creativity/machine

It seems the concept of vernacular creativity has legs that carry it into various disciplinary territories. Interestingly, this Call for Papers for a panel at the American Association of Geographers conference in San Francisco next year uses it in almost exactly the same way as I do.

Every day that passes, there’s more stuff to go in the section of my thesis entitled ‘the idea of vernacular creativity’; from vernacular architecture to domestic craft and DIY to vernacular photographies to vernacular public art (the most symptomatic form of which is the roadside shrine). I have to hurry up and finish. That is, in as much as a scholarly pace ever allows you to ‘hurry up.’ There are no shortcuts - that’s why you get to be called ‘doctor’ at the end of it.

My friend and colleague Melissa Gregg’s book Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices is out now. Having already read it, I can tell you it’s a seriously significant contribution to cultural studies scholarship, and it’s got a beautiful cover to boot.

Blurb:

In a series of encounters with key figures in the field of cultural studies, this book draws attention to the significance of voice and address in enacting a political project from within ‘the Academy’. Combining a focus on theories of ‘affect’ lately dominant in the Humanities with a history of cultural studies as a discipline, Melissa Gregg highlights the diverse modes of performance that accompany and assist scholarly practice. Writing from the perspective of a new generation of cultural studies practitioners, she provides a missing link between the field’s earliest political concerns with those of the present. Throughout, the ongoing importance of engaged, public Intellectualism is emphasized.

Get your order in!

Someone around the office told me just now, in exceedingly poor taste mind you, that Steve Irwin’s last words were ‘crikey, that hurt’.

Update: I’ve just heard that this story was leaked to the media before Steve’s wife could be located and notified. That’s crappy if it’s true.

First decent new sentence I’ve added to my PhD draft for a couple of weeks:

Flickr can be viewed as the site of a vernacular ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud, 2002), where the object of the aesthetic is no longer the image itself, but the ‘modes of social connection’ (McQuire, 2006, pp. 263) that are both made possible by and flow through the image.

References:

Bourriaud, Nicolas. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. English ed. Dijon, Les presses du reel.

McQuire, Scott (2006) ‘Technology.’ Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2-3): 253-263.

From Deleuze via Glen Fuller:

“Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.” — Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, pg 322

(Yes, I have finally and for the first time in my life reproduced a Deleuzian quotation longer than the word ‘assemblage’)

From a longer post by ideant that is well worth your time:

This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.

And a sneak peek from something much more prosaic that I said in a conversation with Georgina Born last month, which will be published soon in a new initiative of M/C called ‘M/C Dialogues’:

So there’s a sense that at the design end you’re creating an open, configurable system that the users will come along and do anything they like with, but on the other hand, that ‘anything’ seems to be taking quite a similar shape over and over again.

Kind of obvious, but worth unpacking in the light of ‘control after decentralization’, as Galloway puts it.