This one's local interest, but anyone in the Triangle who is interested in an "Ecology and the Humanities" working group sponsored by Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute and administered by the Polygraph 22 editors should shoot me an email for details about our first meeting on Nov. 12. We're reading Radkau and Dana Philips the first week.

'We Are All Madoffs': David P. Barash writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the relationship of technological civilization to the natural world is that of a Ponzi scheme. Kim Stanley Robinson makes the same point in the interview we conducted with him for the upcoming Polygraph issue, which will eventually wind up on the website and likely also on this very blog:

KSR: ...I've been trying to use standard economic terms to describe the situation in ways capitalists might have to come to terms with, that might serve as entry-points to a larger discussion: that the implicit promise of capitalism was that a generation would work so hard in the working class that its children would be in the middle class, and that if extended this program would eventually lift everyone on Earth; but now, resource analysis makes it clear that for the three billion living on less than two dollars a day, this promise can never be fulfilled; so that capitalism is really nothing but a big Ponzi scheme, and would be illegal if run in a single state or community.

Then also, the pricing we put on things, carbon especially, does not include the environmental costs of making the thing, so that we are practicing systemic predatory dumping, and the competitors we are predating on are our own children and the generations to come. So we are predatory dumpers, out-competing non-existent people, which is easy enough; but they will suffer when they come into existence, and we are cheaters.

More on the Polygraph issue soon. (via)

Great moments in Polygraph blurbs. (Thanks, Alex!)

Polygraph 21: Study, Students, Universities. Fair warning: these kids are Marxists. This issue of what is perhaps the best-run graduate student journal in the U.S. is sparked by a simple, core, observation: There are students in the university.

Polygraph 23—Call for Papers
"Parties, Factions, Organizations"
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp23.html

Recently, there has been a great deal of work by those discussing political agency and organization on the decline of the nation-state and its displacement by non-state and sub-state actors. Writers on the left, from David Harvey looking at the global city to Hardt and Negri working on political mobilization to the American Studies scholar John Carlos Rowe looking at "post-Nationalism" see the nation state as, increasingly, one factor among many rather than as the central factor in political and economic organization. This change in the role of the nation-state, it is argued, is also leading to a change in the nature of political organization. The party, once the locus of revolutionary desire, seems to be changing significantly as a spate of NGOs and transnational corporations increasingly take on the role of political actor. Both within nation-states and at the level of international party imaginaries, the party and partisanship are taking on a different role. We see, for example, the 2004 Democratic National Convention speech of then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, when he told the audience at the Democratic National Convention, "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America... there is the United States of America." Likewise, French President Nicolas Sarkozy attempted to create the illusion of a non-partisan world by recruiting members of the French Left, such as the economist Jacques Attali, into his cabinet. The Leninist vision of the party as a nexus of action and a starting-point for praxis appears to face displacement by a concept of the party as an ideology-disseminating and fund-raising apparatus, which can be rhetorically sloughed off when the need is felt.

At the same time, nationalist parties, national religious parties, and peasant and indigenous movements are as active as ever. If the role of the party is losing ground, there nevertheless seems to be a retention of interest in institutions that can enable and promote collective activity. What were once derided as "issues politics" and "identity politics" have proven to create real political allegiances that do not adhere to a party structure, mobilizing groups toward political action. Using a different but related tactic, autonomous social movements are trying to re-envision the role of people in politics, trying to shift the locus of action to the humans involved in political practice. Parties continue to be active in national and international politics, but at the same time, people are increasingly searching for and implementing alternatives to the party structure. These alternatives can entail ground-up advocacy and activism, networked through various channels, or they can entail measures such as the Washington Consensus that aim to control the political environment through economic sanctions and privatized governance. Both of these forms of governmentality aim to circumvent the state and the party systems.

The Polygraph Editorial Collective would therefore like to assemble a collection of essays that confront the direction "the party" and parties have taken since the large social and economic shifts of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. We want to look at both the concept of the party and its relevance or lack of relevance in an increasingly globalized society. The party had liberatory aims at one point; have those evaporated or migrated elsewhere, or do they continue to have force within the party and within global politics? Is the party still a category with utopian potential or have parties been rendered into the propaganda wings of international capital? Whither party politics?

Possible topics for this issue include:
* politics without parties
* parties and capital
* the problematic of party affiliation and party identity
* parties and identity/"identity" politics
* alternatives to the party structure
* the concept of "party" in late capitalism
* the relationship of the party to the nation-state
* anti-governmental movements and organizations
* the rise of NGOs
* the left/right division
* parties and religion/religious parties
* movements vs. organizations
* parties/organizations and exclusion
* divisions and splits within parties
* parties and utopias

Polygraph welcomes work from a variety of different disciplines, including political theory, critical geography, cultural anthropology, political economy, political theology, and area studies. We also encourage the submission of a variety of formats and genres: i.e. field reports, surveys, interviews, photography, essays, etc.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 31, 2009

ISSUE EDITOR
Alexander Greenberg

CONTACT
partiescfp@gmail.com

Ongoing projects update.

* The Cultures of Recession graduate student conference (Nov. 20 & 21) is still accepting abstracts. We've just received word that the Duke Center for International Studies will be providing travel support for visiting grad students, which is very exciting.

* Polygraph 22: "Ecology & Ideology" is rapidly moving into the editorial phase. About half our articles are in and the other half will be in by the end of the Fall semester. Look for a great interview between Kim Stanley Robinson and the three editors in this space as the publication date draws closer...

* Fantasy soccer starts in two weeks. Don't miss out; email me or comment for the league codes.

Happy Monday. The summer is dying. We have to face it.

* With the Institute for Gifted Youngsters shut down I returned to Infinite Summer blogging over the weekend with a post on maps and territories.

* The issue of Polygraph I contributed to on study, students, and the university is available from Amazon, or will be soon.

* Time-lapse video of the construction of Disneyland at (where else?) Boing Boing.

* Colin Marshall sings the praises of my favorite film, Rushmore.

Because thousands of a certain generation's cinematic lives have been changed by this film, its territory is best approached with caution. Mine, however, happens to be among those thousands, 1998 marking as it did the opening of my prime window of cultural absporpton. Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove; cinephilic teenagers of the 1970s has Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Taxi Driver; cinephilic teenagers of the 1980s had Repo Man, Blue Velvet, Stranger than Paradise; cinephilic teenagers of the 1990s had Rushmore.

*Revisiting the Rosenhan experiment. Via MeFi.

* And fair warning: Toy Story 3 will break your heart.

The blog Infinite Thought beat me to the punch in announcing the publication of Polygraph 21: Study, Students, Universities, which contains a short book review by me of the indispensable Marc Bousquet's indispensable How the University Works that concerns in part university endowments in the wake of the financial crisis. Here's a bit from the beginning of my review:

Bousquet begins with a pointed rejection of the Lapsarian myth-making that typically characterizes discussions about what has happened to the University in recent decades, a notion that due to pernicious external influence or betrayal from within the purity of the University has somehow been corrupted. Bousquet’s University is not the victim of late capitalism; it is its agent. As Bousquet puts it: “Late capitalism doesn’t just happen to the university; the university makes late capitalism happen.” An analysis of the student as already a worker forms an important part of this picture, as we will see—but it is worth taking a moment to simply peruse Bousquet’s prodigious list of intersections between university capital and late capitalism writ large:

apparel sales; sports marketing; corporate-financed research, curriculum, endowment, and building; job training; direct financial investment via portfolios, pensions, and cooperative venture; the production and enclosure of intellectual property; the selection of vendors for books, information technology, soda pop, and construction; the purchase and provision of nonstandard labor; and so forth.

That’s an awful lot being monetized at “not-for-profit” institutions. And most of these functions have little or nothing to do with humanistic paeans to the “value” of a liberal education or the fantasy of the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; in fact, the intellectual mission of the University rapidly recedes into the background as a type of side business, if not, indeed, a kind of hobby. There’s more truth than we might at first admit to the truistic assertion that NYU (to pick for a moment on the corporate entity responsible, among other things, for the publication and distribution of Bousquet’s critique) is a real-estate trust running a college for tax purposes.

Okay, I think YouTube and I have reached an accord, and all of the clips from the Morton/Rudy roundtable are now up and viewable. The whole playlist is in order here.

Rudy Introduction
Morton Introduction
On Discursive Intervention in Ecology
On Ontology and "Ground"
On WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
On Dark Ecology and "Bambification"
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism

Excerpted moments from the Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph "Ecology, Ideology, Politics" Roundtable are now up on YouTube. You'll note the clever product placement of our secret sponsor, Dasani.

The poor camera angle, somewhat poor audio quality, and incomplete coverage are all functions of the device used to capture the video, but still, I think these excerpts came out pretty well.

Introductions (YouTube messed with this one. Up in two bits soon.)
Question #1 (on rhetoric)
Question #2 (on ontology and "ground") (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
An Excerpt Concerning WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
Dark Ecology and "Bambification"
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)

Big thanks to everyone who was able to come out to our Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph Roundtable last night. Preliminary results indicate a huge success...

Reminder: the big Tim Morton/Kathy Rudy Roundtable, sponsored by the Duke Center for International Studies and moderated by Polygraph, starts today at 5 PM in the Friedl Building on Duke's East Campus. Hope some of you can make it...

Consider this the first of several reminders of our April 17th Polygraph event, "Ecology, Ideology, Politics." It should be a really great discussion—I really hope some of you can make it.

To sweeten the pot, I can guarantee free food and drink.

Higher education and the recession: thirteen reasons colleges are in this mess. (Requires subscription or university IP.) My upcoming review of How the University Works for Polygraph 21 tackles some of these points as well, particularly "1. Took on Risky Investments." When it shows up online, I'll link to it.

The "I Should Be Writing" podcast has an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson this week that's pretty good, though you have to be patient through some lengthy preliminary material. (Via Boing Boing.) It has to be said that KSR is extremely generous with his time; we're actually in the process of interviewing him ourselves for our "Ecology and Ideology" issue of Polygraph, due out sometime (we hope) early in 2010.

Thursday links as I just about catch up to where I need to be:

* My friend, fellow culturemonkey, and "Ecology and Ideology" co-editor Ryan Vu is doing a series on his home blog called Dispatches from the American Left about a recent trip he took to Mountain Justice Summer, a retreat in Kentucky for environmental activists.

* In the wake of cataclysmic Arctic Sea melting, humanity has finally decided to come together and figure out how to begin to solve the environmental crisis who owns the new shipping lanes. Sigh.

* Robokill: a game. Just about exactly what it sounds like.

* "It’s not a happy ending, we end up with almost nothing." Edward James Olmos on the end of Battlestar Galactica. Via io9.

* Also of BSG note: a blog all about the science of Battlestar Galactica.

* What Liberal Media? Part 1,000,000: In the wake of the Scott McClellan book, Jessica Yellin reports that network executives at ABC pressured her to make Bush look good.

Faith in humanity rising: It's been decades since anybody tried to vandalize Stonehenge. Sure, a pair of idiots just tried to, but it was decades before that.

Faith in humanity falling (and Žižek was right!): New explosives could be more powerful and safer to handle than TNT and other conventional explosives and would also be more environmentally friendly.

Now seems like a good time to mention again that I'll be co-editing a special issue of Polygraph that among other things seeks to examine the ways in which ecology quickly comes to function as a contentless rhetoric of control...

Via MeFi.

Polygraph 22—Call for Papers
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html

Special Issue: Ecology and Ideology

The contemporary moment abounds with speculation concerning our ecological future. Specialists in a variety of fields forecast immanent catastrophe, stemming from a combination of climate change, fossil-fuel depletion, and consumer waste. The recent bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on a group of scientists studying climate change indicates the degree to which "peace" has come to signify ecological balance; even the declaration by the Vatican of a new set of "7 Deadly Sins for the modern age" includes pollution in an attempt to grapple with the potential of individuals to inflict ecological damage on a global scale.

In the name of an impending crisis felt to be collectively shared, new political, cultural, and intellectual alignments are being forged, just as seismic shifts in the flow of global capital once again threaten to "redistribute" the world's resources and people. Ecological crisis has become a 24/7 media event, canvassing the planet in the imagery and rhetoric of disaster. From the halls of research and policy to activist documentary and apocalyptic fantasy, at the news desk, podium, pulpit, classroom, and computer monitor alike, all channels are united by a single underlying conviction: the present ecological catastrophe has humanity as its cause.

Precisely because the answer seems so obvious, we want to know: why now? Where are the points of antagonism in the midst of such apparent consensus, and what is at stake in their difference?

The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers concerning any aspect of ecology's relationship to ideology, both interrogating ecology as a location for critique of global capitalism and analyzing the ways in which ecology functions as an ideology in its own right.

Potential areas of interest include:

Political Ecology
Globalization and ecology
Marxism and ecology
"Environmental accounting" as a challenge to the free market
Ecology and capital / consumerism
Ecology as growth market

Eco-Disaster
Peak oil and climate change
Biofuels and the food crisis
Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism
Ecology as a rhetoric of control
Figurations of eco-disaster in popular culture

Religion and Ecology
Green apocalypticism and green evangelism
Ecology and world religion

Ecology and gender
Recent articulations of eco-feminism
Eco- & transnational feminisms
Women's work and the global chain of production
Agricultural work and reproduction

Ecologies against ecologies
"Light" vs. "dark green" environmentalism (i.e. deep ecology)
Primitivism and technofuturism
The status of international Green movements

Polygraph welcomes work from a variety of different disciplines, including critical geography, cultural anthropology, political economy, political theology, science studies, and systems theory. We also encourage the submission of a variety of formats and genres: i.e. field reports, surveys, interviews, photography, essays, etc.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 31, 2008

ISSUE EDITORS
Gerry Canavan
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu

CONTACT
polygraph22cfp@gmail.com