acting as the digital (post)humanist
I’m back on readings for my graduate course on Digital Research and Pedagogy: this week, Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual. Massumi’s text stirs mixed responses, I think. It is a hard text to swallow for many reasons. For example, he writes
The future of the left and neo-liberalism’s appeal as a liberation movement,
The Future of the Left is one of those perennial subjects that run through time memorial, from the crises of how to deal with Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, to the problems of Stalinism in the 1950s, affluence in the 1960s, and Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s.
Where?s the Democracy? ,
The annual British Academy lecture was delivered this week by M.H. Hansen, a leading authority on Athenian democracy and the ancient Greek polis. Professor Hansen?s thesis was that Montesquieu?s doctrine of the separation of powers ? the model used by the founders of the American constitution ? is well past its sell-by date. This is because a) the leaders of modern ?democracies? have assumed powers that are normally associated with seventeenth-century absolute monarchs and b) because the prerogative of modern legislatures is regularly usurped by the judiciary.
The forces stacked against modern liberty,
To mark the publication of The Convention on Modern Liberty: The British debate on fundamental rights and freedoms, one year on, OurKingdom is featuring extracts from the book. Here we publish the afterword by Anthony Barnett examining the potential for a movement for modern liberty and the obstacles it will face.
JOURNAL: E-Currency Systems
from Global Guerrillas by John Robb
Neurocapitalism,
Religion and the civic imagination
from The Immanent Frame by Richard Amesbury