Archive for July 18th, 2009
Words That Shimmer in Ink and Then Evaporate into Pixels
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web on July 18, 2009
At the beginning, let’s do two things: first, we start the circle here in Toronto, with my pal Melissa’s smart, precise post about what physical books do, can have done to them, and do to us; and secondly, we look at each other and remember: it is a circle.
Then we move to Brooklyn where we wonder about the upside of the fetish, the future of publishing and why books will become like vinyl, rare, precious and filled to the brim with aura.
Then we put on our Marxist caps and wonder about the future of the production of books and the networks and economies that sustain them. (Are we yet to seriously contemplate how the mode of production is changing? I think so. More on this later). Also, part 2.
Then we move into the ether to think about – well no, wait, before we think, we languish in the prose, in the aching spaces of what cannot be said, in the fluid of fiction. But once we are done, then we can think again: what does fiction look like when it both is and is not formally altered by the web, when its content is and is not web-ish, its understated, literary style cut through with fragmentation, a flickering screen and casual talk of different ways of fucking?
We end in San Francisco, 30 years from now, to imagine what the world will look like when, like the personalities that create them, books flicker in and out of existence, like time-lapse photography when the film and projector are on fire.
The book that effaces its history, the text that looks like it is made of ink, but then, shimmering, hovering before our eyes, disintegrates, and fades into a faint, diaphanous mist.
Zizek on Democracy and Pandas
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory on July 18, 2009
Other than what friends have told me, I’m not really familiar with Zizek’s academic work. But here’s why I love it when Slavoj writes for the LRB: here, he traces a line from Ahmadinejad to Alan Badiou to Kung Fu Panda to Berlusconi. Yeah, Kung Fu Panda. It sounds ludicrous, but it works. Utlimately, the piece is a very Zizek-like argument about how modern democracies function, particularly in relation to global capitalism.
And he does this cool thing where, in order to explain his perspective, he opens up the double meaning of ‘representation’ in representative democracy. On the one hand, it’s about choosing people to speak for you in your best interests; on the other it’s about the projection, real or false, of the workings of that system into the public mind, so that people keep their faith in it. Those two things – a system of governance and our perception of it - aren’t necessarily the same, particularly at times of crisis. This is where he throws in Badiou, and does a much smarter version of that annoying platitude “it’s the corporations that run things, dude”. Really solid stuff.
Zizek also did something similar in talking about Obama and financial crisis, which all these months on, is still worth your time to read.
(Unrelated, pointless plea: Amazon, can you forget about selling the Kindle in the U.K. and get it up here soon, please? Instapaper’ing stuff like this on my phone works – but only for now.)
