Search results for "node/Swigart"
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Vannevar Bush wanted his Memex to intercept and capture the neural circuits of the stenographer who could reduce his words to a phonetic code on the fly, whose encoding practice was encompassed by her body. As an electronic poet, I want to do the same thing, not from the position of Bush, outside the device, but from the position of the stenographer, attached to it. In her body, words moved through her as she moved, a fluent circuit of meaning that she hosted, instigated, permitted, understood, explored, and enjoyed. Bush exhibited some justified fear as to whether her practice would […]
Praise for the body art of Camille Utterback, and commentary on controls. Early on in the feature film Superman, reporter and professional victim Lois Lane falls from a helicopter dangling from the roof of a New York skyscraper. Plummeting to her certain death, she is rescued in mid-air by Superman (aka: a man made of steel [and, for all we know, in some instances, of bits and bytes]), in his first appearance both in Metropolis and in the film. Such is his innate tenderness and his fine-tuning as a deus ex machina that he alters his ascending velocity to her […]
You have to admire the conceit of a book that wishes to, and in a post-something moment so adroitly, reflexively become that which it cannot be. In First Person we have an object that preserves the fetish of the book by being a book, yet like all recent books in this branch of the humanities can only maintain and insist on its status as the privileged vehicle of knowledge by becoming a desirable object in its own right. Gone are the Guttenberg days of protestant print, simple black on white. Our books now have become designerly, beautiful to view and […]
Clocking in at five-hundred eight-five pages, the gosh-darn-it, point-no-fingers and name-no-names stance of The 9/11 Commission Report subverts its own purported mission. But if you want to know why 3,000 plus Americans were murdered on their way to work three summers ago – and why our government still doesn’t get it – a recent study by the prolific Islamic scholar Malise Ruthven asks us to try out some of the following random propositions: Jesus Christ was the first-ever corporate body. The machismo of the 9/11 hijackers was inspired in part by a cheesy American action-adventure film, starring Kurt Russell, called […]
“Oboyoboy just when we’d wrung the last nostalgia from that Desert Storm, by golly WE GET TO DO IT AGAIN!” From the node, “Balanced Coverage,” in Victory Garden (1991). One of the many narrative voices of Victory Garden comments derisively here on the “media men” who are “just about falling over themselves with crisis-lust,” unsated by the fact that they have just broadcast a war with the highest quality production values in history. The speaker refers to the dual crises of Hurricane Bob and the Moscow coup in August of 1991, but the reference may just as well be to […]
Auguste Comte and the followers of positivism would most likely disagree, but I think it’s fair to say that current consensus is that the discourse of the sciences can make no more persuasive claim to be the sole voice of the True or the Real than did the discourses of theology or metaphysics. As much as anyone’s critique of scientific positivism, Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical analyses of the history and philosophy of the sciences, particularly The Order of Things, effectively put an end to science’s claim to speak with a pure objectivity. Whether you agree with Foucault’s arbitrary approach to […]
The Cheshire cat is a particularly apt metaphor for the elusive prize that in Paul Gilory’s Against Race, at least, is called pragmatic planetary humanism: the recognition that fundamental corporeal fragility can serve to promote a sense of heterogeneous species unity. The nature of the cat is ambiguous. It is neither friend nor foe but possibly both, or neither, or something else altogether. The cat never communicates meaning directly; only ever speaking in riddles and puns. The cat is always and never a tangible presence: just at the moment when it appears to be most vulnerable to capture, it vanishes […]
I’ll start here in a manner typical of responses to optimism: it would be nice to think that the ever-increasing technological facilitation of communication, along with the commodification of deeper and deeper territories of the lifeworld, might bring about a more widespread, immanent, and intimate form of democracy. Certainly it doesn’t feel this way. In the small world of higher education, for example, more intensive commodification, the breakdown of the curriculum into discretely purchased credit hours, has transformed intellectuals into mini-CEOs. The withdrawal of modern-era public funds accompanying the decline of the welfare state has produced among administrators, and increasingly […]
Karim A. Remtulla asks to what degree postfeminism is identical with hactivism? This piece is intended as a further discussion of Carolyn Guertin’s “From Cyborgs to Hacktivists: Postfeminist Disobedience and Virtual Communities” (2005). Guertin contends that, “In the cyberfeminist corner of the postfeminist universe girl gamers like Brenda Laurel and Mary Flanagan immediately spring to mind; so too do techno-performers like Laurie Anderson and Coco Fusco, and new media artists like Mez or Olia Lialina, but the most important and distinctive Web-native postfeminist form is, I would argue, hacktivism.” This statement, for me, warrants some further exploration. Firstly, Guertin does […]
I will allow my title to be misleading. I do not intend to respond directly to Francis Raven’s review beyond a few remarks at the outset of this note. At the risk of being blunt, and in the interests of avoiding beating around the bush: Francis Raven entirely misses the point of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. He does not in any way address what Lessig argues is the book’s point, what I understand to be perhaps the most significant issue facing American and global culture […]