Month: June 2011

Crowell on Phenomenology

Steven Crowell (Rice) offers a defense of phenomenology in an interview here, with mentions of McLuhan and speculative realism. Harman responds briefly here. This provides a nicer summation of the whole speculative realism movement and the reaction to it, which isolates what often leads philosophers to talk past one another, since the latter takes ontology as first philosophy and the former (like Crowell) take the problems of access and epistemology as paramount.

Are you looking for somehow who “values your values”?

And by values, I mean the rapacious egoism of Ayn Rand?

Teaching in the US, students will be enamored by her work and I always ask, well, would you extend it to your relationships? (Especially since Rand based several of her heroic characters on a sadistic rapist and killer? And that her “love scenes” are better described as rape?) Now you can find like-minded egoists willing to dispense with that hated notion of compassion, thanks to the irony-inhibited authors of The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason, who recall for us Rand’s dictum that “to say ‘I love you,’ one must first learn to say ‘I.'”

Paulian Non-Conversions

Like Tim, I’m not sure about Paul as a model for the Left, though likely for different reasons. But the Paulian moment feels oh so 2003 or so: Agamben, Badiou, Zizek, etc., all writing on him at the time. For me it’s linked to the questionable political temporality, which might not be far, actually, from what Tim its non-democratic ethos.

Moving II

After I told Junior we’d be moving to Canada–I had broached whether he’d be up for it before–he reflexively gave me his quick checklist: “okay, I’ll have to start learning French and borrow your hockey stick.” Well, he can put off the French for a bit; no need to make the Anglophiles of St. John’s suspicious. But wow, the hockey thing is legit.

PS Speaking of Junior, here’s a nice trick for getting rid of those knots in his shoes he seems to always double-down on.

Mark Fisher, et al., on Dawn of the Dead

Via A Piece of Monologue:

On 26 May, as part of Birkbeck Arts Week (23-28 May), academics shared their thoughts on George A. Romero’s zombie horror classic, Dawn of the Dead (1978). The roundtable discussion was introduced by Dr Amber Jacobs (Psychosocial Studies) and included four speakers: Mark Fisher (Cultural Studies and Music Culture, Goldsmiths) Gordon Hon (Artist and Lecturer in Visual Culture, Winchester School of Art), Paul Myerscough (Senior Editor at the London Review of Books) and Dr Catherine Grant (Senior Lecturer in Film from Sussex University). The event was part of a series entitled ‘Intrusions: Vampires, Strangers and Monstrous Others’, convened by the Urban Studies group of the Raphael Samuel History Centre  [Listen]

Free Blogging

In the interest of returning to blogging at the rate I was doing up until a few months ago, let me turn quickly to this Matty Ylgesias post about the use of a mix of paid/unpaid bloggers at the Huffington Post:

Erik Loomis castigates “the progressive blogosphere and young progressives in general” for a “lack of concern over labor” as evidenced by, for example, our lack of interest in the union-sponsored boycott of the Huffington Post over its use of a mix of paid and unpaid labor. So I’ll pay heed to the issue, though I won’t be boycotting anything. I’ll just start with the observation that there’s something ironic about a college professor writing a blog post for which he presumably wasn’t paid in order to castigate the practice of unpaid blogging. …

Those of us who write or a living on the internet might well benefit from a rule banning amateur content creation online. No more professors giving opinions on political issues away for free! No more videos of cute cats on YouTube! Heck, no more Wikipedia! More traffic for me! What’s not to like? Obviously there are free speech problems with trying to legally ban amateur internet writing. But should we boycott all free internet writing? My view is that we shouldn’t, even if Wikipedia is reducing the demand for unionized teamsters to deliver physical encyclopedias.

YGLESIAS, who is usually pretty good on these issues, just doesn’t get it. Now I am a college professor who writes (alas, not often lately) for free, but what he misses is that I also don’t rely on this for my paycheck. But I do know someone well who does, namely Freelance Extraordinaire. And here, Yglesias’s frame falls apart: FE worked, until two months ago, for AOL, writing regularly for a variety of its web sites. Then the Huffington Post was bought by AOL and much of AOL’s content was turned over to Arianna Huffington’s crew. This consolidation meant that the team FE worked with was reduced to two (with FE initially being one of those “lucky” two), after making all the freelancers go through the motions of various conference calls where they could discuss the bright future of these changes.

Now, how does AOL/Huffington Post expect to make up for those who were laid off (many of whom were excellent journalists laid off during the depression in the newspaper and journalism industry of the last few years)? Well, by exploiting those who will write for free, hoping to gain enough clips to one day, perhaps, gain a job. In other words, they went from a system that was very much like having adjuncts (bad enough) to then exploiting those who would teach a course for free in the hopes of one day becoming an adjunct. When the unemployment rate is 9.1% and far higher in journalism. Real cheery stuff.

So my worry isn’t whether a college prof or Gary Hart is being paid for online content. It’s when an already profitable enterprise engages in layoffs, making the risk economy riskier for all except those who have enough already. Which is an ironic argument made by someone who already makes money for writing online.

All this is par for the course for AOL, whose business model seems to depend on getting writers dependent on other companies to pay them, or is simply dependent on duping old people.

Moving…

I’ll be moving this summer over to Memorial University’s Philosophy Department. I’m quite excited by the changes. Memorial is about to begin offering a Ph.D. in philosophy (it already has a strong MA program), specializing in Continental, and I join an exciting department headed by Jim Bradley and includes Peter Trnka, Sean McGrath, and others known on the continental circuit. They are a busy department, with weekly reading groups (even going during the summer), with faculty and students all joining in.

Thus, if you intend to get in touch with me, best to use my gmail account: pmgratton[@]….

While I’m at it, I’ll honored to be in Australia for part of next Spring/Summer on a research fellowship at Australia National University’s Humanities Research Centre. The theme of the fellowship is on ecology and my focus will be on connecting my work on time to other fellows’ work on ecology—so look for more here next year on that point (and please feel free to send along ideas!). And many thanks to peeps in the blogosphere, such as Tim Morton, who have already been adding their thoughts on blogs about these concepts.

Getting back down to work

I was in New York for the last week and a half, catching up with friends and family, as well as serving as best man for my friend Danny’s wedding. I caught a Yankees game, got to various museums in New York and Philly, and and generally suffered under the summer doldrums of New York: the heat and humidity and the non-stop talk of Anthony Weiner. Even NPR offered no respite when driving in the car from that mess.