What in the hell …

I swear to god these have got to be two of the most straw-(wo)manned figures ever, and they clearly get a lot of people’s backs up which in turn gets my back up. Argh. I’d like to read some sober balanced assessments.

From the I Know Smart People department -

Here and here you can see my smart (and handsome and stylish) friend Harjit giving a talk. Here you can find Paul D’Amato attacking Harjit. This is one of a string of these sorts of articles. You can see a response to the first two of these articles by my comrade Tom Wetzel here and here. D’Amato’s not responded to Tom. Probly won’t.

I just started watching this TV show The Wire. It’s been on for a while now, as usual I’m behind schedule. I’m not proud of it (being an anarchist and all) but I really like cop shows and spy shows. I’ve only watched the first two episodes or so. In this episode there’s a sequence where a homicide detective sits in a court room during a trial for murder. Some of the people involved in the murder sit in the courtroom and intimidate the witnesses. The jury finds for the defense. The judge speaks with the detective and asks to know what happened. This results in a minor scandal among the police hierarchy. It pretty much boils down to injured egos and perhaps fear of real professional and economic consequences due to mistakes and so on. The show seems to suggest a similar circumstance within the drug dealing operation that the police are opposing. What I find interesting in all this is that it implies a relative autonomy of some segments of the state from each other - at a pretty low level really, all within the police force and legal operations of one city. In this relative autonomy there also seems to be different organizational/institutional logics - different groups operate according to different sets of interests (or the same sorts of interests but opposing actual interests), which are not reducible to short-term narrow interests in the way that some people (at least me) tend to think. It reminds me of the passages in Marx where he talks about the need to recoup value advanced and about the relationship between price and value. Over all, at a general and abstract level, these things correspond and so forth, but this stuff fails in/at short term small scale predictions. There’s a Raymond Williams quote on this too, about how much of Marxim is better at diagnosing epochs than at accurately discussing changes and activities within epochs. This is part of why we need categories like gender and race. I think the epochal changes don’t make sense without those categories, for sure, but even more so the smaller scale/scope changes don’t make sense and the details of *how* changes play out make even less sense without those categories. This is over-reaching but as a starting hypothesis I think this point about relative autonomy and different logics and so on etc etc, I think these dynamics are present in most cop show scenarios where there’s a conflict between a lower level and a higher level police officer, where the lower level police officer’s argument is something like “but what I’m doing is in greater service to the law/justice” and so on. (The Wire seems to be setting up this sort of dynamic between a lower level detective and a higher level commanding officer.) The lower level officer follows a different sort of logic or procedure than the higher level one. Ultimately (in what I bet happens in the show) these activities help the state over all - the relative autonomy is part of an over all dynamic (or rather a sectoral dynamic which is itself bound up with yet relatively autonomous from other sectoral dynamics and a larger systemic dynamic.)

So like I said, lots to read. My time just got a fair bit freer but now I’m sick. Fuck. (more…)

More IWW writing, strictly in a personal capacity as usual. As I mentioned a bit ago (this reminds me I need to categorize my posts, instead of having them all filed under miscellanea) I stepped down recently from a role in the international of the IWW. I’ve got a number of thoughts about that. I also want to lay out what it’s been like for me and how I got here. Self-absorbed, I know. (more…)

I’m cleaning my apartment a bit, throwing out old papers and keeping others, sorting books into stacks and so on, in preparation for another (goddamn) move to a new apartment. In the process I ran across this paper by Rodrigo Nunes. He doesn’t differentiate the stuff from the 60s and 70s from the stuff in the 90s and 00s as much as I’d like, but the paper is useful for identifying continuity across that divide. He writes (more…)

This video is good.

This one is even better.

Please view them and share them with friends.

Funding-wise I mean. This was implied in some of my remarks in the discussion on research funding in the comments on this earlier post. I wonder, are there any major differences between substantive arguments and values that add up to something along the lines of “fund the National Endowment for the Arts” and “fund research by academics in the humanities”? I mean with the NEA parallel specifically funding for artists and artistic production, and by the humanities I mean to exclude things like medical advances, faster microchips, cleaner technology, and social stuff like improved counseling practice for trauma survivors, more effective teaching of reading, and so on - stuff with a clear and relatively short term and obvious economic or social welfare impact.

Hmm. A wrinkle… I realize that I’m assuming that there is no difference between some scholarly research and artistic products. I don’t mean to argue here that this is true for *all* scholarly research (though that’s my inclination, or close to it); I think it’s clear that *some* scholarly research is not different from art in important ways. I suppose then I’ve probably answered my own question: for that work in the humanities that is not different in important ways from art then there could be no real and honest important difference in the justification for that work in the humanities. So I have to extend my claim further. Assuming that some work in the humanities is different from art, what (or when?) is different about justification for funding that work and funding artistic production?