Wiki of Academic Blogs

Check out this Wiki of academic blogs created by Harry at Crooked Timber. It gives you an idea of the warp and weave of who is blogging in academia. While I wouldn't go so far as to call it, as Brad Delong did, "An Invisible College" it is something like an invisible network of academics who are choosing to "publish" outside of the main channels of professional life. I was recently forced to listen to some off-handed disparagement of blogs and blogging from academics and it occurred to me that this is primarily a defensive position against the development of a new form of academic exchange. It really may change the shape of professionalization, but for now it remains a para-university to me...but a very, very interesting one.

Dennis Kucinich thinks Stardust and Magic will bring Peace

By way of Daily Kos Proof that Dennis Kucinich lives on an astral plane that will not permit him to participate fully in the politics of everyday life in our all too mundane world. It's so over the top New Age creepy and draws upon the worst of alchemy, magical thinking to produce a false image of "conflict resolution."

And to think that because he supported universal healthcare, I voted for him in the 2004 Democratic Caucuses in Minneapolis. I am no political wonk so I didn't do my research. Mea culpa! Why is it that so many "progressive" politicians are into this kind of spiritual eclecticism? This includes politicos with whom I am mostly sympathetic like Arianna Huffington.

Please no more Deepak Chopra!

UC Irvine and Derrida: Le Monde reports on the non-affair

Le Monde reports that the "imbroglio" is a non-affair, and that both parties are negotiating in good faith to reach an agreement over the fate of the archives. There is mention of a dispute between Derrida and UCI over the treatment of a "young colleague": the details are not forthcoming and we are to assume that the affair is going to fade away. No one in these here parts is wiling to go on record about this matter: academics are notoriously defensive when asked to speak to the press outside of their function as experts. And the press has proven itself to be all too wiling to report the worst when it comes to anything "Derrida." On the other hand, the institutionalization of his body of work, which is inevitable will require an inquisitive and aggressive historian to assess these developments -- even as they are unfolding. This will require, like the fate of the Freud archives and Freudianism in general, some one who knows how to read.

As Peter Krapp has pointed out, Derrida was very interested in archives and the way in which they are very much dynamic places where the transmission of a body of thought is never a simple affair. The more important problems and questions are -- who is going to be interested in actually working in the archives, in taking on the challenge of writing about them?

numbers please

every now and then I take a look at server logs for this blog. the numbers are quite solid - here are some statistics from the beginning of 2006 to yesterday:



details on who is watching are fun to keep an eye on; some months, spammers distort the numbers, and it takes effort to filter those out again.

private truth and reconciliation committees

Can there be such a thing? Isn't all truth and reconciliation in some sense collective? What happens however to the category of the family in all this? The communalism of Mao and Stalin could not break the back of the bourgeois family and its unitary powers of reproduction...but I think that if there is no psychic ground for family justice, there can be no ground for its public instantiation either.

Mitochondrial Eve

This stuff is blowing my mind. Homo sapiens is one huge "dysfunctional" family that walked out of Africa and populated the world in 150,000 years. They did not mate with Neanderthal in Europe, but they did walk over Bering Strait ice -- perhaps only a group of 10-20 of them to populate the Americas and the rest of the world, from Northern Europe to Australia. Our inter-relatedness, our dense commonality, our sheer will to survive is amazing, as is our hatred of small differences.

Spectacle of Torture

Human Rights Watch is demonstrating that popular culture images of torture in shows such as Alias, 24, Law and Order and Lost promote such techniques of interrogation as fast and effective means of extracting credible information and compliance from dangerous prisoners.

Are they falling into the old media saw of life imitating art? I think not. I think certain forms of narrative justification for violation of human rights naturalize illegal activities on the part of the State -- nay, they glorify them. In Battlestar Galactica, however, a recent episode showing the high-tech (chemical) torture of one of television most compromised characters turns out to be ineffective at extracting anything resembling "the truth" or "justice."

Diversity in the workplace

has become a figleaf for the absence of a thorough going hard hitting critique of how neoliberal economic policies have been bad for all workers, reducing everyone to job insecurity and perpetual competition and obsolescence...Workplaces lacking in diversity don't care about it at all...places that are already diverse are engaged in torturous self-investigation...sometimes I think it is actually a conspiracy to prevent us from actually being able to formulate an agenda of authentic solidarity with ALL workers for a change that would make possible creative self management for everyone.

the flu conspiracy

Next year, I may decide to take the flu shot since I was floored by it for the past few days. It really started the day of the Super Bowl, but we were too happy about the Colts' unbelievable win to really notice how sick I was getting. Leo called the Colts the Magnets because of the Horseshoe shape on their helmets. We cheered on the Magnets in a roomful of Bears fans -- well to call them that is a slight exaggeration.

But getting back to the flu, I had always thought of the flu shot as an X-Files type conspiracy to put gps locators in everyone, but I think I will have to give in next year and accept it.

Badiou vs. Balibar at Irvine

I left my feverish child with a babysitter to go hear the showdown...where over two hundred were gathered in an amphitheater to hear Badiou and Balibar hold forth on the concept of the universalism. Balibar offered a thoughtful critique of Badiou's privileging of Pauline egalitarianism: I must admit that I could not follow Badiou's arguments at all. God is dead he said at one point and so is the human of humanism...what we we will have however is the war of the dead against the dead. In my inability to follow his conceptualizations, I thought of the armies of the dead in the Lord of the Rings, and couldn't quite understand where this was all going or even where it came from. I heard that at UCLA, he talked about the hero and the need for heroism -- suffering.

In the words of Tina Turner, "We don't need another French philosopher": we need to pay a bit more attention to the enforced consensus with regard to perpetual mobilization that underwrites the false state of emergency promoted by the state.

By the way, rumour has it that since the University's case against the Derrida family was made public, the former has dropped its suit.