theory of the offensive

Ben renames his spot, and deftly arcs up the flare: theory of the offensive: “Yet Another Televised Revolution, exclusively distributed as part of the Straight-to-Video CollectionMy new bland ambition: a critique of schematic efforts at the periodisation of the combined and uneven subsumptions constituting this current moment in the history of capital, in which the [...]

Intel needs anthro Interns for Love and Spirit research!!

From: Payne, Michael JSent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 9:42 AMTo: Ethnography ResearchersSubject: Call for Interns – please forward as appropriate Intel Corporation’s Domestic Designs and Technologies Research Groupis calling for interns! As part of Domestic Designs and TechnologiesResearch, the ethnographic and design research team within the DigitalHome Group, you will work within a multidisciplinary team [...]

Guardian becomes News of the World II – return of the Nawaz

So, though we heard it first in the guest lecture Aki gave in class at Goldsmiths in Spring term, finally The Guardian found a stupid headline to put above the press release Nation put out to promote the new Fun^da^mental album. Accusing Aki of terror, support for Osama, un-British sentiments and punk sensibilities… you got [...]

Marx Lecture Notes 1998

Marx lecture – John Hutnyk 1998. DRAFT notes (rough and ropey) Marx (1818-1883). German-Jew in a family converted to Christianity. Student in Bonn and Berlin, met Friedrich Engels in 1844, from which his first important works date, together they wrote the German Ideology, a critique of right Hegelians, and The Communist Manifesto – Manifesto – [...]

Graduate School at Goldsmiths

Well, in a fit of over-enthusiasm that belongs to some sort of undiagnosed workaholicism, and because I think there should be a revolutionary way to remake our universities, I applied for the post of Dean of the new Graduate School at Goldsmiths. I was interviewed on tuedsay, and the SMT have not yet made their [...]

BREAKING NEWS album causes conflict

BREAKING NEWS album causes conflictBREAKING NEWS !FUN DA MENTAL NEW ALBUM IN TROUBLE FUN DA MENTAL’S new album “ALL IS WAR” (the benefits of g-had) has caused the directors of Nation Records to offer their resignations in the event the album is released through Nation Records.Martin Mills and Andrew Heath (Beggars Banquet Group) both have [...]

Hybridity and Diaspora

Big non-debate yesterday with our visitors, so I am posting the beginnings of a chapter just out to show I was not just warbling on (yet again):Hybridity It is by now established that authors writing on diaspora very often engage with the mixed notion of hybridity. We will see that this term also offers much [...]

Malaysian Govt bans books

Apparently Malaysia Govt bans books – including my mate Bobby’s (sadly not very red) rant on Kamalism. KUALA LUMPUR, June 15 (Bernama) — Eighteen books published locally and overseas have been banned by the Internal Security Ministry under the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 as they have been deemed to be able to disrupt [...]

Che and Beret…part one

I can’t get that annoying little ditti by Kylie out of my head today – na na na, na na nana na… And I have to go give a talk later at Aga Khan University about music. This does not bode well. In the afternoon I might swing by the Victoria & Albert Museum for [...]

Che and Beret part 2

[continued from part one] But most annoying of all in the kiss-off-the-revolution in favour of a quick publicity buck is when – na na na – Kylie also dons a Che shirt… My trouble with this is that the absinthe pixie (her best role in a film was just a few minutes and she was [...]

Heidegger technology Stiegler draft…

Tried once again to crack the Heidegger essay on technology (first attempts were for UTS’s Vertigo and then for Sophie Watson’s “Postmodern Cities” conference, but that was aeons ago – circa 1991, then again in Rumour of Calcutta). This version for an edited book – and the weft of discussion meant drifting over to Bernard [...]

Labour

New. Just as new Labour was hardly specific in offering anything actually new, the subsequent political formation will have to invent the semblance of something new, of ‘movement’ and transformation, while once again presenting the trick of the same old right-wing ideas as innovation. Those who fell for the grubby hype of Blair’s new broom [...]

Captain Picard’s Journal: Federation Big Brother

Captain Picard’s Journal: Federation Big Brother: “Wednesday, June 08, 2005 Federation Big Brother Let’s hope some unknown alien force or a spatial anomoly doesn’t attack the Enterprise right now, as we would all be victims to whatever it was. The reason? The entire crew is watching ‘Federation Big Brother’ on a galaxy-wide telecast. Everyone has [...]

University

The University as such is now a place of nostalgia, where it was once thought that a rampant intelligence could thrive, not beaten down by the imperatives of cramming, the horrors of administrative self replication, and bureaucratic procedure. A place that once was a site of ideas (see Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason). We might [...]

The Future is Going to Come True

Diddling away at an article for a special volume on the future, I was pleased to find some provocations in the work of Bernard Stiegler. Somewhat philosophical, but highly relevant (if we can make such distinctions)… We should probably, some many years later, ask just what is Being now? A hard call. Technological innovation does [...]

The Public Service Type, Them and Us.

I have just watched the latest in a long series of gut-wrenching realistic Motorcycle v Car crunch ads (public service announcement type). One of those designed to remind us that cage drivers are blind. Well, these ads are ostensibly to encourage car drivers to look, but are inevitably more effective as scaremongering that dissuades biking. [...]

Posthegemony

Pirates are “in” – see Jon B-M’s recent action in Canada. Why suddenly do so many of us catch the stench of privateering as it wafts from the harbour across the campuses… echoed in Mick Taussig’s course last term at Columbia on pirates too, and more Posthegemony: “piracy, nomadism, and the stateThe complexity and confusion [...]