archive : s0metim3s

°Legal, Tender

October 30, 2009

this cult of continuity, the confident assumption of knowing to whom and to what we owe our existence - whence the importance of the idea of ‘origins’ – Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”

What passes for legal tender is a convention for the reckoning of debts – and a legalised violence steps in where convention falters.

From the UC Santa Cruz occupation. (A much better slogan than “We won’t pay for your crisis” methinks - and “No return to normal” is particularly good too.) Read the “Communiqué from an Absent Future”.

Filed under: Protest + Laboratories + Universities
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°Entrepreneurialism and experiment

September 5, 2009

Eric Beck, “Respecting the Middle: The Wire’s Omar Little as Neoliberal Subjectivity“:

What’s often elided in accounts of neoliberalism is the way that its axiomatic and stratic transformations are responses to, even accommodations of, workers’ and dissidents’ demands. There’s no need to be sad that capital has been able to incorporate and profit from them, just as there’s no need to despair when protest is met with silence or disregard. That’s what capitalism always does, and using its response as a measure not only ensures defeat from the outset but has nothing to do with political desire. None of this is to deny that neoliberalism presents new challenges. As this essay has tried to show, the colonization of nonwork life by the axioms of labor has had a suffocating effect, and neoliberalism’s axioms regarding freedom have made organizing a more delicate and dangerous proposition. Despite this, neoliberalism still has not solved capitalism’s fundamental problem: It requires for its substratum a subjectivity that is independent of it.

Political movements that take comfort in this brute fact, however, are not worthy of the name. Omar Little prefers his space in the middle, but not because it allows him a respite from the dangers of life. Guarantees in The Wire exist only for the molar strata. Instead, the middle permits the most room to create and experiment. And that, in the contemporary conjecture, is a good start.

Filed under: Precarious precarity + Laboratories + Screen
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°Meet King Joe (1949)

August 8, 2009

“… the greatest production team in the history of the world.”

Filed under: Labour + Nationalism
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°Contract’s end

June 27, 2009

In Wake in Fright, a man in very white suit tries to get out of town, end of contract time. Whiter than white, thinks he has shaken off that hint of indentured labour.

Filed under: Nationalism + Precarious precarity + Screen + Universities
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°Without the crossing there is no border

June 18, 2009

Opening scenes from a film by Ursula Biemann, set in the Mexican-US (maquiladora) border town of Ciudad Juarez - on the feminisation of the border region through a reading of the gendered labor division, prostitution, the entertainment industry, and sexual violence.