La Santa Cruz

I took a day trip to the Teuchitlán Pyramids...

and found more than I was looking for.


In what is today known as the state of Jalisco, Mexico, in the village of Santa Cruz Xuchitlán (trans. Place of the flowers) the chapel of La Santa Cruz has been standing for almost 300 years. The façade seems to be the heavily ornamented baroque style of the time with floral and plant life crowding the stone relief, but this work breaks with the established baroque canon and is atypical for the era in style and design and founds instead an alternative aesthetic current. The style was later dubbed New World Baroque, however, there was a special element in these particular stone ornaments.
Part of the territory of the Huicholes, who are said to be direct descendants of the Aztecs, lies between the Tequila volcano and the circular pyramids of Teuchitlán. Here there are several early churches to be found with heavily ornamented facades. What was originally conceived to be a “conversion” to Catholicism was in fact subversive acquiescence so that those without power could continue to observe their own beliefs without fear. Consequently, one question I have been asking is: How can we theorize an image that is, and is not there at the same time?

Crossroads 2010

The 8th Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference will be held in Hong Kong during June 17 – 21, 2010. Hosted by Lingnan University and organized by its Department of Cultural Studies and Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme, this is the first Crossroads Conference to be h eld in East Asia.

Started in 1996 in Tampere, Finland, the Crossroads Conferences were to fill what was felt to be a gap in the international cultural studies community. Since then it had become one of the most important international conferences in cultural studies where scholars from all five continents get together to exchange their scholarly insights as well as to get in touch with different cultures. Organized by the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS), Crossroads conference is now held every two years in different parts of the world: Birmingham in UK, Illinois in US, Istanbul in Turkey and Kingston in Jamaica.

United Breaks Guitars

Speeding Subject

Artist Talk with Mary Joyce
Thursday, July 16, 7 pm
‘Pay-What-You-May’ Admission

The first thing that can be said about the Speeding Subject is that it refers primarily to the artist herself. Don’t miss this special opportunity to experience the Speeding Subject first hand, and spend an evening with Mary Joyce as she talks about drawing, painting, speeding and the social function of art.

Still revolution: Suspended in Time

I found a link to this earlier exhibition at MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art)....looks very interesting, revolutionary even, too bad I missed it... I'm certain I'd be late for my own funeral, God-damn-it! Did anyone get a chance to go and see it?

Review here. Random links here, here, here, here (.pdf).

theory's empire and other depressing thoughts

Tripped on this today. Read the entire article here, if you are interested...


Harootunian, Harry. "Theory's Empire: Reflections on a Vocation for Critical Inquiry." Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 396-402.

What I’m suggesting is that the apparent collapse of theory and the distrust of cultural studies was already prefigured by endorsements that sought to place it within the system and make it a part of normal professionalization that had, and would have, no relationship to the world outside of the academy. In this regard, theory was transmuted into a functional prerequisite of professionalization. The functionalism that had once dominated the social sciences had metastasized and spread into the humanities,notably in the field of literary studies. Hence the folding of Empire had as much to do with this historical conjuncture as the “eventfulness” of 9/11. The contemporary conjuncture had already produced a recognition demanding the formation of a new discourse on modernity, one that might limn Foucault’s general sense of an ontology of the present and thus enable us to envisage a genuine history of the present (Marx’s current situation). Such a history of the present would necessitate historicizing the unity of modernity as a “complex set of temporalizations,” according to Peter Osborne, the coevality of unequal moments, coexisting immanently yet “differentiating” global geopolitical space.With Empire, and a good deal of theoretical practice today, theories are simply jumbled like numbered balls bouncing around in a circulating chamber before they are spit out in random but winning combinations in the great game of academic Lotto, while history of the present and past, here and there, is reduced to mere rumor. Brennan has shown howEmpire has become an exemplar for the widespread practice where theories are made to express winning combinations even as they manage to cancel each other out, while history is emptied of its temporal force for the easy identification of spatial fixes.Mypoint is that the apparent retreat of theory occurred long ago when its supposed practice was grafted onto the professional expansion of literary studies and the creation of a new imperium within the boundaries of the academy, the systems the early Bourdieu and his American followers apotheosized, proliferating new subject matters, moving into area studies, seizing new terrains, poaching on 400 Harry Harootunian / Theory’s Empire other disciplines, trope theft—in aword, Empire. By the same measure that the expansion worked to domesticate and housebreak theory, it also snapped its tenuous but necessary relationship to political and social practices that exceeded the gated communities of academia and, by “academicizing” culture, severed symbolic meaning from the political and social worlds to which it must always stand in a tense and asymmetrical relationship. What resulted was the production of significations independent of the historical mediations of other forms of social activity and the social subjects who live them. Theory, thus, as it has played out in cultural studies and served to further professional proficiency in interpreting the world within the borders of the academy, has been removed from any possibility of changing it.

But the professionalization of theory is simply the reverse of a longstanding and persisting conceit, rearticulated during the meeting of the Critical Inquiry editorial board, that theory has no effect outside of academia, nor should it, according to some. Yet this slide into easy and unknowing cynicism seems oddly out of step with the actual conduct of theory in academic disciplines and the history of scholarship which are lasting testimony to its—theory’s—effectivity beyond the gatedcommunity.We know that this claim to solipsism stems from precisely the professionalization of theory during the last decades as a functional requisite empowered to endow its holders with cultural capital and even stardom, so long as its discourse remains safely within the academic compound. But the University of Chicago, the site of the editorial meeting, provided only the most immediately available example of how theory and intellectual work, time and again, have imprinted their presence on the “real” world. Because our moment is dominated by war in Iraq and its uncertain aftermath, one need only trace the theoretical trajectories of policy makers like Paul Wolfowitz and company or right-wing opinion makers like William Kristol back through the genealogy of an attenuated Straussianism of epigoni like Allan Bloom and others. What this vision once advanced, and which current action still echoes, was a distrust and rejection of mass politics, and its alliance with mass culture, a reluctant acceptance of procedural democracy for the excesses of substantive democracy, curbed by the guidance of a gifted elite of latter-day philosopher-kings (invariably male) sitting in major universities. Who, moreover, could ever forget the impact of the “Chicago School of Economics” on the political economy of countries like Chile or the role played by Chicago sociology in the formation of urban social policy? While we will all have our favorite examples of how theory and intellectuals have seeped through the apparently porous boundaries of academia to make their mark on the real world, as Confucius might have said (school loyalty has to count for something) the chants that continue to disavow theory’s broader vocation suggest simply how codes of professional socialization have succeeded in becoming unquestioned common sense.

Alex Jones' Endgame

Oh my, looks like we're doomed! But don't be scared, for you have nothing to fear, this is an endgame...

Zizek on post-politics

Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. New York: Verso, 1999, 198-200.

Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the degeneration of the political, postmodern post-politics, which no longer merely 'represses' the political, trying to contain it and pacify the 'returns of the repressed', but much more effectively 'forecloses' it, so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their 'irrational' excessive character, are no longer simple 'returns of the repressed' but, rather, represent a case of the foreclosed (the Symbolic) which, as we know from Lacan, returns in the Real. In post-politics, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties which compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists, public opinion specialists...) and liberal multiculturalists; via the process of negotiation of interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. Post-politics thus emphasizes the need to leave old ideological divisions behind and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that takes people's concrete needs and demands into account.

The best formula that expresses the paradox of post-politics is perhaps Tony Blair's characterization of New Labour as the 'Radical Centre': in the old days of 'ideological' political division, the qualification 'radical' was reserved either for the extreme Left or the extreme Right. The Centre was, by definition, moderate: measured by the old standards, the term 'Radical Centre' is the same nonsense as 'radical moderation'. What makes New Labour (or Bill Clinton's politics in the USA)'radical' is its radical abandonment of the 'old ideological divides', usually formulated in the guise of a paraphrase of Deng Xiaoping's motto from the 1960s: 'It doesn't matter if a cat is red or white; what matters is that it actually catches mice': in the same vein, advocates of New Labour like to emphasize that one should take good ideas without any prejudice and apply them, whatever their (ideological origins). And what are these 'good ideas'? The answer is, of course, ideas that work. It is here that we encounter the gap that separates a political act proper from the 'administration of social matters' which remains within the framework of existing socio-political relations: the political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within the framework of existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work. To say that good ideas are 'ideas that work' means that one accepts in advance the (global capitalist) constellation that determines what works (If, for example, one spends too much money on education or healthcare, that 'doesn't work', since it infringes too much on the conditions of capitalist profitability). One can also put it in terms of the well-known definition of politics as the 'art of the possible': authentic politics is, rather, the exact opposite, that is, the art of the impossible - it changes the very parameters of what is considered 'possible' in the existing constellation.

When the dimension of the impossible is effectively precluded, the political (the space of litigation in which the excluded can protest the wrong/injustice done to them) foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the Real, in the guise of new forms of racism; this 'postmodern racism' emerges as the ultimate consequence of the post-political suspension of the political, the reduction of the State to a mere police-agent servicing the (constantly established) needs of market forces and multiculturalism tolerant humanitarianism: the 'foreigner' whose status is never properly 'regulated' is the indivisible remainder of the transformation of the democratic poltical struggle in the post-political procedure of negotiation and multiculturalist policing. Instead of the political subject 'working class' demanding its universal rights, we get, on the other hand, the multiplicity of particular social strata or groups, each with its problems (the dwindling need for manual workers, etc) and, on the other, the immigrant, ever more prevented from politicizing his predicament of exclusion.'

Zizek eventually moves on to claim that post-politics prevents what he calls 'metaphoric universalism' or transformation of the political space through the process of foreclosure discussed in the quote above. This foreclosure occurs through the a whole host of expert knowledges about who is to properly administer the social world, usually resulting in outbursts of violence. The claims here are historically based too, building into a discussion of actually existing socialism as opposed to actually existing capitalism in Eastern Europe. In the former case, there is the possibility to demand the impossible, but in the latter the impossible itself is foreclosed. The mantra was: find your own place in the order of the possible.

the wretched

The disaster of the man of colour lies in the fact that he was enslaved.
The disaster and inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.
And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of colour, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.
I, the man of colour, want only this:
That the tool never possesses the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever; that is, of one by another. That it may become possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London [1967] 1970, pp. 164–5.

Israel VS the rights of humans to have rights

Well I could not really come up with an adequate title, but in the light of the unbelievable events that continue to transpire in the Israel/Palestine conflict, admittedly the most publicized conflict in the world right now, I am posting this report. I am still trying to get my head around the debates and presentations from the much demonized conference at York last week. There seemed to be a lot of talk about human rights, including a number of human rights lawyers explaining situations with refugees, diaspora populations and those that are internally displaced. A great deal of tension in the air and certainly some antagonism between Palestinian presenters and some of the Israelis that had flown in and were presenting from Zionist viewpoints. I think the most important thing to note is that this is the first such conference that has taken place in North America ever, and an important piece in a possible dialogue.
Benvenisti, the former mayor of Jerusalem,called himself as a sad Zionist in reference to the militarization and sheer cruel brutality of the current regime, but he also observed that for the first time in a conflict, the occupation is being funded by the very people that are fighting against it (i.e. USA and Britain). Is it any wonder that events such as the one below take place?

[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, 15:30pm] - Today Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.
“This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip,” said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. “President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that’s exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey.”
According to an International Committee of the Red Cross report released yesterday, the Palestinians living in Gaza are “trapped in despair.” Thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed earlier during Israel’s December/January massacre are still without shelter despite pledges of almost $4.5 billion in aid, because Israel refuses to allow cement and other building material into the Gaza Strip. The report also notes that hospitals are struggling to meet the needs of their patients due to Israel’s disruption of medical supplies.
“The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of "Cast Lead”. Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone" said fellow passenger Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.
"We carry medical and reconstruction supplies, and children’s toys. Our passengers include a Nobel peace prize laureate and a former U.S. congressperson. Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters.” Arraf continued, “Israel’s deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release.”

These are the actions of a rogue state, and we need to remember that the tons of depleted uranium left in Gaza are a slow and painful death for all in the vicinity. So much for human rights.

Vancouver Olympics Symposium CFP: Deadline Approaching

Location:	British Columbia, Canada
Call for Papers Date:	2009-07-15 (in 15 days)
Date Submitted:	2009-06-26
Announcement ID:	169337

The Urban Studies program invites scholars and practitioners from all fields to submit paper proposals for a symposium entitled "Global Games and Local Legacies", to be held in Vancouver from October 22-24. The symposium will involve organized panes, moderated discussion, and an open forum for ideas about urban Olympics outcomes research. Key themes include Urban Development/Gentrification, Governance and Policy, Cultural Infrastructure, Olympic Legacy, Olympic Resistance, Global/Local Tensions in the search for sustainability, and comparative lessons for Vancouver and London. Presentations of both completed scholarship and research at the more exploratory stage are welcome, as is graduate student work. Please send a proposal with a title (3-5 keywords), and an abstract of 250 words or fewer, including your full name, position, and contact information by July 15, 2009 to legaces@sfu.ca. Please indicate whether you wish to apply for one of the limited travel grant available for presenters who produce a complete paper. Your submission will be reviewed by SFU faculty and you will be contacted by August 15.

Carolyn Ruhland, Urban Studies Program Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Second Floor, 515 West Hastings st. Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6B 5K3 Email: legacies@sfu.ca Visit the website at http://www.sfu.ca/urban/events/events.htm

You See It All In 3-D

A neat tilt-shift* miniature faking video found on Core77.com, from Paul Johannessen.

*According to the maker's website, he doesn't actually use the tilt-shift technique for the miniature effect, rather replicating the effect through digital means.

Scenes from a rooftop from Paul Johannessen on Vimeo.

'Meet the North' 2009 Fur Fashion Show

I had the chance to attend the Fur Fashion Show at the 'Meet the North' 2009 tradeshow in May in Edmonton. I met some wonderful people there who led me to several potential opportunities. One possibility is to publish some of my work on the north with Up Here: Explore Canada's North. I haven't the foggiest yet what I will write on, but I felt -- and still do -- inspired to do so anyhow.

I'm preparing the scheduling to take a research trip to Iqluit, Nunavut, in September. But, at this point, it all depends on the ethics application (I'm hoping it is approved soon!). I'm currently trying to get my bearings in order in preparation for the trip, and so I thought I'd post some of my images from the Fur Fashion Show. It was a big hit and a pleasure to attend.

Please send comments to barretweber@shaw.ca if you have any questions/ comments or if you were at the tradeshow too. Moreover, please send me an email if you know how to get a-hold of the people in Iqaluit. I'm out of the loop!


The event began with a talk by one of the Ministers of the Nunavut government. He spoke-out strongly against the European Union's proposed ban on sealskin products, which he claimed would have further negatives effects on Nunavut's already suffering seal hunters. According to recent reports here, here, and here, it is. And, alas, we have an article that uses the centre-piece of Badiouian ethics, 'keep going!'


Here we have two young throat singers who made some amazing music!

Where to Mr. Chips?

My father is a retired school teacher. I remember as a child the anxiety he occasionally expressed when dealing with the variety of folks who are interested in education in one way or another. Parents, superintendents, principals, colleagues, curriculum regimes, students, and so on, all make teaching a very tough and heavily scrutinized occupation. This is all in addition to the actual act of teaching students. Those who teach in the U. would not be surprised. So, when I see stories like the following I am always reminded of my father's warnings as a child: 'whatever you do, son, don't become a teacher'. Now, I can hardly claim to be a teacher, but somehow I still think that I just didn't listen.

Goodbye Mr. Chips?

By Jamie Hanlon
Jean Clandinin

June 22, 2009 - Edmonton - Every year hundreds of education graduates step into their first classroom with a fire to share their knowledge and make a difference for youth.

Less than five years later, a significant number of those teachers will have left the profession, likely for good.

Jean Clandinin wants to know what is extinguishing that fire for so many young teachers who leave their careers abruptly. It's a growing global trend that worries her and one that she wants to change. But, the first hurdle is understanding why.

Clandinin, who recently published an article in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, wants to hear firsthand from the teachers why they are leaving. As a narrative inquirer-one who listens to stories to try to understand the world-Clandinin says that administrators, school boards, the government and teacher educators need to understand the real reasons why this shift is occurring, one that cannot be filled out in a survey box.

"They're not hearing the stories that the teachers are telling. Teachers are checking off on checklists or questionnaires, 'yes, I need more money, yes, I need this, I need that,'" she said, "but we're missing how one goes from the passionate story to live by to the story to leave by."

Her current goal is finding teachers whose passion ran aground in order to understand what changed for them or how their career goal changed so dramatically. She is hoping that by speaking with those that come forward, her findings will help others adapt and thrive in their chosen profession.

"I think this is a much more complicated, much more complex problem we're going to have to deal with," she said. "But, we're going to have to include the teachers' stories as part of this, because their stories are really going to help us understand what this landscape is like for them, [and what] caused them to leave."

Clandinin notes that the trend has led some to call it a weeding out of bad teachers or a labeling of teachers as "burnouts," connotations that upset her as they tend to generalize all teachers without an accurate and unbiased view of their situations.

"I think [this phenomenon] makes it look like there's something wrong with that teacher who left, that they burned out because somehow they couldn't cut it," she said. "I think that's devastating for them."

Speaking with these former teachers will clear up the misconceptions around their decision to leave and give partner-stakeholders some clearer direction on how to solve the problem, which, she says, needs to looked at objectively, and not with a tendency to point fingers or assign blame to any one area

"I think that [changing this trend] is work that's going to have to be done collaboratively with teachers associations and with the government," she said. "School districts are staggering from the loss of teachers.

"They can't afford to keep doing that."