nettime -empyre?
Dear Nettimers: I am moderating this month in -empyre and I know many of you are subscribed also to both lists. Since we are often discussing tangent topics I wonder if I can encourage you to participate in this month's discussion. These two posts were written by two very dear friends to me, two Uruguayan writers. I should love to see some of you contributing to this discussion too! Ana Dear all, I am Alicia Migdal, Uruguayan writer, film and literary critic. I work as academic dean of the Theater School Margarita Xirgu, managed by the Montevideo?s municipality. I am a friend to Ana since many years and thank to what I call her tireless ?mental activism?, which act upon all us in a viral way J, I am here and allow myself a literary sidepath.Estimados todos, Loneliness is always a urbane situation. For us being congenital urbane is not thinkable as a subjective situation the loneliness of peopoe living in not urban places. I am remembering the short story ?Wakefield?, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I associate it always with the short story ?Bartleby?, written by Herman Melville, quoted here by Ricardso Dominguez here the other day. And Kafka?s Gregor Samsa, the clerk becoming an insect looking at the lights of the city from his room. All of them represent urban situations impossible to think upon outside the polis. All of those has always being associated for me with ?The Man of the Crowd?, a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe quoted by Walter Benjamin connecting him with Charles Baudelaire and his condition of ?flaneur?. In this literary triangle the common denominator is the city and it?s anonymity. The famous poem of Baudelaire ?A une passante? put in scene the shock of the ephemerous image: a man was struck at the fugitive image of a woman passing in front his eyes and losing herself in the crowd. She was impossible to find and all possible relation between the poet and the woman, bound to be mysterious and furtive. Benjamin analyzed in detail in his essays on Baudelaie the new role of the urban grid represented by Paris as capital of the 19th century. He dedicated his book ?The Arcades Project? to Paris and it?s life. He studied the passages, galleries, the inside and the outside implicated by the new architectonic conceptions of social life. There is a short story by Julio Cort?zar, ?The Other Sky?, describing it around the Gallery Vivienne in Paris. Galerie Vivienne de Par?s y and Pasaje G?emes in Buenos Aires, where the times and the characters merge and the count of Lautreamond and a serial killer live simultaneusly. By the way the serial killers go from city to city, at least the most famous, or make it?s own map in the urban wave where they live, as showed in the film ?Zodiac?. And in other analyze Fredric Jameson has investigated the disjunction between the self and the constructed space starting on Hotel Bonaventure in his essay on capitalism?s late postcultural logic. But I continue on other day. Dear all, I am Sabela de Tezanos. Is a pleasure to greet you and intervene in this forum at the invitation of Ana Luisa, whom I thank again taking into account my perspective, in which intersect, in unstable doses, my training in philosophy (licensed by the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences of education, UdelaR), my work as a teacher (Department of Psychology, Montevideo) and cultural production (I am a member of the staff of the MAPI - Museum of pre-Columbian art and indigenous) in Montevideo and my writing. Every city has a skin. Its appearance is multiple and mobile, and it's mobility relates to the socio-cultural context in space and time. The factors affecting this skin are innumerable, and referred both to the architectural physiognomy and recent history; to the fast changes that this skin is exposed (technology, communication, globalization, etc.) and currently to trends imposed by social movements in the world. Montevideo is the capital of a small country, with a population of approximately 3,500,000 inhabitants. It's status of peripheric cit is intermittently reflected in successive urban images. As Montevideo born and resident, I have lived in different neighborhoods of the city. My perception, as their climates and peculiarities, have changed over time. I can recognize signs of response to these changes, the resistance and ability of the community to deal with progress, with political movements, to fashions. There are metaphors, reading between lines, manifestos or absent-mindedness, giving rhythm to what, in the words of the Paraguayan critic and current Minister of culture of his country, Ticio Escobar, called social skin. He refers to body painting and ornaments of different indigenous Latin American tribes, they reflect hierarchies, status, membership, practices, beliefs, traditions. I must also quote the Mexican muralist Felipe Ehrenberg: visiting Montevideo (2009) on the occasion of the completion of a work on the walls of the city, his lecture was
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
I apologize to go into the discussion so late but I am moderating this month's discussion at -empyre and it feels the time and the writing skills have indeed a limit :) I was a user of Second Life and remember the discussions about the virtual sweatshops where young Mexicans and Koreans worked for hours in dim or dark places enlightened only for the computers screens making virtual things or fighting wizards to get virtual weapons which could be sold in the real life for real world. Julian Dibell wrote a nice book about it, Play Money. I am myself reading Bataille The Accursed Share and the books by Marcel Mauss about the Gift. The concept of potlach is real interesting, the symbolical exchange of wares and goods which makes wars and conflicts with bloody consequences unnecesary or trivial. The exchange fullfills the symbolical needs of giving and takings. Ana On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.comwrote: On 03/07/2012 12:57 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote: If you boil it down, the valuation of Facebook is based on the promise of the power of the social graph and detailed forms of targeting and data-mining to do what? To serve the needs of advertisers. What needs? To move products and sell services. There may be all kinds of fascinating networking going on, but in economic terms, Facebook is about selling cars and iPads, mobile phones, diet supplements, beverages, and so on. Indeed. And to sell objects is, in our time, to directly command labor: both the labor of production in distant factories (often in Asia) and the closer labor of transportation, warehousing, delivery and sales, which accounts for an ever increasing portion of the hard, super-exploited work being done in and around the city where I live, Chicago. Because all six transcontinental rail lines cross in this city, it's the 3rd biggest container port in the US, an intershipment point for maritime cargo from both coasts. But almost no one knows this. Dazzled by Facebook and the like, people have simply forgotten about the manufacture of goods and the exploitation of largely undocumented labor forces. ... -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15859 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci # 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Haha, join -empyre if you want to have another cup! I enjoy Nettime and Empyre both, it's a great intellectual exchange! Ana On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Keith Hart ke...@thememorybank.co.ukwrote: Just a line to thank all the above for a great thread that could run and run. When combined with the other threads, Nettime has really hit a purple patch in the last week, a genuine symposium of intellectual politics or political intellectualism. And now Ana has served up three of my favourite authors and books in as many lines. My cup runneth over... Keith # 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Dear John I am not sure if we are talking in parallell ways. When I am talking potlach I am talking from an anthropologist view (I am a trained anthropologist) and we are definitely talking about exchanges both in the symbolical view and in the physical form. The most gifts exchanged were not included in the tribe's economy but were burned in a very ritualized ceremony at the end of the exchange festival. Ana On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:06 PM, John Hopkins jhopk...@neoscenes.net wrote: Hi Ana -- The exchange fullfills the symbolical needs of giving and takings. ... -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15859 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci # 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
