Camille Paglia Takes On Academia

The humanities have destroyed themselves over the past 30 years…Through an obsession with European jargon and a shallow politicization of discourse, the humanities have imploded…There’s hardly a campus you can name where the most exciting things that are happening on campus are coming from the humanities departments…I think the entire profession is in withdrawal at the moment. This is a national problem. It’s not just a Harvard problem.

Camille Paglia, in a conversation with Open Source, 2/27/06

Here’s an amusing intellectual exercise; define performance art.

I tend to know it when I see it. I also know what it isn’t. It’s not theatre and it’s not acting. I’d even venture to say that performance art is the antithesis of acting.

A fairly standard definition is that performance art takes the structure of art making and uses it as a starting point. Performance art tends to use the artist body as a material or as a tool within an active art making system.

WHY AMERICA IS POLARIZED

Philip Slater

Political analysts have been impressed lately by the polarization of the American public between "reds" and "blues". Eighty percent of our population has declared itself impervious to persuasion. Why has this happened? Why have political positions hardened while the pragmatic center has shrunk?

While the media speak of the new importance of 'moral values', as if this were some recent fashion trend that had just burst upon the scene, this 'red/blue' division is rooted in major historical changes--changes that are welcomed by half of our nation, appalling to the other half. Furthermore, this division is not simply an American phenomenon, but a global one, rooted in the most revolutionary cultural shift in the history of our species.

Consider these seemingly unrelated events:

 In 1996 business writer E. E. Lawler found that 80% of all the companies he studied had some form of participatory management.

 In 1996, for the first time, there were more visits by Americans to alternative practitioners than to traditional Western physicians.

 In 2001 scientists began to consider the possibility that the "laws" of nature might not be immutable.

 In 2002 lawyers argued that chimpanzees should be accorded legal status as persons.

 In 2004, for the first time, more women than men applied to medical school, while women made up a majority of first-year law students and outnumbered male college students 56% to 44%.

 In 2004, gay marriages became legal in Massachusetts.

 All of these events would have been inconceivable fifty years ago. During this time we've seen social change taking place at a rate unprecedented in the history of the planet. And while many of the changes have had widespread popular support, they have also--especially when combined with the unrelenting pace of technological innovation--stressed our adaptive capacities. We've not only had to adjust to computers and email and cell phones, but also to the changing roles of women and minorities, the "sexual revolution", the decline of the nuclear family, the growth of the global economy, the ecological movement, and so on.

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Phone Jam to Shut Down the Minutemen Recruiting Drive in Philadelphia!

Call the Valley Forge Convention Center and demand that this meeting be canceled: 610-354-8212 and 610-354-8213. Also, please call GF Management. they help to manage the Valley Forge Convention Center: 215-972-2222 and express your displeasure!

The Minutemen Project, a Conservative anti-immigration group with
 strong links to, and overlapping membership with, violent white
 supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations has announced plans to hold a recruitment meeting in Valley Forge, PA on Saturday, February 25, 2005.

Subjective notes about Transmediale 2006

by Armin Medosch on Tue, 2006-02-07

The festival Transmediale is one of the oldest and biggest of its  
kind in Europe. Held annually since 1988, it started out as a video  
festival. In the early days the VideoFest, as it was called then,  
featured works which did not fit into the programme of the Berlin  
Film Festival - the star studded - drum role, fanfare - Berlinale. In  
the early 1990s the festival started presenting interactive works on  
CD ROM - I think this was called multi-media at the time. With  
changing technologies - adopting net art and generative and software  
art in the late 1990s - the festival kept true to its beginnings by  
maintaining the notion of critically engaging with new technologies  
and presenting a broad spectrum of alternative currents in art,  
technology and related theoretical production.

New Left Review 37, January-February 2006

The torching of the French banlieues as both sequel to the No vote of May 2005 and symptom of a wider Western malaise. Rejection of official pieties of integration, and flames of revolt against an automated Europe.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

THE PYRES OF AUTUMN

Fifteen hundred cars had to burn in a single night and then, on a descending scale, nine hundred, five hundred, two hundred, for the daily ‘norm’ to be reached again, and people to realize that ninety cars on average are torched every night in this gentle France of ours. A sort of eternal flame, like that under the Arc de Triomphe, burning in honour of the Unknown Immigrant. Known now, after a lacerating process of revision—but still in trompe l’oeil.

 EXPLODING TELEVISION: TEA TIME TV Dates: Friday 27 January -  
 Wednesday 1 February 2006,

 Location: Witte de With/TENT., Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam  
 Admission: free

 Website: www.v2.nl  | www.explodingtelevision.net

 Live video stream available from http://www.v2.nl/live