In absentia: in construction

I can’t recall the last time I went over 20 days without posting on this site. I have been neglectful. This blog seems to me now a bit like a funeral pyre wasted down to a few glowing embers. I feel as though I almost let something important slip quietly into the background of an otherwise eventful life.

I have certainly been busy. My absence from blogging coincides with a few major projects, some personal, some more professional, but all satisfyingly important and complex.

Professionally I have been traveling meeting with mid-level municipal managers engaging in what the technocratic in-crowd like to call “capacity mapping” with the intent of seeking out possibilities for linking local and regional public health initiatives. My role so far is primarily as a liaison between “stakeholders”, field experts and officials while laying down schedules and procedures for communication and project management teams. The overarching goal is to design and develop more affective assemblages of community health between individuals, groups, ecosystems, institutions, governments and non-human materials.

A few key questions we have been asking are: what constitutes healthy and fair public health ecologies? What associations, practices, discourses and/or technological initiatives need to be advanced in order to more positively affect the health of the wider social field? And what can be done or augmented (on various levels) to shift particular public health regimes towards facilitating or nurturing human and non-human flourishing? These interests have always been at the core of my professional AND theoretical work. And the actual duties entailed keep me very busy.

Outside of all that, I have begun a major retrofit (eco-fit) and renovation of a home I just recently purchased and moved into. Anyone who has done home renovations and construction will know what I am talking about when I say that this project alone requires much of my non-salaried waking hours. Although not at all inclined to the skills required to deconstruct and reconstruct a human domicile, I have eagerly taken up the opportunity to learn more about the intricacies of the electrical, plumbing, venting and structural composition of a (post)modern house.

Both projects, fortuitously, can be brought into focus using a few terms I will be posting much more about in the future: infrastructure and praxis. Also, both projects have, interestingly, brought me back to reading Heidegger.

I’ll talk more about that soon enough, but for now I want to let readers know that blog activity will begin to increase again very soon as I will be posting several thoughts on the relationship between building, coping, ecology, space, place and human knowledge.  It is time to fan those flames.

Welcome To The Machine

This video requires no further commentary. Watch, learn and dig deep:

Bernie Sanders on Corporate Tax Avoidance

U.S Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) calling out corporate tax avoiders:

Last year, the U.S Supreme Court made a disastrous ruling which effectively ended American democracy. Under the guise of the U.S First Amendment, which protects ‘free speech’, the Citizens United decision allows billionaires, powerful companies and their executives to put unlimited sums of money into campaigns without even having to be identified. What it essentially says is corporations and billionaires can sit in a room and decide who is going to become the president of the United States, a U.S. senator, a congressperson, or governor. That corporations get to choose who our "leaders" are explains why they don't pay taxes. Can this system still be called democracy? Somehow I doubt it.

[ h/t Xenophrenia ]

Check Out Related Crazy-Making Stories:

• Plundering Continues Unchecked
• Big Business Getting Richer
• The Story of Citizens United v. FEC
• Class Wars Rage On
• Goldman Sachs Earns 250m as Punishment for Fraud
• Capitalism: A Denial Story
• Wall Street's Top 10 Lies of 2010
• Shock, Awe and the Psychology of Economic Warfare
• Harvey on the Crisis of Capitalism
• The Money Masters

Here Be Dragon

"In a mindless age every insight takes on the character
of a lethal weapon." – Marshall McLuhan

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Disney, Dali and Destino

In 1946 Walt Disney and Salvador Dali began collaborating on a short film they believed would redefine the way animation was understood. The film was called Destino. Deemed too disturbing for general audiences the film was never released. The Disney Corporation eventually released a slightly altered version of the film in 2003. Watch it in its entirety below:

Intersubjectivity and Mirror Neurons

Below Marco Iacoboni, M.D., Ph.D., discusses recent research on mirror neurons and intersubjectivity which suggests how embodied encounters between self and other become shared existential meanings which lead to deep intimate relationships. Iacoboni goes on to detail the dynamics involved in the co-arising of human awareness from the simultaneous functioning of nervous systems, environments and intersubjective experience.

[ h/t Integral Options Café ]

The Power of Ruins

Fukushima nuclear complex

Nuclear power plants are an uncanny presence in the ecosystem of Being.

From The Smart Set:

The Power of Ruins

By Morgan Meis

"Will it make a beautiful ruin?" That was the question Basil Spence asked about the nuclear power station he was designing in Trawsfynydd, Wales. This was back in the 1960s, but it was forward looking. Spence, an architect (he designed the famous Coventry Cathedral in England), was aware of one simple fact: Nuclear power plants are functional for a relatively short period of time before they are put out of commission and replaced by newer, safer designs and technology. The abandoned plant is filled with radioactivity that makes it unusable for anything for a long time. A cathedral is designed with the idea that it should stand, and function, for a very long time — perhaps beyond time. A nuclear power plant is designed with the knowledge that it must become a ruin, and rather quickly. It is born to die, and then to sit as a corpse, a testimony to the strange and unsettling function it once had.

Read More: Here

Kunkel on David Harvey and Financial Crisis

From the London Review of Books:

How Much Is Too Much?

By Benjamin Kunkel

Excerpt: To date, a revived Keynesianism has formed a left boundary of economic debate in the press at large. Only specialised socialist journals have undertaken to diagnose capitalism’s latest distemper in explicitly or implicitly Marxian terms. As for books on the crisis, until recently the jostling crowd of titles included no Marxist study, the exception to this rule, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s Great Financial Crisis, having been bolted together out of editorials from one of those socialist journals, the American Monthly Review. Not until now, with David Harvey’s Enigma of Capital, have we had a book-length example of Marxian crisis theory addressed to the current situation.

Few writers could be better qualified than Harvey to test the continuing validity of a Marxian approach to crisis, a situation he helpfully defines – dictionaries of economics tend to lack any entry for the word – as ‘surplus capital and surplus labour existing side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together’. (This is at once reminiscent of Keynes’s ‘underemployment equilibrium’ and of the news in the daily papers: in the US, corporations are sitting on almost two trillion dollars in cash while unemployment hovers just below 10 per cent.) Harvey, who was born in Kent, is the author of the monumental Limits to Capital – a thoroughgoing critique, synthesis and extension of the several varieties of crisis theory underwritten by Marx’s thought – and has been teaching courses on Marx, mainly in the US, for nearly four decades. His lectures on Volume I of Capital, available online, have become part of the self-education of many young leftists, and now supply the framework for his useful Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’. (I sat in on his lectures at the City University of New York in the fall of 2007; a good Marxist, Harvey made no effort to find out whether any of us – too many for the available chairs – had registered and paid for the class.)

Since the publication of The Limits to Capital in the second year of the Reagan administration and at the dawn of what has come to be known as the financialisation of the world economy, the dual movement of Harvey’s career has been to return time and again to Marx as a teacher, and to extend his own ideas into new and more empirical territory. The most substantial of his recent books, Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003), described the city’s forcible modernisation by Baron Haussmann as a solution to structural crisis – ‘The problem in 1851 was to absorb the surpluses of capital and labour power’ – and situated this urban transformation within the renovation of Parisian humanity it induced. Harvey’s other post-millennial volumes, The New Imperialism (also 2003), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) and now The Enigma of Capital, amount to a trilogy of self-popularisation and historical illustration, taking current events as a proving ground for what Harvey has called, referring to The Limits to Capital, ‘a reasonably good approximation to a general theory of capital accumulation in space and time’.

Read More: Here

Affect Technologies?

From PhyOrg: 

'emotional machine'

by Claire Stringer

Computers may soon understand people better than their spouses do, courtesy of innovations from startup Affectiva that expand on groundbreaking sensing research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Affectiva co-founder and MIT professor Rosalind Picard showed off the fledgling firm's feelings-sensing applications at a Web 2.0 Expo that ended Thursday in San Francisco. "Feelings are complicated," she said. "Now, we can begin to measure them and learn."

Affectiva technology enables computers powering websites to scan web camera imagery for facial expressions, eye movements, and gestures that provide clues to emotional reactions to anything from film scenes, to game action or ads.

"It is getting past wishful thinking and wondering to understanding what is really going on, and that makes it much more actionable," Picard told AFP.

Read More: Here