New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Patricia Pisters on Malabou, plasticity, and the neuro-image

Patricia Pisters is Professor of Media and Film studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she is chair of the department of Media Studies. She is also a member of the steering committee of NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies). Her research and teaching focuses on film-philosophical questions in conjunction with neuroscience and on political implications of contemporary transnational screen culture. Her new book, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Filmphilosophy of Digital Screen Culture is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

She recently spoke about how her work intersects Catherine Malabou's What Should We Do With Our Brain. Here's the Intro to the talk by Pisters; full text here.

Catherine Malabou’s work makes a strong and important intervention in (re)connecting the materiality of physics and the immateriality of metaphysics through the concept of plasticity. In the first part of my response I would like to sketch a trajectory of this concept – as it is a “plastic” concept in itself. In doing this I hope to do justice to the radical moves which Malabou’s investigations entail, even if I will only be able to look at the developments of the concept in big steps. The implications of this radical turn might be even bigger than Malabou herself suggests, but that is something for the discussion. In the second part of my response I would like to look at a concrete example of what I call a “neuro-image,” contemporary cinema’s response to, resonance with and reflections on neurological and digital plasticity.

When American bigots attack cartoons

Naif Al-Mutawa: The continuing saga of The99, superheroes inspired by Islam from TED Blog on Vimeo.

This is business not personal...

This thought occurred to me in reading this line from Diane Jeske's recent review: "Murray Smith's "Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?" has stirred in me a desire to watch the television series The Sopranos, which I have until now avoided due to my dislike of mafia films/TV shows." (I have long admired Jeske, who is the editor of an edited volume Philosophy Through Film, from a distance, by the way.) What happens if you ignore the mob on the screen? It means, of course, no Don Corleone; no On the Waterfront; no Angels with Dirty Faces; no Eliott Ness, etc (For a fuller list see here.) To put the matter succinctly: one fails to learn how America understands itself.

Alice MacLachlan on Canadian TV

Very cool philosopher (despite being a Red Sox fan), Alice MacLachlan, on Canadian TV talking about gratitude.

A cartoonist's observations about Muslims and the Media

"The media don't only reflect reality; they create reality. And by focusing their energy on demonizing Muslims, we are missing an opportunity to positively influence the next generation. After all, if you tell children they're stupid enough times, they start to believe they're stupid. And if you tell them they're terrorists enough times, they start to believe they're terrorists. We live in an age when children are learning the alphabet from Rihanna's "S&M" and French from Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night." Surely Muslim protagonists need not be anathema to American entertainment. Portrayals of Muslim doctors and teachers and parents, Muslim heroes and superheroes, and just ordinary Muslims may well help save a generation." More here.

Discussing David Hume on the BBC

Helen Beebee, Peter Millican, and James Harris.

CC#9: tracking the action-image

The following clip from Chaplin's 1921 short film, "The Idle Class," one of his Mutual Series films, is for me both a clear example of the action-image as Deleuze discusses this in his Cinema books and it points to an important claim Mark Wilson makes in his book Wandering Significance.

 

David Hume Commemorated on the BBC (in context of Hume Society in Edinburgh)

 . It's nicely done and pretty amusing (with great short interviews with the President of the Hume Society, Elizabeth Radcliffe, and with Susan Manning as well as James Harris, who is working on an biography of Hume; Harris foregrounds the continuing relevance of Hume the economist.)

The Gay Girl in Damascus is a hoax

As pointed out by reader Seth Edenbaum here, it has now been confirmed that the 'Gay Girl in Damascus' blog is a hoax. The author, Tom MacMaster, has now published an apology on the blog, which is a pitiful attempt at recovering some dignity:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone -- I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

Best,
Tom MacMaster,
Istanbul, Turkey
July 12, 2011

The sole author of all posts on this blog

This is disappointing in so many respects, and even the knowledge that there isn't somebody called Amina in prison after all doesn't attenuate things much. I am not yet entirely sure what the repercussions may be, but for one thing I can imagine that authoritarian governments will now have the 'hoax' card to play against blogs reporting on abuse and attacks on freedom. The credibility of bloggers doing the important work of bringing out to the world the appalling conditions of so many people living under dictatorial regimes is severely affected. The credibility of serious organizations which got involved, such as Avaaz, is also affected. For now, the hoax just strikes me as utterly irresponsible. Shame on you, Tom MacMaster.

Brian Massumi on media, affect, disaster, and alter-politics

An excellent essay on difficult and important topics. Excerpts: 

.... The images of the disaster will be held indefinitely in store. For as long as there is an internet, they will remain available for recirculation. It is not so much that the horror is replaced by human warmth and its accompaniments. It is rather that it "decays" in the media. The horror transmutes into a different affective element, its intensity halved, then halved again, eventually reducing to trace levels. Globally, the event settles back into a more stable range of the periodic table of collective emotion.

What is the half-life of disaster in today's global media? At most two weeks. The suffering on the ground continues, and will continue for decades. World attention quickly shifts elsewhere....

Natural disaster and terrorism define the poles of disaster. In between stretches a continuum of disaster, a plenum of frightful events of infinite variety, at every scale, coming one after the other in an endless series. The media plays its role of affective conversion with a regularity that is as predictable as each event in the series, taken separately, is shockingly unforeseen....

First the affective strike of the event is instantaneously transmitted, cutting a shocked-and-awed hole of horror into the fabric of the everyday. The ability to make sense of events is suspended in a momentary hiatus of humanly unbearable, unspeakable horror. Then comes the zoom-in to the human detail. Stories get human traction. The horror is alloyed, its impact archived. Another event has been affectively conveyed with irruptive, interruptive force, only to subside into the background of everyday life. What remains is a continuous, low-level fear....

Three points stand out:

1) Collective response does, of course, go on. But it takes the privileged form of a growing state security apparatus....

2) The periodic heartwarming return to the personal level and human scale obscures the reality that there is, in fact, a strange complicity at work between the human-caused and the naturally occurring....

3) The actual dynamics of the disaster-prone interlinking of the complex systems just described involves a third complex system: the global economy. As the crisis of 2008 illustrated once again, capitalism itself is a far-from-equilibrium system eminently capable of generating its own endemic disasters. The financialisation of the capitalist economy has taken it to a level of complexity defying logic or description – not to mention regulation. It is as if capitalism has extruded its own, dedicated threat environment, in the form of abstract financial instruments operating on the edge of chaos, permanently under the pall of the spectre of debt crisis....

The only way out is to militate for an alternate interlinkage: between global anticapitalist political contestation and a renascent environmental movement with opposition to nuclear power at its heart. A political ecology up to the task would embrace the human-nature hybridity, in all its complexity, but toward a new alliance designed to step outside the vicious circle. Also required is a realisation that the affective turn in the functioning of political legitimation that has come with the media saturation of global culture is likely irreversible. An ecological alter-politics must also be an alter-politics of affect.

Read the whole thing here. As always, skip the comments.

Enforcing gender stereotypes in childhood and adolescence

Jon Cogburn posted a great quote on novels that can change "a bookish fourteen-year old's life", in particular in that one of them "often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world". There were some nice comments in the thread, but nobody picked up on the obvious gender dimension of the whole thing (I must have become a real feminist by now, I see 'gender dimensions' everywhere!). (I'm not going to get involved in the Rand debate though, I know too little about the whole thing to say anything sensible.)

Rather than elaborating on it, let me go with the idea that 'a picture is worth a thousand words' and post word clouds made with the most common words in toy adverts, split by gender. The source is this blog post, and this has been circulating all over the internet -- it is impressive stuff. Still, maybe some of the readers of this blog are not in the habit of reading feminist blogs, so here it is again; I'm sure I don't need to tell you which one is which...

Hollywood and the War Machine

They filmed part of Battle: Los Angeles in Baton Rouge (thanks to the ridiculous tax breaks the Louisiana establishment gives the film industry the state loses money and gains only low-paying jobs). Roger Ebert disposes of its aesthetic merits in his lede: 

"Battle: Los Angeles" is noisy, violent, ugly and stupid. Its manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of its makers, who don't even try to make it more than senseless chaos.

But what's more interesting is the Hollywood / Pentagon connection. And that on two levels, before we even get into the Military-Nintendo Complex.

There's the overt propaganda level of relentlessly portraying the US military as the good guys, something examined in the documentaries linked above. There we have consciously registered images, plus whatever conscious emotions you might be in touch with.

But the other on the political physiology level. I'm speculating that the assault on the endocrine system by the fast cuts, loud explosions, and chaotic editing Ebert complains about on the aesthetic level also produce a sort of numbing effect after a while. Associating this numbing (pleasurable after the everyday tension of life in neoliberal insecurity) with the US military leads one to associate them with being saviors at a deeper level than consciously registered images, as in the traditional propaganda movie.

If readers can point me to studies of the subpersonal neuro-endocrine effects of these kinds of movies, I'd be very grateful for the leads. 

UPDATE: M 14 March 9:37 am CDT: Andrew Culp reminds me of the work of James Der Derian in this respect. 

Sean Kelly on the Colbert report

Sean Kelly about Jesus (on the Colbert Report) sounds as if he has been studying Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise (including its emphasis on John)!

Some resources on US media consolidation and media reform efforts

In light of the NBC - Comcast merger and the subsequent ending of Keith Olbermann's show on MSNBC, here are a few resources on media consolidation in the USA: 

• The FreePress.net interactive chart of the Big Six media firms: GE (though soon to replaced by Comcast after the purchase of NBC) / Disney / News Corp (Fox) / TimeWarner / Viacom / CBS.
• StopBigMedia.com, the activism site of FreePress.net.
• The Media Reform Research Center website, with lots of links to media reform groups.
• Columns by Nate Silver and by John Nicols and Robert McChesney on the NBC - Comcast merger. 
• The Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) blog. 
• Brian Leiter implicitly links the Glenn Beck attacks on Frances Fox Piven to the issue of academic freedom. AaronBa at Daily Kos excerpts a CUNY faculty union resolution in support of Piven.

Hiatus for 'The Stone'

I've just noticed that 'The Stone', the philosophy section of the 'Opinionator' blog of the NYT, will go on a break. With his usual (and to my mind quite irritating) verve, Simon Critchley announces that there will not be any new 'The Stone' entries for the time being; he says the section will be back, but he does not say when.

As I noted in a previous blog post of mine, the section has been severely criticized, for example over at Leiter's blog (he truly dislikes Critchley to start with). There have been indeed some terrible pieces, but there have been some very good ones too; to mention but a few, the Priest piece I commented on, but also the one by Andy Clark, the one by Tyler Burge (with which I thoroughly disagree, but it is surely interesting), the one by Frans de Waal, the one by Martha Nussbaum, and a few others. So overall, I think it was a valuable attempt, even if it could have been much better perhaps.

More generally, the most interesting thing about this enterprise has been the massive amount of responses it generated in the form of comments left by readers. The number of comments invariably went beyond three digits, and sometimes even four (predictably, with Peter Singer's piece). Apparently, the idea was that of 'putting philosophy back in the public arena', a goal which has, at least to some extent, apparently been attained. In fact, it's great to see philosophy attracting so much attention from readers.

The Searchers

Last night I watched, via the magic of Netflix streaming video, John Ford's The Searchers (imdb listing here).  A few scattered comments to follow, but first this caveat: I'm not that adept at visual analysis, but I hope those who are can help with the discussion.

1. It's visually spectacular. Ford shot dozens of movies in Monument Valley, and the contrast between the almost overwhelming saturated colors in this Technicolor film and the spooky black and white landscape of Ford's Stagecoach is really remarkable. (See, that's what I mean about my limits: "really remarkable" doesn't say what's remarkable about the contrast! So help! What's remarkable about it?)

2. I didn't read any criticism on the film prior to viewing it, but I'm glad to say that the compositions that most caught my eye in viewing it are widely held to be classics: a). the Comanche band along the top of the ridge paralleling the Texas Rangers; b). the captive Debbie running down the sand dune in the background while Ethan and Martin, engaged in argument, ignore her presence, even though she is the target of their quest; c). Ethan holding Debbie aloft like the little girl she once was; d). the final shot of Ethan in the doorway.