Production, Consumption, Prosumption. Sven Birkerts: The Gutenberg Elegies. The Gutenberg Elegies The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age Sven Birkerts Faber and Faber All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
The despair of having everything. The West's mission is to make the world's wealth of cultures interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global order.
Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges itself upon the values of other cultures. by Jean Baudrillard IS globalisation inevitable? What fervour propels the world to embrace such an abstract idea? And what force drives us to make that idea a reality so unconditionally? The universal used to be an idea. Hence the violence associated with globalisation, with a system that wants to eliminate any manifestation of negativity and singularity (including the ultimate expression of singularity, death). Globalisation's triumph is not certain yet, though. Anti-globalisation actions may be violent, abnormal or irrational, at least as judged by our enlightened philosophy. Who or what can thwart the global system? Singularities [unique or unusual identities or approaches] could be used to baffle the system. Singularities are not inherently violent. Classes and Classifications by Pierre Bourdieu.
Pierre Bourdieu 1979 Source: Distinctions.
A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Conclusion. 1984, translated by Richard Nice, published by Harvard University Press, 1984, 604pp. – selected from pp. 466-484. Postmodernism. 1.
Precursors The philosophical modernism at issue in postmodernism begins with Kant's “Copernican revolution,” that is, his assumption that we cannot know things in themselves and that objects of knowledge must conform to our faculties of representation (Kant 1787). Ideas such as God, freedom, immortality, the world, first beginning, and final end have only a regulative function for knowledge, since they cannot find fulfilling instances among objects of experience. With Hegel, the immediacy of the subject-object relation itself is shown to be illusory. As he states in The Phenomenology of Spirit, “we find that neither the one nor the other is only immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated” (Hegel 1807, 59), because subject and object are both instances of a “this” and a “now,” neither of which are immediately sensed.
Many postmodern philosophers find in Heidegger a nostalgia for being they do not share. 2. In “What is Postmodernism? 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Jean Baudrillard. First published Fri Apr 22, 2005; substantive revision Wed Mar 7, 2007 French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the present age whose work combines philosophy, social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch.
A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture, and thought, Baudrillard is often seen as a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also be read as a thinker who combines social theory and philosophy in original and provocative ways and a writer who has developed his own style and forms of writing. For some years a cult figure of postmodern theory, Baudrillard moved beyond the postmodern discourse from the early 1980s to the present, and has developed a highly idiosyncratic mode of philosophical and cultural analysis. 1. Karl Marx. 1.
Marx’s Life and Works Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. Although his family was Jewish they converted to Christianity so that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer in the face of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws. A precocious schoolchild, Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and then wrote a PhD thesis in Philosophy, comparing the views of Democritus and Epicurus.
On completion of his doctorate in 1841 Marx hoped for an academic job, but he had already fallen in with too radical a group of thinkers and there was no real prospect. The violence of the image. Question : do some images, some exceptional images escape from this double violence - that of the image and that done to the image ?
Is it any chance to escape from the hegemonic overflow of the visual surrounding as to recover the original power of the image - the vital power of illusion ? At first we will point at three forms of violence. Www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthesocietypages.org%2Fcyborgology%2F&ei=twC0TujeAtSk2gXS_9HMDQ&usg=AFQjCNEaBNVJHd5vw-fEqlqXdO7CCW5slQ&sig2=5UrAMEsZiOn_SRTYw3KRqA. On Pharrell’s “Happy” by robinjames, 2 days ago at 05:00 am I find Pharrell’s massive hit “Happy” really, really irritating.
And, for that reason, I love it. In the same way that The Sex Pistols were Malcolm McLaren’s massive joke on us, this song is, I think, Pharrell’s attempt to pull a fast one on the economy of viral “upworthiness”–an economy that, as David has shown, is really racist. (more…) #TtW14 Panel Preview: Tales From the Script by davidbanks, 4 days ago at 12:48 pm Presider: Michael Connor (@michael_connor) Hashmod: Annie Wang (@annieyilingwang) This is the one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC.
Each presentation in this panel considers very different case studies but all are deeply interested in the standards, practices, and assumptions that undergird our augmented society. More fumbling toward a theory of digital abandonment/ruin by Sarah Wanenchak, 4 days ago at 02:19 pm (more…) #TtW14 Panel Preview: a/s/l (more…)