February 2012
4 posts
Lukács on the difficulties of Marxist analysis
“For just as the very best astronomer disregards his knowledge of Copernicus and continues to accept the testimony of his senses which tells him that the sun ‘rises’, so too the most irrefutable Marxist analysis of the capitalist state can never abolish its empirical reality.”
from “Legality and Illegality” (1920)
Carl Schmitt, 1921
“Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-techical and economic-sociological...
Paula Broadwell, the Daily Show, and the Active...
I was saddened, but at this point not at all surprised, to hear that Paula Broadwell appeared on The Daily Show to sell her new book [see video below]. Of course, it would be a mistake to think of the Daily Show as the sad element in all this—the show’s popularity among the so-called “liberal left” is a testament to the degradation of elementary critique within the...
WatchPaula Broadwell on the Daily Show, January 25
January 2012
6 posts
Foucault Bibliography
There are many of Foucault bibliographies floating around, and for years I relied on Richard Lynch’s (now dated, but useful) bibliography of Foucault’s English works through 2008. However, I recently came across this version by Machiel Karsken out of Ramboud University, and it is the most comprehensive I’ve seen to date (updated August 2011). A caveat for English readers is...
JANUARY MIXTAPE: A Tale of Two Cities || (41:54)
Over and over again this past month, I found myself waxing nostalgic about those old-school late-90s, early 2000s hip hop shows on college radio, where they let the beat ride without interruption for almost an hour… I have to be nostalgic about it because college radio, much like the underground scene in general, has completely transformed in the past five or six years, undoubtedly...
Remembering racism in the U.S. Marine Corps "Small...
I’m currently writing the (long) “history of counterinsurgency” section of my dissertation, and I spent part of the day flipping back through the U.S. Marine Corps’s Small Wars Manual. The Manual was first published in 1940, during the height of US intervention in Central and South America and the Caribbean — luckily for “the natives,” the...
Air-Target
My weekend reading is set with the new issue of Theory, Culture & Society, which features a special section edited by Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead, and Alison Williams titled “Air-Target: Distance, Reach, and the Politics of Verticality” (after Eyal Weizman’s work). The issue has Derek Gregory’s important essay on late-modern drone warfare, where he critiques the...
October 2011
1 post
A Brief Genealogy of Occupy Wall Street || A...
Despite recent characterizations of Occupy Wall Street as merely a Left response to the present economic depression, the movement has a rather long, if discontinuous, history. The frustration displayed by establishment analysts and journalists towards the movement’s so-called “lack of specific demands” and inability — at least in the present...
September 2011
1 post
9/12 || The Security-Entertainment Complex, Part 1
In his famous essay on “The Uncanny” (1919), Sigmund Freud identified two meanings for the concept “uncanny” that at first seem contradictory, but actually work in tandem. For Freud, the uncanny at once “means that which is familiar and congenial, [and] that which is concealed and kept out of sight.” Film critic Laura Mulvey has argued that the...
August 2011
5 posts
MONDAY MIXTAPE: AFRO-FUTURISM || a manifesto.
I first came across the term “Afro-futurism” sometime in 2004 or 2005 when reading Octavia Butler’s book Lilith’s Brood. It was around that time that I was beginning have my entire way of thinking subverted by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Over a series of months, I began to explore the links between Butler’s science-fiction project and Sun Ra’s...
How I Write.
[I am still feeling under the weather, foggy-headed, and not at full capacity for thinking coherent thoughts. Nevertheless, in order to fulfill this itching desire to write something on here this week, I thought it might be nice to write about how I write. My inspiration to do so is taken from Stuart Elden’s recent posts on writing, available here, here, and here. Stuart is a good...
MONDAY MIXTAPE: "Yesterday's Active Lifestyles"...
Consider this week’s Monday Mixtape to be my prepostguitar effort. In the midst of a tad bit of nostalgia for Austin this week, I found myself listening to Spiderland on repeat, on my bike, without a helmet, riding blissfully along (no Converse; no air-guitar; there are limits). Fugazi, old-school At the Drive-In, Sonic Youth, The Jesus Lizard, Polvo, Slint…...
Tuesday Readings: The Art of Nonlinear Warfare,...
Violence, bodies and numbers have been intimately intertwined ever since the practice of war was inaugurated as a military science during the Enlightenment. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, successive innovations in calculating marches, soldier movements, logistics, ordinance and terrain by Montecuccoli, Bülow, Lloyd, and many others, including Clausewitz, firmly united the...
MONDAY MIXTAPE: "Blinds Wide Shut" (25:38)
This week’s Monday Mixtape features my two favorite songs (so far) in 2011. Almost identical in structure, yet provoking entirely different reactions from the listener, these two tracks by Curren$y and Shabazz Palaces get your head bobbin’ (rhyming in the felt). The flow of this week’s mixtape is similar to last week: hip hop interweaved with garage dub. Young...
July 2011
10 posts
The Occupied Palestinian Territories and...
I recently guest-edited a special issue on the occupied Palestinian Territories for the journal Human Geography, available here. My introductory essay discusses in detail the “Goldstone Report” (at least the parts that are still “true”), Israel’s insidious “Dahiya Doctrine,” and how the occupation relates to problems of conceptualizing...
Trevor Barnes: Notes from the Underground
One of my committee members, and fellow Cold War history geek, Trevor Barnes, gave this year’s Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography, “Notes from the Underground: Why the History of Twentieth-Century Economic Geography Matters: The Case of Central Place Theory.” Its well known at UBC that Trevor gives stellar lectures in his undergraduate courses, always smart and...
TV Watch: Colbert Flops on Poverty, Meets Adorno
I have no envy for progressives who agree to be guests on The Colbert Report. It typically gives rise to uncomfortable moments, especially when Stephen Colbert turns his satirical “Papa Bear” impression on high, and bombards his guests with a mix of ironic vitriol and absurdly confrontational right-wing platitudes. As a guest, I’m sure it’s difficult to know how to...
Music Review: Shabazz Palaces, "Black Up"
It seems inevitable that in the near future, critics are going to look back at 2009-2011 as a new “golden age” of hip hop. The meteoric rise of our first true “internet stars,” Odd Future, can largely be attributed to the all the work happening below the radar in the thousand different “garage studios” throughout the US and UK. Not since the mid-90s...
Tuesday Readings: Does Foucault Have A Theory of...
I don’t ask this question lightly. At this point, thousands of pages have been written on Foucault and war, largely around the familiar themes of biopolitics, liberalism and governmentality, and their relation to the attendant security regimes of the so-called “War on Terror.” Networks abound and new apparatuses of power subsume “life” in complex ways,...
MONDAY MIXTAPE: "Love is... (Don't Cry)" (22:31)
It is fitting that my first “Monday Mixtape,” “Love is… (Don’t Cry)” be a tribute to Madlib and J-Dilla, two artists whose sound structure continues to have a pronounced influence on my way of thinking. Their sound emulates how one encounters the world as a texture of impressions and relations, pregnant memories and pending obstacles. Detroit-based MC,...
What to Expect (Revisited)
I want to begin by saying thanks for the 800+ site visits in the first week of this “blog.” Now that I have had a week to see how much time and effort this long-term project will take, I want to briefly revisit the question of “what to expect” out of this site.
First, it feels necessary to say that, despite the use of Tumblr, I do not envision this project as a...
Deconstructing Transformers
“The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930)
Perhaps the best way to approach Michael Bay’s new Transformers: Dark of the Moon is...
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Music Review: Milyoo, "Colours \\ Games"
One can identify two moments when Tommy Wilson (a.k.a., Milyoo) matured into his signature apparitional sound. The first occurred in the development of his set for Mary Anne Hobbs, in between the masterfully playful rendering of his own “Multitude” and the subsequent devolution of the movement into a rhythmic theater of decay (listen 4:34-13:35). It was...
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What to Expect...
This blog is finally going to be operational starting this week. Originally, I had hoped to launch it in May, but my last few months in the States before moving to Finland were beyond hectic, and writing content outside of my academic duties proved impossible. Nevertheless, this thing is finally getting off the ground, and I want to briefly outline what you can expect from it.
Reviews and...