Oulu part 1

Some of you know that I’m off to Finland tomorrow to spend the summer as a Visiting Scholar with the Mobilities, Borders, and Identity Research Group at the University of Oulu. I’ll post on occasion about my experiences.

Just a few initial thoughts as I prepare to leave:

1. I’m very excited about the weather (high temps in the 60s, lows in the high 40s to 50s). I’m a little wary of the long days of sunlight, which should peak at about 22 hours of light during June.

2. I have an apartment that, if my google mapping was correct, is very close to the water, or at least a large park that runs along the water. Rent is surprisingly cheap, because I am using the PSOAS, the student housing alliance. I should have access to a sauna, recreation facilities, and laundry on-site. So this is exciting. Less so, however, has been dealing with US Bank and wire transfers. PSOAS will only allow me to pay rent by bank transfer, which is apparently an easy process in most of the EU. In the US we apparently have outdated and technologically inept systems which make it more difficult to complete wire transfers, not to mention the $50 charge that accompanies each wire. Whatever. I’m still saving money in the long-term, even if I have to buy a bed, lamps, and curtains.

3. And I just got sidetracked for like 3 hours… I’ll return to this once I arrive in Oulu.

documentary on/about derrida

Tried reblogging from Stuart Elden, but it didn’t really work.

Balibar on anti-humanism and the question of philosophical anthropology

Audio here.

“The controversy opposing “humanism” and “anti-humanism” was especially virulent in the 1960s and 70s in France, involving different tendencies of Phenomenology, Marxism, Structuralism and Hegelianism, around such issues as the meaning of history and the agency (or praxis) of the individual and collective subject. In order to trace its genealogy, the lecture will begin with a presentation of the “two scenes” on which the “dispute of humanism” (Althusser) was fought in the 20th century as a debate involving the redefinition of philosophy as “anthropology”, which were dominated by the works of Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, respectively. It will then focus on Michel Foucault’s “intervention” in The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses, 1966), where the two debates are merged into a single attempt at divorcing the “quasi-transcendental” objects of anthropology from their humanist prerequisite, from the point of view of the “analytic of the finitude” itself. In conclusion, it will propose some hypotheses on the dividing lines ‘or “points of heresy” that characterize the subsequent debate on epistemology, ethics and politics “after the death of Man”.”

Thanks to Stuart Elden for the heads-up.

Zizek on austerity and Greek elections

“Here is the paradox that sustains the ‘free vote’ in democratic societies: one is free to choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the ‘democratic’ process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.

There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels). When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too.

Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.”

from London Review of Books.

riots in pop music

Salon.com - Natasha Lennard on Kanye and Jay Z’s video “No Church in the Wild”

The New Inquiry – Max Fox and Malcolm Harris on “pop music’s prefiguration of the Occupy protests”

judith butler on anarchism, precarity, and palestine

butler interview at rabble.ca

Here.

“I was just at the May 1st street protests in Paris,” recalls Butler. “I saw a number of different groups come together. Some were opposing violence in Syria; some were trying to gain rights for gay and lesbian parenting, some where fighting cuts to teachers’ salaries. All the issues where so different, and yet they were looking to achieve a greater sense of equality and justice. It was International Labour Day and the left came together, they all show up and a few days later, they threw out their president – it was a beautiful sight.”

“There are ways of being physically proximate to people, modes of solidarity that emphasize the political community we’re striving for. It’s important, if we are going to oppose in a strong way the differentials of wealth that we’re seeing. In order to fight economic conditions that are devastating peoples’ lives, military efforts that are destroying populations and the earth, we need strong bonds of solidarity to oppose those very powerful structures.”

summer 2012 reading list

Some of these I will be reading in full for the first time, others I will be returning to for a review. In no particular order:

• Kathi Weeks – The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
• Althusser – Machiavelli and Us
• Nancy – “Abandoned Being” in The Birth to Presence
• Foucault – Society Must Be Defended; Security, Territory, Population; Birth of Biopolitics
• Gabriel Popescu – Bordering and Ordering in the 21^st Century: Understanding Borders
• Elizabeth Povinelli – Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism
• Nevzat Soguk – States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft
• David Weissbrodt – The Human Rights of Non-Citizens
• Matthew Price – Rethinking Asylum: History, Purpose, Limits
• Balibar – Politics and the Other Scene; Spinoza and Politics; We the People of Europe

*****

Parvati Nair – A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastiao Salgado (reviewing for Human Rights Review)

global apartheid

There is a double-bind of the same kind inherent in the very notion of the circulation of persons. The problem lies not so much in the difference in treatment between the circulation of commodities or capital and the circulation of people, as the term circulation is not used here in the same sense. It is, rather, the fact that in spite of computer networks and telecommunications, capital never circulates without a plentiful circulation of human beings – some circulating ‘upwards’, others ‘downwards’. But the establishment of a world apartheid, or a dual regime for the circulation of individuals, raises massive political problems of acceptability and resistance.

Balibar, “What is a Border?” in Politics and the Other Scene, 82.

refusal, composition, and subjectivity

“Social composition and the formation of revolutionary subjectivity can be explained neither by the idealist hypostasis of a human nature to be realized through historical action nor by the analysis of the implicit contradiction in the structure of productive relations. Neither the presupposition of a humanity needing to be redeemed, nor the analysis of capital are sufficient to understand what happens on the scene of 20th century history, on the stage of working class struggles and capital’s restructuring.

We need to adopt the point of view of labor in its most advanced manifestations, it is necessary to assume the refusal to work, in order to understand the dynamics both of productive transformation and of political revolt. When we do that, we can finally see that social composition is in constant transformation, altering the productive, technological, economic, and political contexts. The motor of this constant transformation is the dynamic of subtraction of lived time from the wage-relation.”

Bifo, The Soul at Work, 59.