We need some DJ to juggle Greg Nice vs Barack Obama going "ah oui oui" vs. "ah wee wee". Barack says it at 0:52, Greg Nice says it at 0:49.
10.30.2009
10.29.2009
Comm 842 Seminar in Performance and Cultural Studies: Surveillance, Simulation, Spectacle
In this course we will be studying surveillance, simulation, and spectacle as modalities of performance. While Foucault defined disciplinary society in opposition to Debord's society of the spectacle: "Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance," and Baudrillard famously told us to "forget Foucault," how might we think these as three distinct but intertwined elements of a performance assemblage? If we are, as Deleuze suggests, in a "society of control," then what can we make of how we are differently positioned as (not) performers: in surveillance, where we are cast as the coerced performer, in a society of the spectacle where are positioned as the entranced audience, and in the culture of simulation where there is only the second order of reality of the theatrical occasion? In addition to the core texts by Baudrillard, Debord, and Foucault, we will look at a broad range of sites where these technologies operate as fundamental elements of daily life, as well as how performance as a mode of "rupture" provides a possibility of thinking their destabilization as operations of power.
Required Readings to Include:
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
Hartman, Scenes of Subject: Slavery and Self-making in 19th Century America
Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
Ngai, Made In China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International (selections)
Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (selections)
Duncombe, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy
Tony Perucci, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In this course we will be studying surveillance, simulation, and spectacle as modalities of performance. While Foucault defined disciplinary society in opposition to Debord's society of the spectacle: "Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance," and Baudrillard famously told us to "forget Foucault," how might we think these as three distinct but intertwined elements of a performance assemblage? If we are, as Deleuze suggests, in a "society of control," then what can we make of how we are differently positioned as (not) performers: in surveillance, where we are cast as the coerced performer, in a society of the spectacle where are positioned as the entranced audience, and in the culture of simulation where there is only the second order of reality of the theatrical occasion? In addition to the core texts by Baudrillard, Debord, and Foucault, we will look at a broad range of sites where these technologies operate as fundamental elements of daily life, as well as how performance as a mode of "rupture" provides a possibility of thinking their destabilization as operations of power.
Required Readings to Include:
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
Hartman, Scenes of Subject: Slavery and Self-making in 19th Century America
Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
Ngai, Made In China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International (selections)
Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (selections)
Duncombe, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy
Tony Perucci, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
10.25.2009
NC State Fair
that mark is from where the shotgun casing flew out of the gun chamber at the turkey shoot.
10.20.2009
10.19.2009
10.17.2009
Basquiat
"The charmed life is about finding feelings where you thought they didn't exist, and religions among the godless. The charmed life is about reflecting on the meaning of 'french sevens'."
10.15.2009
10.13.2009
10.12.2009
10.07.2009
WS 240 Critical Genealogies: US Studies After American Exceptionalism
Spring 2010
Professor Robyn Wiegman
M 10:05 am- 12:35 pm
In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to redefine "American Studies" in global perspective, leading many scholars to focus not on the mythic over-reach of "America" but on the undertheorized nation-state form figured as the "United States." Much of this work has set itself against Cold War exceptionalist paradigms, repositioning the place of US Studies in relation to both area and identity knowledges on one hand and comparative nationalisms on the other. This course will focus its attention on the challenge of forging an internationalized approach to the US an object of study through four points of intervention. The first concerns resituating the history of the formation of the US outside national narratives of self-becoming. One important way to do this is to consider European colonial contestations over "New World" lands, resources, and people as the eviscerated global history in which the US as a specific entity emerged. The second intervention arises in the comparative reframing of nation-state formation, such that we interrogate the strange ways in which the study of the US in the US university has come to be posed against, even opposite to the "international." The third entails analyzing the various emergent paradigms that seek to turn the study of the US outside of itself, including the post-national, transnational, trans-Atlantic, diasporic, bordered, hemispheric, international, and global. And the fourth requires returning to the "origins" of American Studies in the U.S. university to consider the condition of post-nationality as, paradoxically, the precondition from which "American American Studies" was organized. Throughout the course we will specify what is now called "American American Studies" by paying attention to scholarly discourses and critical projects that arise in studies of the US from around the world.
Spring 2010
Professor Robyn Wiegman
M 10:05 am- 12:35 pm
In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to redefine "American Studies" in global perspective, leading many scholars to focus not on the mythic over-reach of "America" but on the undertheorized nation-state form figured as the "United States." Much of this work has set itself against Cold War exceptionalist paradigms, repositioning the place of US Studies in relation to both area and identity knowledges on one hand and comparative nationalisms on the other. This course will focus its attention on the challenge of forging an internationalized approach to the US an object of study through four points of intervention. The first concerns resituating the history of the formation of the US outside national narratives of self-becoming. One important way to do this is to consider European colonial contestations over "New World" lands, resources, and people as the eviscerated global history in which the US as a specific entity emerged. The second intervention arises in the comparative reframing of nation-state formation, such that we interrogate the strange ways in which the study of the US in the US university has come to be posed against, even opposite to the "international." The third entails analyzing the various emergent paradigms that seek to turn the study of the US outside of itself, including the post-national, transnational, trans-Atlantic, diasporic, bordered, hemispheric, international, and global. And the fourth requires returning to the "origins" of American Studies in the U.S. university to consider the condition of post-nationality as, paradoxically, the precondition from which "American American Studies" was organized. Throughout the course we will specify what is now called "American American Studies" by paying attention to scholarly discourses and critical projects that arise in studies of the US from around the world.
The Center for Global Studies and the Humanities presents:
De-colonial Aesthesis: A Workshop
The Thesaurus Dictionary offers these definitions of Aesthesis:
aesthesis - an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation; "a sensation of touch"esthesis - sensation, sense datum, sense experience, sense impressionperception - the process of perceiving
limen, threshold - the smallest detectable sensation
masking - the blocking of one sensation resulting from the presence of another sensation; "he studied auditory masking by pure tones"
visual sensation, vision - the perceptual experience of seeing; "the runners emerged from the trees into his clear vision"; "he had a visual sensation of intense light"
odour, olfactory perception, olfactory sensation, smell, odor - the sensation that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular chemicals in gaseous form; "she loved the smell of roses"
gustatory perception, gustatory sensation, taste, taste perception, taste sensation - the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat convey information about the chemical composition of a soluble stimulus; "the candy left him with a bad taste"; "the melon had a delicious taste"
auditory sensation, sound - the subjective sensation of hearing something; "he strained to hear the faint sounds"
synaesthesia, synesthesia - a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated
Since the eighteenth century, in Europe, the meaning of the word became associated with “the sensation of the beautiful” and with artistic labor. Art and sensation of the beautiful became synonymous.
From the perspective of the colonies, both concepts and practices were on the one hand alien and on the other hand were instruments for the management of subjectivity (e.g., coloniality of being). These “feelings” never died and today they are erupting in both artistic expressions and in art/literary criticism and history.
(Light dinner will be served)
De-colonial Aesthesis: A Workshop
The Thesaurus Dictionary offers these definitions of Aesthesis:
aesthesis - an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation; "a sensation of touch"esthesis - sensation, sense datum, sense experience, sense impressionperception - the process of perceiving
limen, threshold - the smallest detectable sensation
masking - the blocking of one sensation resulting from the presence of another sensation; "he studied auditory masking by pure tones"
visual sensation, vision - the perceptual experience of seeing; "the runners emerged from the trees into his clear vision"; "he had a visual sensation of intense light"
odour, olfactory perception, olfactory sensation, smell, odor - the sensation that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular chemicals in gaseous form; "she loved the smell of roses"
gustatory perception, gustatory sensation, taste, taste perception, taste sensation - the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat convey information about the chemical composition of a soluble stimulus; "the candy left him with a bad taste"; "the melon had a delicious taste"
auditory sensation, sound - the subjective sensation of hearing something; "he strained to hear the faint sounds"
synaesthesia, synesthesia - a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated
Since the eighteenth century, in Europe, the meaning of the word became associated with “the sensation of the beautiful” and with artistic labor. Art and sensation of the beautiful became synonymous.
From the perspective of the colonies, both concepts and practices were on the one hand alien and on the other hand were instruments for the management of subjectivity (e.g., coloniality of being). These “feelings” never died and today they are erupting in both artistic expressions and in art/literary criticism and history.
(Light dinner will be served)
9.25.2009
Ideas for Free
Mad Men parody where the copywriters are writing the headers and content for spam messages.
9.24.2009
9.23.2009
Oil Can -- "Waves and Spurts"
My other job is at a big box bookstore selling DVDs and CDs. Starting about a year ago, I noticed a behavioral characteristic of the shoppers. We would have slow to mediocre sales, and then a shopper would come in and drop $150-200. Very few people bought two or three CDs. It was like one, or six. Partly, this behavior can be attributed to the substitution of hard copy CDs and DVDs for internet streams, torrents, youtube videos, etc. But partly, I would attribute this to the economy. Save austerely, and then treat yourself, like an Alaskan survivalist making his/her twice-yearly trip into Anchorage. ___ has said that it is decreasing inventory due to decreased sales. Last night, for instance, I had all of five transactions, and sent the last two Dizzy Gillespie solo albums we had in stock back to the warehouse. When you fully deplete an artist's catalogue at ____, you have to remove the cardstock label that sits behind the CDs. That was emotionally difficult in the case of Dizzy.
I was on a plane last weekend, speaking with a Duke University Investment Officer in charge of monitoring and selecting vehicles for their endowment. He thought after last November, we were headed for a total market crash. And this guy had studied with Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman at Princeton. So he said that he took lightly the phrase, "green shoots", and thought that the government greasing up the money supply with low interest rates doesn't solve the question of where an economy can grow when 70% of that economy is based on domestic consumption and most of those consumers are heavily indebted.
So what is the lesson here? Companies suspended orders last December, "wait and see". Then, simply to go back to baseline demand without drawing down their inventory too heavily, companies made orders in the Spring. Chinese companies drew down their inventory/glut over the Spring/Summer, and now are hiring again. But does this foretell growth, or stagnation?
I was on a plane last weekend, speaking with a Duke University Investment Officer in charge of monitoring and selecting vehicles for their endowment. He thought after last November, we were headed for a total market crash. And this guy had studied with Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman at Princeton. So he said that he took lightly the phrase, "green shoots", and thought that the government greasing up the money supply with low interest rates doesn't solve the question of where an economy can grow when 70% of that economy is based on domestic consumption and most of those consumers are heavily indebted.
So what is the lesson here? Companies suspended orders last December, "wait and see". Then, simply to go back to baseline demand without drawing down their inventory too heavily, companies made orders in the Spring. Chinese companies drew down their inventory/glut over the Spring/Summer, and now are hiring again. But does this foretell growth, or stagnation?
9.22.2009
9.21.2009
Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 7
Pete Campbell: You ever been hunting, Peggy?
Peggy Olsen: No, I don’t think so.
Pete Campbell: You either have or you haven’t. I went a couple of times. With my uncle. New Hampshire.
Peggy Olsen: I saw my cousin shoot a rabbit by Coney Island.
Pete Campbell: It’s an incredible sensation. You have to be very quiet. Take it down with the first shot or you scare it away. Then sometimes you have to go up and finish it off. Then you tie it to the bumper and go home. But do you know what I’ve always wanted to do? I would pick it up, throw its back legs over my shoulder, and I would drag it through the snow to this little cabin. And there, I’d hang it up between a couple of trees, cut it open, and drain it, dress it. Then I’d take my big hunting knife and I’d cut this loin right out the side. And I’d go into the cabin and there’d be this woman waiting for me. Standing by one of those old stoves with a big black pipe. And I’d hand it to her and she’d put it in a cast iron skillet and then I’d sit at the table. And she’d bring it to me. And I’d wipe my knife on my knee. And then I would eat it. While she watches.
Peggy Olsen: That would be wonderful.
Peggy Olsen: No, I don’t think so.
Pete Campbell: You either have or you haven’t. I went a couple of times. With my uncle. New Hampshire.
Peggy Olsen: I saw my cousin shoot a rabbit by Coney Island.
Pete Campbell: It’s an incredible sensation. You have to be very quiet. Take it down with the first shot or you scare it away. Then sometimes you have to go up and finish it off. Then you tie it to the bumper and go home. But do you know what I’ve always wanted to do? I would pick it up, throw its back legs over my shoulder, and I would drag it through the snow to this little cabin. And there, I’d hang it up between a couple of trees, cut it open, and drain it, dress it. Then I’d take my big hunting knife and I’d cut this loin right out the side. And I’d go into the cabin and there’d be this woman waiting for me. Standing by one of those old stoves with a big black pipe. And I’d hand it to her and she’d put it in a cast iron skillet and then I’d sit at the table. And she’d bring it to me. And I’d wipe my knife on my knee. And then I would eat it. While she watches.
Peggy Olsen: That would be wonderful.
9.20.2009
Jung on Self-Analysis
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Terminator (1984)
REESE
(slow, but intense)
Listen. Understand. That
Terminator is out there. It
can't be reasoned with, it can't
be bargained with...it doesn't
feel pity of remorse or fear...
and it absolutely will not stop.
Ever. Until you are dead.
Sarah slump in utter resignation.
SARAH
(quietly)
Can you stop it?
Reese doesn't look at her.
REESE
Maybe. With these weapons...
I don't know.
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