tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post2270454614610278170..comments2023-11-05T03:05:16.380-08:00Comments on No Useless Leniency: Bye, Bye, Mr Critique?Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-43046890899596629692011-11-21T07:40:26.213-08:002011-11-21T07:40:26.213-08:00@Sean,
I'm writing a review of Gail's book...@Sean,<br />I'm writing a review of Gail's book to appear in HM, so hopefully that might satisfy. I don't know if panels were recorded, so it might have been.Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-43346808204504128632011-11-13T14:37:28.808-08:002011-11-13T14:37:28.808-08:00Dear Ben
Any chance of a report on the meeting on ...Dear Ben<br />Any chance of a report on the meeting on art you were chairing at the HIst Mat conference? <br />SeanSeanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18360717684013426918noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-63824089948176925722011-10-22T14:55:34.326-07:002011-10-22T14:55:34.326-07:00I've not read For a New Critique of Political ...I've not read <i>For a New Critique of Political Economy</i> yet, but I have read a lot by Stiegler. While there is much I appreciate, I have to agree that he is in the end a moralist. It is hard to return to reading the bulk of <i>Technics and Time</i> in the same way after reading, say, <i>Taking Care of Youth and the Generations</i> or "To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us".<br /><br />Not that it's easy or even possible to entirely avoid taking something of a moralistic approach (someone smarter than me once said that the moment you introduce any distinction between intensive and extensive characteristics you are making a moral argument), but it feels especially tacked on and unconvincing after the rigor of the arguments Stiegler makes about humanity and technology prior to resorting to his argument for a conservative threshold of individuation. On the other hand, if you take his morality play seriously and see it as the coda of his work, suddenly his reasoned arguments seem like an elaborate rehearsal of the hero's tale, a staging of the titanic forces a thoughtful person (which seems increasingly hard to distinguish in Stiegler's work from a sentimental person) can only hope to resist.Joshuahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15194708771514694492noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-3763571416197212752011-10-21T02:47:07.885-07:002011-10-21T02:47:07.885-07:00Ben, yes I read the Steigler, and would like to kn...Ben, yes I read the Steigler, and would like to know more of your thoughts on it. Although I appreciated its rehabilitation of critique, and its pinpointing of the problem with the 'poststructuralist' tradition, I'm not sure about the seeming contrast between investment/consumption, or the way in which the Simondon seems to shade into Christopher Lasch-style thinking. I guess I'm not familiar enough with the wide Steigler project, but couldn't help thinking there might be better ways to critically grasp capital.<br />On Boltanski I've read the book on Capitalism (with Chiapello), but not got round to this. As I say I think there is a space to rehabilitate/renew critique, and the crisis has sharpened this, it's more how that should be done.Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-40138887605508528642011-10-20T15:45:40.088-07:002011-10-20T15:45:40.088-07:00Interesting.
However I'm not sure the future...Interesting. <br /><br />However I'm not sure the future of critique is quite so bleak. Consider the rehabilitation of critique in Stiegler's recent work e.g. <i>For a New Critique of Political Economy</i> but also the morphing of deconstruction into 'pharmacological critique' in <i>De La Pharmacologie</i>.<br /><br />Also Boltanski's <i>On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation</i> might be relevant here?Benhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10916957174208127452noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-50036264262431936862011-10-18T03:11:32.938-07:002011-10-18T03:11:32.938-07:00Dear Joshua,
Thanks so much for this enlightening ...Dear Joshua,<br />Thanks so much for this enlightening and considered response. This sounds like what I was aiming at. I'm interested in critique as a taking of measure of actualities and defeats, possibilities and blockages, rather than the invocation of 'saving' powers always encrypted or hidden, or the cynical revelling in what is.<br />You've said it better than I can, but I'll certainly think through more what you've so helpfully articulated (I have a cold, so my brain is even more limited than usual!)Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-29706149386008653742011-10-17T17:48:49.733-07:002011-10-17T17:48:49.733-07:00Impressively stated, as always.
Surrounded by peo...Impressively stated, as always.<br /><br />Surrounded by people in media studies arguing for a renewed assurance of the inexhaustible reserve of private experience on one side and the constituents of media theory contending to define ever more untameable frontiers of contingency in networks on the other (both seeking to provide a metaphysical antihistamine to soothe their allergic responses to strategy and reason), I am certainly sympathetic to renewing the labor of critique. I also think the "bad new" seems like the right place to situate this work, so you'll pardon me for wanting to make sure I understand your take on it in my own terms:<br /><br />I think of Kenneth Burke's ideas in Attitudes Toward History, when he speaks of transcendence upwards or downwards and "the empty acquisition of verbal paraphrenalia". The "empty acquisition", of course, is one clear instance of the bad new captured in your address to the victors in the present situation. Transcendence upwards, the endless conversation that gestures toward the eventual grace of God (the form of overcoming which Burke ends up advocating), reflects as well the affirmation of emerging and infinitely complex societies but also the "shrill" appeal to deeply personal and publicly unintelligible perspectives you address. Here, Burke's attempt at mockery comes back to bite him: "Heretics may drive this 'logic' to its extreme conclusion by deducing the theory that such 'spirituality' requires as its corollary the deliberate degradation of the flesh". Transcendence downward, "Debunking", or "the doctrine that a human act is done purely for gravy" seems to speak to the less explicably joyous perspective of the defeated, where actuality is just a digestive embodiment of a proliferating and painful hunger that debases and destroys us in ways more profound than reason may name.<br /><br />In contrast to these perspectives, critique would insist on taking root in the circuit of the demand to unseat established categories of thought while demonstrating a willingness to name and articulate the terms and manner of this transformation. It would manifest a refusal of the sufficiency of the conceptual overmining or undermining of reality or the collapsing of the distinction between the two.<br /><br />Am I close?Joshuahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15194708771514694492noreply@blogger.com