schmevil: (gwen and mj dance)
As I slog forward on my summer project, in the background, I'm listening to Erik Davis give a talk on nature, imagination, spirituality and technocracy.

Nature and Imagination: Introduction, The Imaginal, Creative Imagination, Ayahuasca Dreams, Death and Science, Imaginal Earth, Creative Technocracy.

I'm also listening to this vid on the history of the Amen Break, a particular sample which forms the basis of a hell of a lot of hip hop, raga dub, techno etc etc. Gets into the beginnings of sampling culture, the politics and economics of copyright.

"Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture (Judge Kozinski)."

And Girl Talk: Illegal Art at its Finest:

"Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk is best known for his wild live shows, super hot beats and, most controversially, that his music is entirely derived from other popular artists. Under current copyright law, Girl Talk's blatant use of samples is considered stealing. Gregg considers it fair use and positive promotion for other artists. As debates over copyright are fueled by the ever growing remix, mashup and digital sampling culture we now live in, we have to ask ourselves- Is it ok to have so many restrictions, with the threat of legal action, on what is fair game for making art?"

Live at the Epicenter (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) should give you a feel for his work.

***

What I'm wrestling with today:

“Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way (Hedigger, The Question Concerning Technology).”

“We do not ask for the influence or effect of technology on the human individuals. For they are themselves an integral part and factor of technology, not only as the men who invent or attend to machinery but also as the social groups which direct its application and utilization (Some Social Implications of Modern Technology, Marcuse)."

ETA:

“But man does not experience this loss of his freedom as the work of some hostile and foreign force; he relinquishes his liberty to the dictum of reason itself. The point is that today, the apparatus to which the individual is to adjust and adopt himself is so rational that individual protest and liberation appear not only as hopeless but as utterly irrational (Some Social Implications of Modern Technology, Marcuse).”
schmevil: (storm)
Paul Virillio:

“Unleashed in the 1920s, the de-neutralization of the media paves the way for what has been called ‘the war of the domestic market,’ a massive ideological campaign addressed directly to the family puzzle that it claims to put together, even to reinvent, as an’ infinite receptacle for consumer goods.’ This campaign will soon become a veritable animal domestication of the American citizens (Speed and Politics, 128).”

“In fact, the government’s deliberately terroristic manipulation of the need for security is the perfect answer to all the new questions now being put to democracies by nuclear strategy... They are trying to recreate Union through a new unanimity of need, just as the mass media phantasmatically created a need for cars, refrigerators.. We will see the creation of a common feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection; this latter will progressively come to the fore and become the target of the whole of the merchandising system (Speed and Politics, 139).”

Carl Schmitt:

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and it its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded somewhat of a modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity (The Concept of the Political, 54).”

“The equation state=politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state - as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains - religion, culture, education, the economy - then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics. ... This results in the identity of state and society. In such a state, therefore, everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the sate it is on longer possible to assert for it a specifically political character (The Concept of the Political, 22).”

Martin Heidigger:

“For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained to obey.The essence of freedom is originally not connected with the will or even with the causality of human willing. Freedom governs the open in the sense of the clear and lighted up, i.e.. of the revealed. It is to the happening of revealing, i.e.. of truth, that freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees - the mystery - is concealed and and always concealing itself (The Question Concerning Technology, 25).”

“Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, whose clearing there shimmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way (The Question Concerning Technology, 24).”
schmevil: (penance)
I thought there was no coffee. This was sad. Then I found secret coffee and suddenly all was well in world. (COFFEECOFFEECOFFEE) I don't have a problem.

So yeah. What kind of a day is it when Foucault is some nice, light reading? A damn good one, that's what! I'm working on my much-delayed summer project. I got seeeeeriously behind on it, so today I've been catching up. Also, I may have broken my brain. Time will tell. And hey, to pass said time, lets ponder this:

"The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control." - Martin Heidigger (The Question Concerning Technology)

***

June Night, by Sara Teasdale

Oh Earth, you are too dear to-night,
How can I sleep while all around
Floats rainy fragrance and the far
Deep voice of the ocean that talks to the ground?

Oh Earth, you gave me all I have,
I love you, I love you, -- oh what have I
That I can give you in return --
Except my body after I die?
schmevil: (jubilee)
Aside from The Project, of course. (For which I'm rereading: Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, Michel Foucault's Fearless Speech, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Paul Virillio's Negative Horizon OR Speed and Politics and a smattering from the Heidigger-Derrida-Marcuse tirfecta).

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Ed Brubaker's Criminal
Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy
Aristophone's The Lysistrata
Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men
Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera
Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner
Michale Pryor's Blaze of Glory

I'm reading these because they are already on my bookshelf, waiting for my attention. I have this terrible habit of accumulating books even when I don't have time to read them. I don't read much for pleasure when classes are in session, comics being the big exception to that rule. I find it hard to really enjoy fiction when I know that there are three other novels, plays and other assorted weighty tomes in need of being read yesterday.

There are a metric tonne of books on my to-read list though, and I hope to get to some of the heavyweights once I've breezed through the above. War and Peace has been giving me the evil eye, ever since that time I gave up on it 3/4s of the way through, in favour of Brothers Karamozov. Moby Dick also knows how to hold a grudge.

What are you people reading?

***



What is this, you ask? A freaking great t-shirt, that's what.

July 2012

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