"No Church in the Wild: Queer Anarchy and Gaga Feminism."

The PSU Dept. of English Presents: The 2013 Kellogg Awards Ceremony. Featuring one of the world's leading gender and queer theorists, Jack Halberstam. whose talk is entitled, "No Church in the Wild: Queer Anarchy and Gaga Feminism."

In a new book on "The Wild" I turn to anarchist thought to elaborate a queer politics for this particular moment of crisis and renewal. As many thinkers have proposed recently, a turn to anarchy makes sense at this time precisely because people's faith in the state and in a politics of inclusion and assimilation is wearing thin, particularly in leftist circles; and, anti-hegemonic, anti-state and anti-assimilationist positions have been rendered thinkable by Occupy movements and other global expressions of radical dissent. My recent book, Gaga Feminism, in that it both calls for and describes an end to "the normal," or that form of state power that manages people by disciplining them in relation to a fantasised norm, could be called anarchist. And my book on failure, in that it breaks with the all or nothing logics of success driven by capitalism, could be characterized as anarchist critique. In this new project, I seek to make explicit the stakes of a queer investment in anarchy that both reaches back to punk movements from the 1970's for inspiration but also seeks other traditions of anarchy globally. 

Jack Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. The 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. In the book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), Halberstam described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity.  Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled THE WILD on queer anarchy.

In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam wrote about "about finding alternatives to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives."

Halberstam's latest book is Gaga Feminism (2012), is "a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity."

The Country House Revealed as Monument

"The balance of forces between monuments and buildings has shifted. Buildings are to monuments as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely perceived, concrete to stone, and so on. What we are seeing here is a new dialectical process, but one just as vast as its predecessors. How could the contradiction between building and monument be overcome and surpassed? How might that tendency be accelerated which has destroyed monumentality but which could well re-institute it, within the sphere of buildings itself, by restoring the old unity at a higher level? So long as no such dialectical transcendence occurs, we can only expect the stagnation of crude interactions and intermixtures between 'moments' — in short, a continuing spatial chaos. Under this dispensation, buildings and dwelling-places have been dressed up in monumental signs: first their façades, and later their interiors. The homes of the moneyed classes have undergone a superficial socialization' with the introduction of reception areas, bars, nooks and furniture (divans, for instance) which bespeak some kind of erotic life. Pale echoes, in short, of the aristocratic palace or town house. The town, meanwhile, now effectively blown apart, has been 'privatized' — no less superficially — thanks to urban 'decor' and 'design', and the development of fake environments. Instead, then, of a dialectical process with three stages which resolves a contradiction and 'creatively' transcends a conflictual situation, we have a stagnant opposition whose poles at first confront one another 'face to face', then relapse into muddle and confusion"- Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space p223.

Frankenstein for the Now

Neo, the hero of The Matrix is rebuilt following his release from the controlling program

Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus published in 1818 is seen as  a historical and literary divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is today recognized as a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism.

The monster of Frankenstein is an abomination that results from the misguided belief in science. Victor Frankenstein believes that  “The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ” But he is wrong with the monster, his creation murdering a child. Victor hunts down his creation and attempts to destroy it.

In contrast we have the contemporary figure of Neo, the young hacker turned savior in the Matrix trilogy. When Neo is rebuilt it is very suggestive of the unnatural birth of the monster in Frankenstein. In this context the reborn man is released from the illusional world of the computer program that holds all humanity in a 'neo'-platonic grip. At the same time Neo has mastered the illusion; he controls technology because he is as one with it. As a telekinetic child says to Neo in the first Matrix film; "There is no spoon." For Neo there is no technology, only extensions of his own self. For this reason he can control the space around him, but at the same time the space around him must be controlled.

The huge difference between Neo and the monstrosity created by Victor Frankenstein is that Neo is here to save humanity; science and poetry have at last joined. Neo is that union. Avital Ronell in conversation with Werner Herzog said, “One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.” But the digital revolution that has Neo as the Chosen One is the marriage of science and poetry.The monster in Frankenstein is Neo's sibling that was abandoned when science no longer needed poetry and poetry stopped understanding science. This occurred when poetry got obsessed with form. Science lost interest in poetry when it began splitting atoms.

For Neo poetic form and atoms are the same thing. Reality is one great poem, a dance of code that can be read, interpreted and responded to with a Will to Power:

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on"- Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

The lie of the matrix is not the illusion of material reality, it is the will to power, the desire to master the space. While the power of the matrix could be use to liberate minds, it is being used to control space, in a violent and ongoing war, waged with the same technology that provides the awareness of reality -  which is defined by the struggle to control it and so on ad infinitum.

Benjamin's Aura

"As we saw in connection with the Dauthendey portrait, the auratic return of the gaze does not depend upon the photographic subject’s direct look at the camera (or, for that matter, the later injunction against that direct look which voyeuristically solicits the viewer as buyer [see SW, 2:512]). What is more, in the above formulation and elsewhere Benjamin attributes the agency of the auratic gaze to the object being looked at, thereby echoing philosophical speculation from early romanticism through Henri Bergson that the ability to return the gaze is already dormant in, if not constitutive of, the object" - Miriam Bratu Hansen (1949–2011).

The entire essay, Benjamin's Aura can be downloaded from here.

Immanent Knowledge

Reflections on Serial Production and the Reversal of Dialectics

What could potentially unite reversal of dialectics and serial production begins with Benjamin in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

"Dialectical thinking involves moving through contraries without ever letting one term gain precedence over its other—or apparent opposite—as most oppositional thinking tends to do.  In dialectics each term only has significance in relation to its apparent contrary or other.  Benjamin begins by assuming the main tenet of dialectical materialism, which states that the the means of production determine the nature of cultural production, or, more technically, the substructure determines the superstructure.  However, he goes on to show that the superstructure changes much more slowly than the substructure, with the effect that cultural phenomena always lag behind the conditions that produce them.  For this reason, he is observing the conditions of present culture at the point of their earliest development and with an eye for the present state of productive (and reproductive) technologies.  His mode of observation (as he puts it) is designed to draw attention to changes in the conditions of production as a way of intervening in the process.  His theses are, thus, regarded as weapons in the war against fascism."- http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/aura.htm

For a good but light and funny summary of Marx's dialectics, drawing on Hegel, have you seen this:

Serial production can be related to dialectics in the conditions of production. The conditions of production regulate social relations, and for Jean Baudrillard they controlled human communication. Going back to Benjamin you probably know about the Aura and the idea of distance in the object no matter how close, the sanctity of art and the regime of craft over mass production. Benjamin saw the mass production of the communicative experience as a threat to free society, he was of course referencing the rise of fascism in Europe. Nazi propaganda and the domination of the State over mass culture was the birth place of many of his ideas.

Then Baudrillard adapts Benjamin's ideas to suit the age of mass digital communications and the totality of signification we live in today. Reversal of Dialectics (RoD) comes from Adorno, a friend and colleague of Benjamin. I have read Foucault on discourse and some if it reminds me of RoD. The idea that dialectic thought or association creates meaning is something that can be used to understand the importance given to a text, idea, action, statement or group of ideas or beliefs. If we follow the concept of serial production, where uniformity, mass production and consumption, standardization, universal access, and mobility are considered paramount to communication, art and culture, then we can see a whole set of relations imposed upon human beings according to those qualities.

Take the example of folk culture.

"Folk culture refers to a culture traditionally practiced by a small, homogeneous, rural group living in relative isolation from other groups. Historically, handed down through oral tradition, it demonstrates the "old ways" over novelty and relates to a sense of community. Folk culture is quite often imbued with a sense of place. If elements of a folk culture are copied by, or moved to, a foreign locale, they will still carry strong connotations of their original place of creation." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_culture

In serial production is can be said that a sense of place is lost. This can be demonstrated though the use of RoD: by showing the elements present in serial production and how they effect a (lack of) sense of place that result from any representations they attempt to articulate.

Reading Marx's Capital Vol I with David Harvey

This is the first in a series of thirteen lectures with Professor David Harvey,  a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for over 40 years. Read his CV. All of the lectures are online. I am wading though them at the moment. While they are dense, they are very very worthwhile.

Professor Harvey makes an extensive and profound close reading of Capital, enclosing the text is a detailed account of references, arguments, logic and methods  according to a historical analysis. Professor Harvey's reading displays a heavy reliance on New Criticism, which contains little evidence of contemporary examples and adaptations to the post-industrial world of global capitalism and information as a commodity.

The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for both the Penguin Classics and Vintage Books editions of Capital.



Marx as presented by Mark Steele. A nice context to the Labour Theory of Value. Marx seems like a dreamer, a poet who dealt with the hard realities of State power and the ubiquity of capital.

Sylvère Lotringer. Capitalism, Leisure, and Potlatch. 2011

Sylvère Lotringer, literary critic and cultural theorist talking about Jean Baudrillard's "Symbolic Exchange and Death," Throstein Veblen and the leisure class. In this lecture Sylvère Lotringer discusses the concepts of potlatch, sacrifice and exchange through the work of Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Sylvère Lotringer.

Sylvère Lotringer, Ph.D., born in Paris in 1938, is Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School EGS and Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University. He is based in New York and Baja, California. Sylvère Lotringer is a literary critic and cultural theorist, and as general editor of Semiotext(e) and Foreign Agents book series was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States. His interests range from philosophy, literature and art to architecture, anthropology, semiotics, avant-garde movements, structuralism and post-structuralism.

Sylvère Lotringer studied at the Sorbonne and received his doctorate from the École Pratique des Hautes Études VIe section, Paris (1967). As General Editor of Semiotext(e) and of the "Foreign Agents" series, Lotringer was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States. His teaching interests include Dada and surrealism, situationism, Mallarmé, Proust, structuralism and post-structuralism, as well as anthropology, semiotics, philosophy and art in relation to 20th-century literature.

Among the books Sylvère Lotringer has published, he has co-written with Paul Virilio: Pure War (1983), Crepuscular Dawn (2002), and The Accident of Art (2005), and with Jean Baudrillard: Forget Foucault (1986), Oublier Artaud (2005), and The Conspiracy of Art (2005). Sylvère Lotringer has also written extensively on Georges Bataille, Simone Weil, L. F. Céline, Marguerite Duras, and Robert Antelme, and is the author of Antonin Artaud (1990), French Theory in America (2001), Hatred of Capitalism (2002), David Wojnarowicz (2006), and Overexposed (2007). Silvère Lotringer frequently lectures on art and has published catalogue essays for the MOMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Musee du Jeu de Paume, Modern Kunst and has edited numerous magazines and books such as Philosopher-Artist (1986), Foreign Agent: Kunst in den Zeiten der Theorie (1991), and Nancy Spero (1995).

For background reading on this lecture see "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign" By Jean Baudrillard, Charles Levin, which includes The Ideological Genesis of Needs.

Invading Present Time: The Politics of Simulation

Séminaire 2011 : Ken Hollings from erg on Vimeo.

Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control

Liquid Theory TV is a collaboration between Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Peter Woodbridge designed to develop a series of IPTV programmes. (IPTV, in its broadest sense, stands for all those technologies which use computer networks to deliver audio-visual programming.) The idea behind the Liquid Theory TV project is to experiment with IPTVs potential for providing new ways of communicating intellectual ideas, easily and cheaply, both inside and outside of the university. We want to do so not so much in an effort to have an impact outside of the academy, be it economic, social or cultural; nor to connect with an increasingly media-literate audience that books supposedly cannot, or can no longer, reach. Rather we want to experiment with IPTV in order to explore the potential for different effectivities that different forms of communication have - to the extent of perhaps even leading us to conceive of what we do as academics, writers, artists, media theorists and philosophers differently (see Wise, 2006: 241).

The second episode in the series takes as its focus Gilles Deleuzes short essay Postscript on the Societies of Control. While this episode is being made available for the first time in an issue of Culture Machine which has the theme of creative media; and while Liquid Theory TV could be described as a creative project, to the extent it is concerned with producing alternative, rival, or counter-desires to those currently dominant within much of society (at its simplest, a desire for philosophy or more broadly theory, rather than for the creations of Richard Branson, Simon Cowell or Rupert Murdoch, say), this does not mean that either the series, or this particular episode, should be regarded simply as an attempt to perform Deleuzes philosophy. The critical and interpretive aspects of scholarly work remain important to us here, even if they are being undertaken in a medium very different to the traditional academic journal article or book.

Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union

“First as Tragedy, Then As Farce”: Philosopher and Cultural Theorist Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union
Dubbed by the National Review as “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West” and the New York Times as “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory.

In his latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce of the financial meltdown.

He spoke on that same theme at Cooper Union during a recent trip to New York.

Book: Software Studies by Lev Manovich Available Online

Lev Manovich's new book Software Takes Command is available online as a PDF under a Creative Commons License. Here are the details:

Note: In the Spirit of the commons Lev Manovich makes available online his latest book. Release notes from the book’s website follow below.

———-

DOWNLOAD THE BOOK:
format: PDF.

VERSION:
November 20, 2008.
Please note that this version has not been proofread yet, and it is also missing illustrations.
Length: 82,071 Words (including footnotes).

Software Takes Command by Lev Manovich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Please notify me if you want to reprint any parts of the book.

ABOUT THE VERSIONS:
One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents. Like contemporary software and web services, the book can change as often as I like, with new “features” and “big fixes” added periodically. I plan to take advantage of these possibilities. From time to time, I will be adding new material and making changes and corrections to the text.

LATEST VERSION:
Check softwarestudies.com/softbook.html for the latest version of the book.

SUGGESTIONS, CORRECTIONS AND COMMENTS:
send to manovich@ucsd.edu with the word “softbook” in the email header.

Brought to you by Remix Theory

Google + Alleph

Here's a tricky textual situation.
I have gone back to close reading the texts that make up my thesis corpus. I have played/read the texts many times, but this time I am being merciless. Every pixel is being accounted for and it will probably be how I am going to spend my Christmas break. I have been having a major problem with Alleph by Sakab Bashir. Using Google to find the text I have been unable to get passed this Macromedia Flash Update page:



No matter what I did I was getting a continual demand to upgrade my Flash plug-in. I called our Tech dude and he also struggled with it. While he was doing this we were having a chat about the vagaries of the Google browser. After trying several alternatives it emerged what the problem was. Tech Dude noted the URL and it was the Google browser prioritizing the Flash Update page over the actual Splash Page:



So, this all leaves me with the thought that the Google search engine has entered into dialogue with the text, Alleph. The texture of response that is projected by Alleph is infected, so to speak, with the texture of the Google search engine. It has slowed me down a bit today, but I image it would be preventing many from responding to Alleph at all. An interesting example of network texture as related to implied response within a digital work. It is also an example of sloppy authorship, or lack of consideration for evolving connections in the networks of the text.

Free TV and the Monkees

At the moment the Swedish public television station SVT is running an advertising campaign about how it is politically and economically independent and therefore 'Free'. I am not sure it is as simple as that (i.e. the people pay therefore we can say anything), but I agree there is an integrity to the public broadcaster in Sweden that is important. However, I have encountered similar levels of 'Independence' in other state run media services in other countries that while they do not favor individual concerns such as business' they do follow national agendas and conform to concepts of 'common sense'- which leads me to my next topic.



The soundtrack to one of the ads being run by SVT is Circle Sky by the Monkees from 1968. Not only is it a great tune, it comes from one of the most surreal psychedelic films produced in the 1960's. An underground classic that rates with other psychadelic films produced which involved Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Roger Corman; Wild Angels, The Trip, Psych-Out,

Head (1968) begins (without any opening credits) at the dedication of a bridge. After a politician struggles with constant feedback with his microphone as he tries to give a speech, the Monkees suddenly interrupt the ceremony by running through the assembled officials, to the sound of various horns and sirens. The rest of the film is essentially plotless, a seemingly stream of consciousness stringing-together of musical numbers, satire of various film genres, elements of psychedelia, and references to topical issues such as the Vietnam War. Trailers for the film summarized it as a "most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, love story, mystery, drama, musical, documentary satire." Some film critics[citation needed] now consider the film to be an allegorical deconstruction of the Monkees' experiences as pawns of the Hollywood starmaking machine that, like their real-life story itself, contains some sinister truths lurking underneath what appears to be a colorful, entrancing facade. Wikipedia

I watched Head many times as a young student in Australia in the late 1980s (along with Easy Rider and a lot of Al Pacino films), as we had a cheap VHS copy of it someone had bought in some closing down video rental. Thinking about it now it was a cut-up or remix and looking at the imdb it seems to have been constructed as such:

The movie's origin was in Ojai, California, where the foursome [the monkees], Bob Rafelson, and Jack Nicholson spent a weekend in a resort motel verbally tossing story ideas into a tape recorder. This became the script for this film.

The SVT campaign today is getting a lot of attention based on its criticism of other media outlets and their ownership structures. However, Head is a strange source for a state broadcaster to appropriate material from, as it depicts a lifestyle that, shall we say, is not really legal in Sweden today. I wonder if the perceived freedom of the 1960's (and the now wealthy demographic that can remember that time) is the target for Circle Sky, "We were free and we can be free again....with SVT." To get some idea of 'where Im coming from..man' here is the theatrical trailer for Head from 1968:

The Production of Space

Tribute to Henri Lefebvre

I had to return to the undergrad library today The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre. I only managed to read 312 pages of the 430 pages but it was a week overdue and I could not extend the loan as there is a waiting list to borrow it (I will buy it when I get the money and finish it). It was not an easy read, requiring much concentration and I took pages of notes from it, but what a book. I have not been so impressed by a text for a long time. First published in French in 1974, The Production of Space is a tour de force of enormous intellectual proportions. Lefebrve dissects the western evolution of conceptualised and representational space, beginning with Ancient Greece and going up to the point of the alignments leading to our present global capital ascendancy ('globalization'). Architectural space, dramatic space, the fictionalized space of novels, avant garde art, urban planning, the body, and nation states are united under the canopy of critical spatial practice by Lefebvre. His analysis is dialogic and intense. I have gained many insights into my own work on the spatial elements and assumptions present in digital literary texts from The Production of Space. For this I am very appreciative.

Herzog and Posthumanism

Werner Herzog - Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) Klaus Kinski as the doomed Aguirre in the final scene of the film.

In his thoughtful and perceptive intellectual biography of Turing, Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing's predilection was always to deal with the world as if it were a formal puzzle.2 To a remarkable extent, Hodges says, Turing was blind to the distinction between saying and doing. Turing fundamentally did not understand that "questions involving sex, society, politics or secrets would demonstrate how what it was possible for people to say might be limited not by puzzle-solving intelligence but by the restrictions on what might be done" (pp. 423-24). In a fine insight, Hodges suggests that "the discrete state machine, communicating by teleprinter alone, was like an ideal for [Turing's] own life, in which he would be left alone in a room of his own, to deal with the outside world solely by rational argument. It was the embodiment of a perfect J. S. Mill liberal, concentrating upon the free will and free speech of the individual" (p. 425). Turing's later embroilment with the police and court system over the question of his homosexuality played out, in a different key, the assumptions embodied in the Turing test. His conviction and the court-ordered hormone treatments for his homosexuality tragically demonstrated the importance of doing over saying in the coercive order of a homophobic society with the power to enforce its will upon the bodies of its citizens. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles (2005)

More on the Herzog Kinski experience on Soul Vlog.

Women the Periphery and Protest

From June 6-8 in Heiligendamm on the northern coast of Germany the G8 will meet. It is expected 100 000 activists, demonstrators, NGO workers, and revolutionaries will be on site as well. For the past few months "a 7.5 mile long, 2.5-metre (8ft) high steel fence topped with barbed wire, video monitors and sensors to detect movement" has been built around the conference site. The fence materials weigh 500 tonnes. Many of the activists attending the alternative G8 will be women. In fact the role of women in radical political action is often forgotten by our collective media memories or translated into a sensational account of demon women who lack the proper maternal graces (e.g. the removal of Ulrike Meinhof's brain after her suicide to determine her "slide into terror, while Che Guevara becomes a T-shirt icon).
Emilio Quadrelli has written a paper entitled Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics that examines through interviews and media comparisons the structures and discourses at work around the mass uprisings in the Paris peripheries in October-November 2005:

What happened last autumn in the French peripheries was quickly dismissed as an apolitical event of which the dynamics should be sought variously in resurgent community sectarianism, in ethnic-religious-cultural identification, in criminality, or in the senseless and desperate gestures of victims of the social exclusion, urban decay and socio-cultural privation typical of metropolitan peripheries. These versions deprived the events of all political significance. My work in the field during a series of stays in the French capital, one in the midst of the émeutes, would seem to reveal something different

What is revealed in Quadrelli's study is the central role of women in the uprising. The marginal of the marginal it seems, the women of the banlieues have to deal with the sexist objectification that is all around them (especially if they break with community norms) and the economic exploitation that accompanies contract and temping work:

Everybody knows what temp agencies are. They regulate access to the labour market on a temporary basis and on conditions that favour companies. They are also organisations of blackmail and social control by police and unions, because if you’re someone who organises the struggle and the conflict in the workplace or in any case someone who steps out of line, you’re thrown out, and you can be sure it will be very hard for you to get another contract. You end up among the undesirables and you don’t work again. The agencies are the main weapons used by capitalism to make workers harmless. Apart from the agencies there were also quite a few businesses, ones that use illegal or semi-forced labour exclusively, that went up in flames. There are quite a few of these which mostly exploit female labour, through piece-work done on domestic premises. Or, in other not infrequent cases, adapting for work warehouses and basements where women work almost under concentration camp conditions, with no safety, no ventilation, with shifts of never less than 10 hours, under the control of physically violent and arrogant bosses.

These are not hysterical women who have lost touch with themselves. In fact reading Quadrelli's study I am struck by the intelligence and insight displayed by the interview subjects when all we get on TV regarding the banlieues is the disadvantage and hopelessness of the inhabitants. This is result of misinformation at the government level according to Quadrelli:

For various ultimately converging reasons, much of the truth of the origin of the French conflagrations was conveniently hidden at the moment they appeared. It was hidden by the government, which in reality, thanks to the information obtained through the security forces, soon had a substantially realistic picture of the context in which the events were determined, but for obvious reasons preferred not to reveal it.[22] The media were largely unaware of the truth at the time, reduced to reliance on government bulletins.[23] Many intellectuals ignored the truth or interpreted it badly, simply because it was not known to them.[24] In some way they all eventually backed up power’s version of truth.

With the G8 upon us we are again faced with a periphery-center arrangement. A sort of banlieues on a global scale. The fence around the meeting attempts to keep the periphery as the periphery and the center secure to allow for discussion and, presumably, agreement. But exclusion is never a long term political solution. There will be breeches of the barriers and many of those who get through will be women.

Women in protest is the title of a photo series I collected of women taking politically motivated collective action. It was actually not so easy to find images of activist women using Google. I used other search engines (Picsearch and Image View) to fine these.

N. Katherine Hayles on Intermediation

N. Katherine Hayles is the Hillis Professor of Literature and Distinguished Professor in the departments of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this video she delivers the keynote address, Intermediation, to the National Humanities Center's 2006 Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity conference.