[…]from the hope that it might be possible to organize mass behavior otherwise. In other words, “code, communication, computing, feedback, and control…embodied an effort to develop more enlightened analytics for the force wielded by science and the state” (2). This impulse (or temptation) is to achieve the ends of the colony, asylum, and camp without resorting to their grisly means. At the risk of editorializing too aggressively, this is the main tension that persists in me upon finishing the book: To achieve submission to authority without violence and to obviate politics though technology (a recurring point within the book) are […]
[…]Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (forthcoming; with Rocco Gangle). Greve is currently working on the concept of nature in the novels of Cormac McCarthy and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies of nature, in particular those of Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Lorenz Oken, and Gilles Deleuze (including the ideas these thinkers have spawned in contemporary philosophical speculation). His further research interests encompass the tradition of intermediality in American cultural practices and the history of critical […]
[…]for that matter (Perloff’s example) architectural theory. The essay compares two reviews as case studies, both from the Times Literary Supplement. One review is devoted to four fairly complex studies of recent trends in architecture, and the other review covers eight unrelated volumes devoted to contemporary poetry. This comparison allows Perloff to demonstrate an important point about poetry and public spheres. The TLS, a review from a major cultural capital with the word “literary” as its middle name, treats books on architecture more seriously and thoughtfully than it treats poetry. Turning to recent years in the New York Times Book […]
[…]twenty four hours. American Online shut down the site, but in that time, hundreds of copies of the code were made by computer geeks around the world. This code is being been collaboratively updated and improved by freelance programmers, much as the Linux operating system has been developed. I suspect that there soon will be Gnutella sites for various types of music, and the program, which I understand is tricky and far from bug-free, will become increasingly user-friendly over time. Gnutella will ultimately be worse for the record companies than Napster ever could be, as Gnutella can grow and develop […]
[…]States to play. Despite our language barrier, I feel an unspoken cross-cultural alliance with this group. Our collective desire to reach beyond the parameters of music, the language we actually do have in common, has brought us together to this rare occasion in Kyoto, and although none of our shows have garnered an audience of over 50 people so far, this little tour feels oddly important, as if we are members of a larger cultural movement in the process of forming. I always find it strange when people say that music is the most “abstract” of art forms, not because […]
[…]of taking something apart and putting it back together directly relates to Wenk’s method of working, and therefore complements Wilson’s insights into the artist’s work. Additional documentary photos of multiple uses of tape in the real world – duct tape holding broken windows together – offer graphic reinforcement of Wilson’s observations, “The tape, as viscous, is dangerous, for it threatens to stick to one like glue or like honey…” A smart group of texts, Wilson’s writing reveals the complexity of Wenk’s seemingly innocuous actions and prosaic material. In his next publication, Wenk would be better served in attempting not to […]
[…]address of social and kinesthetic intelligence. In Sage Walker’s novel Whiteout , a group of friends run a virtual company described as: a mosaic….an interactive group of ideas and personalities,…a collection of disparate talents that can define answers and then come up with questions for people to ask about them. We want to work with the psychology of attractions, with the science of spin-doctoring, with virtual realities that can compact and condense amounts of information that would have staggered us in our childhood. ^2 Walker, Sage. Whiteout. (New York: TOR Books, 1996): 83. Of course, science fiction isn’t the only […]
[…]“language writing.” Writes Bob Perelman in The Marginalization of Poetry, one practitioner’s critical account of this movement: “language writing is best understood as a group phenomenon…whose primary tendency is to do away with the reader as a separable category.” Creeley’s collaborations offer various points of entrance: through artist or poet; in gallery, text, or internet; with one or the other exchanging the roles of artist and reader/viewer and offering ways we can do the same. They break down the disciplinary boundaries that define how we regard the arts, that herd us into singular designations as “readers” or “viewers” or “practitioners” […]
[…]Allegory, Benjamin argues, is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities. While working on the never completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for the Arcades Project. What was recovered after WWII from its hiding place in the Bibliotheque Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly from 19th century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses. The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting […]
[…]and strike and spit and refuse to shop. As official culture promotes bumper stickers for the working class, it promotes the Internet with its commercial websites, bulletin boards, chat groups, and subscriber lists for the middle class. The idea is: displace your anger and passions onto the Net so that you won’t be inclined to actualize them in real time in a context that might conceivably effect change. Moreover every communication we make on the Net is subject to monitoring, and in the process these communications make money for computer, software, and online corporations, as well as profiting paid Net […]