[-empyre-] Further on Evil Media Studies

[magnus lawrie]

Hi Jussi,

I've been looking further into Evil Media Studies. One quote from
Fuller and Goffy's essay which struck me as pertinent to the
discussion describes the "...world of captures wherein power
operates...by inciting, seducing, producing and even creating". This
seems to be about the ambiguous interdependencies that exist, where
"...autonomy of code...is not incompatible with the existence of the
strategically marshalled mulititude of agents who bring it into
being". As I have been reading the week's discussion I have been
repeatedly put in mind of Negri & Hardt's Empire. I suppose I am
interested to position this discussion in relation to the ideas in
that book and it's own context (which is why I mention the
self-reduction and operaismo movements - specific aspects of Negri's
own history - which whilst recognizing an opposite, other power, also
refuse to be defined by that power). I have seen that Frederic Jameson
describes this distinction as a difference between a class-for-itself
and a class-of-itself. Evil Media takes the spectacle to be "an
outmoded model" and so I wonder how these approaches I mention, may be
relevant? Another quote, for me invokes a corrupted version of the
social factory, "The social today is more or less a clumsily deigned
open prison...an abominable, stultifying, stupefying faculty for the
routinization of life." Maybe this is what we have inherited? Or
perhaps I am getting too elaborate - I know you refer to Hardt &
Negri's 'swarm intelligence' in 'Digital Contagions' so I am wondering
about the positioning, about the relation.

I found that there is so much food for thought in "Towards an Evil
Media Studies", so much that resonates, but is confounding:
"paradoxical strategies of the object" ... "straddling the distinction
between the work of theory and of practice" ... "process without
subject". As a PhD candidate enaged in practice based research, I
sense that I am operating at this apex, but to talk in this way
perhaps already is to misunderstand the subterfuge and sleight of hand
that is central to Evil Media Studies (which also, by the way, brings
to my mind the strategizing in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone).

Ok, this is somewhat a 'Q&A post', but I hope you will have a chance
to respond still today - I know you have various additional
commitments soon.

Best wishes,

Magnus