[-empyre-] Further on Evil Media Studies

Mon Jul 18 06:42:31 EST 2011

speaking of evil media studies, here is a little insight into the global
media corporation also known as Fox News

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/17/995522/-Comments-from-Inside-News-Corp
-- 
Nicholas Roberts
US 510-684-8264
http://Permaculture.TV
http://permaculture.coop

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 9:18 AM, Parikka J. <J.Parikka at soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi Magnus
>
> while waiting already for the new openings to discussions by Saul Albert
> and Julian Oliver, just a quick response - sorry to have been so slow now,
> due to work chaos...
>
> you raise good questions, and I have to say that I don't know; the project
> by Fuller and Goffey is interesting, and comes from a different direction
> than Hardt and Negri whose writings have been poor in terms of its
> specificity concerning media and digital culture. Hence, I find such
> approaches as Evil Media Studies closer to practice and not only as a way to
> attach to "bad objects" in media culture, but as a methodology to address
> the subrepresentational and the grey. Hence, what they are after is a new
> form of understanding of power and pragmatics - to quote  Fuller and Goffey
> " which is capable of recognising the collapsing of the technical into the
> cultural, social and ecological, whilst at the same time being explicitly
> cognisant of the opportunities for power that such a situation presents."
> Here, we need to move beyond mere two-phase way of understanding cpaitalism
> as a parasitical force that taps into the creative, lively, inventive forces
> of the multitude, and go to
>  really microlevel operations of both invention as well as that greyness:
>
> F and G again: "Alongside these, the approach works extensively with much
> of contemporary grey media such as expert systems, workflow, databases,
> human-computer interaction and the sub-media world of leaks, networks and
> permissions structures that establish what eventually appears as
> conventional media. These systems are now far more widespread and
> functionally significant than those which are most often apparent as media.
> The relative invisibility, or naturalization through ostensively neutral
> technicity, and their fusing of the cultures of the workplace with those of
> consumption and policing offers numerous opportunities for interesting
> uses."
> -
> http://www.spc.org/fuller/texts/on-the-usefulness-of-anxiety-two-evil-media-stratagems/
>
> But in any way, I think you raise difficult questions and would need to
> think more of those connections. My use of Hardt and Negri's ideas
> concerning "swarms" for instance was in the mode of mapping the various
> translations of such biological, entomological terms (both in Digital
> Contagions and now in Insect Media).
>
> So ok, if we think of the various ways in which "social" is not only the
> object of what is being tapped into in terms of contemporary social media
> capitalism, but actually what is being produced - the specific standardized,
> quite a-social in a way form of social of so many social media platforms -
> the key question is: what different kinds of the social is being produced by
> such seemingly "bad" practices as piracy. Here, the social, practices and
> such are not only an object to which capitalism taps into, but productions -
> produced relations. This would take us to be point aobut power as inciting,
> seducing, producing...
>
> sorry for the fragmented thoughts - but thanks to everyone for good ideas
> and nice discussions!
> J
> ______
> Dr Jussi Parikka
> Reader in Media & Design
> Winchester School of Art
> University of Southampton, UK
> Http://jussiparikka.net
>
> Adjunct Professor of Digital Culture Theory, University of Turku
> Visiting Fellow at Institute of Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin
> - Spring and Summer 2011
> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [
> empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of magnus lawrie [
> magnus at ditch.org.uk]
> Sent: 15 July 2011 10:23
> To: empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] Further on Evil Media Studies
>
> 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
>
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