The Podium
 

 
Some critical theory, some public discourse, and some general nerdiness.
 
 
   
 
Saturday, July 28, 2012
 
This short film evokes the imagery of the cartoons of the 1980's, specifically the superhero team type of shows. Though entirely fictional, just by imitating gestures and styles it ends up being instantly recognizable yet entirely new.

Thursday, June 07, 2012
 
Both Thorstein Veblen and Peter Kropotkin had an expanded view on evolution that was more than biological development, but also inlcuded cultural development as well. Kropotkin demonstrated that cooperation in social groups allowed people and animals to survive in the conditions of their environment. Veblen theorized that the idea of competition within a group was a fairly recent phenomenon, with people competing when surpluses were created and unevenly distributed. In other words, when societies moved away from subsistence. Veblen agreed with Kropotkin in that cooperation is still possible when an unequal surplus is evenly distirbuted or when new forms of abundance are created.

Wednesday, May 02, 2012
 
When one talks about immanence, one is talking about how there is an internal causality rather than an external causality and that all parts can equally affect every other part. There is no absolute authority over the rest. This also means that when parts come together to form a group, the group is added to the aggregate as another part. None of the parts are completely subsumed under the group identity. There is an assumption that groups overshadow their parts, but in immanence the group is on the same level as all of its parts. There is a universal equality.

Thursday, April 05, 2012
 
The formation of collective groups to achieve things that individuals can not do is at the heart of social organization. The community that results from this collective action allows for a new convergence of aesthetic and ethical experience. This is what occurred in tribal societies and its relationship to reality through ritual, and this has returned in various forms of art production that is always resistant to commodification.

Friday, March 16, 2012
 
David Graeber, in his work on both anthropology and anarchism, has offered a very interesting critique of the idea of Western civilization as the birthplace of democracy. He has demonstrated that the West has been more of a collecting and integration of various ideas from other cultures, and in turn has changed those ideas like that of democracy. In non-Western and premodern cultures there has been numerous cases of direct democracy and using consensus in collective action, but the West has transformed that process into representative democracy that allows the formation of hierarchy. The final result has been that an idea of Western civilization has been used to pacify the truly revolutionary potential of democracy for the sake of a preexisting power structure.

Thursday, March 01, 2012
 
The significant characteristic of the Occupy movement is that it is both a resistance of the status quo and a creation of a new politics and economics in one process. The occupations disrupt the accepted narrative that there is no alternative to the plight we find ourselves in by introducing new voices, and through the General Assemblies there is the formation of new collective action that practices direct democracy as a new model. This is in line with the process described by Gilles Deleuze as deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The direct democracy of the General Assemblies insures that this new disruption is not coopted into the old narrative and made harmless to those in power. The result, the new political and economic models, is immanent to the people who first began their resistance by occupying public spaces.

Friday, February 10, 2012
 
The Occupy movement has grown using a different frame of reference that was considered impossible just before it. This frame of reference is how facts are organized to convey meaning. The Occupy movement has created the frame of income inequality and the reclaiming of public space, expanding on the anti-globalization movement, the Arab Spring, and the new ways people actively create their own content on the Internet rather than be passive consumers.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012
 
The commons has historically been a way to insure a society of freedom and equality through shared resources, community, and the active perpetuation of the commons against repeated enclosures. The model of the commons creates new political and economic models through self-organization and is always in struggle with the containment that occurs with capitalism and the state.

 

 
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