Theory of the Avant-Garde, Author: Peter Burger

yang daqing

yang daqing Communications Under the Seas: The Evolving Cable Network and Its Implications.

Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945

006 Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet and Political Participation in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

夏尔·贝特兰(Charles Bettelheim ) （～）,法国马克思主义经济学家。

http://www.leftlibrary.com/bettelheim.htm

new media, old media: a history and theory reader

edited by Wendy Chun & Thomas Keenan            New York, London: Routledge 2006

Introduction: Did somebody say new media? (chun)

p5 Treating knowledge-power as a grid, Foucault's archeology explores the ties between elements of knowledge and power.... Archaeology examines the enunciative functions of the "already said" and its relationship to the general archive, where the archive is "the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events"....

Following Foucault, to pose the question of archaeology of multi-media or multi-media as archive is to question the relationship between multi-media and knowledge, multi-media and power.


the conflation of information and knowledge
information as commodity /power

马克思主义生态学

J.B.Foster.TheVulnerablePlanet[J].MonthlyReviewP ,1999.J.B.Foster,EcologyagainstCapitalismlJ].MonthlyReview .2002. 

以詹姆 斯·奥康纳为核心的一些生态学马克思主义者指出,福斯特 对当今以资本主义制度为主要基础的经济活动所引发的生态 帝 国主义 的问题并没有做出全面的概括 和分析 ,如对资本主 义制度生产条件的破坏问题 重视 和分 析得不够 。他的物质变 换 理 论 作 为 一 个 社 会 理 论 而 言 ,发 展 得 较 完 善 ,但 它 并 没 有 充 分揭露资本主义剥削人 、自然 、社会的所有 现象背后 的本质 。 另外 ,尽 管福斯特 的研究偏重于思想史研究 和理论 的建构 ,但

他只给出了一个经验性 的原则——社会正义运动和环境正义 运动应联合起来。奥康纳阵营中的艾伦·鲁帝对福斯特的“反 思与批判”做了两点批评 :首先 ,‘福 斯特用物质变换概念简化 了资本主义社会对 自然的剥削,忽略了对一般公共生产条件 的关注 ,并且无法探究资本主义农业中不断强化 的复杂性和 不匀称性”;其次 ,‘福 斯特 简化 了对生态 的理解”。这种简化 必然会导致以下两 种结果 :一是看不到马克思那里有丰富的 生态思想 ;二是把生态思想等 同于对物质变换 的分析 。鲁帝 还批评了福斯特对 生态帝 国主义产生根源的错误 的分析 ,认 为福斯特用培根主义的原子化的 自然观来处理 自然和社会现 象 ,对生态帝 国主义 的批判是不彻底 的。

王行坤：《马克思与生态学》

 

Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (Jon Mckenzie) )

p97 While cultural researchers theorize the efficacy of performance in terms of social justice, and organizational experts scan the efficiency of performance in terms of bureaucratic economy, we can say that engineers and technicians measure the effectiveness of performances in terms of executability, the technical "carrying-out" of prescribed tasks, successful or not.

three examples where cultural performance has been deployed as a model by organizational theorists:
1) peter b. Vaill      Managing as a performing art (1989)
2)Iain Mangham and Michael A. Overington
           Organizations as Theater (1987)
3) John Kao    Jamming: the Art and discipline of business creativity   1996


(this is want Ngai calls the convergence of cultural performance and organizational performance,
)
(This new method of management and organization was a response to Tylorism)

P61  In the 1920s the Soviet Union utilized Tayloristic principles as part of its massive, crash program to industrialize its fledgling modern economy. Taylor's task-oriented approach even influenced the biomechanics techniques developed by theater director Vsevold Meyerhold, who, as Joseph Roach writes, "sought to humanize Taylorism by introducing an aesthetic element into the performance of efficient movement."

Taylor  The Principles of Scientific Management

Taylorism involved "the substitution of a science for the individual judgment of the workman."


p62 In polemical terms, Taylor set forth Scientific Management as the solution to the increasing tensions between labor and top management, tensions that he argued arose from the inadequacies of the established approach to organizing work.
whereas the old approach operated by self-selection, rules of thumb, and encouraged a variety of methods, Scientific Management demanded scientific selection, rational formulae, and the determination of "the one best method." Informal knowledge and knowhow that had been handed down verbally from worker to woke must give way to formal knowledge and methods involving meticulous time and motion studies, record keeping, and planning. Old tasks must be broken apart into their component motions, each motion studied and made more efficient, and then the motions reassembled into new and more efficient tasks.


Performance Management; 1) displace the rational control of workers by empowering them to improve efficiency using their own intuition, creativity and diversity 2) counter the monolithic, "machine" model of bureaucracy described by Max Weber and instituted by Taylor, Ford and resituates performance within larger organizational and socioeconomic environments. 3) industrializing economy vs information economy hardwired to computer and communications technologies.

a model that contributed to the formation performance management is systems theory  pp69-70
1) Hanna   designing organizations for High Performance
rigid, static "machine" organization vs system theoriests defines organizations as flexible, dynamic "organisms"
2)  the calculation of inputs and outputs through feedback  ---- a model for evaluating performative efficiency
Robert C. Fried    Performance in American Bureaucracy  (1976)

our aesthetic categories: Zany, cute and interesting

Sianne Ngai

"Interesting" not only descriptive, but also to relay, to connect, to relate.
"Interesting" based on feeling, but undistinguished judgment. A way to delay judgment, but also keep the temporality of incompleteness and the "ongoing"ness.
"interesting" with the technology of production shifts towards typicality, bordering upon fascinating and boring, generic and different.


"Zany"
Zany always represented as a zany character who is continuously looking for a job.
The zany character who is capable of doing everything contradictorily reveals the anxiety of not being able to accomplish everything.
Zany as performance and the performance of affective labor.
The inadequacy of "empire" in defining "immaterial labor" is that they failed to take in feminist critique of the exclusion of domestic field from social production. The labor of reproduction is not regarded as productive labor.
Ngai's approach is to address the gender aspect of affective labor as represented by the Zany characters.
She argues that the informationalization/softening of work in post-fordist era feminizes the nature of work. certain degree of gender in distinctiveness of service and affective labor

Ground control : technology and utopia

le belle captive