FCJManager
FCJ-022 From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: ‘My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be’. Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour? With the…
Issue 05 – Precarious Labour
Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour Broadly speaking, this issue of Fibreculture Journal is interested in the problem of political organisation as it relates to the overlapping spheres of labour and life within post-Fordist, networked settings. It’s becoming increasingly clear that multiple forms of exclusion and exploitation within the media and cultural industries run along the lines of gender, ethnicity, age, and geography. New forms of class division are emerging whose locus of tension can be attributed to the ownership and control of information. The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances, with the flexible nature of work across many sectors of the media and cultural industries. And it is precisely the informatisation of social relations that makes political organisation such a difficult – even undesireable – undertaking for many. Without recourse to traditional institutions such as the union, new technics of organisation are…
FCJ-021 Rhythmic Parasites: A Virological Analysis of Sound and Dance
Stamatia Portanova East London University Introduction This paper sets out a conceptual analysis of rhythm as a force of disruption and of re-organisation. By disentangling rhythm from human corporeality, habits and purposes (rhythm as a prerogative of human movement), we will propose its re-qualification as an attribute of matter itself: rhythm as a galvanising current flowing in and between all human, animal and technological, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic bodies, simultaneously dissolving their solid organisations and re-modelling their fluid exchanges. Being supported by an ontological dichotomy, most philosophical or musicological theories have perpetuated the difference between rhythm as a mechanical and broken repetition of units subject to physical laws (as in Plato’s essentialist theory of rhythm), and rhythm as an organic, uncontrolled and continuously flowing expression of the natural world (coinciding with phenomenological notions such as Henri Bergson’s ‘duration’). [1] In order to escape this philosophical impasse, the aim…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction [print_link] In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the champions…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the champions…
FCJ-019 Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens – Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information
Jussi Parikka Department of Cultural History, University of Turku, Finland As an analogy to a computer virus, consider a biological disease that is 100% infectious, spreads whenever animals communicate, kills all infected animals instantly at a given moment, and has no detectable side effects until that moment. If a delay of even one week were used between the introduction of the disease and its effect, it would be very likely to leave only a few remote villages alive, and would certainly wipe out the vast majority of modern society. If a computer virus of this type could spread throughout the computers of the world, it would likely stop most computer usage for a significant period of time, and wreak havoc on modern government, financial, business, and academic institutions. (Fred Cohen, 1984) We feel that “The Virus” is the “stranger”, the “other”, in our machine, a sort of digital sans papier—uncontrollable…
FCJ-018 Living Dead Networks
Eugene Thacker School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology Contagion and Transmission In contemporary popular culture, ideas about contagion are often tied up with ideas about information transmission. The film 28 Days Later, for instance, opens with a harrowing scene in which primates undergo medical experiments by being exposed to large doses of violent media images. Though the link between these images and the ‘rage virus’ that takes over the British Isles is never explained, the film abstractly puts forth the idea that there is some relation between media image and biological virus. The Japanese horror film Ringu takes this a step further, imaging a videotape, which causes its viewer to suffer a mysterious death. Rumors about the videotape begin circulating and the videotape itself becomes a kind of vector for the contagious and ultimately fatal images. But it is not only in film that such connections…
Issue 04 – Contagion and the Diseases of Information
We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 108) This issue of Fibreculture Journal, dedicated as it is to an exploration of the matter of contagion and the diseases of information, may be usefully read in the context of the political, ethical and theoretical problem of resistance, such as it was outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in 1991. Indeed, the connection which Deleuze and Guattari make – between an excess of communication and a lack of resistance – suggests very strongly the possibility of an epidemiological determination of contemporary politics, and this in a number of senses. As is well known, contagious disease thrives amongst populations characterised by a great deal of contact and little resistance, which is why school playgrounds, the workplace and battlefields have traditionally provided the…
FCJ-017 Material Cultural Evolution: An Interview with Niles Eldredge
Belinda Barnet, Swinburne University of Technology Niles Eldredge, City University of New York Niles Eldredge is good at collecting things, particularly fossils. He is Adjunct Professor of Biology and Geology at the City University of New York, and has been a palaeontologist for nearly forty years. His personal specialty is trilobites – a group of extinct arthropods that lived roughly 540-245 million years ago. Eldredge examines the fossil record of trilobites to determine their evolutionary history, demarcating lineages based on the way their form has changed over time. His ultimate goal is to develop a better understanding of how the biological evolutionary process works to produce the patterns of history he sees in his trilobites. Collecting fossils is a passion. In 1972, Eldredge developed the theory of ‘punctuated equilibria’ with Stephen Jay Gould. This is a revision of Darwinian theory that debunked a reigning assumption in paleontology at the time;…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
