"I demand that things be called by their names." ~ Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
Labels: dissent, Legal, Pussy Riot, Russia, women's rights
“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: dissent, Legal, Pussy Riot, Russia, women's rights
Labels: My Boys
"But other photos tend towards overwrought melodrama . . . Moore leans on the compositional tactic of ironic juxtaposition, an old standby of documentary city photography since at least the days of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt. In one photograph (repeated in Marchand and Meffre’s collection) of the East Grand Boulevard Methodist church, its Biblical invocation, “And you shall say that God did it,” looms above its sanctuary. The irony is obvious, heavy-handedly so, yet the photographer’s meaning is less clear. One feels obliged to raise the obvious defense of the Almighty here: If anyone or anything “did it,” General Motors and the Detroit City Council had a hell of a lot more to do with it than God did. And who said God was ever here in the first place?"The images Leary mentions are those I've lifted above This brings me to the next of the items in my news feed. It is this pointed column by Scott Martelle at WaPo entitled "Five Myths About Detroit." Not only was it not God who flushed Detroit, it was not rampaging black rioters or the unions. It was the usual suspects - corporate and political elites. Mostly Martelle is on point. But I reject this insipid
"Yet scapegoating corporate leaders shifts responsibility from where it belongs: on us. We’ve voted for leaders who endorse policies that require corporate brass to make decisions based on their responsibility to stockholders. Blaming corporations for maximizing profits is like blaming a dog for barking. If we want businesses to behave differently, we need to change our laws and our expectations."He is right that it is important to assert democratic control over political-economic decisions. But that is not going to happen simply in the voting booth. And, as elite response to the efforts by OWS (for example) to push a more radically democratic agenda attest, it is not going to occur without significant resistance from those elites.
Labels: convergences, democracy, Detroit, OWS, political economy, ruins
"Guess my main beef is the tremendous status that is accorded to Jarrett's trio — with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, they've been together for 30 years now — by middle-aged white jazz critics. I just fail to see what makes his trio playing standards any more ''state of the art'' or dynamic than any number of African-American pianists I can think of." ~ Matthew ShippWhen I was in college I liked Keith Jarrett. Then I discovered various musicians and ensembles affiliated with the AACM (Air; Anthony Braxton; the Art Ensemble of Chicago; Fred Anderson) and others (David Murray; Arthur Blythe; Gerri Allen; World Saxophone Quartet; Cassandra Wilson; Archie Shepp; Randy Weston, and, yes, Jack DeJohnette). Jarrett fell pretty far down my list of preferred listening; I no longer found his playing as compelling. In any case, I found this review by pianist Matthew Shipp of Jarrett's latest release on point. Shipp's point, on my reading, is about the racially inflected attention cycle among critics, promoters, and audiences as much as it is about Jarrett or his work. It converges with my own comments about music (especially jazz) and race here in the past.
Labels: Julian Stallabrass, New Books
"Reading this anthology—many of whose pieces date from 2008, and some of which were previously published—is like trolling through a flea market looking for gems. The book mounts no sustained argument, or arguments; instead, it covers—in a fairly haphazard fashion—such issues as the role of embedded photographers; the use of torture in the wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq; and the ways in which technological changes are affecting the reception of photojournalism and the work of photojournalists. Still, I like flea markets ..." ~ Susie Linfield
"Everything that Julian Stallabrass says about how Iraq was strangled, weakened, and torn up by international sanctions and the U.S. invasion is correct. What he doesn’t say is that Iraq had been strangled, weakened, and torn up by previous decades of misrule by Saddam Hussein’s pathologically violent, repressive Baath regime. I am always mystified as to why “anti-imperialists” believe that the history of a country begins when the U.S.—or another power—invades it."And she wants to call attention to the obvious flaws of the Iraqi resistance.
"The “resistance” in Iraq is rabidly intolerant, sectarian, murderous, and misogynistic; like the Taliban in Afghanistan, it represents a reactionary, totalitarian program. To romanticize, or even remotely defend, these movements is, I think, a cruel hoax. They do not represent any sort of liberation, or any sort of decent future, for their fellow citizens."Let me be clear - Linfield is right in this second passage. I am not defending the opposition. However, nothing she says there excuses the US intervention. Moreover, it is disingenuous to suggest that Saddam Hussein simply emerged as a vicious dictator of his own accord. We ought not to frame our arguments so narrowly that they neglect the documentary record.
Labels: BushCo, Critics, embedded, Iraq, Julian Stallabrass, Linfield, New Books, photojournalism, War
Labels: exhibition, Sri Lanka, women, Women in Photography
Labels: New Jersey, Springsteen
Labels: exhibition, Richard Ross
Labels: Heroes, Obituaries
Labels: Bangladesh, Shahidul Alam
"Today, the Frankfurt School is widely associated with hostility to empiricism and even to science. On university campuses, its aficionados are typically found in literature and cultural studies departments, but not in economics, law, or political science. It is true that the most prominent Frankfurt School figures, the social philosopher Theodor Adorno and the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, had little patience for the sort of hardheaded research featured in the OSS reports. But the publication of those reports should serve as a reminder of the Frankfurt School’s neglected face, as represented by the enigmatic Neumann and his OSS colleagues, for whom rigorous empirical inquiry always constituted a core component of what they called the “critical theory of society.”*Among the blind-spots among political theorists that have driven me around the bend has been the more or less thoroughgoing hostility to social science. (Granted, social scientists typically reciprocate!) I recall being at a meeting of the Critical Theory Roundtable (CTR) years ago and listening to Seyla Benhabib go on and on about positivism this and positivism that as though all empirical social research (even quantitative or mathematical) were wedded to a single philosophical interpretation. When I made the seemingly obvious observation that the specific mathematical techniques are related only contingently to positivist interpretations, the response was uniformly hostile. What passes for "critical theory" these days takes place largely in ignorance of the best quantitative and formal research. So much the worse for the critical theorists and for their awareness of their own genealogy. I've not been back to the CTR since that meeting; critical theory was, from the beginning, meant to be social theory not philosophy. In current practice it just is a form of the latter. The results are debilitating.
Labels: critical theory, Frankfurt School, Raymond Geuss
Labels: Amartya Sen, India, political economy
William Livingstone House, Brush Park, a French Renaissance-style house designed by Albert Kahn in 1893 and demolished since this photograph was taken. Photograph © Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.I've spent part of every summer for the past dozen and a half years in southeast Michigan and have mixed feeling about the region. On the one hand, Ann Arbor where I teach is too preening and precious for my taste - by a considerable amount. On the other hand, Detroit - which I have to traverse in each direction to get to Ann Arbor - makes me cringe. It is an amplified version of the political economic disasters in Rochester and the other urban areas across Western NY. Each of these cities is an extremely unflattering monument to both capitalism and political corruption. I've posted here about Detroit several times and about Rochester here more than that. In any case, The Guardian has run this series of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre of the crumbling ruins of Detroit. They remind me of work Robert Polidori and others have done on the 'exclusion zones' surrounding Chernobyl. I've posted on that work here a couple of times before. In this instance the catastrophe was economic implosion rather than technological and ecological disaster. These images are very, very far from a complete portrait of Detroit. But they convey an important dimension of what is wrong with the US these days.
Labels: capitalism, Chernobyl, corruption, Detroit, political economy, poverty, Rochester
Labels: Art, Detroit, Legal, political economy, politics
“A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone's communications at any time. That is the power to change people's fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice -- that it must be seen to be done.”They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It’s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata -- the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content -- is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.
“was an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’ obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.”You said, "I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me." Who you are is fascinating, but what you’ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington’s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people -- those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. “Edward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,” said a headline in Forbes. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.
"I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build, and it's not something I'm willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics."Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?
Labels: dissent, Legal, Political Not Ethical, Rebecca Solnit, Snowden
Labels: Julian Stallabrass, O'Hagan, Photography
Labels: boycotts, Israel, Palestine, Political Not Ethical
Labels: handguns, Legal, Political Not Ethical, race
Labels: Legal, Media Politics, politics, Snowden
Labels: activism, dissent, Music, Obituaries, patriotism
"Waves of support for Aboushi started rolling in on Thursday, and on Friday, the Anti-Defamation League released a statement condemning the attacks on his character and applauding him for taking pride in his culture."
Labels: anti-Semitism, Israel, Palestine, sports
Labels: environmentalism, political economy, Rodrik
"Kim Yoon-ju, a flight attendant on the Asiana flight that crashed in San Francisco last week, became emotional during a news conference near Seoul." Photograph © Kim Hong-ji/Reuters.When did it become impossible to say that a person wept or cried or shed tears? When did the press decide it is necessary to speak euphemistically about a simple, normal reaction to stress and sadness and fear? Can I say that I find the phrase became emotional incredibly irritating? I just did.
Labels: euphemism, Journalists
"Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago." ~ Daniel EllsbergDespite the tacit and distracting Rawlsian lingo (Ideal vs Non-Ideal and all that) this piece by Archon Fung at The Boston Review on Snowden, his predicament, and some consequences for democracy in the US is on point. It elaborates some of what Ellsberg says on his WaPo essay. Democracy Now! has run a two part interview with Glenn Greenwald here and here.
Labels: advertising, athletes, Fashion Photography, Mapplethorpe, PETA
What the movement for reproductive rights needs is for the faces of freedom to emerge from the captivity of shame. To my mother’s generation, I ask: Speak openly about the choices you have made. To all women: ask your mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters and partners about their reproductive histories. Show that abortion has myriad faces: those of women we love, respect and cherish. You have the power to cement in the minds of your communities and families the importance of reproductive freedom. You have made decisions that are private, even anguishing, but the weight of this political moment demands that you shed light on those decisions.This is, I think, an especially important observation/demand. One might make the analogy to coming out of the closet. Here, contra Foucault, invisibility is a trap.
Labels: Legal, politics, reproductive rights, women, women's rights
Labels: communists, democracy, New Books, political economy, politics
Labels: AI, Amnesty International, China, Graphics, Human Rights, political graphics, Pussy Riot, Russia, torture, Turkey
Labels: Animal RIghts, PETA, politics
On copyright...
Christopher Anderson: “If you want to download my pictures, please go ahead. As a photographer trying to reach an audience, [if there are lots of] bloggers who are interested in my photographs, that’s great. Do I want Time Magazine online to be using my pictures for free? No, of course not – that I want to control, as a copyright issue."Setting aside my own selfish reasons for thinking so, these seem like sensible sorts of distinctions to make. And, largely, they are already written in to the fair use provisions of copyright law - in the US, at least.
Abbas: “At this AGM we decided to sue institutions who use our pictures but we decided collectively that individual blogs or [people] downloading the images for their own use is legitimate.”
Labels: dissent, political graphics, protests, Turkey
Labels: Data Graphics, Tufte
Labels: Eugene Debs, Frederick Douglass, Jefferson, MLK, patriotism
Labels: communists, New Books, political economy, politics
Labels: Obituaries