Research Architecture
Stefano Harney: Abolition and the General Intellect
I would like start this essay with two questions. What is the form of capitalist production today? Who is the enemy of that form? Here are my answers. The form of capitalist production today is governance. The enemy of this form is the prisoner.
Those who understand governance as some kind of contemporary extension of governmentality do not, I believe, understand governance.
Those who understand the prisoner as some kind of contemporary manifestation of homo sacer do not, I believe, understand the prisoner.
The prisoner is guilty. And governance knows only this.
Stefano Harney: Unfinished Business, The Cultural Commodity and its Labour Process
We argue that the problems of managing in the creative industries cannot be fully understood in the current and most common overviews of the industries. We review the two ways the industries are understood as social trends before suggesting that they are both insufficiently broad and encompassing. We then use the history of cultural studies, its origins and engagements, to extend the horizon of the creative industries and also to focus on where the work takes place in these industries.
Yates McKee: “Eyes and Ears”:
from Michel Feher (ed.), Nongovernmental Politics, New York: Zone Books, 2007
Michel Feher: The Goverened in Politics
Introduction chapter in: Michel Feher (ed.), Nongovernmental Politics, New York: Zone Books, 2007
Documenting Chernobyl
Three days after the explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 on April 26th 1986, filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was granted permission to fly over the 30-square km site known as the “red zone” in order to document the extraordinary efforts at cleanup by Ukrainian workers and volunteers. When Shevchenko’s 35-mm film footage was later developed, he noticed that the film was heavily pockmarked and carried extraneous static interference and noise.
Gilles Deleuze: "Immanence: A life"
"We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. [...] A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss." This is not some abstract, mystical notion of life but a life, a specific yet impersonal, indefinite life discovered in the real singularity of events and virtuality of moments. A life is subjectless, neutral, and preceding all individuation and stratification, is present in all things, and thus always immanent to itself.
Laura Mulvey: The possessive spectator
"The ‘possessive spectator’ [Laura Mulvey] describes is a fetishist who ‘wounds the film object in the process of love and fascination’ but also ‘reinvent(s) its relations of desire and discovery’ (p. 178). This is a ‘penetration’ and even an ‘emasculation’ of the film, producing ‘a fragmented, even feminized, aesthetic of cinema’ (pp. 179–80)." (Mary Ann Doane)
Michael Taussig: The Nervous System (full text)
Written in 1992, the Nervous System is an insightful anthropological work comprised of nine essays. Michael Taussig sets out on a journey to explore and describe various forces that shape and mold our present society. He tries to explore the process through which we commodify the state and in that way transfer the power to it.
Kenneth Surin: The Sovereign Individual and Michael Taussig’s Politics of Defacement
What do the knotted feeling in the gut, the constriction in the throat, vomit, and feces have to do with the orderly syntax of knowledge and truth? What do such visceral phenomena have
to do with the flows of social power that are regimented by this syntax? How are we to think about those decisive moments of physical and affective communication that precede and exceed interpretation, the sensation that comes before and goes beyond logic but is somehow logic’s operative basis, its sine qua non? Sensation, which provides myriad points of intrusion and
Graham Huggan: (Post)Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis (in Michael Taussig's work)
Situating itself at the interface between critical theory and cultural studies, this article addresses the theoretical problem of the relationship between mimicry and mimesis, two terms which are often seen as being virtually interchangeable but which may, as I shall argue here, have different cultural functions.
Etienne Balibar: My self and my own - one and the same?
"My self and my own" is Etienne Balibar’s exploration of the conceptions of "my self" and "my own" in John Locke’s "Essay on Human Understanding". In a review for "Political Theory" Chris Pierson writes: "In a brilliant essay that ranges effortlessly over the poetry of Robert Browning, the Confessionsof St. Augustine, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Balibar identifies and explores an ambiguity in Locke’s conception of my self and my own."
Etienne Balibar: "Possessive Individualism Reversed - From Locke to Derrida"
Balibar begins his text as follows: "I cannot say if the expression “possessive individualism” was invented by MacPherson in his 1962 book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, or if he took it from another source. What is sure, however, is that from that moment onwards it became an extraordinarily successful instrument of historical analysis and ethical judgment which largely escaped the original intentions of the author.
