Friday, April 29, 2011
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
I promised/threatened Josh that I would post a response to his positivist graphic modeling/theorization of tv quality as soon as grades were in. They're in, as is the first chapter of my dissertation, tentatively titled "Revolting Against Their Government?: Labor Insurgencies and Compromise in the Academic Defense Factory" and two fellowship applications. I'm sitting in the library on a Tuesday afternoon procrastinating from prepping for my first recitation (the stupid NYU term for what the rest of the world calls discussion sections), so i suppose I might as well impugn my friends' television habits.
I kid, of course.
But I was thinking about Josh's graph the other day, (in the shower, oddly enough,) and about why it doesn't work for me, or better to say doesn't really describe how i would evaluate my own affective investments in the tv I watch. This has nothing to do with the fact that Josh seems to think Six Feet Under's increasingly cliched SUPER PROFOUND ALAN BALL CANNED LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF BOURGEOIS SUBURBAN FAMILIES CUM GAY BUT NOT QUEER HOMONORMATIVE OVERDETERMINED NARRATIVE OF THE CLOSET (tm) makes for better TV than, say The Wire. (It most certainly does not, though 6FU had its moments - the kidnapping episode especially is perhaps the most disturbing hour of television which does not feature a cast member of Jersey Shore, and the wire could sometimes mythologize the tropes of policing it sought to problematize and/or fall into the trap of celebrating its Omars and Brothers Mouzone - as in that stupid high noon showdown sequence in season three - as cheap mythic icons, a mythologization which contributed little to the show's polemical interventions and narrative power.) I will say that Six Feet Under is certainly better than say, American Beautyˆ, and that I actually have grown somewhat fond of True Blood even though it too strikes me as really problematic on several levels, maybe most notably how the Tara character has been written over the last two seasons.
Nor does my rejection of Josh's schema have anything in particular to do with my general aversion to Law and Order and more or less every police procedural on the planet on the grounds that their optics are the racialized optics of, if not the state, than a reactionary law and order (the discourse, not the tv show which was headquartered in Roland Betts' chelsea piers complex) sentiment which invests in the state and/or in fascist vigilantism the sole hope of reclaiming the city from a diffuse, shadowy criminal menace. Also, while The West Wing under Sorkin is addictive television, I tend to find it addictive in the same way people find war and racism addictive, and the west wing has plenty of glorification of both, along with the blase sexism Aaron Sorkin is famous for and which he put to such blatant use in The Social Network's ridiculous bathroom stall blowjobs and histrionic bed-burnings by irrational SOCIAL CLIMBING ASIAN IVY LEAGUE STUDENTS(tm) who, like every female character Sorkin has ever written except for the ones who bomb stuff or order stuff bombed (Demi Moore's character in A Few Good Men notwithstanding) are even more neurotic and weak than his stock nebbishy drugged pretentious ass male protagonists. (I don't want to suggest that i see a bed-burning episode as necessarily a negative thing. I'm sure someone could make the argument that that kind of performative excess marks the irruption into the film's narrative of subjectivities which Sorkin is almost always deaf to unless using for his own shallow liberal ventriloquisms, but the problem for me is that Sorkin and Fincher are clearly including this scene as evidence of pathology, of how beyond rationality Andrew Garfield's character's life has become, and his girlfriend is treated as nothing so much as a prop of craziness. This may be an uncanny depiction of the orientalism of the hollywood lens and/or the facebook imaginary, but it's also itself implicated in such a gaze.)
Ok, ok, The West Wing was a good show, at least until season 5, which is awful, and if you can get past its self-righteously liberal triangulatory potshots at the kind of politics I subscribe to - the episode where Toby visits the IMF protesters is Sorkinian megadouchery at its finest. But I'm not being fair to Josh, who deserves better than me saying my bone to pick with his graph isn't his tastes and then going on to bash the TV he likes for like 500 words in the longest praeteritio since I don't even know. Josh, by the way, is a pretty amazing person who does really amazing work, so when I tease him for not having sufficiently refudiated the finale of Battlestar Galactica, I kid. Though seriously, that was some awful writing.
No, the problem for me is really the criteria, the effort vs reward schema. I like TV that makes me think really, really hard, that makes me work, makes me rewatch episodes. That's why I liked Lost, especially the 4th and 5th seasons, despite their cliches and stupidity, more than 6fu, which i felt trafficked in a lot of the same, but more pretentiously and without time travel or smoke monsters or polar bears. But the shows I love that aren't Lost or The Wire or Deadwood are things like Freaks and Geeks and Buffy Season 3, and the reason I like them isn't because they require little effort, it's because they evoke things that I care about or that resonate with me, whether that's the cultural politics of air travel in the age of the patriot act, the denouement of the urban crisis, the coloniality of the west, or the condition of geekitude, the collective fantastic escapist world-making of dungeons and dragons, high school as hell, or hand-eating loose seals. So really I think what I am arguing for is for other ways of evaluating cultural production which escape the rubrics of labor invested or guilt indulged and instead point us towards the alternative and sometimes dangerous knowledges we locate in the culture we produce and enjoy. Or, in other words "we have to take the boxer-brief approach." (JRE, quote page, 2003.)
I kid, of course.
But I was thinking about Josh's graph the other day, (in the shower, oddly enough,) and about why it doesn't work for me, or better to say doesn't really describe how i would evaluate my own affective investments in the tv I watch. This has nothing to do with the fact that Josh seems to think Six Feet Under's increasingly cliched SUPER PROFOUND ALAN BALL CANNED LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF BOURGEOIS SUBURBAN FAMILIES CUM GAY BUT NOT QUEER HOMONORMATIVE OVERDETERMINED NARRATIVE OF THE CLOSET (tm) makes for better TV than, say The Wire. (It most certainly does not, though 6FU had its moments - the kidnapping episode especially is perhaps the most disturbing hour of television which does not feature a cast member of Jersey Shore, and the wire could sometimes mythologize the tropes of policing it sought to problematize and/or fall into the trap of celebrating its Omars and Brothers Mouzone - as in that stupid high noon showdown sequence in season three - as cheap mythic icons, a mythologization which contributed little to the show's polemical interventions and narrative power.) I will say that Six Feet Under is certainly better than say, American Beautyˆ, and that I actually have grown somewhat fond of True Blood even though it too strikes me as really problematic on several levels, maybe most notably how the Tara character has been written over the last two seasons.
Nor does my rejection of Josh's schema have anything in particular to do with my general aversion to Law and Order and more or less every police procedural on the planet on the grounds that their optics are the racialized optics of, if not the state, than a reactionary law and order (the discourse, not the tv show which was headquartered in Roland Betts' chelsea piers complex) sentiment which invests in the state and/or in fascist vigilantism the sole hope of reclaiming the city from a diffuse, shadowy criminal menace. Also, while The West Wing under Sorkin is addictive television, I tend to find it addictive in the same way people find war and racism addictive, and the west wing has plenty of glorification of both, along with the blase sexism Aaron Sorkin is famous for and which he put to such blatant use in The Social Network's ridiculous bathroom stall blowjobs and histrionic bed-burnings by irrational SOCIAL CLIMBING ASIAN IVY LEAGUE STUDENTS(tm) who, like every female character Sorkin has ever written except for the ones who bomb stuff or order stuff bombed (Demi Moore's character in A Few Good Men notwithstanding) are even more neurotic and weak than his stock nebbishy drugged pretentious ass male protagonists. (I don't want to suggest that i see a bed-burning episode as necessarily a negative thing. I'm sure someone could make the argument that that kind of performative excess marks the irruption into the film's narrative of subjectivities which Sorkin is almost always deaf to unless using for his own shallow liberal ventriloquisms, but the problem for me is that Sorkin and Fincher are clearly including this scene as evidence of pathology, of how beyond rationality Andrew Garfield's character's life has become, and his girlfriend is treated as nothing so much as a prop of craziness. This may be an uncanny depiction of the orientalism of the hollywood lens and/or the facebook imaginary, but it's also itself implicated in such a gaze.)
Ok, ok, The West Wing was a good show, at least until season 5, which is awful, and if you can get past its self-righteously liberal triangulatory potshots at the kind of politics I subscribe to - the episode where Toby visits the IMF protesters is Sorkinian megadouchery at its finest. But I'm not being fair to Josh, who deserves better than me saying my bone to pick with his graph isn't his tastes and then going on to bash the TV he likes for like 500 words in the longest praeteritio since I don't even know. Josh, by the way, is a pretty amazing person who does really amazing work, so when I tease him for not having sufficiently refudiated the finale of Battlestar Galactica, I kid. Though seriously, that was some awful writing.
No, the problem for me is really the criteria, the effort vs reward schema. I like TV that makes me think really, really hard, that makes me work, makes me rewatch episodes. That's why I liked Lost, especially the 4th and 5th seasons, despite their cliches and stupidity, more than 6fu, which i felt trafficked in a lot of the same, but more pretentiously and without time travel or smoke monsters or polar bears. But the shows I love that aren't Lost or The Wire or Deadwood are things like Freaks and Geeks and Buffy Season 3, and the reason I like them isn't because they require little effort, it's because they evoke things that I care about or that resonate with me, whether that's the cultural politics of air travel in the age of the patriot act, the denouement of the urban crisis, the coloniality of the west, or the condition of geekitude, the collective fantastic escapist world-making of dungeons and dragons, high school as hell, or hand-eating loose seals. So really I think what I am arguing for is for other ways of evaluating cultural production which escape the rubrics of labor invested or guilt indulged and instead point us towards the alternative and sometimes dangerous knowledges we locate in the culture we produce and enjoy. Or, in other words "we have to take the boxer-brief approach." (JRE, quote page, 2003.)
Monday, January 24, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
"Not only has the education industry been the site of rapid employment growth, it has also been the site of growing labor unrest worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the VVLG data, the education industry is one of the few industries that has experienced a rising trend of labor unrest in the final decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, the geographical spread of teacher labor unrest has been far greater than was the case historically for the textile and automobile industries."
-Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor, 115
Friday, December 10, 2010
Unbelievable footage from London yesterday of students fighting back against the cops. Behold the potentialities of the liberation of living knowledge that is the book bloc.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Another occupation linkdump
Solidarity twitters from UC to Goldsmiths
Statement from the turbulence collective
The call from Paris, via edu-factory
European calling from Uniriot, with concomitant photo of the new British section of the book bloc
If you've got anything good on what's going on in PR at the moment, send it my way.
Edit: British book bloc in action!
Statement from the turbulence collective
The call from Paris, via edu-factory
European calling from Uniriot, with concomitant photo of the new British section of the book bloc
If you've got anything good on what's going on in PR at the moment, send it my way.
Edit: British book bloc in action!
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
University for Strategic Optimism at Lloyds TBS [High Quality]
this is what the university looks like.
This is a really interesting article about the place of nonacademic university employees in the current, inspiring wave of student occupations and strikes that is erupting across the United Kingdom, from Leeds to Cardiff to Warwick to Oxford to the University of East London.
I've previously written (and feel like a careerist liberal asshole so noting) about the question of how the student occupationist movements ought to rethink the place of service work and workers as central to university capitalism, and I think the tensions this mute piece points out in the current moment speak similarly to the challenges and possibilities of future organizing.
Widening Participation: "
"
I've previously written (and feel like a careerist liberal asshole so noting) about the question of how the student occupationist movements ought to rethink the place of service work and workers as central to university capitalism, and I think the tensions this mute piece points out in the current moment speak similarly to the challenges and possibilities of future organizing.
Widening Participation: "
By Anathematician
Despite frequent declarations of solidarity, protesting students and academics are failing to join forces with non-academic staff. Except when police brutality momentarily unites them - writes Anathematician
"
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