemble of free improvisationalists and began to understand – rather late, admittedly, – the creative interconnectivity of musical improvisation with aspects of political and ethical life. Encapsulated in Cage’s comment is the close enmeshment of creation and performance, fabrication and action, production and interaction, set against a modernist ontology of profound uncertainty, pertinent beyond disciplinary analytical divides. Simultaneously embracing and resisting the scientifically and technologically mediated quest for certainty in his time, John Cage, along with other experimental musicians and artists, perpetually sought to challenge a reliance on that which can be decided, by finding different disruptive and unfamiliar techniques.The Disorder Of Things _______________________
These techniques are not merely aesthetic choices or practices, but rather, as forms of encounters, have also ethical and political relevance. ...
(....)In this third and final paper, I try to rethink ethics in trans-disciplinary ways and turn to an unlikely source: free improvisation in music. Drawing on the principles of free improvisation, I suggest, allows us to conceptualise ethics as action rather than an applied abstract concept or epithet. In other words, to overcome the shortcomings of traditional modes of theorizing ethics in political theory, I look to free improvisation in music to rethink ethics and politics in less familiar ways, through the modes of sonic and corporeal interaction. ...(more)
