Oh, whoopsie, you’re doing that already.

My observation is the opposite. Blogging elevates the tedium of the “Palestinian issue” way above its actual significance in the world.

More pussies and less Palestinian blogging I say!

I am at a loss to why you think some esoteric nonsense about the universe is somehow not simply a fanciful bourgeois indulgence that is expressed through the rhetoric of ’seriousness’ (or ‘importance’ as above) compared to the explicit racism of everyday australians and the stupid belligerence of those who condone it? what in the hell are these people thinking and feeling that makes them believe it is ok to make such racist comments to another person? the racism in itself is irrelevant to me, people can believe what they want, it are the enacted power dynamics that I simply can not understand. Right there, in the spaces between bodies. Do people honestly think that someone who is “asian” is somehow less Australian than someone else? Or that “asians” will effect the way that these Australians can be Australian? How do the intellectual and affective expectations that underpin this utter stupidity circulate?

My point about Palestinian cats was aimed at breaking this economy of expectations that seems to pollute the everyday experience of citizens in most western countries at present.

Comments above insinuate that I am a snob looking down on the stupidity of the general population. If this is evidence of the general population, then yes I am a snob. An angry one.

the academic disciplines also have their received set of expectations, ie this is what we should be concerned with, etc. latour is bad example because he is a stuffy frenchman who did research with scientists. in Reassembling the Social where the matters of concern stuff is explored, he tries to drag his sociology of science into the proximity of a sociology of the social, but he has a long way to go yet. cultural studies people have been exploring those aspects missing from concepts like matters of concern for ages (such as the affects of alterity! etc). i think in a footnote in RtS Latour says something like his next project will involve exploring ‘regimes of reference’, which to me reads like a version of the Foucauldian ‘regimes of the sayable’ which will be completely shot through with ‘cultural differences’.

Getting on my extra-high soap box: We should be trying to assemble the social from these relations of interest, involving what Bruno Latour has recently called “matters of concern,� rather than attempting to operate within an economy of expectation received from the commercial interests of ‘old media’. A good example is the work Lovink is doing through his Institute of Networked Cultures

By way of a semantic clarification (I hope): When I put my Latour hat on, I’m more interested in fueling serious debate about headlines like this than encouraging this sort of tail-chasing. Though, that’s precisely the point of trans-disciplinary/exoteric discussion if you think critically about any ‘deficit model’ of knowledge within the Western tradition – namely that schools of thought have always swapped properties and always will.

I prepared my book launch with straight old media rules (ress releases, threemonth review copies sent out) with a plan to go blog within two week of the launch date, that’s why I relate the distribution to blogs, I was trying to create a old-style pseudo event and hybridise it with tne bloggy world, but the mongrel is 99% blog now, and yes, Baroque

BTW I love dense sentences, saves times if you’re a reader and not a skim/scanner of text (because it is actually less reading, but more on that another time) (so long as you know some, but not necessarily all of the lingo)

In the future, everyone will be minute for 15 famouses. Or something to that effect.

Actually I thought this was a pretty interesting piece, and not as dense or baffling as some have complained. (Isn’t it simply the case that in this style of writing, some big weird words serve the purpose of placeholders for many-worded concepts — they’re almost like Chinese characters, right? Not that I necessarily approve of the concepts in the first place; but you write what you gots ta write, and there’s gonna be a tradeoff between brevity and clarity in these cases…)

I haven’t thought about any of this stuff anywhere near as hard as Glen, so I’m reluctant to take issue, but I can’t help wondering if what’s happening out there isn’t maybe sort of simpler than these platforms of thought. Aren’t we just living in a period of interface and transition between one technology and another? Presumably, what was understood as “news” before the advent of writing, or of paper, or of printing, or of radio, and so on, was different than after, simply because the new tools revealed new possibilities. And the new tools also have different expenses, and different ways of expressing and amortizing those expenses. You don’t have to retain a herd of scribes in your castle to write things down, if nobody knows how to read or write. But if you have to keep records, then you have to pay for the stylus and the clay tablets and what-not somehow. Maybe the news cycle is (or was) simply an expression of the actual costs of running a newspaper. It doesn’t invalidate Glen’s analysis, but I see no reason why these phenomena should necessarily be anchored to a specific phenomenology, when a more homely explanation may be the case.

As to the binary of “important/non-important” events, one might also as easily shrug and say, some things never change.

“What great ones do, the less will prattle of.”
–Twelfth Night, written about 430 years ago

I suppose that Og the Caveman might have thought a good huntsman or root-digger was a more “great” or “important” personage than Shane Warne or Britney or the Israeli Prime Minister; but then he would, wouldn’t he?

Still and all, very cool post, and lots of interesting things to chew on. Three cheers for Glen!

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/01/09/to-photoblog-or-not-to-photoblog/

These technocratic Marxists really think we’re getting out of control!

Well some factoids speak well of us. We started out behind the right-wing American eight-ball but when the number of us outside grew larger a few years ago we are now taking over the narrative of the whole wired world.

‘We’ being overwhelmingly unpretentious democratic and libertarian leftists who enjoy life and a laugh now and then. Oh, and a good conversation.

In our ‘ Newtonian’ economic and political space we are starting to make large waves. Waves that now threaten the bourgeois types masqurading as
‘ knowledge workers.’

We don’ need no steenkin’ authoritarian theory Geert. Our home is girt by INFINITY.

robert merkel,

You have to remember that I am also writing for cultural studies postgrads and professors who know exactly from where I am writing without having to explain too much. I thought I did a good job flagging the theory nerd comments and providing links for when I would mention something that couldn’t be explained by me properly in the limited space of a blog post.

First point, Lovink isn’t describing a group of people, he is saying that a group of people serve as evidence for a much larger techno-social condition. He is trying to use bloggers in this argument about the techno-social condition.

Second, importance and so on are value judgements to a certain degree but they are also built into the materiality of our discursive systems. Think of the rage in American Psycho over the occassion of the similar but different business cards.

Third and fourth, events are filtered through the network by the multiple (I would say multiplicity) perspectives provided through blog commentary. The event as such is now no longer something that happens over there and is talked about over here, it is a movement (like stupidity! well, sometimes) across the language and the bodies of bloggers and the state of affairs being discussed. The whole lot, but there is not a totality within which bloggers insert themselves (that is one of the philosophical points), it is assembled from the interest-commentary generated through the act of blogging.

So I would totally agree that this movment extends between poeple commenting and the world in which they are commenting. There is a line, or a kind of vector, which adds to the movement of the event in question.

Fifthand six, indeed so we need to reach out and connect up these different vectors, but some are congruent and some cancel each other out. I am thinking of standing waves. The weird thing about Lovink is that he does all this, so why does he assume that the rest of the blogosphere doesn’t attempt to do this?

skepticlaywer, that is a good link and I saw that earlier today too. At first glance and in an absolute sense it is not dissimilar to the quandry of second wave feminism. Do we try to dismantle the system and replace it or try to effect change from within? I met people over xmas who work doing PR for charity groups…

For what it’s worth, I think glen could have made the same points in somewhat more accessible prose without losing any of the theoretical underpinnings.

Conversely, it’s worth remembering that parts of the post originated as a conference paper – different audience. But on the other hand, glen, I think it’s pretty clear which are the more theoretical bits that might require a touch of translation.

There’s nothing wrong with writing for an academic audience. But it’s worthwhile remembering on a blog post that you’re writing for a different audience.

No doubt I could link this into Lovink somehow if I tried, but I’m too tired

Do responses have an independent meaning ?
8. No ,sorry, 9.
Let’s see.
One further point Glen is why do you keep referring to , oh , I guess everyone else ( the general public ) in your posts as being stupid ?
You bring this up each occasion you write.
Why bother casting your pearls before such a herd of porcine self indulgers?
“â€?(Did anyone ever think that maybe the new generations aren’t actually attention deficient they are just sick and tired of the obvious stupidity of previous generations’ relations of attention?)â€?”
All of the prevoius generations ?
“â€?Traditional politics no longer cultivates anything other than anti-charismatic machine men and women whose sole purpose is to maintain the status quo.â€?” Tony Abbott ? Tanya Plibersek? Bob Brown ?

polluted skies,

“Do responses have independent meaning?” I am not sure what you mean by this?

I guess you make your first proper point without irony. You assume that I am describing an attribute (stupidity) of a group of people, when I am actually trying to describe something else. My constant use of ’stupidity’ is derived from a very specific meaning of the word used in translation of a book review by Foucault (larger quote here):

“Intelligence does not respond to stupidity, since it is stupidity already vanquished, the categorical art of avoiding error. The scholar is intelligent. It is thought, though, that confronts stupidity, and it is the philosopher who observes it.”

Deleuze talked about the domain of philosophy as the operative outside of thought and so on. It is in this sense I talk about stupidity. If you search my blog I often talk about being ‘intimate with my stupidities’ or something to that effect for this exact reason. Stupidity is a movement across the social body at war with thought. However, if as Foucault says philosophers observe and scholars avoid, then I try to be neither. Does this help you appreciate my elite over-education as the cause of some of my stupidity?

Second, yes, the obvious stupidity around which relations of attention are organised for previous generations. I have a feeling we will see more research on the effect of the media apparatus and modern environment on human perception. I mean in terms of genetic variation produced by and with the environment, not some version of genetics as a biological determinism. The human body in genetic dialogue with its environment. Hence, one of the reasons for calling it a biopolitics. The thresholds of attention have changed. For me this is obvious in the context of the first reactions to automobiles and the like compared to nowadays.

Lastly. This is one is slightly more tricky to understand. Whitehead defines the stability of ’societies’ (a technical concept for him, relating to the extension of events, but the precise meaning doesn’t matter in this case) not in terms of how unchanging they are, but in terms of how they incorporate variation into their structure. He talked about various types and levels of societies. On one level a society may not change relative to another. So on one level the political machinery of which I am critical needs people like Bob Brown. He provides some sort of resistance which becomes friction which becomes traction. At first I shook my head at Tony Abbott being mentioned, but then I realised he is a brilliant example. I dislike him so intensely for his complete and utter stupidity. He would be the resistance in my political machinery.

Robert Merkel and skepticlawyer, I wasn’t going to bother with what I thought were mere conservative posturings. However, if you are genuine and you can’t understand something in my post, then describe the limit of your understanding and I will try to find my links online or provide explanations if time permits. Your description of your limit of understanding is essential to help me help you. You could be a little more affable if you need help understanding something in future comments.

Unless of course you have no interest in understanding anything like this and you are quite content to keep on thinking those thoughts already in circulation in the thougt bubbles of your collective minds. In that case, to comprehend such inertia, you might want to read the rest of the Foucault quote in the post linked to above.

phil,

“Soooooooooo? I can still blog right?”

I assume you are making a joke about my minor dig at media theorist gurus, right?

“Because media theorists in general want to maintain the regime of importance inherited from the ‘old media’ because they can then supplant themselves as mediators between ‘old media’ and consumer?”

That said, if someone writes unclear prose, it is legitimate to point it out. This is particularly the case when some of the authors cited, like Foucault, write clearly enough – even if they are not great stylists. Unlike Jason, I do not think all postmodern theory should be peremptorily written off because much of it is badly expressed. However, the insights it does have to offer will be ignored or mocked unless its proponents learn to write with clarity and economy.