Noting Gerda Taro
Labels: photojournalism, Spain, War, Women in Photography
“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: photojournalism, Spain, War, Women in Photography
Labels: Janet Delaney, political economy, Rebecca Solnit, San Francisco, spaces
Labels: elections, Legal, politics, Republicans
Labels: Enthusiasms, Independent Purveyors of Books and Music, jazz, Music
They see OWS as primitive and diffuse because it has no precise demands - as if the demand for equality were not a demand, at once moral and economic, redefining personhood and reality itself. ... What the experts want is for OWS to submit to the language of the prevailing system. Yet is it not the case that merely to articulate such is to sell out the movement?" (39-40)But if, as seems clear the demand for equality is one (a demand that is), then what follows is how to make equality real. The various occupations did so prefiguratively. On that I agree. But, the occupations succumbed to a concerted effort to clear them and to reclaim and secure the various "public" spaces in which they had appeared. What was left behind was the task, among others, of subverting the barriers to entry surrounding the category "expert." Enter Occupy the SEC.
Labels: Data Graphics, Occupy the SEC, OWS, political economy, political graphics, politics
Labels: Occupy the SEC, OWS, political economy, politics
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The issue is not debate, simpliciter, but how it is done. Too many philosophers accept the idea that truth is best achieved by a marketplace of ideas conducted in the fashion of ultimate fighting. But aggressive styles that seek easy victories by harping on arcane counterexamples do not maximize truth. Nor does making use of the social advantages one might have by virtue of one’s gender, ethnicity or seniority. Nor does stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the real world contexts, rife with implicit bias and power distortions, in which even philosophical debates always occur.And, lest it seem as though I am calling attention to the foibles of philosophers from the perspective of an outsider, recall this post on gender trouble in political science.
Sometimes, interestingly, the aim of truth is enhanced less by adversarial argument than by a receptivity that holds back on disagreement long enough to try out the new ideas on offer, push them further, see where they might go. Sometimes pedagogy works best not by challenging but by getting on board a student’s own agenda. Sometimes understanding is best reached when we expend our skeptical faculties, as Montaigne did, on our own beliefs, our own opinions. If debate is meant to be a means to truth — an idea we philosophers like to believe — the best forms turn out to be a variegated rather than uniform set.
Labels: Academic Follies, philosophy, political science, Political Theory
Labels: political economy, politics, poverty, Rochester, UofR
Labels: jazz, Music, Obituaries
The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.
He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."
Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.
Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".
Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "
By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."
A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "I recommend this to those of my friends and colleagues about to launch into a Faculty Activity Report for the bean counters in one or another College or University. Of course, you shouldn't use this to persuade yourself that but for all those distracting demands - administration, teaching and publishing bundles of literature-driven papers - you'd be a Nobel laureate. Resist self-deception. But it is a nice counter-example to those pushing the rationalization of educational institutions.
Labels: Academic Follies, Prizes, science
Nelson Mandela has died. An obituary is here at The Guardian. It is perhaps more appropriate to recall his own words - The New York Times offers a digest of of his own letters and speeches here. Advice: don't stop with the inspiring but sanitized blurbs excerpted by The Times, click through to the texts themselves.1964: Eight men, among them Nelson Mandela, with their fists raised in defiance through the barred windows of the prison car, leave the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, having been sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy, sabotage and treason. Photograph: AFP/Getty Image
Labels: Mandela, Obituaries, Our Criminals, terrorism
Labels: Museums, Rancière, Sontag, Technology, UofR
I think it is not only about the wall, my book is about the wall and the Israel and Palestinian landscape. You have this divided country and these people who react certain ways to these conditions.But this strikes me, too, as unexceptional. (Meaning I see no reason to take exception to his comments.) Why? I read that passage in light of this one:
For me, Palestinian or Israeli, I look at you for who you are. When I left Czechoslovakia people asked me: “Are you a Communist? Are you opposed to communism? Are you an anarchist?” How you label it doesn’t mean much to me.
We have a divided country and each of two groups of people tries to defend themselves. The one that can’t defend itself is the landscape. I call what is going on in this most holy landscape, which is most holy for a big part of humanity, is the crime against the landscape. As there exists crimes against humanity there should exist the crime against the landscape.
I am principally against destruction — and what’s going on is a crime against the landscape that is enormous in one of the most important landscapes in the world.
An Israeli poet said to me, “You did something important — you made the invisible visible.” He meant that Israelis don’t want to see the wall and they don’t even want to speak about it. They don’t go across it. It is very easy to live in one country, in France or Czechoslovakia, and ignore completely one thing, one important thing, that you want to ignore.And, surprisingly, this comment brought to mind Jacques Rancière's essay on the intolerable image.* I don't have time to offer a detailed discussion. But Rancière invokes this image of an Israeli constructed roadblock on a Palestinian road from the series WB by Sophie Ristelhueber.
The classic use of the intolerable image traced a straight line from the intolerable spectacle to awareness of the reality it was expressing; and from that to the desire to act in order to change it. But this link between representation, knowledge and action was sheer presupposition. . . . Renewed confidence in the political capacity of images assumes a critique of this strategic schema. The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be thought and, consequently a new landscape of the possible.Rancière thinks Ristelhueber's "little pile of stones" performs just this function. So too does Koudelka's series on the separation barrier. Not because he, like Ristelhueber, on Rancière's account, "has refused to photograph the great separation wall that embodies the policy of the state and is a media icon of 'the Middle East problem'," but because he too has focused on the various segments of the wall as "elements of the landscape" that inflict "wounds and scars ... on a territory." Koudelka is uninterested in the indignation his critics express. (He knows first hand about living behind a wall.) He is interested in making the scars and wounds on landscape visible. In that, it seems to me, he succeeds.
Labels: Israel, Koudelka, Palestine, politics, Symbolic Politics, walls
ABOUT: fierce pussy is a collective of queer women artists working in New York City. Formed in 1991, the members of fierce pussy came together through their shared involvement in AIDS activism. During a decade of increasing political mobilization around gay rights, fierce pussy brought lesbian identity and visibility directly into the streets with posters, stickers, t-shirts and various public interventions. They have continued to engage in a reclaiming of language and public space with installations and exhibitions in galleries and museums. Originally composed of a fluid and often shifting cadre of dykes, four of the original core members —Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka— continue to work together.
Labels: activism, fierce pussy, Graphics, HIV