Robert Storr: Most theory has little bearing on art

Robert Storr: Most theory has little bearing on art

The critic and curator speaks to The Art Newspaper

By Helen Stoilas | From Frieze daily edition, 16 Oct 09
Published online 16 Oct 09

 

Robert Storr, US critic, curator and dean of the Yale School of Art, is visiting Frieze Art Fair for the first time, to take part in “Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?”, a panel discussion today at 12pm with artist Barbara Bloom and philosophy professor Simon Critchley. He spoke to The Art Newspaper about the role of art theory, and what advice he is giving to his students in today’s artistic climate.

Zizek on Democracy Now!: Financial crisis, new book, etc…

Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Capitalism, Healthcare, Latin American “Populism” and the “Farcical” Financial Crisis

 

Dubbed by the National Review as “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West” and the New York Times as “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory. In his latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce of the financial meltdown. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. He is author of more than fifty books, including his latest, First as Tragedy, Then as

JUAN GONZALEZ We continue on the subject of the financial crisis with a man the National Review calls “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West.” The New York Times calls him “the Elvis of cultural theory.” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory. His latest, just out from Verso, is called First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. It analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.

Love…. Blah, Blah, Blah….

Jacques-Alain Miller: On Love 

Hanna Waar – Does psychoanalysis teach us something about love? 

Jacques-Alain Miller – A great deal, because it’s an experience whose mainspring is love. It’s a question of that automatic and 
more often than not unconscious love that the analysand brings to the analyst, and which is called transference. It’s a contrived 
love, but made of the same stuff as true love. It sheds light on its mechanism: love is addressed to the one you think knows your true truth. But love allows you to think this truth will be likeable, agreeable, when in fact it’s rather hard to bear. 

H. W. – So, what is it to really love? 

J.-A. M. – To really love someone is to believe that by loving them you’ll get to a truth about yourself. We love the one that 
harbours the response, or a response, to our question: ‘Who am I?’

Greek Anarchists respond to questions about the current insurrection

Normally I can’t stand anything produced by Crimethinc; but, their reporting on the revolt in Greece has been surprisingly good.

From Crimethinc - by CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective    We humbly present one of the first inside reports from participants in the upheavals that shook Greece after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia on December 6. This is only the first set of answers to come in from our Greek comrades. We hope shortly to receive further perspectives from other elements of the Greek uprising, so we can provide a comprehensive background on the context and dynamics of the revolt. If you or someone you know is situated to give your own answers to these questions, please email them to us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.

How were the actions coordinated within cities? How about between cities? 

There are hundreds of small, totally closed affinity groups—groups based in longstanding friendship and 100% trust—and some bigger groups like the people from the three big squats in Athens and three more in Thessaloniki. There are more than 50 social centers in Greece, and anarchist political spaces in all the universities of the country; also, the Antiauthoritarian Movement has sections in all major cities, and there is a network of affinity groups of the Black Bloc active in all Greek cities, based on personal relations and communicating via telephone and mail. For all of them, Indymedia is very important as a strategic point for collecting and sharing useful information—where conflicts are happening, where the police are, where secret police are making arrests, what is happening everywhere minute by minute; it is also useful on a political level, for publishing announcements and calls for demonstrations and actions.

Of course, we can’t forget that in practice the primary form of coordination was from friend to friend through mobile phones; that was also the main approach used by young students for coordinating their initiatives, demonstrations, and direct actions.

Steven Poole’s essay on video games as work

Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames1

Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.

Uri Gordon on the Greek Revolt

 

“The cardinals of normality weep for the law that was violated from the bullet of the pig Korkoneas [the policeman who shot Grigoropoulos]. But who doesn’t know that the force of the law is merely the force of the powerful? That it is law itself that allows for the exercise of violence on violence? The law is void from end to bitter end; it contains no meaning, no target other than the coded power of imposition.”

 

A road to revolution?

 By Uri Gordon

 Three weeks have passed since the unprovoked police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens, and the riots engulfing Greece show no sign of abating.

Art, Truth, and Politics… Harold Pinter’s Nobel Speech

 

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

Harold Pinter is Dead

 

— “I can sum up none of my plays . . . but my writing life has been, quite simply, one of relish, challenge and excitement”

— “Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living”

— “It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940s, but I felt I had to stick to my guns”

— “The crimes of the US throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless and fully documented but nobody talks about them”

— “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on Earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either”

— “One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness”

— “I know little of women. But I’ve heard dread tales” Moonlight, 1993

— “Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself” Tea Party, 1964

— “I hate brandy . . . it stinks of modern literature.” Betrayal, 1978

— “I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs” Moonlight, 1993

— “I made a terrible mistake when I was young, I think, from which I’ve never really recovered. I wrote the word ‘pause’ into my first play” Interview, 1989

— “I don’t give a damn what other people think. It’s entirely their own business. I’m not writing for other people” Interview, 1971

— “I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way” 1971

— “I’ve never been able to write a happy play. [But] I’ve been able to enjoy a happy life” Interview, 2007

Thomas Frank on the latest dirty job to be outsourced…. Pregnancy! Followed by the offensive NY Times article that inspired him.

Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads

Surrogate motherhood raises troubling issues.

• By THOMAS FRANK

At long last, our national love affair with the rich is coming to a close. The moguls whose exploits we used to follow with such fascination, it now seems, plowed the country into the ground precisely because of the fabulous rewards that were showered on them.

Massive inequality, we have learned, isn’t the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it’s also profoundly ugly.

Some people haven’t received the memo, though. Take Alex Kuczynski, author of the New York Times Magazine cover story for Nov. 30, which tells how she went about hiring another woman to bear her child.

Arundhati Roy on the Mumbai Terror Attacks

 

9 Is Not 11

(And November Isn’t September)
By Arundhati Roy

 

We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11.” And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “bad guys,” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

Alfredo Jaar Interview: In step with Gramsci

 

“For the last five years I have been rereading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and reviewing films of Pasolini. In my view, they are the most outstanding thinkers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Both believed in the capacity of art to affect society and to change the course of history. I think that these ideas are more important than ever, and this is what has prompted me to pay homage through my work to these two illuminating intellectuals.”

In step with Gramsci: an interview with Alfredo Jaar

Yulia TihonovaThe mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence … but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator …

Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison (1)

These words of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist and humanist, may aptly describe the artistic position of Alfredo Jaar, the Chilean-born, New York City-based artist who has chosen the commutative strategy of being an active intellectual for more than twenty-five years. By virtue of his expressive medium, Jaar creates evocative artworks that not only inform viewers about the tragic events all over the world but also attain a personal meaning for the artist and viewers alike. The artist impels and organizes public perception in such a way that viewers are inspired to take action and confront issues.

Matt Taibbi on the Minnesota recount

 

 

The Last Recount

In Al Franken’s race in Minnesota, blue and red tangle for the final time in the Bush era

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Dec 11, 2008 12:30 PM

On a Saturday in mid-November, Al Franken stands in front of a roomful of volunteers at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The former comedian and talk-show host knows that his campaign troops are fired up over the recount of his race to unseat the state’s Republican senator, Norm Coleman. The official tally ended in a virtual tie, with Coleman leading by only 215 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast — a margin of seven-thousandth of one percent. To Franken’s campaign volunteers, it seems like Florida 2000 all over again.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs- An interview with Simon Critchley on “The Book of Dead Philosophers”

 

Dead Philosophers Society: An Interview With Simon Critchley

By Andrew Gallix.

3:AM: Did the idea for The Book of Dead Philosophers come from theMontaigne quote you use as an epigraph? Was that the first spark?

SC: It was one of the first sparks. As so often happens in writing, it was a coincidence: a close friend sent me that quotation from Montaigne just as I was rereading the latter’s “To philosophie is to learne how to die” inFlorio’s florid translation. Montaigne is really the hero of the book and I love his suspicion of suspicion, his skepticism and the deeply personal quality of his prose, which is never narcissistic. It is ourselves that we find in Montaigne, not him. But I suppose that’s a narcissistic thing to say.

3:AM: Commenting on another passage from Montaigne, you state that “The denial of death is self-hatred”. This reminded me of Dostoevsky’sKirilov who attempts to defeat God by committing suicide. His rationale is that, in order to negate transcendence, Man must learn to love himself for what he is and must therefore embrace his own finitude — desire his own death. (One could wonder if the espousal of death isn’t a form of self-love?) Your own conclusion — “Accepting one’s mortality…means accepting one’s limitation” — isn’t that far removed from Kirilov’s way of thinking, is it?

William T. Vollmann answering questions about his Book “Poor People”

 

William T. Vollman: I’ll do my best to answer any questions I can. I’m not sure I know any more than anyone else, but I’ve thought about it a bit, so that’s all I can say.

_______________________

Southern Maryland: I have asked myself why am I rich and so many others in the U.S. are rich in comparison to most of the world population. Basic needs met: food, clothing, shelter; stable government; education and literacy; available jobs and transportation to those jobs; health and health care; stable environment/weather. If people do not have their basic needs for survival met or have to expend all resources to meet basic survival needs, it makes for a dire situation.

William T. Vollman: I would say that that’s fairly accurate. One of the most common aspects of poverty I see is lack of access to decent water, and we have fairly decent water everywhere in the U.S. A lot of poverty has to do with how it is perceived in the mind of the poor person as well. Marx talks about absolute vs. relative poverty, and I’m not a Marxist but it’s a good distinction. Someone with enough to eat but who doesn’t have a TV when everyone else does is going to feel a little impoverished, and we can’t say it’s wrong that the person feels that way.

I don’t happen to drive, and I live in a city (Sacramento, Calif.) where most people use cars. If there’s any sort of specialty item I want to buy — a bed or something like that — I have a great deal of trouble. I have to hire someone with a car to get to the store — it’s not something I can do walking around. A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people — that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society. Those are some of the phenomena of poverty that I have noticed.

I remember a panhandler I saw in Portland a couple of years ago — actually took her photo for the book. She has a sign saying “donate here and get me out of your neighborhood.” She wasn’t wearing rags, didn’t look dirty — but she knew she was unwanted, people didn’t want to be panhandled, and all she could promise was that she could go away and stop bothering them. And that’s sad. They know rich people don’t want them around. When there’s a labor surplus, the people who become unneeded become unwanted and because they’re unwanted they’re unneeded. So there’s a lot of vicious circles in this.

Mumbai attacks: Terrorists took cocaine to stay awake during assault

 

Terrorists who battled Indian commandos for 60-hours last week relied on cocaine and other stimulants to stay awake for the duration of the fight.

 

By Damien McElroy in Mumbai 
Last Updated: 12:54PM GMT 02 Dec 2008

Previous

1 of 2 Images

Next

Commandos battled terrorists in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel Photo: AP

Officials said drug paraphernalia, including syringes, was recovered from the scene of the attacks, which killed almost 200 people.

MONEY

Jacques-Alain Miller
The Financial Crisis

Question - As etymology would recall, there exist affinities between the word crisis and the word critical. Crisis calls upon judgment, but it is more than anything a swinging point, like a disease which can lead to death or to the cure. For an analyst, what is the meaning of the word crisis?

Jacques-Alain Miller - The psychoanalyst is “crisis friendly”. To start analysis always constitutes for the subject a critical moment, which responds to a crisis, or unveils one. Only, once started, analysis becomes a hard work. A crisis of tears? You wait until it passes. A crisis of anguish, a panic attack? You defuse them. A crisis of madness? You avoid starting it… Besides, each session is like a small crisis, each one undergoing paroxysm and resolution. In short, there is crisis in the psychoanalytical sense, when speech, discourse, the words, the figures, the rites, the routine, all the symbolic apparatus, prove suddenly impotent to moderate a real which makes as it pleases. A crisis, it is the real unchained, impossible to control. The equivalent, in civilization, of these hurricanes by which nature periodically recalls mankind of its precariousness, of its land frailty.

Q - How do you interpret the fear of losing money, our own money? To hoard money, is it the same for a small saver than for a billionaire?

Woe is the economy….

Fathoming the financial crisis at the Brecht Forum

By Casey Samulski

The Web site’s introduction opens with the words of playwright Bertolt Brecht: “Everything changes.” Like the economy, for one.

Even for those unfamiliar with the playwright’s work, prominent quotations on the Brecht Forum’s Web site from Marx’s “Das Kapital” should leave no room for error when guessing which direction its politics lean. However, now perhaps for the first time, the forum and its contributors are not just being taken as a bastion of leftist intellectualism in the city, but rather, something much more: scarily prescient.

Necrosexuality by Patricia MacCormack: A delightful essay about the pleasures of watching dead things get fucked in movies

Necrosexuality

 

Patricia MacCormack

[1] Transgressive sexuality has frequently been defined through the dominant paradigms which it transgresses. This means transgressive sexuality is often seen as either affirming these paradigms by being oriented in dialectic opposition to them, or politically challenging in reference to them. Perversion is, however, the multiplicity at the very heart of desire that dissipates and redistributes the body’s intensities. ‘Normal’ sexuality is one reiteration of these corporeal libidinal cartographies – reiterative because reliability in repetition is a key feature of normal sexuality’s nature and power. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s claim that all desire affords a becoming means that transgression [1]is already within all forms of desire. Theirs is a project of queering desire, rather than reifying any one form of sexuality as queer. This article will explore the queerness of one seemingly heterosexual desire – male/female sexual situations – as it is incarnated in necrophilia. Deleuze and Guattari, together and separately, as well as Foucault, all critique the term ‘transgression’. Transgression is unable to exist independently as a haecceity. It can only be measured against and in reference to, while a Deleuzio-Guattarian reading is an interrogation of the different parameters, paradigms and plateaus within rather than against systems, an alteration of trajectories and velocities. Perhaps a more correct term would be ‘lines of flight’, however I use the term transgression here because necrophilic trajectories have been truncated and reified through a variety of institutions and thus have a particular relationship with these institutions. The use of the term is, however, brief and tactical, and is only relevant while necrophilia’s relationship with these institutions is being discussed and reactive rather than active affect is maintained in the analyses.

Dalai Lama Is A Moron!

 

Sex invariably spells trouble, says Dalai Lama  (No Fucking Shit! Thanks for the news flash professor) Nov 28 02:39 PM US/Eastern The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual and temporal leader, on Friday said sex spelt fleeting satisfaction and trouble later, while chastity offered a better life and “more freedom.”

Creative Writers and Daydreaming by Sigmund Freud

Creative Writers and Daydreaming

Sigmund Freud

 

We laymen have always been intensely curious to know–like the cardinal who put a similar question to Ariosto–from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable. Our interest is only heightened the more by the fact that, if we ask him, the writer himself gives us no explanation, or none that is satisfactory; and it is not at all weakened by our knowledge that not even the clearest insight into the determinants of his choice of material and into the nature of the art of creating imaginative form will ever help to make creative writers of us.

Gilles Dauvè: a contribution to the critique of political autonomy

 

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL AUTONOMY

It’s very difficult to force into obedience whoever 
has no wish to command.
J.-J. Rousseau 

No critique beyond this point

Any critique of democracy arouses suspicion, and even more so if this critique is made by those who wish a world without capital and wage-labour, without classes, without a State.

STUDS TERKEL R.I.P

Acclaimed author Studs Terkel dies at 96

(CNN) – Pulitzer Prize-winning author, radio host and activist Studs Terkel died in his Chicago, Illinois, home Friday at the age of 96.

Terkel had grown frail since the publication last year of his memoir, “Touch and Go,” said Gordon Mayer, vice president of the Community Media Workshop, which Terkel had supported.

“I’m still in touch, but I’m ready to go,” he said last year at his last public appearance with the workshop, a nonprofit that recognizes Chicago reporters who take risks in covering the city.

Future War Technologies To Pacify Enemies

 

DARPA Engineering New “Home Invasion” Technologies

by Tom Burghardt / October 27th, 2008

Just when you thought the Pentagon’s Dr. Strangeloves couldn’t design anything more devilish than they have already, new plans on the drawing board may help make the science of repression an ever-more lucrative market for capitalist grifters in the defense and security industries.

A David Harvey joint

 

DAVID HARVEY

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.

Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze

 

This is a transcript of a 1972 conversation between the post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, which discusses the links between the struggles of women, homosexuals, prisoners etc to class struggle, and also the relationship between theory, practice and power (4,000 words).

This transcript first appeared in English in the book ‘Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault’ edited by Donald F. Bouchard.

MICHEL FOUCAULT: A Maoist once said to me: “I can easily understand Sartre’s purpose in siding with us; I can understand his goals and his involvement in politics; I can partially under- stand your position, since you’ve always been concerned with the problem of confinement. But Deleuze is an enigma.” I was shocked by this statement because your position has always seemed particularly clear to me.

Are we made of money?

Notes on the “Bailout” Financial Crisis

George Caffentzis

0. These notes on the political-financial crisis were written in the last month while many US financial corporations were, in effect, nationalized in response to the bankruptcy of several major investment and commercial banks. The notes have been prompted by the fact that there has been remarkably little political activity in the streets, union halls, retirement communities of the country demanding a resolution of the crisis in favor of the millions of workers who are now losing wages, houses and pensions.

Certainly not even the most compliant unions and the retirement associations were invited to participate in the negotiations that were carried on concerning the legislation.

Is this lack of attention to workers’ interests due to the “shock” tactics that the Bush Administration used to push the “bailout” legislation? Perhaps, but we also think that money and the financial sector of capitalism that deals directly with it have been inherently opaque to working class political analysis and action for more than a century. (The last time there was a self-conscious working class debate on a national level concerning the money form was the 1896 election when the fate of the gold standard hung in the balance.)

Alain Badiou Interview from NLR: radicalism’s turnover rate, Sarkozy, Maoism, 1968, Politics as fashion…

 

ALAIN BADIOU

ROADS TO RENEGACY

Interview by Eric Hazan

One of the most striking aspects of Sarkozy’s rise to power was the support he attracted from Left renegades—from turncoats such as André Glucksmann. As someone who still wears his coat very much the same way round, how would you explain this strange phenomenon?

I think you have to put this in perspective, or rather look at it more closely. First of all, it would be better to ask: why so many Maoists from the Gauche Prolétarienne? Because it is among them that you find those who ‘went wrong’ in this way. Secondly, as far as I am aware, only a few rank-and-file activists in the GP made this about-turn. So, to give your question a slightly more technical character, I would say: why did so many people in the GP leadership take such a bad turn?

Interview with Joseph Stiglitz on economic meltdown

[This interview published in: Berliner Zeitung, October 9, 2008, is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, link towww.berlinonline.de. Joseph Stiglitz is one of the leading economic experts of the world. The winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, is a former chief economist of the World Bank and advised US president Bill Clinton from 1997.]

Q: Professor Stiglitz, are you afraid? 

J. Stiglitz: I am not afraid but rather alarmed because of the financial crisis. A high degree of insecurity prevails. These are extremely risky times. For me, it is a kind of Deja-vu. It reminds me of my time at the World Bank ten years ago, when the Asian crisis broke out. The difference is only that people in Thailand and Indonesia were stricken at that time. Today Americans and Europeans are affected. Today’s crisis is four times greater than ten years ago.

Depressing And Hysterical

 

Matt Taibbi and Byron York Butt Heads Over Whether McCain Deserves Blame for the Wall Street Meltdown

10/14/08 at 1:31 PM

James Lockhart before the Senate.Photo: Getty Images

Every day (or close to it) until November 4, a series of writers and thinkers will discuss the election over instant messenger for nymag.com. Today, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and National Review’s Byron York argue over the headwinds facing McCain, what Phil Gramm had to do with the financial crisis, and the importance of credit default swaps.

M.T.: So how are you feeling about McCain’s chances today?

B.Y.: I’ve just finished an article for National Review — the actual magazine — about the headwinds McCain faces. I was going to look at three, and then I started to list them. I stopped at ten. New Gallup numbers out today show that George W. Bush’s job approval rating remains at 25 percent, while his disapproval rating has ticked up to 71 percent. How hard is it to succeed a two-term president of your own party who is at 25-71? We don’t know because it’s never been done.

M.T.: Yeah, that’s a damned shame, too. I feel really badly for the guy. I suppose you think the media coverage is also a headwind?