[-empyre-] April 2009 on –empyre-
April 2009 on –empyre- “Creativity and Postmodern Finance, or the Artifice of the 21st Century Global Financial Implosion” Plan on escaping the travails of finance and capital? Sure you do. We are all creative in our orientation toward the artifice of capital. The decision to survive requires employment of the arts of finance and capitalization, regardless of one's subjectivity or preoccupation. 'Creativity,' from the Latin, 'crescere,' means 'I come to be,' 'I increase,' 'I grow and expand,' etc. To be sure, some are endowed in one way or another with more or less of something, creativity notwithstanding. And for certain, some are more creative than others. Out of all this, what ‘comes to be’ as humanity employs the arts of capital in the 21st century? What does our creation obtain? As of late, the human world is preoccupied with artisans of capital and finance, and with good reason. Humanity is fearful that its future, we might say, is being foreclosed upon by the uncontrollable forces of their trade. Many cultural theorists feel that capital is an artifice. Capital is but our creation, they say. So perhaps we need only recreate capital, and its terms, to adjust for its errors, to render an ever better society. Others say capital is the problem in itself. What have we caused to be, to be increased, or expanded upon, that has led us to this spirited place? How does our art, our artifice, from the Latin ‘armus’…art being that which comes from our arm or shoulder…contribute to the problems or solutions of the global meltdown? Who are the artisans? And who is the audience that goads them onward? Our guests: Michael Angelo Tata is the author of Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality (forthcoming in 2009). Laurence Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Devil Notebooks (2008), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002) and The Vampire Lectures (1999). Joseph Tabbi is professor of contemporary literature and technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995). He also edits the Electronic Book Review. Jeff Pierce is an independent equity trader based in Canada. He is also the editor of Zentrader.ca Davin Heckman is Assistant Professor of English at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. He is the author of A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (2008). Nicholas Ruiz III is a moderator of –empyre-. He is the author of America in Absentia (2008) and The Metaphysics of Capital (2006). He is also the editor of Kritikos. Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] April 2009 on –empyre-
Hi everybody, I want to thank Nicholas for inviting me (on the strength of a recommendation from Manuela Rossini), and for setting the month’s topic. Bad times for all of us. Certainly here! At my State University in Chicago this season, so far just three of our eight graduate job seekers had an interview at the Modern Language Association job fair. Of these, one was called back for a campus talk. That was in Creative Writing. One of our recent lit Ph.Ds got a visiting position for a single term at a university abroad, and was told on arrival that the course load, and his salary, would be cut in half. I, personally, am burdened with it day to day since I am handling job placement in my Department. I’m also presiding at the Electronic Literature Organization where, this past month, I’ve written three letters defending e-lit researchers whose positions have been, or could be, cut. The firing of Laura Borràs Castanyer in Spain was discussed here I think, on the list before I joined. A prestigious department of Germanic Studies may be denying tenure to another active and well published e-lit scholar. One recent MA in Germany, who was planning on doing a dissertation in e-lit, lost her supporting program when their grant was not renewed: she needs now to migrate back to ‘literature,’ if they will let her back. Three in less than a month: these letters are becoming my genre. We all saw it coming. Now that it’s here, do we again do what we’ve always done? Protect what we have? Re-assert our commitment to the traditional goals of the traditional Humanities? Cooperate with the upper administration in the hopes that we’ll be favored when things turn around? Tenure stream jobs in those ‘traditional’ disciplines have been systematically reduced in any case and no turnaround can be expected. In the U.S., compare the 75% of undergraduate classes taught by tenure stream faculty, in the 1960s, with the current 25% (the rest taught by instructors and grad students whose scholarly career ends with the Ph.D., more often than not: see M. Bousquet, How the University Works). So I’m wondering if those of us who have been, in our writing and academic careers, seeking new directions ought to continue channeling our energies primarily through disciplines. I’m wondering if Humanities scholars haven’t been following, for too long and maybe semi-consciously, the models of high finance. We both have our derivative instruments. Where finance has moved from a system of reliable debtors to speculation itself, we scholars describe what others have been describing under the term, “postmodernity.” (See N. Luhmann, “Globalization or World Society”) We protect each other with professional “languages” and we like to form micro “cultures” and establish disciplinary boundaries as a barrier to entry, somewhat as Finance uses capital. We are all working now largely through networked media of communication and exchange (of information, money, ideas). Recent experience suggests that, even if nobody knows how to stop the capitalist system from unraveling, the networks themselves go on functioning, and something transformative is in store (for better or worse). Most people of course will go on doing what they always do (because doing so has produced success in the recent past). In the past, despite some belt-tightening, at least we could reproduce the disciplines and add a number of sub-disciplines when conflicts arose (over resources, over concepts, over concepts covering for anxieties over resources). But for those who are working seriously not only in disciplines, but also in networked environments, I think different kinds of academic/aesthetic production have to be recognized. Networks now are where discourse takes place. They generate a fair amount of gossip, shop talk, and vaporware. But ways of creating value, uniqueness, and stability are also emerging in literary and aesthetic scholarship. Maybe some of us, here, know of some ways. I look forward to the discussions, Joseph Tabbi ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] April 2009 on –empyre-
I will also take the time to introduce myself here, too. (Although I was a pretty excited participant last month, too). I am Davin Heckman and I teach in an English department at a small Catholic liberal arts college called Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. My teaching duties are divided between courses in media studies, visual culture, literature, and composition. Some people estimate that the unemployment rate in this little part of Southeast Michigan could be as high as 20%, so at a small school (with under 800 full time undergraduate students at our main campus, a great many of whom are first-generation, working class kids) we are also feeling the squeeze. Being so small, you really get to know students, so I am constantly reminded inside of class, outside of class, and everywhere else, that people are losing jobs, homes, and, in some cases, hope. As far as my research goes, I have spent the last few years with my eyes on neoliberalism (reading lots of David Harvey, Mike Davis, Frederic Jameson, etc.) and exploring a lot of theory through this lens (reading Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, Virilio, Heidegger, Stiegler, Badiou, deCerteau, etc). In general, I guess I come back quite often to discussions I used to have with my advisor, Hai Ren, about Neoliberalism and Governmentality http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/, in particular the pervasive character of capitalism. My book on smart houses (A Small World) attempts to discuss these problems in relation to household technologies. In addition, I am quite interested in electronic literature, new media art, popular culture, etc. And so the next step in my research has been to turn my critical concerns towards these things that I enjoy, to ask how the arts (broadly conceived) express, critique, embody, or propose alternatives to the current economic, political, and social malaise. Furthermore, I am interested in how I can function as a scholar and teacher to promote a critical awareness of this malaise. As a result, I have picked up a couple of odd projects. Most immediately, I am trying to initiate broad reforms in my school's liberal arts curriculum. I am also doing a bit of reading and writing on the history of the University as an institution, and am interested in sketching out various theories for the university as a humanist (or posthumanist, the specific terms are unimportant) enterprise after poststructuralism. For this I have been reading Bill Readings' University in Ruins, Gary Hall's Digitize this Book, and Neil Postman's various writings on the topic, Bernard Stiegler's works on Ars Industrialis, etc.) Hopefully, I will be able to sustain some sort of meaningful discussion in this area. Specifically, I am interested in how these philosophies will effect they way I teach courses like Electronic Literature, Visual Culture Studies, Media History, etc. In my travels, I have also identified a number of practical approaches to the problems of the current economy. In the upper Midwestern United States, especially in Minnesota, there is a strong tradition of co-ops. I am especially interested in worker-owned co-ops, community supported agriculture, and, because I work for nuns, religious and/or intentional communities. I am very interested in figuring out how these models might teach us something about how to create better colleges and universities that are not so dependent on the whims of the stock market. As a peripheral matter, I am also interested in the professionalization of academia. Going to various conferences, having many friends who are looking for jobs, and having very recently done the job search thing, I am acutely aware of the desperation that prevails among academic job seekers. This leads to an intensity which strikes me as contrary to intellectual life (the constant jockeying for attention, the obsession with prestige, the pressure of writing and trying to publish, etc.). I cannot blame people for trying hard to compete for jobs that are scarce, but as a whole this is also continually devastating the culture of academic life, which simply should not mirror the Wall Street ethos. Philosophy is about considering how to use our lives differently, in figuring out what to do. Too often, higher education is not about figuring out what to do, it is about learning what you have to do to progress to the next level, so you can hurry up and work. So that was my long-winded introduction. Peace! Davin Heckman www.retrotechnics.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Eddies, Whirlwinds, Trade Winds
Greetings, all! I’m quite excited to share this panel with such an eminent bunch, and look forward to undertaking some important reflection upon what the cultural ramifications of the current Wall Street debacle might be, both domestically and globally. Basically, I’ve written a book about Warhol which is currently forthcoming from Intertheory, so hopefully Warhol’s own relation to commerce, as well as the role he has been slated within pomo-ism proper by people like Jameson, will become a part of the discussion. Aside from Warhol, the place toward which my mind immediately turns as I think about what Nicholas refers to as the Immaculate Deception is Camille Paglia’s identification of Jacques Derrida as a junk-bond salesman in her “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (part of Sex, Art, and American Culture). I think my mind races to this piece of writing because it does raise the important question of the potential bankruptcy of theory in general (a risk that does not seem to plague philosophy quite the same way). Glancing anew at Derrida’s The Gift of Death, I take immense pleasure in the text’s flow, the beautiful post-structural play of surfaces that carry me away on currents of semantic glissement: perhaps she’s right, but without comprehending that the problematic she formulates is wrong because theory is nor philosophy, what it can give transcends the gross objectivity of a fact or datum. Still, there is Derrida’s love of counterfeit money in Gift and Given Time. How does this tropism speak to Madoff’s antics? To the culture that will flourish in the wake of collapse and that has flowered all along during these golden years of HELOC madness and Home Depot grand openings? To the “cultural logic” of late capitalism in general, and the late, late gerontic capitalism of today’s world? Places my mind travels to next: The marvelous bankruptcy of American culture in general—especially in its postmodern instantiation. Something for nothing, nothing for nothing. The Dotcom crash of the early millennium as prefigurement to the present real estate crash: the no-there-there of the virtual reasserts itself in the financial sector. 9/11 and the return of a historically meaningful present, pace Baudrillard’s post-history: what is post-postmodernism? Are we experiencing it now? Specifically, what comes next, after irony? The Pecker paradigm. “Yes We Can” becomes “Yes You Can”; the Obama slogan becomes a Pepsi mantra (or is it the Obama mantra becomes the Pepsi slogan?). Where do we go with this mutation? On a recent trip to Geneva, I stumbled across a department store (Manor-La Placette) built on the original site of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s boyhood home: a little placard, tender yet bearing the weight of history, read something to the effect of “Ice est né le petit Rousseau….’ How do we read this repurposing of Rousseau in light of his “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences”? How do we connect the cultural bankruptcy Rousseau outlines with recent Wall Street hijinks? Commerce and culture alike straddle an abyss of currency and meaning: what does each realm have to say to the other regarding risk and venture? Alright: this little poetic scatter catalogues my various points of inception. I am looking forward to reading everyone else’s. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ _ Quick access to your favorite MSN content and Windows Live with Internet Explorer 8. http://ie8.msn.com/microsoft/internet-explorer-8/en-us/ie8.aspx?ocid=B037MSN55C0701A___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
