Organic Intellectual Work: Interview with Andrew Ross [REVISED]
http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/interview-with-andrew-ross/ Organic Intellectual Work Interview with Andrew Ross By Geert Lovink Does cultural studies scholar and labour activist Andrew Ross need to be introduced? I became familiar with the work of U.S. American researcher of Scottish decent in the early nineties when his co-edited anthology Techno-Cultureand books No Respectand Strange Weatherreached wide audiences. His highly readable books deal with a range of topics from sweatshop labour, the creative office culture of the dotcoms, middle class utopias of the Disney town Celebration to China's economic culture as a global player. For outsiders, Andrew Ross might embody the 'celebrity' persona of academia, but he is someone I experienced as modest and open, a prolific writer who is very much on top of the issues. To me Andrew Ross has been a role model of how to reconcile the world of High Theory with the down-to-earth work within social movements, a tension that I have been struggling with since the late seventies. Reading Andrew Ross makes you wonder why it is so hard to be an organic intellectual after all, as Antonio Gramsci once described it, a figure which is light-years away from the abstract universes of the Italian autonomous theorists such as Negri, Virno and Lazzarato. No esoteric knowledge of Spinoza, Tarde or Deleuze is necessary to enjoy Ross. We do not read about exploitation in a moralistic manner but instead obtain a deeper understanding of the complex contradictions that the global work force has to deal with. Australian post-doc researcher Melissa Gregg, whose book Affective Voicesdeals with the history of (Anglo-Saxon) cultural studies, includes a chapter about Andrew Ross. Gregg describes Ross as an "intellectual arbiter between the academic politics of cultural studies and the activist imperatives of the progressive Left." His "academic activism" describes the "human cost of economic growth," thereby counterbalancing the "neglect of material labour conditions." Instead of fiddling around with concepts and terminologies, Ross describes the "human face of economics" much like Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative journalism, reaching into the category of airport non-fiction. The suspicious attitude towards appropriate payment is the key obstacle to an effective labourist politics among Leftist intellectuals. In the case of the no collar culture "not only did the culture of willing overwork severely haemorrhage any chance of a sustainable industry, but investment in the cult of creativity disassociated no collar work from the manual labour involved in producing the tools of their craft." In the following email exchange with Andrew we focused on the topics of research methodology and style of writing, the role of ethnography, the question of creative labour and strategies of activism. GL: Suppose you were to write one of those booklets and we would entitle it Letter to a Young Researcher. How would you approach this? Could you tell us something about your method? Is it fair enough to say that you moved on from General Theory to case studies? Clearly, students need to know about both, but I have the feeling that theory is a dead end street these days and that your research methodology offers an alternative. AR: Since I came of age, intellectually and politically, in the 1970s, I was a paid-up member of the Theory Generation, dutifully participating in Lacan and Althusser reading groups, and the like. But even then, I was rarely comfortable with the hothouse climate around what you call General Theory. Even then, I was learning that theory should be approached as simply a way of getting from A to B. It wasn't the only way to get from A to B, nor was it always the best way, and it was easy to get stuck en route with all your mental wheels spinning in the air. Indeed, I saw some of the best minds of my generation--to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg--vanish down that path. I'm glad I survived, I've been in recovery for two decades now. When it comes to method--and this is what I tell my graduate students--it's more important to know what A and B are. Once you have a good sense of your object and the questions you want to answer, then you are in a position to choose your methods--i.e. how to get from A to B. In most disciplines, the method comes first, and is then applied to an object. For us, it's the other way around. The questions and the goals determine the methods. So, how will I answer those questions? Do I need to do interviews, or conduct surveys? Do I need to visit sites, or consult archives? What kind of reading do I need to do, and what is the likely audience? In the program where I teach, our students are trained in more than one method--ethnography, historical inquiry, textual analysis, data analysis--and are encouraged to be flexible in their application. They are much more likely to think of themselves as in
Textile Activism: Srebrenica Memorial Quilt Unites Massacre Survivors in Bosnia and America
* AdvocacyNet News Bulletin 110 * Srebrenica Memorial Quilt Unites Massacre Survivors in Bosnia and America July 10, 2007, St. Louis, United States: Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and the United States have joined forces to launch a large, hand-woven quilt in memory of more than 8,000 men and boys who were killed in the massacre. The quilt was unveiled in public for the first time on Sunday at a religious ceremony in St. Louis, which is home to more than 45,000 Bosnian refugees, including around 5,000 former inhabitants of Srebrenica. Men, women and children paused in silence at the quilt, and many laid flowers. The quilt measures around two square meters and comprises 20 panels, each carrying the name of a massacre victim. The panels were hand-woven by five women weavers from Bosfam, a women's organization in Bosnia that brings together women who lost relatives in the massacre. One weaver, Nura Suljic, lost her brother, brother-in-law, father-in-law and cousin in the massacre. Her husband is also missing. The Bosfam weavers are using the quilt to reach out to the large, Bosnian diaspora in the US, in the hope of keeping the message of Srebrenica alive. They have also offered to make new panels for any Bosnian family that lost a relative in the massacre. This way, they hope that the quilt can move around diaspora communities outside Bosnia, growing in size and generating publicity. "It's a great idea," said Rusmin Topalovic, Vice President of the Association for the Survivors of Genocide in Srebrenica, a community group in St. Louis. "I'm sure plenty of relatives will want to commission panels." The quilt was brought to St. Louis on behalf of Bosfam by The Advocacy Project (AP), which has supported Bosfam's advocacy since 2002. Alison Morse, a graduate student at Tufts University is volunteering with Bosfam this summer as an AP Peace Fellow and is helping Bosfam to manage the quilt. Meanwhile, in Bosnia itself, thousands of Srebrenica relatives and survivors will gather tomorrow at the site of the massacre to mark the 12th anniversary and rebury around 460 massacre victims who have been identified during the past year. Among those attending will be the Bosfam weavers and several families from St. Louis who lost relatives. Srebrenica is the largest mass killing to have taken place on European soil since the end of World War II. The town was besieged by the Bosnian Serbs for three years before finally falling on July 11, 1995. All men and boys over the age of 15 were separated from the women, and taken off to be killed. The women and children were bussed to territory held by Bosnian Muslims. Memories of Srebrenica remain vivid for many of the survivors in St. Louis. Nihad Sinanovic was 11 when he escaped the town in 1993, at the height of the Bosnian siege. His father, Resid, was among thousands who set off through the woods in July 1995 in an attempt to reach safety, only to be captured and killed. "Every year it's the same," said Mr Sinanovic, who today runs a successful business in St. Louis. "We meet and ask the same questions. What actually happened? How come the killers are still free? It's impossible to put it to rest and move on." Also on Sunday, at a reception in St. Louis, 210 Bosnian refugees signed a new petition calling for the arrest of Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the two former Bosnian Serb leaders held most responsible for the massacre. Both men have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, but remain at large. The arrest petition has been drawn up by the Center for Balkan Development, and co-signed by The Advocacy Project, Physicians for Human Rights, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and the Congress of North American Bosniaks, which lobbies from Washington on behalf of grassroots advocates like the St. Louis survivors. Nihad Sinanovic was one of those who appealed for signatures on Sunday in St. Louis. "Help us heal the wounds of the many relatives who lost their loved ones. Help us bring the perpetrators to justice and bring closure to the families," he said, to loud applause. * For media coverage of the quilt launch in St. Louis, visit http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/ story/3248D 74C6D4647DB862573130013FE59?OpenDocument * For background on the quilt project, including a map of those commemorated and profiles of the weavers, visit http://advocacynet.org/page/quilt * To sign the arrest petition, visit http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/arrest_mladic_karadzic/index.html or visit the CBD website http://www.balkandevelopment.org/timeforjustice/ * For Alison Morse's blogs, visit http://advocacynet.org/blogs/index.php?blog=88 AdvocacyNet is a service of The Advocacy Project (AP) that is offered to advocates working for human rights and social justice at the community level. AP is based in Washington, DC. Pho
Re: Essay, minus poor translations of punctuation.
Patrick Lichty schrieb: > as opposed to Manovich, Csuri, Kluver, Ascott, Davies, Verostko, Cosic, > Schwartz, et al. That IS a neat list, but I guess, you know that. :) Anyway, thanks for that insightful piece. Yet, one questions remains: how many square meters of valuable MOMA space does this show actually take? For someone who can only look at the website it seems a bit like a show that you can fit into a room, with all those videos etc... -- Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel Film Institute, College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines www.tilmanbaumgaertel.net # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Organic Intellectual Work: Interview with Andrew Ross
Organic Intellectual Work Interview with Andrew Ross By Geert Lovink Does cultural studies scholar and labour activist Andrew Ross need to be introduced? I became familiar with the work of U.S. American researcher of Scottish decent in the early nineties when his co-edited anthology Techno-Cultureand books No Respectand Strange Weatherreached wide audiences. His highly readable books deal with a range of topics from sweatshop labour, the creative office culture of the dotcoms, middle class utopias of the Disney town Celebration to China's economic culture as a global player. For outsiders, Andrew Ross might embody the 'celebrity' persona of academia, but he is someone I experienced as modest and open, a prolific writer who is very much on top of the issues. To me Andrew Ross has been a role model of how to reconcile the world of High Theory with the down-to-earth work within social movements, a tension that I have been struggling with since the late seventies. Reading Andrew Ross makes you wonder why it is so hard to be an organic intellectual after all, as Antonio Gramsci once described it, a figure which is light-years away from the abstract universes of the Italian autonomous theorists such as Negri, Virno and Lazzarato. No esoteric knowledge of Spinoza, Tarde or Deleuze is necessary to enjoy Ross. We do not read about exploitation in a moralistic manner but instead obtain a deeper understanding of the complex contradictions that the global work force has to deal with. Australian post-doc researcher Melissa Gregg, whose book Affective Voicesdeals with the history of (Anglo-Saxon) cultural studies, includes a chapter about Andrew Ross. Gregg describes Ross as an "intellectual arbiter between the academic politics of cultural studies and the activist imperatives of the progressive Left." His "academic activism" describes the "human cost of economic growth," thereby counterbalancing the "neglect of material labour conditions." Instead of fiddling around with concepts and terminologies, Ross describes the "human face of economics" much like Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative journalism, reaching into the category of airport non-fiction. The suspicious attitude towards appropriate payment is the key obstacle to an effective labourist politics among Leftist intellectuals. In the case of the no collar culture "not only did the culture of willing overwork severely haemorrhage any chance of a sustainable industry, but investment in the cult of creativity disassociated no collar work from the manual labour involved in producing the tools of their craft." In the following email exchange with Andrew we focused on the topics of research methodology and style of writing, the role of ethnography, the question of creative labour and strategies of activism. GL: Suppose you were to write one of those booklets and we would entitle it Letter to a Young Researcher. How would you approach this? Could you tell us something about your method? Is it fair enough to say that you moved on from General Theory to case studies? Clearly, students need to know about both, but I have the feeling that theory is a dead end street these days and that your research methodology offers an alternative. AR: Since I came of age, intellectually and politically, in the 1970s, I was a paid-up member of the Theory Generation, dutifully participating in Lacan and Althusser reading groups, and the like. But even then, I was rarely comfortable with the hothouse climate around what you call General Theory. Even then, I was learning that theory should be approached as simply a way of getting from A to B. It wasn't the only way to get from A to B, nor was it always the best way, and it was easy to get stuck en route with all your mental wheels spinning in the air. Indeed, I saw some of the best minds of my generation--to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg--vanish down that path. I'm glad I survived, I've been in recovery for two decades now. When it comes to method--and this is what I tell my graduate students--it's more important to know what A and B are. Once you have a good sense of your object and the questions you want to answer, then you are in a position to choose your methods--i.e. how to get from A to B. In most disciplines, the method comes first, and is then applied to an object. For us, it's the other way around. The questions and the goals determine the methods. So, how will I answer those questions? Do I need to do interviews, or conduct surveys? Do I need to visit sites, or consult archives? What kind of reading do I need to do, and what is the likely audience? In the program where I teach, our students are trained in more than one method--ethnography, historical inquiry, textual analysis, data analysis--and are encouraged to be flexible in their application. They are much more likely to think of themselves as investigators, undertaking case-studies, rather than being motivated
more about money
The age of money Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it is as a world 'market'. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of it and most don't have enough. The unequal face of the age of money is 'capitalism'; and the principal source of that inequality has been a machine revolution whose uneven development is only two centuries old. The combination of money and machines is the engine pushing humanity from the village to the city as our normal habitat. The result is a polarized world society that resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime, with an isolated elite controlling the destiny of powerless human masses to whose fate they are largely indifferent.[1] <#_edn1> A lot hinges on where in human evolution we imagine the world is today. I think of us as being like the first digging-stick operators, primitives stumbling into the invention of agriculture. The second half of the twentieth century brought the peoples of the world closer together as never before. Future generations will be interested in us for the single interactive social network we formed then. This has two striking features: it is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers fuelled by a money circuit that has become progressively detached from production and politics; and it is driven by a digital revolution in communications whose symbol is the internet. Three developments of the last two decades have been decisive: 1. The collapse of the Soviet Union, opening up the world to transnational capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies. 2. The entry of China's and India's two billion people, a third of humanity, into the world market as powers in their own right and the globalization of capital accumulation, for the first time loosening the grip of the US and Europe on the global economy. 3. The shortening of time and distance brought about by the communications revolution. The corollary of this revolution is a counter-revolution, the reassertion of state power since September 11^th and the imperialist war for oil in the Middle East. Certainly humanity has regressed from the hopes for freedom and equality released by the Second World War and the anti-colonial revolution that followed it. If society is now caught between national and global forms, neo-liberalism has opened up a range of political options -- from transnational association via the internet and regional trading blocs to new patterns of local enterprise and co-operation. Anthropology is indispensable to the making of world society: not the current academic discipline as such, but rather in Kant's sense of what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a world fit for everyone.[2] <#_edn2> This use of 'anthropology' could also be embraced by students of history, sociology, political economy, philosophy and literature. Ethnography was a revolutionary move a century ago. For the first time, professionals left academic seclusion to join people where they live in order to find out what they do and think. But it will not help us much to understand money and world society now. The mystery of money The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. (John Kenneth Galbraith) The film, Money as Debt seeks to explain where money comes from.[3] <#_edn3> All members of capitalist societies live by money, yet there is remarkably little curiosity concerning its source. Most people probably imagine that the government issues the money they use and that, under its surveillance, banks lend amounts that are covered by assets such as gold and property or at least by cash deposits. In fact, over 95% of the money in circulation is issued by banks whenever they make a loan. The 'fractional reserve system' traditionally constrained them to lend up to nine times the value of deposits with the central bank; but this ratio has since increased and in some cases no longer exists. The real basis of money is thus our signature whenever we promise to repay a loan. The banks create that money by a stroke of the pen and the promise is then bought and sold in increasingly complex ways. The total debt incurred by government, corporations, small businesses and consumers spirals continuously upwards since interest must be paid on it all. The film briefly mentions some possible remedies, including local currencies. This attempt to demystify money is admirable, but it addresses a North American audience in terms that never move beyond the assumptions of twentieth-century national society. It says nothing about the current world economic crisis. This has features that are well enough advertised in the media. The huge trade and budget deficits of the US economy are financed principally by Japan, China, the Gulf States and
