From Judith Butler’s Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, from pg 17: Asserting that a group of people is still existing, taking up space and obdurately living, is already an expressive action, a politically significant event, and that can happen wordlessly in the course of an unpredictable and transitory gathering. Another “effective” result of […]
From pg 163 of Material Participation by Noortje Marres: Among concepts of the community of the affected we could also include theories of affective politics developed in recent cultural theory (Thrift, 2008; Terranova, 2007; Blackman, 2008). Such ‘post-emotive’ conceptions of the public propose to understand the mobilization of publics in terms of the quick and […]
From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 203: These are the tough tools with which the environmental movement won its greatest string of victories. But with that success came some rather significant changes. For a great many groups, the work of environmentalism stopped being about organizing protests and teach-ins and became about drafting laws, then […]
My notes on Hashemi, M. (2019). Bedouins of Silicon Valley: A neo-Khaldunian approach to sociology of technology. The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118822823 This hugely original paper seeks to counteract what Morteza Hashemi sees as an excessive focus on technological development in accounts of Silicon Valley, looking beyond this macro-social (often Schumpeterian) approach to “the evolution of Silicon Valley […]
There’s an interesting section in Žižek’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight reflecting on the politics of crowds. Making a similar argument to the recent book by Will Davies, he argues that political crowds involve a rejection of representation. He argues on pg 71 that the presence of crowds seeking political change is literally a rejection […]
These notes are for the fifth and final week of the CPGJ platform capitalism intensive reading group. One of the themes running through the readings over the five weeks has been the political valence of platforms and its relationship to our analysis of them. My own instinct is that valorising platforms in an a priori […]
In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself using the term ‘playbook’ in a number of contexts. It’s typically defined as “a book containing a sports team’s strategies and plays, especially in American football” but I’m not quite sure where I picked up the phrase from as someone who hasn’t had much interest in sport […]
Well over a decade ago, I was due to start a PhD in Political Philosophy looking at ideas of the individual within liberal thought. There are many reasons why I ultimately moved into a Sociology department instead, though my lack of regrets about this choice hasn’t stopped me occasionally wondering what might this thesis might […]
I love the phrase ‘rhetorical rapture-race’ used by Thomas Frank to describe the mobilising dynamics of the far-right resurgence in the U.S. From his Pity the Billionaire loc 960: Conspiracy theorists have always been with us. But Glenn Beck brought them into the mainstream. And so began one of the most distinctive features of the […]
I wish I’d read Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise before writing my fragile movement’s paper, because this is exactly what I was trying to explore: how does this ‘imaginary unity at its most sublime’ inform popular perceptions of the mobilising potential of social media? From pg 97: The ongoing events in Egypt provide yet another example […]
From David Frayne’s Refusal of Work pg 222. My first paper on this topic is coming out soon. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons why democratic debate is currently in such a moribund state is that our busy lives leave us with so little time to study policies, collectively organise, or find out what is […]
Via John Brissenden
Via Tom Dark: Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance Lucas Melgaço (CRiS-VUB) and Jeffrey Monaghan (University of Ottawa) launch the following call for chapters for their book on protests in the information age. Editors: Lucas Melgaço (Dept. of Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) & Jeffrey Monaghan (Dept. of Criminology, University of […]
From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 1384: One start- up sentiment mining application, for example, claims to “understand how the web feels ” via a “vibology meter.” 56 This version of prosopopoeia – attributing an imagined and unified voice to a dispersed and invisible aggregate that cannot speak for itself – enacts the fetishistic disavowal […]
Notes for the talk I’m doing a couple of times next month. First at the Political Agency in the Digital World conference in Denmark then at the Global Cultures of Contestation workshop in Amsterdam. Given I’m going to these places without funding to get feedback, I can’t stress enough how keen for pointers & ideas I […]
The notion of fragile movements is an integral part of my new project. I’ve tried to explain it at various points on the blog, as well as in a book chapter which will be published as part of the Centre for Social Ontology’s annual Social Morphogenesis series. But I just encountered a really apt description of the […]
I’m on the verge of finishing my first article for this project. Once it’s done, I’ll put this on hold until Social Media for Academics is finished. But from the summer onwards, this will be my main project. Here’s the abstract I’ve submitted for a number of conferences later this year: Distracted People and Fragile […]
