dates pThink, resignification. Edmonton candidates please reveal yourselves.

cracked tree and other random photos

Seems fairly straightforward, but sometimes a sign is in order. I think that my neighbour object put the sign on the tree.



I didn't do anything for Holloween this year - this picture is from last year. But I thought it is still sort of seasonal... anything but Christmas trees!



One gulp later and the coffee was gone. This is my favourite souvenir from Turkey trip 2006.

I'm not just being a 'polite Canadian' when I say, Escape from suburbia? Yes please!

Anyone seen this one?

Museum construction downtown Edmonton...


Can't wait for Heroin 2010!

Gottcha!

I wouldn't cross this guy.

So, this is what I had to eat before visiting my brother in law in the hospital. By all means, it should not have been eaten. This was the first time I ate at McDonalds in 8 years.


The police officer might have been asleep...

Campus events Nov 16-20, 2009

It's a 'hot' week for academic talks on campus, so I thought I'd post the notables that might be relevant to Yolk readers. If I have missed important others, please suggest them in the comments. (I took the photo on the weekend at my cousin's hockey game in Red Deer - the logic of providing it with the events below I would defend if anyone was to argue that it makes no sense to include a picture of a hockey game alongside an announcement of a series of talks occurring at the University of Alberta, if you see what I mean. I'm not mad, or ironic, or wierd, honest I'm not! Academic talks are exactly like hockey games, almost literally! Trust me!).

In any case, hope to see you fellow bloggers at some of these talks:

1. SIPS (Sociology in Process Series)

November 18, 2009 3:30 PM

Location: 5-15 Tory Building

Robyn Braun --
WE3: Undermining State Power

The comic book WE3 tells the story of three pets – a dog, a cat and a rabbit – nabbed by the US military and forced to serve as cyborg weapons in the top-secret “Weapons Experiment 3.” When WE3 is decommissioned and the animals are slated to die, their keeper leaves their restraints unlocked and the animals escape. I will show how WE3 examines and represents the tenacious power of those who must be left behind for capitalism to function, and those whose existence must be walled off for our ‘humanity’ to flourish.

2. Northern Speakers Series

Anita Dey Nuttall
India's changing perspectives on Antarctica
Date
Wednesday November 18, 2009
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Location
Tory 3-36

3. Space and Culture Research Group

19 November 5:00pm-6:30pm

Presenter: Jason Wallin
Title: I’m Not There: The Cinematic Time-Image, Cultural Curriculum Studies and the Political Arts of an Untimely Subject.

Location: City Region Study Centre
Faculty of Extension – Enterprise Square
2-184, 10230 Jasper Avenue
Edmonton, AB, Canada

4.History & Classics Colloquium

Andrea Graziosi "Stalin's Foreign and Domestic Policies: Dealing with the National Question in an Imperial Context, 1901-1926."

Date
Thursday November 19, 2009
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM

Location
North Campus: Tory Building, Henry Marshall 2-58

5. The Interdisciplinary Critical Theory Group

Imre Szeman will present his paper Cultural Politics of Oil: On 'Lessons of Darkness' and 'Black Sea Files'

The paper is available beforehand. Please contact: catherine.kellogg@ualberta.ca, or nhurley@ualberta.ca if you would like a copy (or to be added to our e-list).

Date
Friday November 20, 2009
2:00 PM

6. 2009 F.M. Salter Lecture on Language

"A Practice of Reading: Propositions From Under Mill Creek Bridge"
by Christine Stewart
This presentation describes a close poetic and archival reading of the site where Edmonton's Mill Creek Bridge, the Mill Creek, and the Mill Creek Ravine meet at 82nd Avenue between 95A Street and 93rd Street. From under the Mill Creek Bridge, Christine reads and documents the various intersections of reaction and interaction--how does the bridge function as both traffic conduit and a sleeping shelter? What are the historical, social, political, economic and ecological significances of the bridge's structure and purpose? And she also takes in the surrounding area--the history of the aboriginal people, the history of the settlement by non-aboriginal people, the railway, contemporary issues of homelessness, land claims, urban ecology, urban development, graffiti, alienation and community, homelessness and shelter, globalization and citizenship, disconnection and connection, disfigurement and beauty.

Date
Friday November 20, 2009
3:30 PM

Location
North Campus: Humanities Centre L-3

CBC News - Edmonton - Canadians tour U.K. to raise oilsands awareness

CBC News - Edmonton - Canadians tour U.K. to raise oilsands awareness

Dedications

From Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes:

Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine - I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly... If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, this book is dedicated to Alain Badiou.

cfp CITIES IN TURMOIL

Online journal Re-public <http://www.re-public.gr/en> invites contributions for a special issue dedicated to “*Cities in Turmoil*“. Cities matter politically, not merely as sites where the political occurs, but as part of the political itself, participating in the reconfiguration of citizenship. This is the space in which local topographies are interconnected are-divided, the container and stage of political conflict, where formal institutions and non-state movements develop agendas, often aimed at releasing and mobilizing affect, such as ridicule, anger, apathy and indifference. Within this context, urban turmoil is at the same time perceived as a threat and as an opportunity and its legacy equally demonised and mythologized.

Inhabitants of Athens are as familiar with the poetics of paralysis as they are accustomed to the violence that often accompanies it; inertia and upheaval seem to take turns as protagonists in the urban life, feeding into the collective imagination. Reactions to paralysis range from voices of confusion to resignation, to protest and anger. Such was the case last December, when residents of Athens, Greeks and immigrants alike, with diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds took to the streets to protest against state violence after the murder of a teenager by a policeman in the centre of Athens.

The conditions and processes that led to the December events, may have brought Athens to the fore, but are not specific to Greece. Indeed, rapid urbanisation across the world has forced new relationships between citizen and state, mediated and articulated by rapidly growing and changing cities. The city acts both as the seat of government and as site of resistance but rapid growth and a changing population reconfigures the very notion of citizenship, challenges what is the public and the private and calls for other modes of participation in its political affairs.

Submissions may deal with the theme from various disciplinary perspectives and may be about (but not restricted to) the following:

- The contestation of urban public space;
- Negotiation between the urban margins and the centre, between the formal and the informal, between local residents with recognised rights and those excluded from the right to the city;
- Politics of apathy and anger in the city: processes of radicalisation and the generation of multiple articulations of violence;
- The inscription of memory, the traces of uprisings on the city.

Essays should be approximately *1,500 – 1,800 words *.

Please submit contributions in any electronic format to guest editors of the special issue Gia Galati and Kostantis Kastrissianakis

e-mail: <> and <>

Deadline for submissions: *Friday, 15 January 2010*

Let Us Think: Reading "First as Tragedy, then as Farce"

Zizek's most recent effort is welcomed by this peripatetic with open arms and eyes glued to the pages as I bump into strangers all over campus. Our dear old Slovenian wordsmith has always had a knack for grabbing and holding the reader's attention, only with this effort, as with his earlier writings, when I stop reading, I can recall and explain the point of what I just read. No, Zizek hasn't stopped theorizing through innumerable examples and rhetorical flourishes that some of us find distracting, albeit entertaining. In First as Tragedy, then as Farce, Zizek uses his familiar methods to discuss and deliver his message in all of the detail and nuance they deserve. This takes considerable effort, and many, many examples to think through. Only, in this work, all of the twists and turns seem to help his cause. Instead of talking continuously so as not to cease existing - a worry he expresses in Astra Taylor's film Zizek! - he seems genuinely impassioned. For someone wandering around the left wing with a vague sense that something needs to be done, having his genius directed toward something he seems to care so much about should prove useful, if not comforting.

For my money, and I'm not finished reading (only 20-ish pages to go!), the value of First as Tragedy for political thinking lies both in the general message that Zizek is laying out, and in the many analyses of our present situation that he offers. I want to comment only on the former at this time. His program is distinctly Communist in character, but not a naive return to a critique of the contradictions of our historical situation - which is not to say that such a critique cannot be performed. Instead, Zizek highlights the imperative to think through the idea of Communism, an idea we must hold onto in the face of a hollowed out Democracy that applies to any and all situations. Communism, as an idea, is itself something we have to make sense of in light of our current historical situation, and not something we apply to the situation in order to make sense of the latter. The failing of the left is that even in a world where the whole political spectrum knows that something is wrong, the left, the alternative, has no clear picture of what to do in place of the status quo. This diagnosis leaves us in a position where we want to act (that is, some of you want to act), but don't know what to do. By default, the liberal hegemony continues. This is why Zizek offers my favorite of his recent injunctions: we need to stop and think. With incredible frequency, Politicians deliver promises that are never fulfilled through action. Granted. But, on the contrary, those politicians also act all too often without thinking. The current financial crisis is the result of something, yet instead of figuring out what and why, the governments of the global powers act - perhaps in response the their jerking knees - by throwing $700 Billion (in the US alone) at the problem, as though this will save the sinking ship. Likewise, activists of all stripes gather in futile efforts that serve their egos and self-images more than any 'cause' which they feign to represent. Perhaps this may be overly cynical, but those activists, those young people, do little more than practice being political, even when they have good intensions. My wager is that this is because they have a confused mix of tired messages and newly born angst, but little if any thought (maybe they are lacking a procedure of truth?) guiding their efforts.

Zizek reminds us that in lieu of a well thought out program of action, and in lieu of an alternative vision of life to the one that "ended history", we ought to slow down, regroup, figure out what it means to be the left, the communists, of today, and then proceed. As a philosopher, this injunction to think is the sweetest music I've heard in a while. I'd like to suggest that we need to think about what kind of event could, and what it would mean for that event to, symbolically 'un-end' history.

Rally of the impossible

There is much to be said about these remarks, but the most striking for me is the relation between knowledge and belief. Working with Inuit, and in spaces in which Inuit are the majority, really raises this issue. I have found that much of the University training that I have received is basically irrelevant to make sense of practices that are not rooted in the field of the city - skills for surviving in the city are very different than living on land as a primary orientation towards the world. Is the city simply 'abstract' and the land 'concrete'? I wouldn't necessarily say so, it is rather quite the opposite: there is something incredibly abstract about living in and on concrete for the majority of one's life in the city...

The 8th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference

Not sure if it is worth mentioning in the middle of a right-wing induced recession that is somehow still getting the right-wing political 'leaders' elected, but is anyone planning on going to Hong Kong for the Crossroads Conference?

LATEST UPDATE

Spotlight Sessions, New Session Topics, Free Cultural Activity & more…

The 8th international Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference will be held in Hong Kong June 17-21 2010. Hosted by Lingnan University, a distinctive liberal arts institution, and organized by its Dept of Cultural Studies and Kwan Fong Cultural Research & Development Programme, this is the first time this important academic gathering to be held in Asia Pacific.  Below is the latest update:
 
．    Spotlight Sessions on Mobile Intimacy, Production Cultures, Cultural Studies & Institution-Building, Affect & Cultural Studies are organized and many more on the way. Please see the session and paper abstracts at: http://www.crossroads2010.org/proposed_accepted_panels_papers.html
 
．    Interesting and innovative sessions calling for your papers: e.g. Cultural Economy of the Quotidian, Migration Policies in Asia, Emotional Citizenship, Human Rights – Media & Power and more. Please see the session abstracts at: http://www.crossroads2010.org/panel_session.html
 
．   World-class keynote speakers, cutting-edge topics, financial assistance scheme, low cost accommodation and many more… Please visit our conference website http://www.crossroads2010.org for details.
 
．   Get to know the indigenous culture of Hong Kong. Free demonstrative Chinese opera performance and more cultural activities to come.
 
．   ONLINE REGISTRATION is READY. Act now to catch the Early Bird Discount and the  Special Student Rate.  Details at http://www.crossroads2010.org/registration_details.html
 
．   SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSALS NOW for acceptance in time for Early Bird Discount.  Please check the submission guidelines at: http://www.crossroads2010.org/panel_and_paper_proposals.html 
 
．   NETWORK with your international peers in Hong Kong!  Please help forward this message to your colleagues and friends.
 
Since its inception in 1996 in Tampere, Finland, the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference has filled a significant gap in the global academic community. It is now a key international conference in cultural studies where scholars from all five continents get together regularly to exchange research outputs, critical viewpoints and scholarly insights. Organized by the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS), this biannual conference has been previously held in Birmingham in UK, Illinois in USA, Istanbul in Turkey and Kingston in Jamaica.
 
Crossroads 2010 Organizing Committee, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Website: http://www.crossroads2010.org               

Email-Enquiry: crossroads2010@LN.edu.hk

public secret

Michael Taussig:

"the secret of the public secret is that there is none" Jackpot! Trembling hands reach out to grasp the negativity.

Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford University Press, 1999)

an open letter to James Moore, March 2009

Here is what the President of CBC did not say in his speech in October. He chose rather to advance a lobby effort for money from US and Canadian cable and satellite companies through the CRTC. In other words, instead of making this a political issue, it becomes one of lobbying private companies. But the fact of the matter is that the CBC has faced vicious cuts from government for well over a decade!

The Canadian Media Guild, which represents 5,500 employees at CBC/Radio-Canada, released this open letter to Heritage Minister James Moore today (March 18):

Dear Mr. Moore:

We were heartened to hear your words of March 17 in support of a national public broadcaster that provides local, regional and national news, drama, arts and public service programming in both official languages across the country.

We point out respectfully that the public broadcaster must respond to a situation not of its own making when it attempts to boost commercial revenue in order to pay for other important programming that can no longer be afforded on the parliamentary appropriation.

That appropriation of around $1.1 billion this year is the same in constant dollars as in 1995. In today’s dollars, the 1995 appropriation would have been more than $1.5 billion. CBC’s per capita public funding is far below what public broadcasters in Europe and Australia receive and means that it can be less distinctive relative to private broadcasters.

The all-party Heritage Committee recommended a year ago that a seven-year memorandum of understanding with CBC/Radio Canada be negotiated. It would outline public expectations and provide for adequate and stable funding, indexed to inflation, throughout the term of the agreement. We also urge you to move forward and make sure to cost out the mandate carefully to ensure that it is adequately funded and able reduce its reliance on commercial revenue.

This new funding structure would permit CBC/Radio-Canada to do the job Canadians expect while providing day-to-day and year-to-year independence from government - a crucial element of public broadcasting. Public pronouncements on the CBC every year at budget time leave the unfortunate impression of potential government interference in what is supposed to be an arm’s-length relationship.

Respectfully,

Lise Lareau
National President
Canadian Media Guild

FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting

The Canadian media situation is certainly worsening. In terms of content at least, the CBC increasingly can hardly be distinguished from the CTV, a marginal right wing network (yet, admittedly, the CBC might still retain more liberal paternalism than the CTV).

The problem is that the CBC has decided, since it has no choice (not much of a 'choice'), to act in the interest of the PM, and not in relation to what people actually want. It is sickening how much the CBC has been effected by the budget cuts of around $60million announced by the MP James Moore in the Winter of 2009. The problem is that CBC could have as much as a $200 million budget shortfall this year.

The worst part is that more cuts are on the way in 2010-11 at a time when advertising revenues have basically collapsed. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting has called me for support in the past, and I'll certainly be donating again. I'd recommend that you support them if you can. It is interesting to note that "The CBC currently gets about $33 from each Canadian taxpayer, compared to $124 to support the public broadcaster in the U.K. and $77 in France".

POLLARA public opinion survey on Canadians' views on the CBC: KEY FINDINGS

May 18, 2009
Briefing Note for FRIENDS' supporters

From Ian Morrison, FRIENDS' Spokesperson

FRIENDS commissioned POLLARA to survey a random sample of 3,361Canadians 18 year of age or older. The results are considered accurate to +/- 1.69% nineteen times out of twenty. The resulting data were weighted by age, gender and region to ensure that the results are representative of the Canadian general public. Full results can be viewed here. This survey was in the field from April 20 to 24, 2009:

* 88% of Canadians believe that as Canada's economic ties with the U.S. increase, it is becoming more important to strengthen Canadian culture and identity. [p. 26]
* 78% tune in to some form of CBC programming. [p. 19]
* 76% rate the CBC's performance in fulfilling its mandate 'good', 'very good' or 'excellent'. [p. 20]
* 83% believe the CBC is important in protecting Canadian identity and culture. [p. 23]
* 81% believe CBC is one of the things that helps distinguish Canada from the U.S. [p. 25]
* 74% would like to see CBC strengthened in their region. [p. 25]
* 63% believe that CBC provides value for taxpayers' money [p. 25]
* 80% believe CBC is best suited to provide Canadian programming on television. [p. 27]
* 51% believe the Harper government has a hidden agenda that favours private corporate broadcasters, 25% disagree and 25% don't know. [p. 31]
* 52% believe the Harper government is under funding the CBC so that it can turn it into a private, commercial broadcaster, 24% disagree and 23% don't know. [p. 31]
* 25% believe that privatizing and commercializing the CBC is the right thing to do, 62% disagree, and 14% don't know. [p. 31]
* 74% believe that annual funding to the CBC should be increased: 54% support the Commons Heritage Committee recommendation that CBC funding should increase to $40 per Canadian, and 20% believe $40 per Canadian is too low. [p. 33]
* "Assume for a moment that your federal MP asked for your advice on an upcoming vote in the House of Commons on what to do about CBC funding. Which of the following three options would you advise him/her to vote for?" Decrease funding? 9%, maintain funding at current levels? 31%, and increase funding? 47%. [p. 43]
* 70% of Canadians believe the CBC should be most responsible for ensuring that Canadian programming continues to be an integral part of the Canadian economy and culture, 18% favour private broadcasters, 9% cable and satellite companies and 3% Internet content providers. [p. 38]
* "In Canada, the Prime Minister appoints the Board of Directors of the CBC. Do you feel that this is the best way to manage CBC or should a non-political process appoint the CBC board?" Prime Minister? 14%, Appointed non-politically? 86%. [p. 40]
* "Unlike at, for example, the BBC, in Canada the Prime Minister also appoints the President of the CBC, currently Hubert Lacroix. Do you feel that the mandate of the CBC is best managed by appointment by the Prime Minister, or at arms length from the political process?" Prime Minister? 13%, President should be appointed non-politically? 87%. [p. 41]
* "Which of the federal political party leaders do you trust most to handle matters of culture and Canadian identity in broadcasting?" Stephen Harper? 27%, Michael Ignatieff? 31%, Jack Layton? 22%, Elizabeth May? 13%, Gilles Duceppe? 7% [p. 46]

To view the POLLARA report, please visit http://www.friends.ca/poll/8288. The numbers in [brackets] above refer to page numbers in the report.

Proper Names: This post reads like a bundle of sticks

Two instances of naming and changes I've recently run across.

fag·got ²

(fāg'ət) n. Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual man.

The screen shot is taken from:
SouthPark -Season 13 Episode 12 - watch here - http://www.allabout-sp.net/?p=season13/1312

Todorov and Torture: "In Torture and the War on Terror, Tzvetan Todorov argues that the use of the terms “war” and “terror” dehumanize the enemy and permit treatment that would otherwise be impermissible. He examines the implications and corrupting impact of the attempt to impose “good” through violence and the attempt to spread democratic values by unethical means. Todorov asks: Can violence overcome violence? Does the need to protect one’s own country justify violating human rights? Invalidating one by one the political and ethical arguments in favor of torture, Todorov likens institutional torture to a cancer that is eroding our society and undermining the very fundamental democratic ideas of justice and right." http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=1954500

review of The Porcelain Workshop

Here is a v. short review I wrote that was published in the September issue of Political Studies Review. I noticed that Magdalena Zolkos, a former UofA student now in Australia, also has a review of a book on Derrida (click here to read all of the political theory reviews .pdf).

The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics. Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e), 2008. 173pp., £11.95, ISBN 9781584 350569

by Antonio Negri.

If the debate over the distinction between modernism and postmodernism has in any sense declined in urgency in the contemporary moment, Antonio Negri (born 1933) makes a compelling case in a set of workshops conducted in France in 2005 for why we should insist on its enduring utility. These ten thought-provoking workshops have been drawn together in this volume and published as The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics. After being denounced as a 'cheat' for 'questioning some socialist categories', Negri cancelled the first workshop, but he continued shortly thereafter with less resistance as the lectures progressed.

Negri's object of analysis in this text is not without its own potential to raise controversy: he attempts nothing less than a history of political theory in the twentieth century and a push to forge a further movement beyond the traditional terms of leftist political thought such as class, sovereignty, ideology and state. He insists that a redefinition of modernist and postmodern (or 'hypermodern') thought is necessary even in the context of the fragile 'porcelain workshop' in which one can easily become an 'elephant in the china shop' while feeling a collective 'shared breath'.

According to Negri, the movement from modernism to postmodernism represents a real crisis for the concept of sovereignty and thus the unity of the nation state. The breakdown of the legitimating categories of political power – such as the state, the people and social class – reveals that a new ontology and way of speaking about politics is necessary. Political thought must come to terms with those aspects of 'alterity' and an 'alternative tradition' that show the ongoing resistance to trends of postmodernity and biopolitics, including those that attempt to reduce life and subjectivity to law.

With a significant theoretical debt to Giorgio Agamben's work on the state of exception, this leads Negri into a long clarification of his Marxist-oriented ontological position that is preoccupied with questions of the production of value and subjectivity. Negri pushes his readers to begin to think again about the consequences of the decline of sovereignty, and to find new conceptions of politics once the unravelling of the nation state – in the author's view – has irreversibly begun. But what it means to go 'beyond' the traditional categories of political thought is not answered in the text. Negri leaves us with an analysis of these transformations without providing any certainties about where we might end up. In other words, we are left once again with a politics without foundation and Negri's unstable concept of multitude.

Barret Weber

No more pessimistic nihilism!!

I'm still interested in researching populism and the problem of so-called nihilism that critical theory promises to hold at bay. This is a conflictual universe. While I was away on fieldwork I read a very interesting argument that addresses the importance of studying 'social reality':

"Critical Theory cannot be a dismissive or pessimistic nihilism; it must engage with and learn from actual individuals and their social practices in order to make itself aware of wider social reality against hegemonic accounts of that reality. Being critical in the era of global capitalism requires, therefore, not taking the shibboleths of this new political-economic order seriously, but always deconstructing such asserative claims through revealing how they deliberately misrepresent social reality for explicitly political ends. The importance of Baudrillard lies in the fact that he both demonstrates the most extreme symptoms of contemporary intellectual malaise and simultaneously provides the cure for that disease. Although many contemporary figures share the later Baudrillard's nihilism, the writing of no other individual represents both critical and pessimistic moments quite so dramatically. It is in this contradiction that the lasting importance of Baudrillard's work resides" (Anthony King "Baudrilard's Nihilism and the End of Theory" Telos, 1998, 106).