archive › Bryan Klausmeyer
Mama Said Knock You Out
K-punk on the demise of hip-hop:
The stage was set for hip-hop’s embracing of the gangster. Its adherents were fixated on films such as the Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas and (a particular favourite) Scarface, because they presented a kind of anti-mythical myth. The world they projected – of generalised betrayal, distrust and exploitation – was in tune with the capitalist realism of neoliberalism, except that hip-hop’s celebration of the crime lord, its sense that there was ultimately no difference between the tycoon and the criminal, acted as an unintentional parody of neoliberal rapacity. Even so, the left was faced with the melancholy prospect that the dominant form of black popular music was now a celebration of conspicuous consumption and will to power. In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.
Commonwealth
The long-awaited conclusion to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s anti-globalization trilogy (which includes Empire and Multitude). Here is how Harvard University Press describes Commonwealth:
Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.”
Slavoj Zizek Audio Lectures at Birkbeck
Zizek is teaching several master classes this month (or summer?) at Birkbeck University in London and the lectures are publicly available on the Internet. So far there have been five lectures which I will link to individually below:
- Monday, 15 June 2009: Utopias
- Tuesday, 16 June 2009: Architecture
- Wednesday, 17 June 2009: Wagner
- Thursday, 18 June 2009: Populism and Democracy
- Friday, 19 June 2009: Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism
Simon Critchley on Heidegger
Simon Critchley has a new blog at The Guardian where he reads and comments on Heidegger’s Being and Time. I haven’t had a chance to read this yet but it looks interesting.
On the Situation in Iran
Since I’ve been busy and haven’t had any time to post links about this as they came in, here are some that I’ve culled together over the past few days:
- Lenin’s Tomb poses the question of whether or not the Left should… read more ›
Vehmgericht on the Nihilism of the Day
Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper” (1856):
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.
At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.
This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.
(Via No Useless Leniency.)
Fans and Trolls: A Response to Badiou-Haters
I have nothing really to say about the “I hate Badiou” meme, especially since I haven’t read Badiou. I just liked this quote from K-Punk because I think it’s absolutely true:
It’s always other people who are ‘fans’: our own attachments, we like to pretend (to ourselves; others are unlikely to be convinced) have been arrived at by a properly judicious process and are not at all excessive. There’s a peculiar shame involved in admitting that one is a fan, perhaps because it involves being caught out in a fantasy-identification. ‘Maturity’ insists that we remember with hostile distaste, gentle embarrassment or sympathetic condescenscion when we were first swept up by something - when, in the first flushes of devotion, we tried to copy the style, the tone; when, that is, we are drawn into the impossible quest of trying to become what the Other is it to us. This is the only kind of ‘love’ that has real philosophical implications, the passion capable of shaking us out of sensus communis. Smirking postmodernity images the fan as the sad geekish Trekkie, pathetically, fetishistically invested in what - all good sense knows - is embarrassing trivia. But this lofty, purportedly olympian perspective is nothing but the view of the Last Man…
It continues for a bit from there, so I recommend that you keep reading along.
The Unmarked Font of Metaphysics and Truth: Helvetica
K-vond has an interesting analysis of the font Helvetica, following his viewing of the eponymously titled film, arguing that the metaphysics of the “Marked” and “Un-marked” (Helvetica belonging to the latter) operates at the basis of today’s contemporary ideologico-political fantasy of neutrality.
While I agree that to some extent with this view, especially as it’s found in the film Helvetica, I don’t think we should be so quick to throw (modernist) minimalism away. I think that it has a certain power to strip away baroque, Imaginary “meaning” and to reveal beneath it the pure mathematical formalism underlying design: to this extent, I think there is a certain radical aspect of minimalism, what we might call “militant minimalism” (as opposed to today’s self-contradictory ideology of what I would call “romantic minimalism,” as exemplified by the trite works of Malcolm Gladwell).
As a broader point, I think typography is just as worthy a domain of ideology critique as art and architecture, perhaps much closer to the latter insofar as we spontaneously interact with it, yet nevertheless operates at various levels: political, aesthetic, social, economic, etc. In so far as it materializes at the aesthetic level our unconscious, ideologico-political fantasies, typographic critique can function as an important element in the overall critique of ideology.
And as a side note, I just wanted to compliment the Lenin’s Tomb’s header image.
Understanding “Critique” in Marx’s “Capital”
Criticism is something I’m very interested in. It was essentially what my undergrad thesis was on. That’s why I’m linking to this terrific talk, given to the Marx & Philosophy Society, by N. Pepperell of Rough Theory. Here’s an excerpt:
Capital’s reflection on critical standpoint, I suggest, takes the form of a sustained analysis of all the conditions that we have not chosen, of materials – in the form of practices, institutions, beliefs, affects, forms of perception and embodiment, habits of thought, technologies, forms of interaction, and other subjective and objective moments that feed into the reproduction of capital – that have been thrown up from the detritus of history and are currently suspended into a determinate form that reproduces the capital relation. Marx’s analysis examines these materials as they currently are – looking at the properties these materials exhibit while suspended within this distinctive relation. It also, however, examines what other properties these materials might exhibit, if they were to be suspended within new relations. It is through this contrast – examining what we currently create with the historical materials that lie ready to hand, and contrasting this to what we potentially could create with these materials – that Marx establishes his standpoint of critique.
Deutschest of Lands: Ein Reisebericht
Greetings, Howlers!
Over the course of the next day or so I will venturing from Virginia/Washington, D.C. area to Schlactensee, Berlin (with a brief pit-stop in London Heathrow’s visionary quasi-aquatic “Terminal 5,” presumably greeted by dolphins and sea turtles when I… read more ›
Competing Against Free
Matthew Yglesias has it right on Internet profitability:
But in the world of websites, it’s not clear that the ability to raise large sums of capital really is a huge advantage. The startup costs of a decent website are pretty small in the scheme of things. And there are lots of people and institutions—academics looking to bring their research to a wider public, think tanks and advocacy organizations looking to influence the public debate, corporations like Google looking to express their views on policy debates, students trying to get an edge in the job market, authors hoping to promote a book—with perfectly good incentives to run websites that don’t aspire to maximize profits.
Realism and Correlationism: Truth
I haven’t had a chance to read Quentin Meillassoux’s much-discussed After Finitude yet, but this post over at Grundlegung, which, among other things, defends the complexity of the Kantian “thing in itself” against speculative realist reduction, is a pretty marvelous read. It’s also probably one of the few, if only, somewhat inspiring posts I’ve read throughout the rather asinine Realism Wars™. The real bite of the post comes here:
Even with these revisions in place, it seems to me that Meillassoux mischaracterises the thrust of the Kantian strategy. Kant is not trying to redefine truth or objectivity in intersubjective terms, under the pressure of epistemological constraints introduced by transcendental idealism. Instead, he attempts to vindicate certain a priori concepts — such as the categories of the understanding — as being objectively valid. For example, these concepts include like causality, as a necessary connection between two events. These concepts figure in Kant’s attempt to provide a reformed and legitimate metaphysics, able to justify the concepts to which it appeals. In contrast with empirical concepts, such as bear or atom, we supposedly cannot give a full defence of them by simply looking to the world and seeing whether there is anything which corresponds to them (recall Hume’s scepticism about justifying causality). For Kant, these concepts have a special status: “since they speak of objects through predicates not of intuition and sensibility but of pure a priori thought, they relate to objects universally, that is, apart from all conditions of sensibility.” (B120) Not being based upon experience, they “arouse suspicion.”
If Kant had argued that truth is reducible to universalizable intersubjectivity, then the first Critique would’ve been far less devastating for both traditional metaphysics, as well as skepticism. What Kant is really after with his transcendental philosophy is a critique of introspection by way of introspection.
Twitter Profitability
First off, I want to preface this post by saying that, in the long-term, I don’t think the Internet can be made “profitable.” This is because the medium itself is inherently opposed to profit-making: it can be done, but only… read more ›
Love The Factory, Hate The Job
A meditation on affect.
Business As Usual
Bloomberg explains the significance of the recent Air France plane crash:
Air France-KLM Group (AF FP): An Airbus A330-200 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard went missing after reporting an electrical-circuit breakdown and encountering turbulence, the company said. The shares gained 3.5 cents, or 0.3 percent, to 11.26 euros.
Via A Tiny Revolution.
about the author
Bryan Klausmeyer is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where he wrote a history thesis on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Kantian transcendental philosophy. Aside from watching film noir and reading books, he has spent the last few years writing for the Velvet Howler, but is still unsure of why.