http://www.douban.com/note/341846174/
1. Write a very brief abstract (a few sentences), starting with, "In a nutshell, X argues that ...." Polish this; make it as complete AND as concise as possible.
2. Divide the essay into sections, identifying the important steps of the argument. Think about what size units feel right for this purpose. If the author has divided the essay into sections (subheadings, dividers of some sort), you almost certainly need to subdivide further and identify smaller units. On the other hand, it doesn't need to be paragraph by paragraph either.
3. Write a "functional" or "dynamic" outline using these divisions, that is, focus on what the author does in each section. ("The author raises the question . . . " "the author refutes . . . " "the author distinguishes between . . . "). Take care over the verbs: make them as precise and expressive as possible. Let's agree to ban generics like "says" or "states." Be sparing with "explains."
4. What is this essay's intended audience? Be specific: in most cases, the audience will be broadly academic. But within that? Is the essay addressed to specialists in a small field/ people already familiar with the texts and/or main issues, or does it seek to include literary scholars more broadly? Does it seek to include readers beyond literary studies? Beyond academia? How can you tell? Identify a few good examples of what you're describing.
5. How does the essay involve its readers? Does it directly address us? Take us along? Coopt us? Antagonize us? Puzzle us? Find good examples.
6. How does the essay deal with other scholars in the field? Does it quote a lot? Effectively? Does it provide an overview of previous scholarship? Does it insert itself into that broader field, or try to distinguish itself from it? Does it build on other people's work, or bounce off it? Does it use "strawmen" (i.e., weak arguments introduced solely for the purpose of being knocked over)? Is it collegial, antagonistic . . . ? Find good examples.
7. How would you describe the essay's voice? (You can even play games if you like: how do you picture the author? How does she look/what does she wear/age? Where does he sit as he writes? How do you imagine his or her speaking voice sounds? Now try to account for these impressions: where do they come from?) Is the author trying to establish a voice, or seeking to remain neutral?
8. Is the essay clearly argued? Does it mean to be "easy" to follow, or is it aiming to challenge and puzzle you? Are there places where you get lost? Why is that? Would you advise the author to fix that? How?
9. Look at the opening paragraph (or paragraphs—you decide what constitutes "the opening"). Divide it into functional steps, much as you did for the whole essay in 2. and 3. What does the author do to introduce the problem/question/issue we'll be looking at? How does the author motivate you to enter into the discussion with her? Does the author give a "thesis statement" or preview his or her conclusion? Entirely/partially? How? Do you like the opening paragraph(s)?
10. Look at the ending: how does the author leave things? Is there a summation? A looking ahead to further questions? Some kind of special effect? Is it effective?
11. Note any other observations that didn't come under any of these questions.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Mao China
Maurice Meisner
Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). ISBN 0299084205.
The Deng Xiaoping Era : An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1st, 1996). ISBN 0809078155.
Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait. (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2007). ISBN 9780745631066.
Sigrid Schmalzer
The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
book titles unread
Sentient City
post-scarcity anarchism
Voyage on the North Sea
Reality of the Mass Media
The Technopolitics of Cold War: Toward a Transregional perspective
钱学森系统科学思想研究
"Missile Science, Population science: The origin of China's one-Child policy"
susan Greenhalgh China Quarterly 2005
The advertising research handbook
Young, charles E.
China's techno-warriors
Television as digital media
mainframe experimentalism
post-scarcity anarchism
Voyage on the North Sea
Reality of the Mass Media
The Technopolitics of Cold War: Toward a Transregional perspective
钱学森系统科学思想研究
"Missile Science, Population science: The origin of China's one-Child policy"
susan Greenhalgh China Quarterly 2005
The advertising research handbook
Young, charles E.
China's techno-warriors
Television as digital media
mainframe experimentalism
Monday, April 28, 2014
Thursday, April 24, 2014
digital cultures and the politics of emotion: feeling, affect and technological change
p3 Adi Kuntsman on Ahmed The cultural politics of Emotion (2004)
"Combining insights from psychoanalysis and Marxism, she notes that 'emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation'."
Tagg, P. "Subjectivity and Soundscape, motorbikes and music," in A. Bennet, B. Shank and J. Toynbee (eds), The Popular Music Studies Reader
Mbembe, A. (2003) "necropolitics," Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.
p 23 Patricia Clough
In her discussion of what she calls "aesthetic capitalism," Christine Harold (2009) points to a shift in the functioning of brand from its being about representation to the aura of the circulating sign to designing objects that themselves can stir affect, promising a transformative experience in the object's use rather than in the mere possession of it. Modelling a user's future manipulation of it, the commodity is designed to sensually transmit a "creative juice" that will be transformative for its user, bringing a not-yet lived future into the present. Thus, the aura and the value of the commodity now its transmission of affect, where affect refers not to emotion but to a bodily capacity, a bodily readiness, a trigger to action, including the action of feeling an emotion. While emotions are commensurate with a subject, affect is a pre-individual and therefore a non-conscious, a-subjective potentiality. Affect is a vector of unqualified intensity seeking future actualization; it is a vehicle from one dimension of time to another. It is for its capacity to bring the future into the present that affective branding becomes useful in the graphic framing of unending war and humanitarian response to it.
Harold, C. (2009) "on Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of 'design democracy'", public culture, no.21
This is because affective branding actually works not by giving one future possibilities but by pre-empting the future. For Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman the pre-emptive logic of branding is a "mnemonic control" that aims to remodel long-term memory through an occupation of or the "parasiting" on the dynamics of affective potentiality in the neuro-physiological plasticity of the body-brain. Mnemonic control is something like "a distribution of memory implants", which provides one with the bodily or affective memory of an actually experience which one actually has not had, nonetheless, giving a base for the future rise of affect, the repetition of an anticipatory response. Thus, the power of mnemonic control is in this turn to affect as life's non-lived or not-yet lived potential. Mnemonic control brings life back to a non-lived potential in order to modulate affect's emerging effects.
Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman 2011 "Mnemonic control" in Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, edited by Patricia Clough and Craig Willse
p.53-54
Athina Karatzogianni
In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Gregg and Seigworth identify no fewer than six approaches in relation to the emergence of affect theory, summarized briefly here according to my own understanding of their categorization: phenomenologies of embodiment and investigation into the body's capacities for extensions; the hybridization of human with non-human in bio-informatics and bio-engineering; work found in feminist studies, the Italian autonomism, and philosophically inflected culture studies; in psychoanalytic inquiries focusing on desire; political work undertaken focusing on people crushed under the thumb of normativizing power, by queer, feminist, subaltern and disability activists; and work aiming to move beyond the linguistic and representational.
"Combining insights from psychoanalysis and Marxism, she notes that 'emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation'."
Tagg, P. "Subjectivity and Soundscape, motorbikes and music," in A. Bennet, B. Shank and J. Toynbee (eds), The Popular Music Studies Reader
Mbembe, A. (2003) "necropolitics," Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.
p 23 Patricia Clough
In her discussion of what she calls "aesthetic capitalism," Christine Harold (2009) points to a shift in the functioning of brand from its being about representation to the aura of the circulating sign to designing objects that themselves can stir affect, promising a transformative experience in the object's use rather than in the mere possession of it. Modelling a user's future manipulation of it, the commodity is designed to sensually transmit a "creative juice" that will be transformative for its user, bringing a not-yet lived future into the present. Thus, the aura and the value of the commodity now its transmission of affect, where affect refers not to emotion but to a bodily capacity, a bodily readiness, a trigger to action, including the action of feeling an emotion. While emotions are commensurate with a subject, affect is a pre-individual and therefore a non-conscious, a-subjective potentiality. Affect is a vector of unqualified intensity seeking future actualization; it is a vehicle from one dimension of time to another. It is for its capacity to bring the future into the present that affective branding becomes useful in the graphic framing of unending war and humanitarian response to it.
Harold, C. (2009) "on Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of 'design democracy'", public culture, no.21
This is because affective branding actually works not by giving one future possibilities but by pre-empting the future. For Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman the pre-emptive logic of branding is a "mnemonic control" that aims to remodel long-term memory through an occupation of or the "parasiting" on the dynamics of affective potentiality in the neuro-physiological plasticity of the body-brain. Mnemonic control is something like "a distribution of memory implants", which provides one with the bodily or affective memory of an actually experience which one actually has not had, nonetheless, giving a base for the future rise of affect, the repetition of an anticipatory response. Thus, the power of mnemonic control is in this turn to affect as life's non-lived or not-yet lived potential. Mnemonic control brings life back to a non-lived potential in order to modulate affect's emerging effects.
Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman 2011 "Mnemonic control" in Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, edited by Patricia Clough and Craig Willse
p.53-54
Athina Karatzogianni
In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Gregg and Seigworth identify no fewer than six approaches in relation to the emergence of affect theory, summarized briefly here according to my own understanding of their categorization: phenomenologies of embodiment and investigation into the body's capacities for extensions; the hybridization of human with non-human in bio-informatics and bio-engineering; work found in feminist studies, the Italian autonomism, and philosophically inflected culture studies; in psychoanalytic inquiries focusing on desire; political work undertaken focusing on people crushed under the thumb of normativizing power, by queer, feminist, subaltern and disability activists; and work aiming to move beyond the linguistic and representational.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
editing suggestions
1. throw money AT advertising
2. built-in commercials
3. Sometimes it mingles with the voices on radio or TV, as if it arrives through the airwaves
4. a fad for
5. Does this mean that he approves of the defamiliarizing effect of substituting balloons for eggs?
6.To attract the attention of an audience from within a sea of information, an advertisement must break away fromwith
conventional ways of thinking.
2. built-in commercials
3. Sometimes it mingles with the voices on radio or TV, as if it arrives through the airwaves
4. a fad for
5. Does this mean that he approves of the defamiliarizing effect of substituting balloons for eggs?
6.To attract the attention of an audience from within a sea of information, an advertisement must break away from
Monday, March 3, 2014
The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Kathi Weeks) Duke University Press, 2011
p.2 two reasons for the inattention to work within political theory
1) the privatization of work
work and family (the institute of private property secures the privacy of employment relation alongside the marriage relations) private and public division
p.4 As a result of work's subordination to property rights, its reification, and its individualization, thinking about work as a social system –— even with its arguably more tenuous private status— strangely becomes as difficult as it is for many to conceive marriage and the family in structural terms.
2) the decline of work-based activism in US
P5 buying and selling of that very "peculiar" commodity labor power
presents two free, self-interested individuals, each an owner of property and both equal under the law, who enter into an exchange of equivalents.
p.8 Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation. That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship.
p. 11 agains the normativity and moralization of work
p 12-13 critique past feminisms for its tendencies toward the mystification and moralization of work
13. "Feminists, I suggest, should focus on the demands not simply or exclusively for more work and better work, but also for less work; we should focus not only on revaluing feminized forms of unwaged labor but also challenge the sanctification of such work that can accompany or be enabled by these efforts."
16- 20 work and class
1) work allows broader reacher
p17. the politics of and against work has the potential to expand the terrain of class struggle to include actors well beyond that classic figure of traditional class politics, the industrial proletariat.
p. 60 ( historicizing postindustrial work ethic)
The postindustrial work ethic, with its new emphasis on work as an avenue for personal development and meaning, was at least a response to the rebellions in the 1960s and early 1970s against the disciplinary subjectivity of the Fordist period and the problem of worker alienation that they helped to publicize. The human-resources movement that had come into its own by the 1980s attempted to change work processes in ways that would address, in profitable terms, the problem of work quality posed by activists. Thus the shift from the industrial ethic's focus on work as a path to social mobility to the postindustrial emphasis on work as a practice of self-realization is part and parcel of the confrontation of competing versions of the ethic and the struggles over the organization and meaning of work that they signified and facilitated.
Post-fordism and work ethics
p70 Whereas Fordism demanded from its core workers a lifetime of compliance with work discipline, post-Fordism also demands of many of its workers flexibility, adaptability, and continual reinvention.
Cremin, Colin. 2010. "Never employable Enough: The (im)possibility of satisfying the boss's desire." Organization 17 (2): 131-49.
Managing post-fordist independence: being professional
a complex art of cultural fashioning and emotional engineering typical of many managerial regimes today
p. 72 the discourse of professionalism today enjoys a wide application, serving as a disciplinary mechanism to manage the affects and attitudes of a service-based workforce that is less amenable to direct supervision.
professionalization style and dress
p74 the professional look, and the time and resources necessary to achieve it, tie us not only economically and socially but also aesthetically and affectively to work
Chapter 2 marxism, productivism and the refusal of work
The lack of critique of the value of work inside marxist traditions
1) socialist modernization (originated in the context of revolutionary moments in europe )
(Lenin)
p.86 an ideal of social and economic progress grounded in the continuing development of science and industry
an insufflaient critique of capital
p.84 This tribute to proletarian labor and to the progressive development of productive forces replicates the fundamental attributes of capitalist society… here we find an endorsement of economic growth, industrial progress, and the work ethic similar to the one that can be found in bourgeois political economy, with its naturalization and celebration of the process of economic modernization.
{for my purpose, perhaps it is exactly this socialist modernization made it so easy to transform into capitalist mode of modernization in the 1980s}
2) Socialist humanism (gained popularity in the 1960s coincided with the rise of the new left)
Fromm
p86 labor is understood as an individual creative capacity, a human essence, fro which we are now estranged and to which we should be restored.
p. 89 individual is the unit of analysis "the critique of alienation becomes attached to a prior claim about the nature of the human subject"
"As Baudrillard describes it, this model of the human founded in a transhistorical capacity for labor mimics the standardization and generalization of work that was established under the conditions of industrialization. To put it in other terms, the abstraction from the concrete and particular that allows one to grasp labor quantitatively is what also allows one to conceive the commensurability of its qualitative instances as the expression of an essential humanity."
p90. Negri expresses no interest in the problematic of alienation as a discourse of interiority
1) the privatization of work
work and family (the institute of private property secures the privacy of employment relation alongside the marriage relations) private and public division
p.4 As a result of work's subordination to property rights, its reification, and its individualization, thinking about work as a social system –— even with its arguably more tenuous private status— strangely becomes as difficult as it is for many to conceive marriage and the family in structural terms.
2) the decline of work-based activism in US
P5 buying and selling of that very "peculiar" commodity labor power
presents two free, self-interested individuals, each an owner of property and both equal under the law, who enter into an exchange of equivalents.
p.8 Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation. That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship.
p. 11 agains the normativity and moralization of work
p 12-13 critique past feminisms for its tendencies toward the mystification and moralization of work
13. "Feminists, I suggest, should focus on the demands not simply or exclusively for more work and better work, but also for less work; we should focus not only on revaluing feminized forms of unwaged labor but also challenge the sanctification of such work that can accompany or be enabled by these efforts."
16- 20 work and class
1) work allows broader reacher
p17. the politics of and against work has the potential to expand the terrain of class struggle to include actors well beyond that classic figure of traditional class politics, the industrial proletariat.
p. 60 ( historicizing postindustrial work ethic)
The postindustrial work ethic, with its new emphasis on work as an avenue for personal development and meaning, was at least a response to the rebellions in the 1960s and early 1970s against the disciplinary subjectivity of the Fordist period and the problem of worker alienation that they helped to publicize. The human-resources movement that had come into its own by the 1980s attempted to change work processes in ways that would address, in profitable terms, the problem of work quality posed by activists. Thus the shift from the industrial ethic's focus on work as a path to social mobility to the postindustrial emphasis on work as a practice of self-realization is part and parcel of the confrontation of competing versions of the ethic and the struggles over the organization and meaning of work that they signified and facilitated.
Post-fordism and work ethics
p70 Whereas Fordism demanded from its core workers a lifetime of compliance with work discipline, post-Fordism also demands of many of its workers flexibility, adaptability, and continual reinvention.
Cremin, Colin. 2010. "Never employable Enough: The (im)possibility of satisfying the boss's desire." Organization 17 (2): 131-49.
Managing post-fordist independence: being professional
a complex art of cultural fashioning and emotional engineering typical of many managerial regimes today
p. 72 the discourse of professionalism today enjoys a wide application, serving as a disciplinary mechanism to manage the affects and attitudes of a service-based workforce that is less amenable to direct supervision.
professionalization style and dress
p74 the professional look, and the time and resources necessary to achieve it, tie us not only economically and socially but also aesthetically and affectively to work
Chapter 2 marxism, productivism and the refusal of work
The lack of critique of the value of work inside marxist traditions
1) socialist modernization (originated in the context of revolutionary moments in europe )
(Lenin)
p.86 an ideal of social and economic progress grounded in the continuing development of science and industry
an insufflaient critique of capital
p.84 This tribute to proletarian labor and to the progressive development of productive forces replicates the fundamental attributes of capitalist society… here we find an endorsement of economic growth, industrial progress, and the work ethic similar to the one that can be found in bourgeois political economy, with its naturalization and celebration of the process of economic modernization.
{for my purpose, perhaps it is exactly this socialist modernization made it so easy to transform into capitalist mode of modernization in the 1980s}
2) Socialist humanism (gained popularity in the 1960s coincided with the rise of the new left)
Fromm
p86 labor is understood as an individual creative capacity, a human essence, fro which we are now estranged and to which we should be restored.
p. 89 individual is the unit of analysis "the critique of alienation becomes attached to a prior claim about the nature of the human subject"
"As Baudrillard describes it, this model of the human founded in a transhistorical capacity for labor mimics the standardization and generalization of work that was established under the conditions of industrialization. To put it in other terms, the abstraction from the concrete and particular that allows one to grasp labor quantitatively is what also allows one to conceive the commensurability of its qualitative instances as the expression of an essential humanity."
p90. Negri expresses no interest in the problematic of alienation as a discourse of interiority
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