square white world

discuss

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:09:56 -0400

There is … a great deal more to be said for post-colonial studies … Whatever its romantic illusions and secret self regard, this most rapidly growing [1999] sector of literary criticism signals the entry onto the Western cultural stage, for the first time in its history, of those the West has most injured and abused. …But there are discreditable as well as creditable reasons for the speedy surfacing of post-colonialism, and [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak remains for the most part silent about them [in her book, reviewed here by Terry Eagleton, A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present]. Its birth, for example, followed in the wake of the defeat, at least for the present, of both class struggle in Western societies and revolutionary nationalism in the previously colonised world. American students who, through no fault of their own, would not recognise class struggle if it perched on the tip of their skateboards, or who might not be so keen on the Third World if some of its inhabitants were killing their fathers and brothers in large numbers, can vicariously fulfil their generously radical impulses by displacing oppression elsewhere. This move leaves them plunged into fashionably postmodern gloom about the ‘monolithic’ benightedness of their own social orders. It is as if the depleted, disorientated subject of the consumerist West comes by an extraordinary historical irony to find an image of itself in the wretched of the earth. If ‘margins’ are now much in vogue, it is partly because those who inhabit them clamour for political justice, and partly because a generation bereft of political memory has cynically abandoned all hope for the ‘centre’. Like most US feminism, post-colonialism is a way of being politically radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist, and so is a peculiarly hospitable form of leftism for a ‘post-political’ world.

…

For all his dyspepsia about the shock-headed Marxists, not to speak of his apparent willingness to shop Communists to the state, [George] Orwell’s politics are much more far-reaching than his conventionally-minded prose would suggest. With much post-colonial writing, the situation is just the reverse. Its flamboyant theoretical [theatrical] avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda. Where it ventures political proposals at all, which is rare enough, they hardly have the revolutionary élan of its scandalous speculations on desire or the death of Man or the end of History. This is a feature shared by Derrida, Foucault and others like them [sic], who veer between a cult of theoretical ‘madness’ or ‘monstrosity’ and a more restrained, reformist sort of politics, retreating from the one front to the other depending on the direction of the critical figure.

…

Gayatri Spivak’s own politics are as elusive as her thought-processes … At times, she will speak positively about the need for new laws, health and education systems, relations of production; at other times, in familiar post-colonial style, her emphasis is less on transformation than on resistance. Resistance suggests militant action, but also implies that the political buck is always elsewhere. It is a convenient doctrine for those who dislike what the system does while doubting that they will ever be strong enough to bring it down. … The current system of power can be ceaselessly ‘interrupted’, deferred or ‘pushed away’, but to try to get beyond it altogether is the most credulous form of utopianism.

– Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essay on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others, Verso, London, 2003, pp. 163-165

http://bit.ly/12U1ZFX

what I was thinking of, II

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:08:26 -0400

http://bit.ly/111FifY

what I was thinking of

Sun, 12 May 2013 21:38:29 -0400

the problem of writing: in order to designate something
exactly, inexact expressions are unavoidable. Not at all because it is a neces-
sary step, or because one can advance only by approximations; on the con-
trary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way

- Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, p. 20

http://bit.ly/YDNOFg

square white world – a gesture, in Agamben’s words, neither enactment nor production

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:53:39 -0400

http://bit.ly/17UuS88

τραῦμα: theatres of memory, new zealand, germany, big & little

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:38:30 -0400

Germany bore witness to the Death of God.

America saw and presided at the Death of Man.

Colonies see the Death of the World.

http://bit.ly/10BgLE6

Hallucination with Execution is Vision

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:53:54 -0400

I completely agree with this.

http://bit.ly/ZOcgok

a dreadlocked virtual-reality pioneer turned classical-music composer and techno-pundit

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:23:40 -0400

In his new book Who Owns the Future?, [Jaron] Lanier looks to a future in which it isn’t just our social networks and search engines that reap billions from our data. It’s everyone: retailers, banks, health care providers. Lanier thinks they’ll all offer us wonderful services at irresistible prices—yet leave us unemployed and at their mercy.

- Will Oremus, here … cf. here

http://bit.ly/12S1ACi

No photos to show: Assange, Manning, Dotcom, MacBride and Freud

Tue, 07 May 2013 19:38:38 -0400

“there’s a lawfare thing going on with U.S. law, to apply U.S. law to as many jurisdictions as possible. And if you have control over use of force in a foreign jurisdiction, it’s your jurisdiction. It’s part of your state by definition.”

Chris Hedges interviews Julian Assange at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London here.

moving

incredible

remarkable

articulate

“a heroic quality is deciding to do something, as opposed to it being an unconscious, unreasoned expression of madness or sexual frustration or whatever. .. if you’ve done things because you were a mad homosexual, and no one can choose to be a mad homosexual. So they stripped him of—attempted to strip him of all his refinements.”

“We know that he won three science fairs, or we know the guy is bright. We know that he was interested in politics early on, and he’s very articulate, and outspoken, and didn’t like lies. And we know that he was interested in the state of the world. And we know that he was skilled at his job of being an intelligence analyst. And these things suggest that if you’re going to say, what, be careful, that the combination of abilities and motivations that might cause an action, here are talents and virtues that could perceivably give rise to the phenomenon. But instead people go … they look at all the, ya know, they say, “Oh, he’s a homosexual—this is the answer.”

“how absurd is it that on the East Coast of the U.S., to be a proper successful person, as a woman you have to have a psychiatrist, and as a man you have to have a lawyer?”

http://bit.ly/15oaj6B

The idea came from a medical discharge… more »

Sat, 04 May 2013 19:53:25 -0400

http://bit.ly/ZwwAao

bofject perpo discops

Fri, 03 May 2013 21:23:40 -0400

http://bit.ly/18j7vWS

70s = sexuality + politics; 80s = sexuality – politics; 90s = – ; 00s = : ); 10s = …

Fri, 03 May 2013 17:38:26 -0400

Odiseo from Alvaro Posadas on Vimeo.

http://bit.ly/ZthFxz

Please visit https://gust.com/c/littleelephantltd for more, request access and forward to friends who may be interested.

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:38:26 -0400

http://bit.ly/YqbJdu

I am listening to this again

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 03:53:34 -0400

http://bit.ly/YdELNn

a note on the translation: ἐμέσαι

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:08:16 -0400

you would spit out a venom but you would spew something out which you had first eaten or had drunk. And you would spit something out of your mouth before you had eaten or had drunk it. But you would try to spew something out which had been or had grown inside you, like a disease or a parasite.

Revelation 3:16 allows for a compromise by having ἐκ τοῦ στόματός μου – literally “out of the mouth of me” – out of my mouth. Also, ἐμέσαι is preceded by μέλλω σε – the latter in English: “I am about to” – I am about to spit/spew you out of my mouth. However, ἐμέσαι contains the root for emetic, so the phrase τινα ἐκ τοῦ στόματος could be translated as “reject with extreme disgust” – Thus because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold I’m going to reject you with extreme disgust.

Choosing among rejecting with extreme disgust, spewing or spitting may be less important than the elision or inclusion of the word indicating my present intention: I am going to – present indicative, first person singular – μέλλω. I haven’t yet, but I am going to, I’m going to try to spew you out, to reject you with all the force of my disaffection: You are abject.

And so because you are lukewarm and neither warm nor cool I’m going to vomit you out of my mouth.

http://bit.ly/11X1Qzo

χλιαρός

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:23:46 -0400

trans. evfokas

Left behind are miserable small-time parties,
bashful girls, timid grebos,
Olympians¹ and Doors along with vermouth on the rocks;
you know all this

I’ve seen you too like the other so called college students,
fart rebels relying on daddy’s doe;
all miserable and skimpy, this is why I’m telling you:

There’s a good reason I was a lukewarm youth
unfortunately I’ve been through that but fortunately I’m not hiding it
and here’s a good reason I am cool

Left behind are miserable schools,
truancies and porn, exclusions for haircut,
cheeks and politics, get-togethers at the square;
you know all this

I don’t recall junta, but neither freedom,
poor generation of the polity²,
all colourless and skimpy, this is why I’m telling you:

There’s a good reason I was a lukewarm youth
unfortunately I’ve been through that but fortunately I’m not hiding it
and here’s a good reason I am cool

Now our songs fall short to them,
the elders are laughing up their sleeves,
you see they have the glamour of the sixties,
they pulled a gallstone

If history gave to us only nothing,
expressing this nothing and expressing oneself
is the only chance we got you and me,
this is why I’m telling you:

There’s a good reason I was a lukewarm youth
unfortunately I’ve been through that but fortunately I’m not hiding it
and here’s a good reason I am cool

¹ Greek pop-rock group of the ’60s
² For Greece the political times after the 1974 fall of the coup d’ etat

http://bit.ly/14g4jfh

http://bit.ly/14g3TFC

So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:08:16 -0400

χλιαρός

It is remarkable that the Greek adjectives are in the masculine, agreeing with the angel, not feminine, agreeing with the Church.

- Revelation 3:16

http://squarewhiteworld.com/2013/04/26/so-then-because-you-are-lukewarm-and-neither-cold-nor-hot-i-will-spew-you-out-of-my-mouth/

last will and testament of a costumer – or should that be costumier? – join the charade

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:08:43 -0400

http://bit.ly/11DvLiL

It is an idea whose time has come.

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:38:08 -0400

http://bit.ly/11tmtVb

o drugs

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:08:32 -0400

http://bit.ly/ZcUr2Y

Dear Alice, Crime Oil #7

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 08:53:25 -0400

http://bit.ly/11rC3SJ