CALL FOR PAPERS

WAITING FOR THE POLITICAL MOMENT

Utrecht & Rotterdam, June 17-19, 2010

Convened by Frans-Willem Korten and Bram Ieven

Sponsored by Stichting Letteren en Samenleving Rotterdam, Erasmus Trust Fund Rotterdam, the Centre for the Humanities and the OGC at Utrecht University, The Faculty of History and Art of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the City of Rotterdam.

‘Hamm: What’s happening?

Clov: Something is taking its course.’

Beckett, Endgame

Over the last decades, several political and cultural theorists have argued that the domain of politics, and even the very idea of the political, has been hollowed out. Politics today appears to have lost its proper status or has been submerged in the more powerful and encompassing infrastructures of late capitalism. Instead of frantically affirming or denying the emptying-out of the political, this conference traces the appropriation of the political by apparatuses of state, church, capitalism and media in modernity to look for ways to reinvigorate it. To do so, the conference focuses on a key concept: the political moment – the moment in which political agency becomes possible, as well as the formative role of the moment in politics.

To get to grips with the political moment we not only need to understand our current moment; we need to have an idea of how it developed over time. Not considering the political moment from an exclusively contemporary point of view, this conference also calls for proposals that focus on the formation of the political in relation to its emptying-out from the late Middle Ages to the present.

Contributions in the form of a 4000 words positioning paper distributed in advance and to be discussed in a seminar setting could address (but are not limited to) the following issues: what is a political moment? What does the emptying-out of the political imply? How has the appropriation of the political by state, religion or media shaped the conditions of possibility of the political? What is the role of the moment in politics?

Confirmed speakers include: Mieke Bal, Bruno Bosteels, Rosi Braidotti, Simon Critchley, Martin van Gelderen, Olivier Marchart, Patchen Markell, Benjamin Noys, and Alberto Toscano.

If you are interested in participating, please send in a 300-words paper proposal and a short résumé of your current research by January 15 2010 to Frans-Willem Korsten, Professor of Literature and Society, Erasmus University Rotterdam, email: korsten@fhk.eur.nl; and/or to Bram Ieven, lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University, email: b.k.ieven@uu.nl.

For more information see: www.waitingforthepoliticalmoment.org

by Bruno Girin

I’ve just published an article in the new issue of the open access journal Fibreculture. This is the abstract:

This paper argues for a sceptical approach to the political promise of Web 2.0. In particular it examines critically the claims made about participation and the ‘network public sphere’ in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Moreover it argues that the work of Bernard Stiegler and that of others in the Ars Industrialis group cofounded by Stiegler can help inform a more nuanced account of the relationship between politics, participation and technics. It looks specifically at the arguments in Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler’s recent book De la démocratie participative, written during the recent French presidential campaign, and examines how the idea of participation articulates with key themes in Stiegler’s philosophy of technics. Finally it suggests some ways in which this debate on participation might be moved on.

by Kevin Prichard

Felix Salmon thinks the New York Times should go nonprofit.

On wikipedia

Nature report on wikipedia which concluded that, for a subset of science articles, it was not not much less reliable than the Encyclopedia Britannica:

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html

Encyclopedia Britannica’s response to Nature report:

http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf

Nature’s rebuttal of Encylopedia Britannica:

http://www.nature.com/nature/britannica/eb_advert_response_final.pdf

The Guardian: Can you trust wikipedia?:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1599325,00.html

On white phosphorus story

Correntwire blog entry on White Phosphorus which provided links to online sources showing the U.S. military had used White Phosphorus in Falluja:

correntwire blog story

BBC News story on White Phosphorus (largely a write up of the blogs):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4442988.stm

BBC news journalist reflects on the power of blogging in the wake of the white phosphorus story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/4696668.stm

Bill Thompson (BBC technology commentator) on the power of blogging:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4492150.stm

New Media and Copyright Issues

Presentation on ‘Free Culture’ given by Lawrence Lessig in 2002 at the OReilly Open Source Conference. Note that this is a flash presentation with embedded audio of Lessig speaking:

http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

Lessig’s book, Free Culture, is freely available online:

http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf

youtube clips played

http://youtube.com/watch?v=z8SYHxlH9mI

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DLqCM16i6QY

The book is freely available online under a Creative Commons license. It seems as if it could be a useful resource for teaching as well as cultural organisations.

It’s a shame there’s not (yet?) audio or a transcript of the debate. Some of these NYPL talks do appear to be available online so maybe it will turn up one day.

The fact is that the new media paradigm wouldn’t be possible without an already existant brand-saturated culture. In other words, the vast majority of user-generated content – the volume with which YouTube, MySpace, etc depend upon to maintain some future – is built up around the “branding” of the people involved. Reviews, comments, demonstrations, novelty sneak-peeks, even “what I like” lists… We define ourselves according to what we buy, what we watch and what we listen to, and so our communications, and our “social indicators” (i.e. things that say “who will like me?”) reflect this utterly.

Up to a point I would have to agree with this scepticism, in the sense that a large amount of user-generated content could be as derivative from ‘old media’ content. However I can think of two responses to this. The first, an old media studies argument, is that it doesn’t necessarily follow from the basically parasitic nature of ‘fan culture’ that nothing interesting, creative or original is going on there. Bands and brands (or bands as brands) can be seen as providing contexts for conversations that are not solely defined or limited by those contexts.

The second response is that the fact that user-generated content is both coexisting and interacting with ‘big’ media doesn’t necessarily stop it from representing a genuinely new form of media: new media forms often seem to sit alongside old media forms without entirely replacing them. If the criterion for a form of media to be recognised as radical or a new paradigm is that it be a total break with existing cultural forms and conventions then we could be waiting for a very long time….

The Academy is concerned that recent developments in technology, legislation and practice have meant that the various copyright exemptions, which enable creative and scholarly work to advance, are not always achieving the intended purpose.

[...]

All creative activity builds on the creative activity that has gone before … A regime which is unduly protective of the interest of existing rights holders may therefore inhibit, or even stifle, the development of original material.

Interestingly, Google (Research) is probably the most important of the white box makers today. According to some industry experts, Google is now assembling so many of its own servers that it may be the third or fourth-largest server maker in the world.

Can this really be true? I wonder how ’some industry experts’ have worked this out.