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The Melancholy of Counterfactual Imagining

image thanks to Rebecca Wright

Coffee, Nicotine Gum, and David Graeber

Jean-Luc Godard, Masculin, féminin (1966)

I woke this morning to find an e-mail in my inbox announcing an upcoming lecture at SVA’s Art Criticism Program by David Graeber with the description:

DAVID GRAEBER, On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time

The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all.

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The name sounding more than vaguely familiar and the topic sounding more than vaguely interesting, I put the coffee on popped a nicotine gum and got to work (re)discovering the work of this (sometimes labeled) radical scholar. 

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Lorenz Engell

neo-series 

1 limitation in time

- from Brazilian telenovella informed American inception in the 1990s in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (season 1)

Effects:

explicitly heading towards an end in time

making time an explicit part of the dram

contrast between acceleration and delay

Indefinite number of episodes can be inserted —> time scales can become variable

2 Transformation - 

Exemplified by Twin Peaks’ Character Dale Cooper as an Avatar of Evil

Tranformation of characters and images themselves smooth the transition between the episodes in a series

3 improvisation as transformatiom

Based upon work and conepts by Deleuze, John Fiske, Gunther Anders, Stanley Cavell

Examples: flash Forward, Breaking Bad, CSI, Twin Peaks, 24, Ally MacBeal

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This fella’s (Grant Wythoff @ the English department’s Media and Modernity Program at Princeton) lecture on the history/birth of gadgets/gadgetry and science fiction was inspirational: http://wythoff.net/

At Media Histories: Epistemology Materiality Temporality in NYC

IKKM Weimar/Princeton/Columbia Universities

Just arrived at the auditorium for a panel discussion entitled: The Making and Marking of Time

Its exciting and overwhelming to be back in an English-speaking academic environment. Makes me realize why you have to take the GRE to do graduate work!

A really interdisciplinary conference that combines a lot of my interests: media/medium, contemporary history, cultural studies, antiquity/modernity, and the history of science + history of media