Tower of Sleep

Art History PhD @ McGill, freelance art writer, mystical idiot. #postinternet #fullcommunism

so, was or is the internet a tool of freedom or control? does it enable greater self-control or surveillance?…these questions and their assumptions are not only misguided but symptomatic of the increasingly normal paranoid response to and of power. this paranoia stems from the reduction of political problems into technological ones—a reduction that blinds us to the ways in which those very technologies operate and fail to operate. the forms of control the internet enables are not complete, and the freedom we experience stems from these controls; the forms of freedom the internet enables stem from our vulnerabilities, from the fact that we do not entirely control our own actions.

—wendy chun, control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics

(Source: karaj)

The Problem of Sex | Jacobin

thenewobjective:

Without radical change, disquiet finds other outlets. Dystopic visions have replaced Firestone and Rich’s utopian ones.

….
They asked how we had organized ourselves in social and economic relations, what the consequences of these organizations were, and how it might be done differently. The result was not a laundry list of “issues” to be dealt with, but an analysis of a system that deforms everything from work and family to art and science. It’s an analysis that continues to resonate, even as public discourse declares on the one hand that feminism’s goals have been accomplished, and on the other that they were always impossible….
The nuclear family may be a recent construction, she notes, but a biological, patriarchal family is not. But, she asks, so what? We accept many things into our world that have not been there before; we need not accept oppression because of its long history any more than we accept disease. “The ‘natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value.” And yet the biological structures persist. “The problem becomes political, demanding more than a comprehensive historical analysis, when one realizes that, though man is increasingly capable of freeing himself from the biological conditions that created his tyranny over women and children, he has little reason to want to give this tyranny up,” she writes.

Great article, read it in full.

Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.

—

Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

Extremely relevant to the catalog essay I’m working on! Downloaded.

(Source: particlesofthings, via sterwood)

paper-journal:  ‘I think about the contemporary photograph as a picture made with an assisted camera.’- Improvising Eye: An Interview with Lucas Blalock, up on Paper Journal today img167, 2012, 40.75 x 51.25 in, chromogenic print, Lucas Blalock

paper-journal:

 ‘I think about the contemporary photograph as a picture made with an assisted camera.’- Improvising Eye: An Interview with Lucas Blalock, up on Paper Journal today

img167, 2012, 40.75 x 51.25 in, chromogenic print, Lucas Blalock

The “real thing” of women’s writing is not what’s desired, but which desires; which has conatus; which is not pure at all, but is good.

—

sarah nicole prickett, amid all the flurry re: marie calloway/alt lit/etc.

What a heart-stopper this sentence is! Prickett is an incredible critic because she’s not afraid to make real demands on the reader, and to demand writing that makes such demands. Nothing less than an axe for the frozen sea will suffice. This is a sentence that needs and deserves to be unpacked. CONATUS! UGH YES.

(Source: jeanwhy, via snpsnpsnp)

*maniacal laughter*

*maniacal laughter*

This entire box is full of books from MIT Press. Also, my new Domenico Quaranta book came today and it looks super good.

This entire box is full of books from MIT Press. Also, my new Domenico Quaranta book came today and it looks super good.

tanacetum-vulgare said:

I hear what you’re saying, but on a hypothetical level anyways at least one option in terms of how to live in that reality could include finding ways to limit or evade some forms of surveillance. The “there’s no going back” argument seems just as disingenuous to me as moral outrage over something we already suspected and, through our actions, seem to have accepted. All that figure of speech really means is “tough shit, live with it,” and serves as an excuse for not actually taking a good hard look at what the tangible options for dealing with the problem may be. I don’t think that’s what you’re thinking here, but “there’s no going back” is, frankly, a really stupid way of thinking about the issues raised by information technology.

Oh, for sure. I knew that post would get some negative responses. I didn’t mean it to imply that we should just accept massive state surveillance. When I said “The question is just how to live in that reality,” I was totally including “taking a good hard look at what the tangible options for dealing with the problem may be,” including finding ways to evade, block, confuse, or otherwise fuck with that surveillance.

What I think is dumb, however, is any kind of shocked response that says, “How could they! What an outrage! Stop it, you guys!” Like, expecting the government to not already be doing these things — or even to back down on them after being discovered — seems totally naive to me.

So when I saw there’s no going back, I just mean we should always already be assuming that these kinds of surveillance are possibly going on, and we should act accordingly: be careful what you make public, and take precautions if you need to.

The thing is, we all already knew this anyway, right? The bargain we make with social media is that its logging and tracking of us is sufficiently harmless and noninvasive enough that we deem it an acceptable trade-off for the convenience and access it grants us. The fact that a direct link with state surveillance has been confirmed is just the opportunity to consider that bargain openly rather than implicitly. Not that I’m indifferent to surveillance, of course, but I do think moral outrage is a disingenuous response. In much the same way that file-sharing made all music (and lots of other things besides) effectively free, it’s a bit too late to sit around talking about how it can be stopped or limited or whether it’s wrong or offensive. It’s just how it is. The fact is that we live in a world where it is entirely (by which I mean technologically) possible for everyone to be monitored all the time. And once the possibility exists, there’s no going back. The question is just how to live in that reality.

The thing is, we all already knew this anyway, right? The bargain we make with social media is that its logging and tracking of us is sufficiently harmless and noninvasive enough that we deem it an acceptable trade-off for the convenience and access it grants us.

The fact that a direct link with state surveillance has been confirmed is just the opportunity to consider that bargain openly rather than implicitly. Not that I’m indifferent to surveillance, of course, but I do think moral outrage is a disingenuous response.

In much the same way that file-sharing made all music (and lots of other things besides) effectively free, it’s a bit too late to sit around talking about how it can be stopped or limited or whether it’s wrong or offensive. It’s just how it is. The fact is that we live in a world where it is entirely (by which I mean technologically) possible for everyone to be monitored all the time. And once the possibility exists, there’s no going back. The question is just how to live in that reality.

(Source: standardgrey, via doinwork)