This article on what contemporary philosophers believe is mostly boring, but this part is exciting:

There was once a website on which academic philosophers listed the curious things that strangers had said to them upon learning that they were in the presence of a philosopher. The following conversation allegedly took place on an aeroplane:

“May I ask you a question?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a philosophical question. Is that ok?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a boy I fancy. Should I text him or e-mail him?”

In a similar vein, also from the skies:

“What do you do?”
“I’m a philosopher.”
“What are some of your sayings, then?”

Franke: Cascade, 1978

Mark Wilson: Untitled Gray Ground, 1973

Tony Pritchett: Flexipede, 1968

Early computery art!

http://translab.burundi.sk/code/vzx/index.htm

Lady Gaga's Bad Romance video remade in the Sims.

Elizabeth Currid - The Economics of a Good Party

In his Frieze article 'Life Work', writer Jan Verwoert discusses the distinction (or lack of) between life and work in creative fields such as art. Verwoert recalls that Theodor Adorno wrote that 'the freedom of the artist and intellectual, lies in the possibility of not having to separate work from pleasure as all those caught up in the system of division of labour do'*. This is somewhat in contrast with Elizabeth Currid's description of the art world in 'The Economics of a Good Party', most simply because her economic analysis of the art world by nature seems to make it about all of the labour involved in creative practice. That is, the social nature of it makes even socialising work, if we are to 'access the gatekeepers' (390-391). However, this also shows the similarities to Adorno's suggestion that the lack of distinction between life and work brings artists freedom, for pretty much the same reason - the close relationship between the social dynamics and economics for artists blurs the lines between life/work.

Another issue this raises is that if there isn't much of a distinction between life and work, then is there also not really a difference between friends and colleagues. Currid touches on this only briefly (specifically anyway) - that artists at openings 'talk (casually, of course) about their own work and establish personal relationships that may further their career in the future' (391). Verwoert suggests there should have to be some kind of way to recognise the difference because of the potential awkwardness or difficulty 'when everyone around you is professionally friendly'. Currid observes that there is another potential lack of distinction worth looking at - the 'cross-fertilization' amoung art/culture industries - for example, fashion designers' promotion of bands when they choose to play for their fashion shows (391). While this cross-fertilization broadens the context we're looking at, combined with the friend/colleague blur it potentially makes the group of 'gatekeepers' and 'cultural intermediaries' even smaller!


* Off topic here, but Verowert goes on to talk about how Conceptual art originallly was really in spirit of this idea - simple gestures didn't take up too much time, so left you time to hang out with friends or make a living - it was 'part of an experiment with finding ways in art to live a good life'.

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Works cited:
Currid, Elizabeth. "The Economics of a Good Party: Social Mechanisms and the Legitimization of Art/Culture". Journal of Economics and Finance. Vol. 3, no. 2, Fall 2007. pp. 386-394.

Verwoert, Jan. "Life Work". Frieze Magazine. Issue 121, March 2009. pp.120-125.

Lyotard "Answering The Question: What Is Postmodernism?"

I'm going to write about a very small part of Lyotard's "Answering The Question: What Is Postmodernism?". In the beginning, titled 'A Demand', Lyotard is talking about what he is seeing happening - things postmodernism is said to be doing by those Lyotard has been reading, like 'under the name of postmodernism, architects are getting rid of the Bauhaus project, throwing out the baby of experimentation with the bathwater of functionalism.' (71), and that 'some are displeased with Mille Plateaux [by Delueze and Guattari] because they expect, especially when reading a work of philosophy, to be gratified with a little sense.' (71, emphasis added). He has also read 'a young philosopher of language who complains that Continental thinking, under the challenge of speaking machines, has surrendered to the machines the concern for reality, that it has substituted for the referential paradigm that of "adlinguisticity" (one speaks about speech, writes about writing, intertextuality), and who thinks that the time has now come to restore a solid anchorage of language in the referent.' (71-72, emphasis added).

So, I'd like to write about my italicized parts above in relation to some of the criticism directed at Derrida. Both seem like the criticism of his writing from Michael Foucault and Noam Chomsky. I think a great and key word for me to take from this criticism would be obscurantism - the accusation being that Derrida deliberately obscures the argument to prevent criticism of it, with the suspicion that the argument isn't any good (the following from an online bulletin board post by Chomsky)*:

'...what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.'

I guess another key to what I find interesting about this criticism is Chomsky's background/academic work in linguistics but popular writing in politics - what does it mean for someone in that position to be saying this. It seems like a concern in the middle of these? (Chomsky's worry about obscurantism, in context of his political writing, seems quite political to me.) What does having a background in linguistics change about the way we would read things like Derrida - Chomsky is one of those expecting to be gratified with a little sense? are the aims just different (would that mean Chomsky is misunderstanding or not agreeing with the importance of the aim of deconstruction theory?)?


* All discussion on it I've found seems to come back to this, which is maybe not the most trust worthy of sources! But since there are trust worthy sources that reference this, I'd hope it's accurate. But maybe it is an odd '90s Internet rumour!
EDIT: I have figured this out, and the answer is quite boring. Chomsky originally posted on the bulletin board of Z-Magazine, which it turns out was this left wing political magazine and website he often contributed to.

--
Works cited:
Lyotard, Jean-François. "Answering The Question: What Is Postmodernism?", trans. Durand, Regis. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1984. pp.71-82.

Chomsky, Noam. "Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism". Centre for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan. 23 September 2009. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

Thomas Hirschhorn's Hans Ulrich Orbist interview

In Hans Ulrich Obrist's interview with artist Thomas Hirschhorn, Hirschhorn talks about archaeology in relation to how we might consider history and the mass of information (concepts!) we are surrounded by. He suggests archaeology is a useful model as excavation sites are 'never finished, because there are always deeper strata which are not unearthed', too be understood as wholes, they are without hierarchy*, and without answers (394-395).

Probably it's because of my current essay writing, but this reminded me of contemporary philosopher Christine Korsgaard's essay "The Activity of Reason", where she proposes a theory of reason as an activity, part of which involves the use of specific sets of principles (that is, those we regard as rational). She suggests that these principles are what hopefully unify our experience of the world and allow us to reconstruct the mass of perceptions, ideas, desires etc., into our identities (22-28). She likens the usefulness of these ways of conceptualising the world to that of maps, rather than simply true or false - because they don't only answer to the physical world but the person using them and their situation (26-27).

Hirschhorn's affection that archaeology is (ultimately) 'without answers', but (fundamentally) useful, methodology wise, seems similar to this map idea - and indeed archaeology could be this model/set of principles that helps to deal with all the stuff around us (the stuff Hirschhorn likes to remind us of!).


* I'm quite puzzled by this - I don't know anything about archaeology, but it seems like excavation sites could easily be hierarchial (simply because the way we view history could easily be?).

--
Works cited:

Hirschhorn, Thomas. Interview with Hans Ulrich Orbist. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews volume 1. Boutoux, Thomas, ed. Milan: Charta, 2003. pp 393-400.

Korsgaard, Christine. "The Activity of Reason". Presidential Address of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, 2008. Accessed from her personal webpage of unpublished essays. 21 September 2009. www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CMK.Activity.of.Reason.pdf

Zizek stores his clothes in his kitchen!

Appadurai - Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

I am really struggling the Appadurai reading (mostly, understanding and writing about it), though I enjoyed it. So for now I'm going to post incomplete stuff that might end up more complete later but will at least allow me to stop worrying about it for awhile. So:
--

First, here are some other Appadurai things that are helping - this interview, largely about activism/grassroots movements. Also this short article, about capitalism being 'faith based' (this one seems kind of useful in being a more explicit example of a 'financescape', or how an economic system involves (is?) 'the imaginary').

Largely what I wanted to focus on from our text was Appadurai's concept of the imaginary (which he says is developed partly from Benedict Anderson's idea of imagined communities, and partly from the French word/concept 'imaginaire' (31)).

"The image, the imagined, the imaginary - these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleasing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order"

Appadurai gives examples of 'imagined worlds' - ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes (33-36)*. I guess here is where I start struggling most - it is hard for me to think of finance, media, etc. as 'imaginary' in the definition I first think of - they seem real, at least if anything beyond simply physical stuff can be real. But Appadurai's 'imaginary' isn't the imaginary I'm getting stuck on, for at least a couple of reasons. Maybe most helpful is that he is discussing a 'social imaginary' - it is collective, shared, rather than individual (as an imaginary friend is). Somehow I think this adds greater deliberateness to it, and certainly an organised-ness. Another thing is that maybe a return to the related words (in his explanation, even) is helpful - image and imagined. Also, obviously these 'scapes' still have real and inescapable effects - they are 'no longer mere fantasy' or 'mere contemplation'.



*The -scape suffix I find really great, and he says it 'allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes' (33), which is nice.

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Works cited:
Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy". Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. p.27-47.

Appadurai, Arjun. "Welcome to the faith-based economy." 14 Oct. 2008. The Immanent Frame. Accessed 22 July 2009. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/10/14/welcome-to-the-faith-based-economy/

Appadurai, Arjun. "Airoots Interviews Arjun Appadurai (full version)". 21 September 2008. airoots.org. Accessed 9 September 2009. http://www.airoots.org/airoots-interviews-arjun-appadurai-full-version/