20 Years of Collapse
Nov 10, 2009 Politics
November 9, 2009
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Duringthis time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculousnature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true,the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the worldsuddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few monthsearlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections withLech Walesa as president?
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Tags: 2009, Berlin Wall, Cold War Era, english, Slavoj Žižek
Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics
Oct 13, 2009 Economy
Dr. Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics on October 12th, 2009, just four months after speaking at the Frankfurt School on the same topic in which she was awarded the prize.
Renowned political scientist, Dr. Elinor Ostrom, from Indiana University – Bloomington, gave a lecture on Friday June 19th, 2009, outlining her latest research and outcomes regarding the problem of “the commons.”
In the lab, she had simulated conflicts concerning the allocation of the commons and had derived a complex theoretical framework that exploits the various elements (e.g. leadership, trust and reciprocity) of this process.
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Tags: Commons, Elinor Ostrom, english, Video
State Capitalism in Britain
Jun 25, 2009 Economy
James Heartfield, Mute magazine
Despite the State being the main investor in the UK’s national economy, the official rhetoric of private sector productivity is alive and well. James Heartfield takes a look at Labour’s failed strategy of privatising public services and the rise of ‘corporate welfare’
Two very contradictory stories about British capitalism are told today. The first is that the State is eating up more and more of the private sector. The sudden increase of public shares in the major banks and the falling of the railways into receivership is evidence of a return to the nationalisations of the 1970s. Some on the left even take heart from this, and urge the government to go the whole way and nationalise the banks. The Sunday Times runs stories warning of ‘Soviet Britain’, to show that in many towns in Britain (and especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland) state spending is a majority of output.
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Tags: 2009, Britain, Capital, Capitalist, corporate welfare, english, government, management, privatisation
Science reinvents the economy: An economy in a computer
Jun 25, 2009 Economy
Magazine issue 2711. New Scientist
More: Can science reinvent the economy?
Can we pack an entire economy, with all its complex human and political interactions, into a computer? Physicist Dirk Helbing of ETH thinks so – as long as we’re bold enough in going about it.
He points out that financial systems aren’t the only monsters we’ve let out of the box. How traffic flows in and around huge cities simply cannot be grasped by mathematical analysis, but computer models let millions of virtual vehicles interact on realistic road patterns – and often discover potential problems before they occur in reality.
The complexity of today’s economy, Helbing suggests, demands a similar approach. “We’re not currently using the best capabilities of science,” he says. “We need to bring together scientists from different fields and put together tools that can be used as a kind of wind tunnel for testing out social and economic policies.”
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Tags: 2009, Capital, Capitalist, computer, english, Knowledge, Market, model, Postcapital, science, text
Marx: the quest, the path, the destination
May 22, 2009 Politics
Alexander Kluge’s nine-and-a-half hour long film of Marx’s “Kapital” is not a minute too long says Helmut Merker
What is a revolutionary? The writings of Marx and Engels both use the metaphor of revolution as the “locomotive of history”. Is, then, the revolutionary a standard bearer of progress, a pace setter, a frontrunner?
None of the above, because in a world ruled by a turbo “devaluation” where only the new has market value, where commodity production spirals out of control, the “train of time” is a deadly trend. Alexander Kluge instead opts for Walter Benjamin’s idea of the revolution as mankind “pulling the emergency brake“. We must hold up the torch of reason to the problems at hand, and the true revolutionary is therefore the one who can unite future and past, merging two times, two societies, the artist who montages stories and history. And so we come to Alexander Kluge and his art.
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Tags: 2009, Alexander Kluge, Capital, Das Kapital, Eisenstein, english, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Kapital, Marx, Revolution
New Deal for Cultural Employment
May 22, 2009 City
By Carla Bodo
It is by now widely recognised that connecting culture and employment as a promising job reservoir in our post industrial countries (Delors, 1992) is not at all automatic. It is rather the outcome of robust and well devised cultural policies – with a clever mix of regulations and financial incentives in support of cultural activities and the cultural industries – carried out at the different levels of government: national, regional, local, as well as European.
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Tags: 2009, Carla Bodo, Cultural Employment, Cultural Policies, english
Digital Library of Slovenia
May 18, 2009 City
Digital Library of Slovenia: Developing Cultural Digital Content, Interconnectind Digital Sources and Enabling Free Access to Knowledge
Zoran Krstulović
Tags: Archive, english, Free access, Knowledge, Slovenia, Video
Distorted Morality
May 18, 2009 Politics
Noam Chomsky Lecture
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4054523048548733881Speech at Harvard University about America’s war on terror.
Tags: 2006, America, english, Hardvard, Noam Chomsky, Terror, Video
Examined Life. Astra Taylor
Apr 21, 2009 City
Interview: Astra Taylor, Director EXAMINED LIFE
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and raised in Athens, Georgia, 29-year-old writer and filmmaker, Astra Taylor is a good case study for a life well-lived. Unschooled until she was a preteen and raised by two independent thinkers to become one herself, Taylor currently occupies herself with wrangling high intellectual pursuits and philosophical theories into wonderful pieces of cinema. Her non-traditional upbringing, or as she calls it, her “super weirdo hippy background,” stood her in good stead, providing a strong sense of confidence and an affirmation in her own abilities and artistic vision.
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Tags: Astra Taylor, Avital Ronell, Cornel West, english, Judith Butler, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Peter Singer, Slavoj Žižek, Video
