Train Research Group

This Wednesday 1st Feb, 4pm G3 Laurie Grove Baths is the second Goldsmiths meeting of the Train & TubE Research Section (ahem, I am not really suggesting we call the group ‘tatters’! Its just that the abbreviation TRG also does not scan). all welcome. The following few things sent in may also be of interest: The Olympics [...]

Perspective Society : Marx, Ford, Jobs.

. An outline for a block course as part of “Theories of Modern Society” at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen in Feb-March 2012: . Perspective Society : Marx, Ford, Jobs. . This 3-part discussion takes Theories of Modern Society as a research problem in the tradition of workplace Inquiries. In part one, by examining the Blue Books and Factory Inspector reports [...]

Bees again

Nothing can be understood, as Adorno said of Hegel, in isolation from the whole: ‘in the context of the whole, but with the awkward qualification that the whole in turn lives only in the individual moments. In actuality, however, this kind of doubleness of the dialectic eludes literary presentation’ (Adorno 1963 Hegel: Three Studies – [...]

Leonard Horner Hall

Since one of the first (positive) mentions of a really existing individual in Marx’s Capital is Leaonard Horner, we should find out a little about this fellow who will not be forgotten…: ‘Leonard Horner was one of the Factory Inquiry Commissioners in 1833, and Inspector, or rather Censor of Factories till 1859. He rendered undying [...]

Market Project on Banks(y)

Alistair Gentry: To me it relates pretty closely to the banks being “too big to fail”, I think in this country- John Hutnyk: Banksy is too big to fail. Alistair Gentry: Yes, Banksy IS too big to fail. Julie Freeman: He’s actually very short. Alistair Gentry: He’s not a big man… in any sense. Julie [...]

MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy at Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies

Vijay Prashad’s most excellent course rubric

“Requirements: (1) 300 level course. This is a 300 level course. That means that its purpose is to push you beyond introductions to this or that part of the world, and into an investigation of how to theorize the world, how to do an analysis of problems and opportunities in the world. I expect very [...]

Newspeak – Ken Fero

Watch Newspeak: http://vimeo.com/34527445 Newspeak (25minutes/2011/Ken Fero/Migrant Media) Truth is the first casualty of war and ‘Newspeak’ explores just how media is currently controlled in the UK through power structures like Ofcom. Using poetry and experimental visual techniques the film is a personal journey with filmmaker Ken Fero reflecting on how the radical content of certain images [...]

Re-read Spivak’s Ghostwriting for this week’s lecture on Capital. Spivak uses the occasion of Derrida saying ‘hello to Marx’ (Spivak 1995:78) to make some key points about women in the contemporary condition of financialised capitalism, and offer a reading of Assia Djebar’s Far From Medina and the ghosts of many women that must be retrieved [...]

Taussig 27.1.12

Trinket of The Week in Iran

From:  http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/iran-offers-u-s-tiny-replica-of-lost-drone/ (thanks Rachel) January 17, 2012, 4:48 PM Iran Offers U.S. Tiny Replica of Lost Drone By ROBERT MACKEY Scale models of an American drone are now on sale in Iran. While Iran’s government has so far refused an American request to return the C.I.A. stealth drone it captured last month, on Tuesday, an Iranian company that is manufacturing [...]

Some Like it Hot

Screening monday 23 Jan 2012 7:15pm Laurie Grove Council Room Goldsmith Centre for Cultural Studies.   Other monday films here.

Michael Taussig 27.1.2012

Excelente Zona Social Anthropologist Michael Taussig talks about the relationship between writing, culture and time. “I began began doing fieldwork in 1969. I have returned every year” says Mick Taussig. His writing has spanned a wide range of issues ranging from the commercialization of peasant agriculture to a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction [...]

Marx Writing Notes

Two quotes from Theories of Surplus Value Vol 1. ‘a writer is a productive laborer not insofar as he produces ideas, but insofar as he enriches the book-seller who publishes his work, or insofar as he is a wage-labourer of a capitalist entrepreneur’

Academic Publishing, Libraries, and What Not

I’ll collect various things to come back to regarding alt-publishing here: First up, a thesis that sets the scene (from Canada, but international in scope) – by Heather Morrison That thesis was the one linked to in the previous post about big publisher profits in anticipation of the CCS workshop on questions of academic publishing mid [...]

Cut Flesh from the Bone – big publishing profits

This article is one in an issue becoming quite the popular. Having published a commissioned (unpaid) article with Elsevier – it was called ‘Jungle Studies’, and after proofreading they replaced the phrase ‘For fuck’s sake’ with ‘For God’s sake’ – I know, there are several levels of gah! – I am keen to point out that [...]

The piece-rate Worker

Turning our lives into sausage factory grunt work and mere value extraction. This is all too common. Before electronic rights became a standard in publishing contracts I used to scratch out that part (eg for my Calcutta book, and for ‘Dis-Orienting Rhythms’ – only the latter is online for free – see sidebar to download [...]

from G.W.F.Hegel

from The Phenomenology of Spirit – relevant to Marx’s preface comments on coquettery and such-like

draft notes 1.2

draft notes 1.2 lecture notes not for forwarding Fragment of Kane Kane collects: ‘Witness the repugnant spectacle of a blind lust for collection … Man envelopes himself in the odour of decay; through his antiquarian habit he succeeds in degrading even a more significant talent and nobler need to an insatiable craving for novelty, or [...]

Draft Notes 1.1

Draft Notes 1.1 [rough word hoard from lecture - not for forwarding - as it really needs editing] How to start reading that rich book that is Marx’s Capital of which an immense, even monstrous, accumulation of commentary on the Marxist mode of literary production appears to have already shaped its elementary forms? A great [...]