Perhaps Bayley should wear this as penance

In retrospect, the review I wrote of Stephen Bayley's Woman As Design (not online, not out yet, will be in Icon soon) is a pussycat of a piece compared to those by Camilla Long and Germaine Greer.

Bayley devotes the second half of the book to assorted babe issues, such as being blonde, wearing high heels, wearing skirts, being a pin-up, being a babe, being intellectually vacant, having hot bazongas, looking like a Coca-Cola bottle, ­acting like a Coca-Cola bottle, looking like a car, ­looking like a building, wearing bikinis, um, having a tight butt, having a tight butt that looks like buildings. All of which is delivered in a style that is at best confusing, at worse ­downright misleading - from the Long review.

Ouch! But very funny.

Bayley insists. "The female body is a masterpiece of design: an eternal natural classic as well as an inexhaustible source book of inspirational form and detail." Needless to say, menstruation, that stunning triumph of design, is nowhere mentioned in his book. He steers clear of childbirth, too. Bayley's examples of consummate womanhood are all the usual suspects, from the Mona Lisa to Kate Moss, women whose images are so familiar that only photo agencies can have wanted to see them replicated yet again - from the Greer piece.

I like the music,' I commented. 'Though maybe it's a little too martial. Somewhere in there I can hear the Horst Wessel song.'

'It's good for morale,' Carradine explained. 'We like to keep people cheerful. You know...?' - Kingdom Come

Lots of people were a bit nonplussed by Ballard's final full-length fictional effort, Kingdom Come (2006), thinking it a poor understanding of the relationship between sport, shopping malls, the suburbs and racism, not to mention a clunky caricature of English sociology. In the wake of recent violence involving Casuals United and the English Defence League ('Peacefully Protesting Against Militant Islam'), it has to be said that he might have had a point: a toxic mix of misplaced victimhood combined with a tired fetish for violence is planning protests throughout the Autumn, in Harrow, Luton, Manchester and Leeds. Their excessive 'we're not racist, honest!' rhetoric is pure revelation: The lad doth protest too much, methinks.


[The English Defence League Forum screen, featuring randomly generated ads from Google - this one unlikely to be approved of by the folk writing on the message boards, however].

There were flowers, a row of miniature teddy bears, one wearing a tiny St George's shirt, and a dozen jars of honey and treacle - Kingdom Come.

'...members of Casuals United marched through the town and last month they picketed an Islamic roadshow in North London' - Times article.



A bulldog clip held a dozen issues of a Metro-Centre newsletter, filled with photographs of sporting club dinners, everyone in their St George's shirts. the teams looked as smart and disciplined as paramilitary units - Kingdom Come

'Polo shirts available via merchandise button on website, You can have your town/city division printed on for same price' - English Defence League advert.

Atheism in Christianity: "Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist"

In the long unavailable Atheism in Christianity, Ernst Bloch provides an original historical examination of Christianity in an attempt to find its social roots. He pursues a detailed study of the Bible and its long standing fascination for “ordinary and unimportant” people. In the Bible stories’ promise of utopia and their antagonism to authority, Bloch locates the appeal to the oppressed—the desire “to transcend without transcendence.” Through a lyrical yet close and nuanced analysis he explores the tensions within the text that promote atheism, against the authoritarian metaphysical theism imposed on it by priest interpreters. At the Bible's heart he finds a heretical core and claims, paradoxically, that a good Christian must necessarily be an atheist.
Speakers: Jane Shaw, Dean of Divinity, Chaplain and Fellow (New College, Oxford), Peter Thompson, Director, Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies (Sheffield), Ben Morgan (Worcester College, Oxford),
Eric Kaufmann (Birkbeck), George Pitcher (Chair) Religion Editor of The Daily & Sunday

Saturday 17th October 3pm - 5pm Room B35 Birkbeck Main Building
Free – open to all – no registration


Walter Benjamin & Bertolt Brecht: Story of a Friendship? One day conference

The English translation of Erdmut Wizisla’s formidable study Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship is published this Autumn by Libris. No-one has a better view of the much disputed relationship between these two figures than Erdmut Wizisla, director of Berlin’s Benjamin and Brecht Archive. Greeting the German edition, Momme Brodersen spoke for many when he wrote: ‘If this book had appeared decades ago, it would have terminated an unproductive debate in one fell swoop: that of the influence – be it fruitful, be it disastrous – of probably the most significant German playwright and poet of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht, on probably the most significant critic of his day, Walter Benjamin’. Our conference celebrates the book’s publication and explores the ways in which Wizisla’s study augments, challenges or re-constellates previous analyses (most notably the one emanating from that other ‘Story of a Friendship’, published in English in 1982, by Gershom Scholem).
Speakers:
Erdmut Wizisla (Berlin), Peter Thompson (Sheffield: on 'Brecht, Benjamin and the Crisis of Modernity'), Barbara Engh (Leeds: on ‘Friendship and Clang Figures), Tony Phelan (Oxford: on 'Brecht on Benjamin – On the Philosophy 
of History'), Steve Giles (Nottingham: on ‘Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno and the Kunstwerk essay’), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck: on ‘Constellations and Comradeship’) and Chryssoula Kambas (Osnabrück).

Friday 6th November Room B36 10am - 5pm followed by book launch and drinks in Room B02 & B03
To register for this event please email Julia Eisner j.eisner@bbk.ac.uk

This story about the 'lying down game' reminded me of the 1920s, with its chess games up flag-poles, dance marathons and general mucking about. These end-of-days type activities must somehow correlate to the likelihood of even more severe economic catastrophe, I'm sure of it. Next we'll be hopping down the street on one leg whilst reading the final edition of thelondonpaper. And then the markets will crash for good.

The new issue is out, and you can read some of it online. I particularly recommend Rob White's editorial, which discusses Antichrist among other things, and Joshua Clover's 'The Future in Labor' which discusses The Girlfriend Experience:

'Journalists, call girls, trainers, bloggers, traders all ply their hustles in the midst of an economic collapse brought on exactly because of the tottering imbalance between the service sector and productive base—they are the simultaneous subject and object of the disaster, its cause and effect.'

Saw District 9 the other night, the South African sf film about apartheid. The premise and the setting is brilliant, but I don't know why they had to make into a boring action film after the first part: what is it about seeing people get blown up? Is it supposed to make you feel better about things? Hmmm.....

First of all, there's Brian Smith's review of Graham Harman's Prince of Networks. Then there's Brooke Lewis on why there aren't very many women teaching in philosophy departments. Even more stuff in the magazine, which you can buy, um, in selected bookshops and newsagents everywhere, or subscribe here!

For fans of both Wolfen (1981) and Chris Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (1977 + 1993), it should be noted (after careful research) that the same footage of wolves being shot from helicopters is used in both films. The question is: where is the footage from? Did Marker see it in Wolfen and use it in the 1993 addendum? Answers, if anyone knows, on a pigcard (to be fed to a wolf): infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk. No mentions of Sarah Palin please.

UPDATE: (From...surprise! Evan):
'As for the who-saw-who lineage question, I would put my money on Wadleigh borrowing it from Marker. (Also, I recall the same footage being in the '77 cut of Le fond de l'air est rouge.) Wadleigh never considered himself a horror director, but rather a political filmmaker. (Tellingly, he is better known for the Woodstock documentary.) In this interview from '04, he says it's a "serious political film": "it's about American Indians killing rich people" and about Finney's cop character "letting the murderers and terrorists get away with what they're doing." (Here's the interview, the Wolfen part is about three-quarters of the way through). As such, I'm positive he would be a watcher of Marker. But I don't know for sure if that is the source: perhaps a documentary on the depredation of native American hunting grounds?'

[Gulp...but at least I got to finish that interminable alphabet series!]

You can buy my forthcoming short book at the Book Depository (cheaper than Amazon) for 5.99, which is slightly more than a packet of cigarettes. It is, of course, much worse for you than a packet of cigarettes. UPDATE: Ben says 'one pee less than in some places - non-smoker'. Quite.

It comes out at the end of November, by which point it should have a slightly different (and better) cover.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you won't be very surprised by things I say, not least because some of them I've said here already (literally!). There's some stuff about how feminism doesn't make any sense if you don't look at transformations in work and working conditions, some crossness at American feminism for its consumerist upbeatness, the usual annoyance about chocolate and some frankly insane stuff about teenage pregnancy. On the plus-side, it's only about 80 pages, so you can read it in the time it takes to put on your make-up. It's not a proper book like Owen's (not least because I thought we were supposed to be writing short polemics, not giant astonishingly-impressive bildungsroman - Owen! You've made it impossible for anyone to follow you!).

Besides, if this book does make any money, it's all going to The Fistula Foundation, so, erm, you could think of it as a mediating object between the (free) blog and the (genuinely moral) charity. So, erm, if you like the blog, you could buy the book. Or something. See, self-promotion: it wasn't as hard as all that, was it, piglet...

Somebody put the whole of Ray's book, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007) online. Blimey.

It should be noted that, according to scribd, the average stats for 'letters per word' in Ray's book is 6.66. It's as if he planned it!

See here.

The University’s “paramount teaching mission,” we are told, justifies the imposition of furloughs on non-instructional days. But the President does not hesitate to fund the budget shortfall through ballooning tuition payments and increased class sizes. The decision on furloughs does not serve to mitigate the effects of these policies; it serves to perpetuate them while dissimulating their effects. We cannot allow either the California legislature or the Office of the President to proceed as though cuts to public education do not have debilitating consequences.

In other news, London Met has been greylisted (again). Not a good time to be a university, or in one.

[via Bat]

It looks like Curtis has put the whole of It Felt Like A Kiss up on his site. It looks like it'll only be up for a short while though.

Further to recent discussion of 'woman as design' and such things here and at Ads Without products, here is Roger's fine account of the invention of cellulite.

[This is quite a bit longer than the interview that appeared in the New Statesman]

NP: You've just been awarded $1.5 million to found a "Thinking Critically About War" centre at Berkeley. Tell me what kind of work you hope to do there.

JB: I hope to be able to help organize faculty and students to think together about the changing character of war and conflict and what that implies about critical intellectual positions. Wars no longer take the same form and do not always rely, for instance, on the integrity of nation-states. The methods and tactics have also changed. How does one formulate a politically responsible criticism of war in the midst of this changing terrain. My hope to is to fund some conferences and fellowships dedicated to these sorts of questions.

NP: In your recent Frames of War you continue some of the work you did in Precarious Life (2004) concerning the representability of life and death. How do you see the link between the two books?

Well, I think that even though "life" was in the title of Precarious Life, I did not think about it as carefully as I should have. The first book considers questions of public culture and censorship in the aftermath of 9/11, but the second is more concerned with questions of torture and how we conceive of the human body as injurable. I think the second text goes further in trying to think about the kinds of obligations we might have on the basis of our anonymous exposure to others. I hope that it also spells out some ethical and political implications of what it means to be "precarious."

NP: One of the first things a child learns about death, it seems to me, is that the death of a countryman or woman is more important in media terms than the death of someone elsewhere, which we might not even get to hear about. How do you understand the relationship between nationalism, death and the media?

JB: Yes, I suppose some children do learn this. But it may be possible to learn death first through the media as the death of strangers. I am wondering, for instance, about some of us who were young children during the war in Vietnam. Our first exposure to death may have been from photojournalism. Still, there is a question about whether we regard as valuable and grievable those lives that are closest to us or which readily conform to local and national norms of recognition. In other words, lives that are more readily "recognizable" tend to be regarded as more worthy and more "grievable." I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war. In order to become open to offering that sort of acknowledgement, however, we have to come up against the limit of the cultural frames in which we live. In a way, we have to let those frames get interrupted by other frames.

NP: The notion of 'frames' is a very useful one for understanding how lives come to count or be represented, and in Frames of War you do interesting work on the question of photography. The US government has recently lifted a ban on showing photographs of coffins at the same time as the Obama administration has vetoed the release of more torture photographs from Iraq. What do you think these two rulings indicate about how we 'frame' war, or how war is allowed to be understood?

I think that even in the Obama administration there is the fear that explicit photographs of torture or death will portray the nation in a bad light or possibly turn national or international sentiment against the US. I find this a very peculiar kind of argument since it values how we are seen more highly than whether we are seen in a truthful way. Obama basically claims that it is his job to present a likable picture of the US, but I think that the responsiblity to the national and global public actually is more important than this rather weak imperative. The rulings do confirm that frames are powerful. We saw that already in embedded reporting, and we continue to see it in the censorship of war photography and even poetry from Guantanamo.

NP: You touch upon the question of abortion in your discussion of how we value 'precarious' or 'greivable' lives. 'Life' is an extremely contested term, as you say. How do you understand some of the difficulties attached to this word in the context of the way it has been mobilised, for example by the Christian right in America?

JB: Yes, of course. But my sense is that the Left has to "reclaim" the discourse of life, especially if we hope to come up with significant analyses of biopolitics, and if we are to be able to clarify under what conditions the loss of life is unjustifiable. These means arguing against those who oppose abortion and making clear in what sense the "life" we defend against war is not the same as the "life" of the foetus. I don't know whether one can be a nominalist about life, since there are so many instances of living processes and beings. We have to enter into this complex array of problems, which means as well that social theory has to become more knowledgeable about debates in the life sciences.

NP: To the horror of many on the left, feminism and (to a lesser extent) gay rights were invoked as democratic values in the case for war in Afghanistan and Iraq ('freeing' women from the burka, for example). How do you understand the contemporary relationship between feminism (and gay rights) and war?

JB: There are at least two problems here. The one has to do with the sudden instrumentalization of "gay rights" or "women's rights" to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a move that suggests that we are actually fighting a culture, a religion, or an entire social structure rather than a particular state or its government. The notions of emancipation instrumentalized for such purposes are clearly imperialist, and assume that liberation means adopting certain kinds of cultural norms as the most valuable. But this argument is really treacherous in my view, since it overrides the actual political movements already underway in such countries that are working out specific political vocabularies and claims for rethinking gender, sexuality, and domination.

The second problem is that lesbian/gay rights, and the rights of sexual minorities, need to join with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-war movements and are, in many instances, already joined together. There is no bonafide feminism, for instance, that is not also anti-racist. Similarly, there is no struggle for the rights of sexual minorities that is worthy of the name that does not affirm the cultural diversity of sexual minorities. Further, it is important to understand "minoritization" strategies as effecting both sexual and religious minorities - another reason why complex alliances are crucial.

NP: Sometimes, as in the case of the recent Iranian protests, a particular death (that of Neda Agha-Soltan) is captured, disseminated and comes to stand in for a larger horror. Can we separate popular use of media channels (Twitter, YouTube, blogs) from more entrenched, hierarchical forms (state media, newspapers)? How might these new kinds of 'frames' transform our understanding of conflict in the future?

JB: Of course, this is the key question. I think it is probably inevitable that certain iconic images emerge in the midst of these conflicts, and they can, as we saw, be very powerful in mobilizing popular resistance to a regime. But what was most interesting to me here was the way that mainstream media became dependent on twitter and on hand-held phones to relay video from street demonstrations. It was not that "twitter" and cell phone videos were "alternative" media that showed a different picture from what appeared in dominant media venues. On the contrary, these internet based media became the basis for the dominant media image, and there was no other alternative under conditions when foreign media was barred, as it still is, from Iran. So are we actually seeing the emergence of hybrid media and, as a result, a certain wild region of "source material" and "corroboration." Perhaps this fragmentation and hybrdization will allow for different perspectives - at least until some corporation figures out how best to "own" it all.

As I don't seem to be able to load any pictures to Blogger (more ftp problems, perhaps?), I've put up the photos from the Climate Camp at Blackheath here as a Flickr set.

It's probably the cleanest place I've ever seen! I mean that in all seriousness - they're running an incredibly organised thing down there (and what it is isn't quite clear: Climate Camp tend to picket and protest at things, like the G20. Here they've just set up camp and put on meetings for a week, raising awareness about climate change and related matters). The campers are incredibly young, or perhaps I am just getting old. There were a few proper crusties about, and not a little juggling, but mostly it was perky twenty-somethings making vats of food, giving presentations and asking me if I were a journalist ('I might write something on my blog!' I squeaked, happy just to be thought of as a member of the press, rather than worried I might be kicked out, which was in fact quite likely - the mainstream media coverage, as you might imagine, has not been very positive).

Anyway, as Owen pointed out as we walked beneath the very good, and somewhat Benjaminian 'Capitalism IS Crisis' sign, this is it - the Climate Camp people, the RMT and the odd Trotskyist group. Whatever organised resistance there is in Britain, it looks like this: unable to formulate a properly economic response to the economic crisis, whatever opposition to the undead spectacle of neoliberalism there is has found itself moored on the shores of environmentalism and the odd industrial strike. Whilst these are obviously important things, there are so many gaps left open: I mean, the banks, they belong to us! The bankers can't just go back to those grotesque bonuses, can they? The fact that they can with barely a pause can only mean that when the crash happens again, and it will, it'll be even more catastrophic. Capitalism IS crisis: a Tory government (however weak) will be more of the same, but somehow even worse. Labour will spend years in the wilderness and come up with another New Labour plan (Neo-New Labour perhaps). The minute political oscillation around the centre-right will carry on forever and ever until there's one pigeon in Trafalgar Square, half a job for one unpaid intern, and one train costing £500 for a ten minute journey.

'Earlier it was announced the band had cancelled their second gig in the space of a week because of "an altercation within the band". Rumours at the time of publication that the brothers had fallen out after a heated debate about Jacques Derrida and the death of the author with Noel subscribing to a hard line Plato/logocentric position with Liam unable to convince him of the need to consider "fookin' Roland Barthes" remain unconfirmed.' Oasis split...ah ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!

My interview with Judith Butler is in the current issue of the New Statesman. I was originally supposed to do this in person, but Butler was ill. Nevertheless, I think her answers are pretty interesting, and I really like the line: 'we have to let those frames get interrupted by other frames'.

My interview with Sylvère Lotringer is in the current issue of Frieze. I like this bit best:

'It requires quite a mental jump to equate the immateriality of sub-prime speculation – signs spinning on signs – and the huge devastation that it dealt on the entire planet in just a matter of hours. This is the violence of capitalism. And the worst is still to come, in this or other ways, ecological disasters on the scale of continents yet as abstract in our minds as this crisis in liquidity was, all caused by the terrorism of greed and neglect. So it did help remind me that, for all the freedom it promises, capitalism is on its way to destroy everything that made life worth living on this planet, art included.'