k-punk

Correspondence corner

Well, I'm back, but debilitated by illness, so I'll let readers take over for a while....

Chris Baylis writes:

'I was on the London underground last week visiting a friend (slices of bacon swinging from meat-hooks), surrounded by people with dead straight eyes gently nodding heads and drug white iPod wires stuck in there ears, when all of a sudden out of the I saw an advert rush by depicting a sheep wearing an iPod with the word "iSheep" on it. 'Thats strange' I thought, some kind of subvertising group advertising on the underground?

Today I visited the website [name of website]. At first I was enthralled (Yeah stick it to those iPod zombies etc) only to immediately realise that the website is a little to to well designed. Adbusters.com for instance is quite amauterish with a slow server speed. This website however has pretty graphics and slick animation. Upon reading some of its faux anti-corporate propaganda I clicked on the last window option in the list entitled "The Alternative" written in graphics that drip like fresh spray paint. I shall quote:

"So here it is the [name of product]"

You should do a post about this with lots of neologisms, quotes from Delueze and things like "This is hyperstitional coopted conformity semiotic dialectics presented as the new consensual hyper reality reflexive impotant schizogenic cybernesis. The mediaspheres alien brain parasite entity internodal affect with parareality."

Lol...

An American correspondent who would like to remain anonymous writes:

Speaking of managerial solutions and ideology, my boss subjects me to that nonsense every day. I do security at the school library. A knife fight at the front door is not a problem, but someone opening the doors to the garden IS a problem. Another one: there is a patron who insults me every shift and is trying to instigate me to hit him. Instead of banning this asshole they offer me courses in how to deal with difficult customers and maintain "inner calm". Try yoga? Haha.

And Josef K from Different Maps forwards me news of a 'Hauntology month' at the Horse Hospital. The connections with hauntology seem a bit tenuous in many cases (well, the Horse Hospital was one of the principal inspirations for some of the invective in Pomophobia), but some of the events look like they might be worth checking out.

Dejan Nikolic writes:

there's something you don't seem to understand and I, as a cultural parodist, simply must explain: it is not only Minghella who shifted the dynamic from class to sexuality - it is Zizek, too. If you read his review of Talented Ripley you will see that the observations he makes never touch upon the issue of class, focusing instead on a critique of the film's representation of Ripley's sexual identity etc. And Minghella's adaptation is repulsive precisely because it wants us to share Ripley's admiration of the rich and persists in making us feel guilty about the death of characters like Gwyneth Partlow. Zizek speaks from the position of a (Slovenian) neo-liberal and social-democrat. He always wanted to be with the rich capitalists, and he speaks the same doublespeak that he later deconstructs in his lectures. And this ''Marxist circle of Christians'' that he seems to be building sounds like something straight from Hell!

lol again, but it seems to me that Zizek's review of the film took its cue from Minghella. The problem with most of Zizek's discussions of Highsmith, actually, (cf his London Review of Books piece on the Highsmith biography) is that they end up being about the film adaptations rather than about Highsmith's own texts. As is increasingly the case with Zizek's texts (but in contrast with the admirable focus of the current lecture series at Birkbeck), there are a few tantalising references to specific novels before he is off again, recounting old jokes or making remarks about films. Still, if he managed to produce a sustained account of Highsmith, there would be no need for I.T. and me to do one...

Meanwhile: reports on the Thursday Zizek lecture from Different Maps and Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy: I missed it, I'm afraid, in order to endure the gruesome yet soporific spectacle of Badiou being pushed through the Continental Philosophy boredom and gravity-machine at Middlesex.

Posted by mark at June 5, 2006 11:05 AM | TrackBack