darkmatter

Call for Papers - Special issue of International Journal of Žižek Studies http://zizekstudies.org/

Guest Editors: Ashwani Sharma ash.disorient@gmail.com and Valerie Hill v.hill@coventry.ac.uk

On the 30^th of October 2007 Judith Butler gave the annual British Journal of Sociology lecture at the London School of Economics. It was called, ‘Sexual Politics: the limits of secularism, the time of coalition’.

  The shambolic, illegal occupation of Iraq by Western powers has resulted in countless deaths (murder) of civilians.

The ‘war against terror’ is as much an info-war as it is one involving death and destruction.

Enter Wikipedia into the affray. It’s an amazing resource. While controversy exists over the accuracy of its contents, a more interesting question is how it contests the authority of conventional (expert) knowledge. Moreover, what Wikipedia reveals is the politics of knowledge itself. A significant example is how the contents of a page about Iraqi “resistance” has been edited to “insurgency“.¹

I was about to comment on this US print advert for a new Intel computer chip, when after complaints of racism, Intel have apologized and pulled the offending ad.

This is Intel’s statement on their blog:

Before rehearsing those wonderfully myopic arguments about the internet as a space of unlimited freedoms beyond censorship, it’s worth bearing in mind the corporate nature of social networking sites like Facebook. Though you might not consider the ethics of corporate responsibility to be at the cutting edge of anti-racist politics today, surely it’s essential to take a clear position in these new media culture wars. There’s an email petition here.

The failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow in late June were strange and shocking. They were so spectacularly inept and bodged that one has to question both whether they were intended to cause apocalyptic loss of life and their connections to an international al-Queda ‘plot’. Most shocking however, were the rapid revelations in news coverage that the key suspects were thought to be doctors who had worked for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Within days of the attacks, the British government had called for greater surveillance and regulation of all overseas professionals working in the NHS. A response that played to the renewed moral panic about immigration controls that accompanied the vilification of the doctors in the tabloid media. In the blogosphere, the responses ranged from ‘I told you so’, to ideological critiques of socialised health care, to the stark and fundamental question ‘…does this now make you think twice before you go to the doctors?’

The upcoming Cultural Studies Now conference at the University of East London will be a major event examining the critical productivity of Cultural Studies as a discipline and political project. The conference raises a number of key issues:

‘Cultural Studies, as the paradigmatic interdisciplinary project, has always been defined by its relationships to proximate sets of ideas, practices and institutions. As Cultural Studies has grown and matured, its borders have multiplied. Cultural Studies has affected and been affected by contiguous disciplines, academic and non-academic institutions, political movements and projects, and creative practices of many kinds.

Boxed In is a recent essay by Sonya Dyer under the Manifesto Club banner. It is a rather predictable critique of public funding of black arts and artists. The core of the well-versed argument is that racially targeted state funding only leads to the ghettoisation of black artists. As the essay illustrates, it is not very difficult to give numerous examples of failed ‘diversity’ schemes and projects. Without going through the rather partial examples in the essay it is worth highlighting the real limitations of the argument:

Yet another post about Big Brother (BB) racism, but the last one you’ll ever need to read…

1. Was Emily Parr calling her fellow housemate a ‘nigger’ a racist expression? Yes…and stop asking such dumb questions. Regardless of whether with malicious intent , or just “speaking carelessly” as CH4 inanely put it, the term ‘nigger’ is steeped in a history of symbolic violence. Emily “nigger-is-a-friendly-term” Parr lives in a white fantasy land believing that this word can be inoffensively expressed to fellow contestants.

Something unusual happened yesterday in a city built largely on the artifice of celebrity. Millionaire heiress and ‘Simple Life’ star, Paris Hilton was led screaming from an LA courtroom to an uncertain future and the possibility of actually completing her 45 day jail sentence for driving offences and contempt of court violations. ‘Star’ might be a little excessive to describe Hilton’s invariably hapless efforts on the said TV programme to forego the umbilical comforts of a mobile phone and credit cards for the ’simple’ pleasures of an honest day’s work. What sticks in the mind, though, especially in the light of everything that’s happened since, is the flagrantly staged nature of her encounters with everyday folk and their work and home lives. The knowing smirk behind each frame gently reminds us, in case we’d forgotten, that this is just a game, the latest sitcom to feed off the carrion of ‘reality TV’. And like all games, it only carries on for as long as the players want to play - hence the cut, the commercial break, diverting out-take sequences and the media filtered knowledge of Ms Hilton’s ubiquitous presence on the not so pedestrian global party circuit.

Anxious? Mixed Bipolar Disorder? Varicose Veins, need Botox, difficulty sleeping? Just a sample of the full page ads littering the front, middle and back pages of LA Weekly which incidentally sees itself as more Village Voice than Sunday Sport. Such luminaries as the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Institute of Beverley Hills and the American College of Phelbology (don’t ask!) occupy pole position in the race to capture the reader’s disposable imagination and presumably disposable income. Later, much later, we learn of the sociopathic exploits of ‘Chester the Molester’, a sadistic rapist/serial killer who preyed on vulnerable black women in his South Central neighbourhood and whose crimes went undetected for over a decade.

While it is a relief to us all that the British National Party failed to make significant gains in last Thursday’s local elections in England and Scotland, it’s disturbing to find a growing acceptance of the Party amongst political commentators. Often hedging their discussion with Thatcher’s remarks on the ‘oxygen of publicity’ or misquoting Voltaire on freedom of speech, pundits of all political persuasions have scrabbled to find reasons to condone or excuse the BNP’s successes in 50 local wards, and their presence in over 700.