Mark Amerika lecture

4 thoughts on “Mark Amerika lecture”

1. Steve….are you aware of this article that analyzes your critical activities along with those of Avital Ronnel?

   http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=506

   Found it to be a rather interesting read. Kind of wish she was blogging too. Do you know her? I’ve never more then dipped into her books but find any interviews with her to be very worthwhile. Justin

2. Well, this isn’t the first time I have been bashed by CTHEORY. I suppose I should consider it an honor that I am being criticized for asserting that the world is different today than it was seventy years ago. The article is oddly conservative/nostalgic in its privileging of a certain Eurocentric, entre-les-deux-guerres over all else. I could also note that the article only cites old work of mine (written a decade or more ago), when what I am doing now is quite different.

   Actually, I am quite puzzled about being paired with Ronell here, if only because her work is so steeped in Heidegger, to whom I have an absolute aversion.

   Since these comments are ostensibly responding to my announcement about Mark Amerika’s forthcoming lecture, I should note that Amerika’s work addresses precisely the questions raised in the essay, having to do with the unavoidable presence of Capital in contemporary popular culture.

3. perhaps I’ve fallen out of practice with my critical reading skills but ….how much is that article really bashing you? I catch your point about the essay referring to your older critical output .On the other hand isn’t an interest in “subjects” points of passivity still part of the focus of your research. You often mention a quality of “affectlessness” in recent works of note… and isn’t that just the flipside of certain media working us over and relying on our passivity?
   Amerika sometimes seems too frothy for me to pull anything from. The fetishization of tech outshines any content I can glean. Maybe I need to spend some more time with the work. I’m sure he will be an interesting speaker though.

4. I’m not sure “bashed” is really the right word. I would suggest that what happens in that article turns on a distinction between being ‘grasped’ and ‘groped’. The point I raised with regard to your piece on the Spectres of Marx referred to Ronell’s apparent anticipation of Derrida’s concern with “hauntology” and the limited success she enjoyed in exploiting it substantially prior to Derrida’s published translation. That an aesthetic has since sprung from that distinction provides a context for examining the roots of that conception. The play on words, formulating or deriving hauntology from ontology, could simply be a translator’s fleeting source of amusement, a one-liner, a crack joke, or does it perhaps represent a more significant fissure between languages that merits extended treatment? Your piece on Marx seems to suggest that it does. In regard to Mark Amerika, I originally encountered your work online through that site while hunting up news on Ronell.

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