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,â€? 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.