nettime Fwd: MESSAGE FROM VICE-CHANCELLOR --- Redeployment of Dr Barbrook
- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 10:32:10 - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MESSAGE FROM VICE-CHANCELLOR --- Redeployment of Dr Barbrook To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wmin.ac.uk/images/system/logo.gif The University can confirm that Dr Richard Barbrook is to be redeployed from the School of Media, Arts and Design to the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages. The University has followed its agreed procedures in attempting to identify opportunities to redeploy Dr Barbrook following the need to make his previous post redundant last year and is delighted that this opportunity has arisen. Dr Barbrook 's new post is a full-time Senior Lecturer role within the Department of Social and Political Studies. Dr Geoffrey Copland _ This e-mail is intended for the above named only and may be confidential. If they have come to you in error you must not copy or show them to anyone, nor should you take any action based on them. If this has been sent to you in error please contact the Help Desk http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-988 - End forwarded message - --=_6s3bxk2r5og0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary==_NextPart_000_58B7_01C760A3.DD05D070; name= Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message is in MIME format. --=_NextPart_000_58B7_01C760A3.DD05D070 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit http://www.wmin.ac.uk/images/system/logo.gif The University can confirm that Dr Richard Barbrook is to be redeployed from the School of Media, Arts and Design to the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages. The University has followed its agreed procedures in attempting to identify opportunities to redeploy Dr Barbrook following the need to make his previous post redundant last year and is delighted that this opportunity has arisen. Dr Barbrook 's new post is a full-time Senior Lecturer role within the Department of Social and Political Studies. Dr Geoffrey Copland _ This e-mail is intended for the above named only and may be confidential. If they have come to you in error you must not copy or show them to anyone, nor should you take any action based on them. If this has been sent to you in error please contact the Help Desk http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-988 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Baudrillard - in memoriam, for The Nouvel Observateur
this is a memoriam for Baudrillard that Sylvere Lottringer organized for Fr= ance's Nouvel Observateur. It'll be out next week. I just thought I'd pass = it to the list. Greetings from Istanbul! in peace, Paul aka Dj Spooky Istanbul Baudrillard: A Remembrance of Things Unpassed By Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid I first met Jean Baudrillard at a conference Sylvere Lottringer of Semiotex= t(e) organized in Las Vegas several years ago. The idea of the conference = was about chance processes. Needless to say, with the Whiskey Casino as the= backdrop for the conference, and randomness as the main motif of the situa= tion, the soundtrack of the constant churning of slot machine wheels and pu= lleys, and the continuous movement of the attendees between speeches and ga= mbling, it all seemed totally appropriate. Baudrillard gave his speech dres= sed in a gold suit in simulation of Elvis, and I ran my speech through vari= ous software processes to turn it into the sound of water. When I look bac= k at the moment, it seems crystal clear that we were at the edge of an aest= hetic and philosophical ocean turn in how people put ideas together in the = era of hyper media. Since that time, simple things like wireless networks, = the ubiquity of the Ipod, global media events like 9/11 or the SARS virus, = have all brought home how prescient his thought was. The world knows Baudri= llard as the philosopher who gave us a cautionary tale about simulation, an= d if the events of today =E2=80=93 the war in Iraq, the economics of global= ization, Katrina=E2=80=99s destruction of New Orleans =E2=80=93 have told u= s that in no uncertain terms, we live in a world with a more and more tenuo= us grasp of the =E2=80=9Creality=E2=80=9D underpinning the myths of the pre= sent day. In a world where bleak man made landscapes and the psychological = effects of technological, social and environmental developments cannot be d= enied, his words were a beacon of how we can reason through the myriad ways= that we humans have displaced the natural world. For me as a just graduati= ng student in the early mid 90=E2=80=99s, Baudrillard seemed like a figure = who cut through the haze of post-everything American cultural malaise. I st= udied French literature at a time when it seemed that America was enthralle= d by the end of the Cold War =E2=80=93 my studies were populated with peopl= e like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Althusse= r, Lacan, bounded by Badiou. Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Wittig=E2=80=A6 Th= e list goes on but you get the point: these figures are part of a pantheon = where, perhaps, one of the common themes is a simple cry for new ways to pe= rceive how the mass media-landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the= private mind of the individual.=20 What Baudrillard did for me was make the world safe for doubt: doubt about = the intentions of governments, corporations, ideologies, and yes, people. L= ike J.G. Ballard or Bruce Sterling, his work hovered between descriptions o= f the world in present tense and the strange and uncanny networks that hold= together =E2=80=9Cthe real.=E2=80=9D For him, like the 'simulacrum' follow= ing DeBord's 'spectacle' where 'revolution' became synonymous with natural = skin care and something everyone did against the name of 'freedom.' I don't= mean to say anything here, I wonder about the doubting that once swayed th= e world, Today, I wrote this piece traveling on a flight between Tokyo and Istanbul,= and as I sit here and use a wireless network in the coffee lounge of the H= otel Buyuk Londra, I re-read him as doubting everything =E2=80=93 it=E2=80= =99s as if Baudrillard says never model a thought about anything unless yo= u can say it to yourself. The thought lingers, and links to a meta critiqu= e: it posits modern thought as withdrawn, proffered as kind of a peripheral= speech. At the birth of the 21st century, at the birth of the new New Worl= d, of suicide bombers, insane Presidents, multi-media equipped private armi= es and fundamentalist militas, his words bear reviewing: Baudrillard =E2=80= =93 a voice that says the seductions of reality are what we now hold dear.W= e speak the world. Reform, remix, re-engineer the consent of the Western w= orld. We need this analysis more than ever. Vietnam is now long gone. Mute,= May 68 almost forty years ago and most of us young people have never thoug= ht of burning monks, Chariman Mao, Stalin, or the origins of half of todays= problems. I think back to an almost innocent moment in the mid 1990=E2=80= =99s when Baudrillard with a gold suit, made people remember that the chanc= e processes of the world are what give us joy. With a simple flourish, I th= ink that he set the tone for many young artists, writers, and musicians, to= remember a simple thing: that another world is possible. Tokyo/Istanbul 3/15/07 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission #
nettime Fwd: Terrific result for the Westminster University and College
- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:42:10 + From: UCU - University of Westminster [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Terrific result for the Westminster University and College Union To: UCU [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] As you may now know, after two years of hard work by UCU representatives, at the 11th hour management suddenly pulled a job out of the hat after all for the colleague about to be made compulsorily redundant. This happened (surprise, surprise!) two hours before the ballot result emerged and action was due to be called. The ballot produced an excellent result of 76% in favour of action short of a strike and 62% in favour of strike action. * It demonstrates the strength of having the union around you * it has made us stronger and shown the deep-rooted solidarity felt for colleagues in difficulty * it shows that the merged union works * it allows us to move forward on other issues we need to progress for members with confidence and renewed vigour Well done to all who voted in support of the UCU advice - now is a good time for all members to ensure that all their colleagues are also in the union - link to application form below:- (_http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/pdf/e/n/ucuapplication.pdf_) =A0More information will follow. From: The UCU committee - End forwarded message - # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime radical sadness--exchange between ken wark and geert Lovink
Email exchange between Ken Wark and Geert Lovink Held during the week after Jean Baudrillard passed away. KW: You ask: what is radical sadness? That's an excellent question, and Jean poses it to us, so it's a good place to start. I have certainly felt a sadness since I heard Jean had died, but it is not yet a radical sadness. Maybe if I work on it I can radicalize it. With Jean dead, an era seems to end. I have lost, not exactly a 'father' but a crazy adopted uncle. He showed me what to do when you were no longer a militant. That theory should be 'radical' or not at all. How not to be a bureaucrat of thought. But radical sadness? That is another thing. Perhaps it begins with the claim that disappointment isn't personal. It is the world that has let us down. And we have the right not to just give in and accept 'reality'. Hurling oneself against that world in the name of another one may be futile, but one does not just accept one's sorry lot. There are other paths. The path Jean himself took is not necessarily the one to follow. It's a Nietzschian thing. My followers are not my followers. But he opens up a whole family of tactics. But perhaps it begins and ends with affect. It is the real itself that failed us. GL: Maybe I am searching for an alternative style, to avoid the official obituaries that focus on his all-too-obvious career highlights and post-correct opinions such a la The Gulf War didn't happen. What happens when one of your teachers that most influences your thinking dies? In my Baudrillard, is one of three sources of inspiration that I encountered simultaneously in 1983 and that have stayed with me ever since (the other two are Virilio and Theweleit). In 1986-1987 our group ADILKNO intensely studied The Fatal Strategies that had just came in out in a Dutch translation. We even gave weekly courses for interested members of autonomous movements and produced a small dictionary to explain the unique terminology that comes with this book. I guess it is obvious that Baudrillard played a formative role for an entire generation of media theorists that grew up during the 1980s and early 1990s. The urgency of his work somehow faded, at least for me, in the second part of the 1990s, but then it bounced back with the latest Cool Memories and The Conspiracy of Art. It was always interesting to see, as you say, how one struggles with the process of identifying with an author who so clearly cannot be turned into an (academic) school, as happened with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. What is important here, at this moment, is to distinguish between the beauty of ideas and not to treat them as lifestyle guides. Ideas alienate, disrupt, cool down and should not be elevated into a belief system. Baudrillard's struggle against his illness is a story of warmth and humanness. To project some of notions onto one's life, his life for that matter, luckily doesn't work. What we see here is a sabotage of life against death, an element that we find throughout the work of Elias Canetti, who, as we know, strongly influenced Baudrillard. Radical sadness in this respect is an attempt to circumvent the conventions of the everyday. There is the revolt again death and an ironical play with it. Baudrillard did not want to surrender. If we want to talk the language of theory, it is not the task of subject to take over the role of the object and all its (passionate) indifference. Theory should not end up in the self-help section. Death can spread disillusion or reinstate illusion (to reformulate what he once said). How do read his book The Symbolic Exchange and Death and related remarks on the death revolt at the moment when the author himself passes on? KW: For Baudrillard, our faith in the real is one of the elementary forms of religious life. While there are plenty of 'realist' philosophers, particularly in America, none bother to question the reality of the real itself. Baudrillard's thought was not an unmasking of the unreal but rather took place outside of the procedure of falsification. For him theory was closer to poetry, an operation that made nothingness out of the power of the sign. Everything he wrote was marked by a radical sadness and yet invariably expressed in the happiest of forms. After the foreclosure of so many seemingly 'radical' projects, he pursued the last one left to him, a symbolic exchange outside of the endless proliferation of indeterminate signs. He returned the world to itself exactly as it was given, as an enigma. But always at least as a far more elegant and astonishing one. GL: What strikes me most, going through my German, Dutch and English collection of his writings is his amazing ability to integrate news events into his theories, and to see news events themselves as major theory. Still one would never think of him as a commentator, let alone a journalist. It's something we find in Zizek's writings as well. KW: When Baudrillard's writing started showing up in Australia in the 80s, a
