biomedia by Eugene Thacker

in Critical Terms for Media Studies

Biomedia require understanding biological "life itself" as both a medium and as a process of mediation.

Against two criticism of biomedia   ?????
1) reductionism
Biomedia ask us to think outside of this either-or, qualitative-quantitative dichotomy. Networks, systems, pathways, and swarms may offer alternative models in this sense
2) instrumentality
solution: emphasis on environment, epigenetics, and autopoietic self-regulation have become central in rethinking the technological aspect of biomedia.

The question regarding reductionism and instrumentality both presume an unproblematic relation between the way we think about "life itself" and the way we talk about it.
the use of language
rethinking  the prior set of metaphors
biomedia ask us to rethink the relation between language and object, metaphor and materiality,

The freudian robot by Lydia Liu

Introduction:
Freudian robot: any networked being that embodies the feedback loop of human-machine simulacra and cannot free her/him/itself from the cybernetic unconscious is Freudian robt
Can human beings be Freudian robot?

Does the logic of reciprocity compel human beings to imitate their machines just as much as the machines are built to resemble them, keeping an infinite feedback loop of simulacra or dopperlganger in place?

Do human beings become masters of their machines, or their slaves?
both wrong    prosethetic argument that the physiological deficiencies of the human species are in need of prosthetic extension through technology   is wrong
because of the transformative role on human and the human-machine entanglement

argues against Haraway
the idea of cyborg or transhumance often obfuscates the political and psychic foundations of human-machine entanglement
the political consequences of an emerging society of Freudian robots

how information theory and digital media reframe the problem of unconscious between human-machine simulacra.
digital writing

chapter 6 the missed rendezvous bet critical theory and cybernetics
Frankfurt school      semantic approach of language
                      language -- consciousness     logicentrism
As an alternative to the philosophy of consciousness, Habermas put forward a theory of communicative action to emphasize intersubjectivity and privilege linguistic philosophy.
His theory of communicative rationality shares the normative stance of pre-World War II theorists of language and meaning. He restaged the battle agains the eruption of irrationality in social interactions by proposing a normative model of communicative action based on a semantic understanding of language.

But telecommunication technologies from telegraph to information technology and satellite communication systems.... are pushing the philosophical consideration of sense and nonsense beyond the realms of semantics, speech act theory, theories of meaning, and all other theoretical models that are premised on the face-to-face verbal communication between a human speaker and a human listener. Taken in a cybernetic register— as Lacan has demonstrated to us — communication is fundamentally schizophrenic.

妇女运动文献

新民主出版社发行   4176.4433

包括从延安、陕甘宁边区到解放区妇女运动的讲话等

妇女生产运动

刘少奇关于农村妇女切实情况的论述

节录恩格斯关于私有制与家庭起源的论述   列宁关于自由恋爱与资产阶级基础

劳动与经济的平等

p 157－158  性生活与社会再生产   性生活过度与社会生产的背离

“革命要求群众要求个人将力量集中起来紧张起来”

中国电视

1958.5.1.  北京电视台（中央电视台前身）第一次发出电视信号
10月、12月上海电视台、哈尔滨电视台建成试播
60年代初 19座电视台建成开播
1958.9 紧急从苏联进口200部电视机
不久 天津712厂仿造苏联的“旗帜”牌生产出第一批黑白电视机  14英寸  “北京”牌
同年7月  上海广播器材厂 第一批黑白电视   显像管为进口货
50年代末  全国有17000台电视机

1972 上海电视机厂 第一台晶体管黑白电视机  “金星”牌 （从电子管时代到晶体管时代）
     同年北京电视台向美国租借了彩色电视制片和播出的全套设备  于次年5月1日面向首都播出彩色电视节目

1983年
1） 3月第十一届全国广播电视工作会议 在北京召开   “四级办电视”政策
       允许市县办电视
（孙玉胜 《十年：从改变电视的语态开始》）
2） 电视节目的改革
新节目  电视系列片 《话说长江》
              电视杂志 《九州方圆》
3） 电视收看的魔力风暴
   《射雕》登陆荧屏
     广东等开播《霍元甲》
日本进口《排球女将》《阿信》
《大众电视》1983年开设 “大众电视金鹰奖”
“星”“腕”
“春节文艺联欢晚会”首次亮相
（马季相声“宇宙牌香烟”     王景愚哑剧《吃鸡》）

个人回忆录中的媒体

葛元煦 《沪游杂记》  对新媒体如 电话、影楼的咏叹
关庚 《我的上世纪— 一个北京平民的私人生活绘本》对听留声机、买电视机
袁念琪 《上海品牌生活》对照相的回忆
陈存仁 《银元时代生活史》对童年“廉价坐”电影

zhang xudong : postmodernism and postsocialist society— historicizing the past

p400
Chinese postmodernism as a social discourse can therefore be considered as a revolt against the modernist and modernization ideology of the New Era (1979-1989); during this time modernism posed as a "new enlightenment" in opposition to Maoism as a form of Chinese feudalism, and thus sealed the legitimacy of Deng's China within the discourse of modernity. Modernity in the context of post-Mao Chinese history has its centrality in economic, bureaucratic, and social rationalization.

p405

But it is precisely in its resistance to the postmodern that the Chinese modern reveals itself not as a totality, but as a differentiated, fragmented, and contradictory experience. Its prolonged discursive and ideological uniformity is not a historical given, but a historical contingency made possible by the persistence of the truly "premodern" elements in Chinese society... and, more recently, by the continued and renewed rivalry between socialism and capitalism, that is,  between the two competing ideological claims on modernity in China in post-cold war years.....(postmodernism) disrupts the demystifies entrenched positions in an interestingly differentiated cultural and social sphere after the disintegration of the reformist consensus among the state, intellectuals, and the masses, and among elite intellectuals themselves.

P 408
(the) modernism-postmodernism turn offers the possibility of a new discursive and ideological framework by which to continue the search for an alternative to the classical blueprint of modernity, namely the free market and liberal democracy.

(my notes:   is it true in reality?   Post-1992 era  marked exactly the acceleration of free market and liberalism)




P 407 With respect to the dialectic between form and content, one may contend that Adorno's thesis, based on his study of European classic music, that each new artistic paradigm contains, in and only in its aesthetic solution of tensions created in the history of form, a solution— or what we call articulation— of the social-moral dilemma of its time, still holds true, although only on an expanded historical horizon, with an added appreciation of the radical Other.

Adorno   Philosophy of Modern Music

horror film, and others in late 1980s and early 1990s

1992年拍摄的《毒吻》改编自1991年出版的哲夫同名新作。1989年的《凶宅美人头》改编自前苏联科幻大师别利亚耶夫名著《陶威尔教授的头颅》。除此之外，还有一些类型交融的作品。比如涉及科幻题材却披着恐怖片兽皮的《幻女》（1993）、警匪悬疑片《蓝煞星》（1989）具有少数民族猎奇趣味的《恐怖的鬼森林》（1987 改编自李迪小说《这里是恐怖的森林》）都或多或少蒙着一层恐怖怪异的光彩。


http://www.douban.com/note/266455999/

tastes of paradise

Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants

Printing the Sound of Cosmopolitan Beijing: Dialect Accents in 19th-century Martial arts fiction

by Paize Keulemans
(in from woodblocks to the internet    ads by cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed  )

1) the imitation of dialect accents in Beijing-produced novels
reproduce the city's central linguistic position by gathering a host of different dialects within its pages
2) not follow the logic of mimesis but instead the aesthetics of performance
cross-talking    19th-century storyteller performances
3) the printing of regional accents should be understood as a practice of the written language
the 19th-century storyteller's performance of cross talking was given textual form by drawing on a rather unlikely counterpart: the Qing-dynasty scholar's philological interest in recording dialect

Yang Guobin and the internet

*   For a timeline of the development of the internet in Chian, see the Web site of the China Internet Network Information Center, at http:// www. cnnic.net.cn.
* by the time china was connected to the internet in 1994 via the American National Science Foundation Network, the earliest works of chinese-language Internet literature had already appeared overseas
* Yang Guobin  "Historical Imagination in the Study of Chinese Digital Civil Society"  
(periodization in the history of the chinese internet)

The ecstasy of communication (jean Baudrillard)

Private "telematics": each person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin. Which is to say, in the exact position of an astronaut in his capsule, in a state of weightless that necessitates a perpetual orbital flight and a speed sufficient to keep him from crashing back to his planet of origin.


We are here at the controls of a micro-satellite, in orbit, living no longer as an actor or dramaturge but as a terminal of multiple networks. Television is still  the most direct prefiguration of this. But today it is the very space of habitation that is conceived as both receiver and distributor, as the space of both reception and operations, the control screen and terminal which as such may be endowed with telematic power— that is, with the capability of regulating everything from distance, including work in the home and, of course, consumption, play, social relations and leisure. Simulators of leisure or of vacations in the home — like flight simulators for airplane pilots — become conceivable.

obscenity



Investment, desire, passion, seduction or again, according to Caillios, expression and competition— the hot universe. Ecstasy, obscenity, fascination, communication or again, according to Caillois, hazard, chance and vertigo— the cold universe (even vertigo is cold, the psychedelic one of drugs in particular).

(Roger Caillois    Man, Play and Games, trans. by Meyer Barash. New York, Free Press of Glencoe, 1961)

電世界

高陽氏不才子  1909     in 小說時報 1, 1－58

Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects

As the work of Dr. Matthew Fuller (a foundational new media theorist / artist and co-organizer from Goldsmiths) reveals, the cross-over between the technical and the experiential is what produces value and novelty in contemporary computing. The point is also to think throughhabits of living as possible points of transformation and intervention: as the term habitat makes clear, they also imply a certain sheltering and practice of care, something which the SARAI collective in New Delhi has addressed in their work in new media.  This notion of habitat and change has also been further addressed, specifically in terms of “the archive in motion,” by Eivind Rossaak—an international expert in film and media—and his research group at the National Library of Norway, Oslo.  Their creative rethinking of the archive and the role of media technologies is crucial to understanding the radical mobilization, perpetuation and preservation of habitual media and memory practices.  The work of Nishant Shah—the director of the Bangalore Center for Internet and Society and co-editor of the groundbreaking Digital AlterNatives with a Cause —highlights that, to understand how new media affects habits of living, we need to rethink assumptions about “digital natives” and imaginings of“netizens.”  He has also started a far-reaching research program investigating the relationship between affect and participation.  Dr. Kelly Dobson’s—chair of Digital + Media at RISD and an innovative and much lauded new media artist—work focuses on the intimate “caring” relationship between machines and humans, which emerges from mainly non-intentional interactions, such as noise and vibrations.  Lastly, Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed. (This is the focus of my current book project).

Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class

"Rise of the Red Engineers" explains the tumultuous origins of the class of technocratic officials who rule China today. In a fascinating account, author Joel Andreas chronicles how two mutually hostile groups--the poorly educated peasant revolutionaries who seized power in 1949 and China's old educated elite--coalesced to form a new dominant class. After dispossessing the country's propertied classes, Mao and the Communist Party took radical measures to eliminate class distinctions based on education, aggravating antagonisms between the new political and old cultural elites. Ultimately, however, Mao's attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred inter-elite unity, paving the way--after his death--for the consolidation of a new class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, which--as China's premier school of technology--was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the party's preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China's current leaders.

petrified utopia: happiness soviet style

sound

Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound [Paperback]

Don Ihde (Author)

苏联电影系列

http://www.tudou.com/plcover/h__harB6GEA/

Tina Mai Chen and Hershatter

Gail Hershatter, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century



Tina Mai Chen, “Peasant and Woman in Maoist Revolutionary Theory, 1920s-1950s” in Catherine Lynch, Robert Marks, and Paul Pickowicz, editors, Reform, Revolution, and Radicalism in Modern China, Essays in honor of Maurice Meisner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2011).

Tina Mai Chen, “Use the past for the present; the foreign to serve China,” in Wang Ban, editor, Words and their Stories, Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 205-226.

Tina Mai Chen, “They love battle array, not silks and satins,” in Wang Ban, editor, Words and their Stories, Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 263-282.

Tina Mai Chen, "The Possibilities and Problematics of the Third World in the 1960s: Historical Connections and Critical Frameworks", in Karen Dubinsky et al, editors, New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2009): 421-430.



Rosemary Roberts, “Positive Women Characters in the Revolutionary Model Works of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: An Argument Against the Theory of Erasure of Gender and Sexuality,” Asian Studies Review 28, no. 4 (December 2004): 407-22.

Timothy Morton ecological thought

• 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard University Press).
• 2010. The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press).
• 2013. Realist Magic (Open Humanities Press).