Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • Some thoughts on blogging during a pandemic

    We often talk about blogging within higher education as if it’s relatively new, leaving us with the challenge of explaining and making a case for it to colleagues who might be sceptical and unfamiliar. This is a curious state of affairs given that blogs have been around for close to thirty years, even if the…

  • The coming fascism

    The closing passage from Richard Seymour’s latest essay has been reverberating in my mind since I read it: Should we fail to posit the alternative, the constructive reworking of civilisation that is so urgently required, and that accommodates us to inhospitable nature, we do not get the boom years and centrist orthodoxy. We get harder…

  • Social media for academics and Covid-19

    In this fireside chat from the Australian National University’s Get #SoMe course, Mark Carrigan and Inger Mewburn discuss social media for academics, the challenges of digital scholarship and their significance when daily life is being transformed by Covid-19.  

  • Inhabited institutionalism

    I just came across the idea of inhabited institutionalism and I find it extremely compelling. Here’s an overview from a paper by Tim Hallett and Emily Meanwell: Inhabited institutionalism is a nascent approach that creates a conversation between Chicago-style interactionism and the new institutionalism in organizational analysis. (Bechky 2011; Haedicke 2012; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). Inhabited…

  • We won’t have digital scholarship until we rethink outputs, expertise and knowledge

    I’m currently editing The Public and Their Platforms, a book I’ve co-written with Lambros Fatsis about the prospects for public sociology once digital platforms are ubiquitous. At the risk of sounding conceited, it’s a long and multifaceted argument which didn’t become entirely clear to us until we had completed the first draft. I’m trying to…

  • Social media in the Post-Pandemic University: a bootcamp for graduate students

    Online boot camp, with Dr Ana Canhoto (Brunel University London) and Dr Mark Carrigan (University of Cambridge). With social distancing likely to be the ‘new normal’, confidence and competence in using social media tools for professional purposes is more important than it has ever been. In this month-long, online boot camp, we explore what this…

  • Silicon Valley’s cult of work

    One of the clearest themes in Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley is the disturbing embrace of work and her attempts to move beyond it. Much of the book is a memoir of her own experience entering the tech world as co-founder of a startup, what this lifestyle entailed for her and the meanings she has…

  • Trump’s regrets about Twitter

    From today’s Protocol newsletter: President Trump’s (otherwise relatively boring) interview last week with Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy brought a somewhat unprecedented look into how @realdonaldtrump thinks about Twitter. Here are a few excerpts: On what happens to the account when he leaves office: “Well it’s mine, and I don’t know that I’ll ever use it again, but…

  • Time is a cycle, not a line

  • Deadline soon! CfP: the Post-Pandemic University

    Organised by Mark Carrigan and Susan Robertson  In a matter of months, the world has changed beyond recognition. Covid-19 has led to an unprecedented reorganisation of everyday life, with half the world’s population subject to lockdown measures at the peak of governmental response to the pandemic. These measures are being eased across the world, with…

  • Platform Epistemics, Slavoj Žižek and Digital Reflexivity

    It would be hard to imagine two thinkers with seemingly less in common than Margaret Archer and Slavoj Žižek. However one of the reasons I enjoy the latter’s work, in spite of my many reservations about him, relates to the status of reflexivity within their work. In spite of their different terminology, emphasis and interests I believe…

  • What does social media do to the civil sphere?

    I’m reading Jeffrey Alexander’s massive The Civil Sphere in the final stages of my project with Lambros Fatsis on public sociology. The reviewers suggested we need to expand our concept of publicness to take account of the notion of civil sphere, defined by Alexander on pg 3 as “a world of values and institutions that generates the…

  • What is participation?

    I’m greatly enjoying Christopher Kelty’s recent book The Participant which is an enormously creative reflection on participation from a philosophical and anthropological perspective. What endears me to it so much is it clear sense of the ontology of participation which it sustains without remaining stuck at the level of ontology. He treats participation as: A concept A…

  • Covid-19, lockdown and the kinetic utopia of modernity

    As often happens when I read older texts by Peter Sloterdijk, I’m struck by a sense of their enduring relevance compared to other thinkers who write in his register. In this extract from his Infinite Mobilisation (1997) he writes about the significance of those experiences when infrastructure struggles and we grind to a halt. What he…

  • Recognising the need which Jordan Peterson is serving

    There’s a short aside in Against The Web by Michael Brooks which identifies something which I’ve often reflected on. For all their terrible characteristics figures like Jordan Peterson are serving an existential need which the left ought to understand. From pg 50: Like everyone else, young white men are trying to muddle through life in…

  • The possibility of a digital police state: Hegel, Fichte, Mejias, Couldry, Bauman and Sloterdijk

    In a debate about Fichte’s conception of the police state, Hegel took issue with the logistical demands involved in such over-weaning control of a population. However as points out on pg 28 of Žižek’s Hegel In A Wired Brain, Fichte’s vision seems eerily prescient when we consider the possibilities for control inherent in digitalisation: When…

  • The importance of what we don’t (and can’t) say

    I loved this section from Žižek’s Hegel In A Wired Brain pg 43 about the importance of what we don’t (and can’t) say. It can certainly be a negative experience, a claustrophobic imminence in which we struggle to express something which we need to externalise into the world But the reality of the unarticulated/inarticulable is…

  • What will it be like to work on Elon Musk’s Mars colony?

    This short piece by Keith Spencer is absolutely spot on. Exploring the contrasting visions which Bezos and Musk have of our interplanetary near-future would be a wonderful exercise in design fiction for someone who is a more talented writer than me. This is what makes Musk’s Mars vision so different than, say, the Apollo missions…

  • Žižek on asexuality

    It’s been at least seven years since I last worked on asexuality but I inevitably encounter the topic on a regular basis. I was a bit surprised to find it in Slavoj Žižek’s recent book Hegel in a Wired Brain, in spite of his penchant for god awful writing about trans issues in recent years. This…

  • Elon Musk as the intersection between influencer culture and the stock market

    There’s a fascinating point in yesterday’s Protocol (seriously, sign up to this if you haven’t already) about the vested interests which Elon Mask has in building his own profile. With his Tesla compensation pegged to the firm’s stock price, his online contrarianism (and its evident popularity with a committed cohort of fans, increasing numbers of…

  • The terrifying horizon of (digitalised) social order

    This is a powerful statement by Ulises Ali Mejias and Nick Couldry on pg 22 of their data colonialism. I’m not entirely convinced by the book but I think they’re certainly correct to see a radical horizon of (digitalised) social order having opened up in the last decade: Two possibilities result that, before digital connection,…

  • Big Tech and sustainability: the current state of play

    This is such a helpful overview from the consistently excellent Protocol newsletter: As Facebook has gone from “social network for chatty college kids” to effectively powering a version of the internet with data centers and offices all over the world, the company’s begun to think a lot more about sustainability. Good for the world, good…

  • The monthly Digital Sociology discussion group

    We would like to alert subscribers to the roll out of an ongoing series of discussions hosted by the British Sociological Association’s Digital Sociology Study Group.  Starting from July 15th 2020, The Digital Sociology Study Group will be hosting monthly discussions, workshops, and book launches with academics, researchers, authors, practitioners, and activists exploring a range…

  • What is a stereotype?

    I thought this was a fascinating aside in Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology pg 63. It captures something which the contemporary sense of stereotype as reductive/cliche tends to miss: the fact these categories are impervious to countervailing evidence and reproduce the same judgement in different circumstances: It first referred to a practice in the printing…

  • Twitter and the structure of polarisation

    A few days ago, I tweeted* a complaint to a public transport operator in frustration at how few people were wearing masks on their services and the seeming lack of enforcement by the operators. I was visiting my parents, who’ve been shielding since March and I was growing increasingly concerned that I was exposing them…

  • Is capitalism too big to fail?

    I can’t stop thinking about these words from David Harvey, recirculated by Richard Seymour in this excellent post: Capital, right now, is too big to fail. We cannot imagine a situation where we would shut down the flow of capital. Because if we shut down the flow of capital, eighty percent of the world’s population…

  • What is ‘modernising zeal’?

    This description of Tony Blair’s ambitions by Alastair Campbell invites a question I’ve often wondered about. What is ‘modernising zeal’? It’s such a loaded term but clearly so significant to understand centrists dispositions yet it’s rarely, if ever, defined: But he feared that unless the party adapted to the modern post-Cold War, post-Thatcherite world, it…

  • Call for Papers: Digital Technology, Lockdown and the Post-Pandemic University

    Organised by Mark Carrigan, Ibrar Bhatt and Jeremy Knox  In only a few months, the world has been transformed beyond recognition by Covid-19. As we face the prospect of many months, even years, until a vaccine can be produced and distributed, it seems increasingly clear there will be no return to normality. This online conference…

  • Social media governance within higher education

    For a number of years I’ve believed we urgently need a conversation about social media governance within higher education. This is a general term for a range of mundane issues which emerge from the use of social media by those within the university (academics, students, support staff, managers etc) in ways which are likely to…

  • “The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it stares back at you”

    I found this quote from Karl Kraus in a book of Walter Benjamin’s fragments. I’m struggling to find the original source but I can’t stop thinking about the experience it describes: The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it stares back at you. The uncanny tendency for meaning to recede as…

  • Call for Papers: Building the Post-Pandemic University

    In a matter of months, the world has changed beyond recognition. Covid-19 has led to an unprecedented reorganisation of everyday life, with half the world’s population subject to lockdown measures at the peak of governmental response to the pandemic. These measures are being eased across the world, with uncertain and worrying consequences in the continued…

  • Neoliberalism and its dependence upon oil

    From Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things loc 2651-2699: When the United States abandoned the gold standard in August 1971,80 international capital sought refuge from this “Nixon shock” in commodity purchases. At the same time, the Soviet Union—following poor harvests—traded its oil for wheat, driving up…

  • Why I’m so fascinated by education

    This passage from Keri Facer’s superb Learning Futures (pg 21) captures why I’m so interested in education. I wrote a PhD on what I called personal morphogenesis: how we become who we are and how personal changes are bound up in social changes. The reason I’ve moved into education is because I want to understand how…

  • The potential virtues of online education during Covid-19

    I found this a thought-provoking, if not entirely convincing, account by University of Bristol PVC Tansy Jessop on WonkHE: personalise learning, with students working at their own pace and thoughtfully going back to material in their own time trigger a shift from content-driven curricula (the idea of ‘covering content’) to carefully structured and selective bite-sized…

  • Theoretical interventions as events

    Scott Lash interviewed by Nicholas Gane in the Future of Social Theory pg 105. I found this thought provoking in terms of its linking of the transcendent with the book form (the slow, careful, considered attempt to get outside of the issue) and the imminent with more feral forms of intervention outside the established repertoires…

  • To see the machine we need to dispense with the Weberian legacy on technology

    In The Future of Social Theory Nicholas Gane draws attention to Weber’s remarks about technology and how they shaped the treatment of related questions in the discipline. As Gane puts it on pg 3, “In this perspective (which runs from the nineteenth century through to today), sociology is only to be concerned with objects and…

  • Situating digital education in the longue durée of educational restructuring

    This account of past educational change by Margaret Archer in Social Origins of Educational Systems struck me as an apt characterisation of what many providers of digital education are currently doing. Has any sought to compare current strategies to past strategies rather than treating digital education as something sui generis? As a method of assertion,…

  • A bleakly plausible future for post-pandemic labour

    This piece by James Meadway paints a bleakly plausible future for post-pandemic labour. Firstly, the economic costs of social distancing on businesses with already thin profit margins incentivises a renewed push towards automation, something which has been stalled by the relatively cost of labour heretofore. Why risk the large capital investment in robots when humans…

  • The dark side of social media and what it means for academics

    I was really pleased to discover that Sage have put this chapter from Social Media for Academics online. I’ve felt somewhat self-conscious that I deleted my Twitter account soon after publishing the second edition of a book about social media. But this chapter is what led me to the conclusion that this was the right…

  • In defence of lurid curiosity about the lives of the rich and powerful

    This short piece by Norman Solomon about the wealth of NYT columnist Thomas Friedman captures something I’ve often felt about the sociological value of what might otherwise be framed as lurid curiosity about the lives of the rich and powerful. For example I’ve been interested for a long time in the personal biography of Anthony…

  • I don’t mind if I’m with you

    When I was younger, I had a bad dream The one where you run, and you run, and keep falling Thank God for the dream you’ve been to me Like a light in the long dark hall They set me on fire and I did a lot of burning Told me I didn’t know things…

  • Ulrich Beck’s bleak vision of a future Europe battling against immigration

    I was struck by how bleak a vision Ulrich Beck offered at the end of his final book, as well as how uneasily it sits with what I had assumed to be his self-consciously cosmopolitan politics. I think he’s correct to identify “the striking mismatch between higher education and unemployment” such that “we have the best…

  • Beck on two forms of social integration

    In his final book Metamorphosis Ulrich Beck contrasts two forms of social integration. As he writes on pg 168-169: If one understands the communities of world cities in this sense as ‘cosmopolitan communities of global risk’, however, one must abandon the widespread assumption in the social sciences that community-building is possible only on the basis…

  • And why the hell, if there are real enemies, shouldn’t I be allowed to insult them?

    I love this line from Alain Badiou quoted on loc 4686 of Jade Lindgaard and Xavier De La Porte’s BHL in Wonderland: It is characteristic of politics that there are enemies, even if capitalo-parliamentarism presses its domination to the point of trying to make us forget this. And why the hell, if there are real…

  • Being an intellectual outside the academy: the sociology of branding strategies

    I thought Jade Lindgaard and Xavier De La Porte identify something important about the strategic issues faced by those who style themselves as intellectuals while remaining resolutely outside the academy. This is from their incisive critique BHL in Wonderland loc 4617, describing the growing rivalry between their titular nemesis Bernard-Henri Lévy and his emerging foe…

  • Keeping our intellectual communities going during lockdown: a show and tell workshop

    By Mark Carrigan and Pat Thomson  Over the last decade social media has gone from being a fringe part of academic life to something which is mainstream. What was once regarded as a slightly suspicious activity has now been recognised as a legitimate means to keep connected within the academy and engage with audiences outside…

  • The private symposia of the rich and powerful

    This extract from Carlos Slim by Diego Osorno left me wondering how many private symposia are organised each year, for the edification of high level managers or the amusement of the rich. There are scholarship programs and think tanks organised by the ultra-rich which have senior academics as their directors. For example Nigel Thrift left…

  • The disruption of routines and new consumer behaviours

    This extract from today’s Protocol newsletter hinted at something which has been on my mind in the last few weeks. Could new consumer behaviours which might once have seemed implausible quickly take hold during the current crisis? We could ask the same question about non-commercial social media which I’ve always thought was brilliant in principle…

  • there are no new beginnings until everybody sees that the old ways need to end

    I saw it roaring I felt it clawing at my clothes like a grieving friend It said there are no new beginnings Until everybody sees that the old ways need to end But it’s hard to accept that we’re all one and the same flesh Given the rampant divisions between oppressor and oppressed But we…

  • Running an online conference

    Notes from the SoLAR Webinar Running an Online Conference The convenors Vitomir Kovanovic and Maren Scheffel described their experience of turning a large (500 person) conference into an online conference at short notice due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They observed that most online conferences have tended to be run with people experienced with online platforms,…

  • Zuckerberg on the three types of video chat

    From today’s Protocal newsletter: There are three kinds of video chat, Zuckerberg said: One is video calling — “when you call someone and their phone or computer actually rings.” It’s good for quick, ad-hoc interactions. Two is video rooms, “where you create a link, send it out to people, and they can go ahead and join…

  • The internet and the return of multimodal literacy

    From Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement pg 83: This pattern is epitomized by the career of the novel, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often included frontispieces, plates, and so on. But all of these elements gradually faded away, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the very word illustration…

  • The patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population

    From Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement pg 91: What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human…

  • The rich have much to lose, the poor do not

    I found this passage from Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement pg 147 deeply unsettling to read in the context of the current crisis. The comparative aspect applies slightly less to Covid than it does in the current crisis but the fragility of affluence seems obviously correct: It is not impossible, for instance, that in dealing…

  • The uncanny remembrance of the non-human

    From Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement pg 30-31: Yet now our gaze seems to be turning again; the uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors seem to have stirred a sense of recognition, an awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share…

  • The materiality of resources and the social forms they give rise to

    I thought this was a really insightful passage from Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. I’m trying to deepen my understanding of the socio-environmental at the moment (not least of all because you can’t understand Covid-19 without it) and conjunctures like this built around a specific causal relationship between the material and the social over time seem like…

  • “A life. A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come”

    This section from Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement reminded me of my favourite line from Lester Freeman in The Wire. The substance of the lives we lead is mundane, reproducing who we are in circumstances which remain roughly the same. However we are culturally surrounded with representations of life which are preoccupied by change, continuity,…

  • The sociology of civilisational collapse

    I found this section by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore really arresting to read a couple of months into the Covid-19 crisis, from loc 216 -231 of their A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Cascading failures brought feudalism to an end but there were long struggles as elites resisted demands for change but without having the…

  • Now we’re apart. Though not through choice. Do we stay mute? Or raise our voice?

  • Could science fiction be a research method?

    I thought this was a really interesting insight on 44-45 of Steve Fuller’s Humanity 2.0: Setting aside the prescience – or not – of these works when it comes to genetic transformation and more radical future embodiments for humanity, they provide the trace of what remained of sociology’s original non-academic impulse after much, if not…

  • The downward mobility of intellectuals

    This passage from Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (pg 108) resonated horribly with me at a time when universities are freezing their recruitment: There were a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I…

  • Ian McEwan on the mundane reality of reflexivity

    On Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me pg 96 there’s a lovely description of the mundane reality of reflexivity, as well as our tendency to assume other people could not possibly notice it: My days sometimes began with an unspoken soliloquy. A matter of seconds, usually after shaving. I dried my face, looked myself in the…

  • The agricultural origins of pandemics

    I’m slowly getting my head around how the arrangement of agriculture, with its co-ordination of animals in time and space, creates the conditions in which viruses are incubated, as Catharine Arnold explains in her Pandemic 1918: Little did doctors suspect, during the First World War, that ducks operated as a ‘reservoir’ for bird flu viruses, littering…

  • The irreducibility of hope

  • What is ‘post-truth’?

    I’ve spent the last couple of years grappling with the notion of ‘post-truth’ in order to understand the changing social and political context within which academics are using social media. It’s a term I’m instinctively wary of because it so often fails to transcend the level of platitude, enabling people to dismiss political currents they…

  • The Isolation Pod: Theorising in/of Covid-19

    Find it online here

  • The geopolitics of Big Tech and the Covid crisis

    This was a succinct summary by Laurie Macfarlane of the emerging interface between a US national security apparatus seeking to ward off the growing power of China and a Big Tech apparatus in Silicon Valley seeking to ward off the threat of regulation. His excellent essay shows how this will become more significant in the…

  • Žižek on Covid temporalities

    This is the last thing I’ll post about Žižek’s Pandemic! eBook but I thought these observations about what I’ve come to think of as Covid temporalities, the distinct temporal experiences of crisis and lockdown, were very useful. On loc 396 he considers the inevitability of ‘dead time’ during those who can lockdown during this crisis…

  • Slavoj Žižek’s surprisingly earnest and rather good advice about adapting to lockdown

    I thought this advice from loc 814-829 of Pandemic! was helpful as well as charmingly earnest. It verbalises my own instinct about how to respond to this, at least after a week of drunken despair after I grasped that ‘normal life’ as I knew it simply wasn’t going to return. What matters is to find…

  • The Utopian Dystopia of Lockdown

    There’s a familiar dystopian character to the (middle-class) experience of lockdown, conveyed by Slavoj Zizek on loc 384-396 of his Pandemic: Many dystopias already imagine a similar future: we stay at home, work on our computers, communicate through videoconferences, exercise on a machine in the corner of our home office, occasionally masturbate in front of…

  • The abandoned city

    From Zizek’s Pandemic! loc 396: The abandoned streets in a megalopolis—the usually bustling urban centers looking like ghost towns, stores with open doors and no customers, just a lone walker or a single car here and there, provide a glimpse of what a non-consumerist world might look like. The melancholic beauty of the empty avenues…

  • Panic and reflexivity

    From Zizek’s Pandemic! loc 439: What this contrast tells us is that panic is not a proper way to confront a real threat. When we react in panic, we do not take the threat seriously—we, on the contrary, trivialize it. Just think how ridiculous is the notion that having enough toilet paper would matter in…

  • Our vocabulary of intervention in a platformised crisis

    This point made by Benjamin Bratton, in a personal conversation quoted by Zizek in Pandemic!, makes an important point about how we categorise state action in a crisis like this. From loc 523: China introduced measures that Western Europe and the USA are unlikely to tolerate, perhaps to their own detriment. Put bluntly, it is…

  • Why do academic celebrities self-plagiarise?

    I’m not searching for self-plagiarism but I increasingly spot it when reading. It’s a vague itch of “I’ve read this before” and the search facilities of digital books (Google Books, Kindle etc) makes it easier than ever to confirm. I noticed recently that a paragraph of Zizek’s recent Russia Today pieces on Covid-19 (which one…

  • The fast eat the slow, the rich eat the fast. Or, the moral economy of Thomas Friedman’s digital illiteracy

    I thought this was an interesting extract from Imperial Messenger concerning Thomas Friedman’s advocacy of a digital imperative (‘get-wired-or-die’) which he himself is insulated from. As Belén Fernández writes on loc 668: Quoted in Foreign Policy as saying “I talk the talk of technology, but I don’t walk the walk,” Friedman elsewhere admits to not knowing how…

  • Will Covid-19 generate an epidemiological folk consciousness? What will this mean for platform capitalism?

    For the last few weeks I’ve been preoccupied by the question of what social distancing and the threat of Covid-19 means for our sense of self. It’s remarkable how quickly we have adapted to sustaining a distance from others because of the reciprocal risk inherent in our interaction. There are many cases where this doesn’t hold true…

  • Covid-19 and the re-politicisation of the economy

    From Zizek’s The Ticklish Subject pg 430: In short, the only way effectively to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions would ensue from public debate involving all concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capital’s freedom, the subordination of the process of production to social control – the radical repoliticisation of the…

  • Covid-19 and the impossibility of floating freely in our undisturbed balance

    This extract from Zizek’s The Ticklish Subject pg 451 left me reflecting on the edginess which pervades public spaces at the moment, with practical co-existence in a situation of implicit (invisible) threat clearly taking a psychological toll on many of us: This disintegration of paternal authority has two facets. On the one hand, symbolic prohibitive norms are…

  • The epochal sublime

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how breaks, ruptures and transitions are conceived of an ontological level. They are evidenced through factors across a range of domains which are presented as indicators of change but the underlying rupture must exceed these particular trends in order to be regarded as such. There’s something might and…

  • Covid and Social Acceleration

    A summary of Hartmut Rosa’s recent interventions on Covid-19 from a (rapidly published) paper by Christian Fuchs: The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2020b) argues that the corona virus crisis means “forced deceleration”4. He argues that there is a “massive deceleration of real physical life, where on the one hand one feels silenced and excluded but…

  • The fragmentation of the humanities

    I can’t help but relate this proliferation (in my view fragmentation) within the humanities to the discursive phenomena of turns. Much as we turn when we’re unsure where we’re going, I’m intuitively sceptical that what Rosi Braidotti describes on pg 100-102 of PostHuman Knowledge is a sign of the humanities being in good health: The discursive…

  • Against the theoretical avant-garde, some thoughts against Rosi Braidotti’s PostHumanities

    I’m reading Rosi Braidotti’s PostHuman Knowledge at the moment and I’m struggling with it. Leaving aside my other objections to her approach, due to be published by the end of the year, it perfectly embodies a tendency towards the theoretical avant-garde which I’ve found more problematic with each passing year. She is far from alone…

  • the pandemic age has its origins in neoliberal agribusiness

    A really important argument from Richard Seymour’s latest Patreon blog post: The geo-economics of particle conveyance, is an industrial byproduct of agribusiness. The concentration and centralisation of agricultural capital results in unprecedentedly large farm sizes, with big, sedentary animal populations intensifying virulence. The imperative to streamline production where profit margins are often very tight, results in working conditions…

  • The Shifting Plate Tectonics of Late Neoliberalism

    I thought this was a good summary of the strange alliances unfolding as the plate tectonics of politics shift, from Rosi Braidotti’s Post Human Knowledge pg 34-35: Former liberal thinkers turning arch-conservative, in response to the current US administration’s preference for white supremacy, is becoming a salient feature of the contemporary American theory wars (Lilla…

  • The neoliberal social contract

    From Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism loc 373: While neoliberalism, which emerged with the Thatcher and Reagan governments, led to higher unemployment and lower wage growth, for more than a generation this was mitigated by access to cheaper goods and services–by relocating production to countries with lower wages–as well as inflated asset prices, particularly…

  • What is an essay?

    This extract from Xavier de la Porte’s The Imposter: BHL in Wonderland loc 1946 captured something important about intellectual culture in late neoliberalism: the essay sits in between specialised writing and the popular press, in spite of the tendency of essayists to elevate it above everything else: At the same time a structural evolution was taking…

  • The pleasures which superstar professors have access too

    This fragment from  Xavier de la Porte’s The Imposter: BHL in Wonderland stuck with me because it dramatised an issue which I’ve often found myself reflecting on. How is financial, social and cultural capital transformed into the pleasures of intellectual production? This account of Bernard-Henri Lévy resonated because of how easily I could imagine myself enjoying…

  • What noisily calls itself philosophy

    This extract from Xavier de la Porte’s The Imposter: BHL in Wonderland reproduces a conference opening given by Derrida in which he drew attention to the new generation of philosophers who were being put forward as a consequence of the ‘techno-politics of telecommunications’. From loc 1809 of their book: There lies, in the techno-politics of telecommunications,…

  • The Anthropological Shock

    Anthropological shocks occur when many populations feel they have been subjected to horrendous events that leave indelible marks on their consciousness, will mark their memories forever, and will change their future in fundamental and irrevocable ways. Anthropological shocks provide a new way of being in the world, seeing the world and doing politics. — The…

  • Anti-Trumpism mirrored Trumpism

    From Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc loc 120: In 2016 especially, news reporters began to consciously divide and radicalize audiences. The cover was that we were merely “calling out” our divisive new president, Donald Trump. But from where I sat, the press was now working in collaboration with Trump, acting in his simplistic mirror image, creating…

  • Just the flu

    Looking back to the past, Predictions of the end Unseen ultra violet rays Are beating on my head Nuclear threat want to bet will be our demise The day will come when we’ll look to apocalyptic skies When the news had spread, that soon we’d all be dead Well it just blew our minds No…

  • The anthropological shock of Covid-19

    I thought this extract from Ulrich Beck’s final book Metamorphosis shed light on our current situation. The role of expert systems in rendering the crisis legible is familiar, with “the means to make the invisible threat to their life visible” lying in the mediation of events. The obvious different though is how intensively mediated Covid-19…

  • Eventbrite mobilising users to lobby for government support

    I thought this action by Eventbrite was really interesting. Platform firms reliant on face-to-face interaction face a difficult future and their relationship with their user base is one of the key resources they have access to: On Thursday, March 19, we sent a letter to the White House and Congressional leadership urging them to protect the live events…

  • Cosmopolitanism as class project

    From David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 80–1: The optimistic cosmopolitanism that became so fashionable following the Cold War, Craig Calhoun points out, not only bore all the marks of its history as “a project of empires, of long-distance trade, and of cities,” it also shaped up as…

  • Philosophical problems as existential problems: the difficulty of Nietzsche’s internal conversations

    I’m currently rereading Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a cheery accompaniment to the early signs of civilisational collapse. The translator R.J. Hollingdale captures something important about what has always drawn me to Nietzsche when he writes that “unlike most people, even most philosophers, Nietzsche lived with his intellectual problems as with realities, he experienced a similar…

  • The fragmentation of audiences is the norm, their centralisation is the exception

    From Tim Wu’s The Master Switch pg 214: The age of “mass media” upended by cable television was actually a period of unprecedented cultural homogeneity. Never before or since the sixty-year interval from the 1930s to the early 1990s had so many members of the same nation watched or listened to the same information at…

  • What an exhausting strike this has been

    And this is just the half, I can’t even find the words How alive I finally felt, in the apex of a curve Pressing so damn low, my knee was dragging in the dirt I could feel the evening heat, radiating from the earth

  • “Free speech” in the attention economy

    This is an important point by Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson which echoes an argument Will Davies made a couple of years ago. The claim of being suppressed, being denied a platform, plays an increasingly crucial role in how reactionary celebrities build their platform. It draws attention for their work, provides them with their narrative and…