Research Journals

I found this book, History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, London, Merlin Press 1971-1990, very enlightening, confirming my interest in Marx and consolidating the idea to inquire the possibility of working with dialectical materialism as a methodology for my PhD. Thus I have transcribed copious notes from this book, interspersed with a few notes to myself where further to look, in terms of the continuity of this type of thought, as well as its critique. Publishing those notes in this group may or may not be of value to anyone else, I do it nevertheless.

Welcome Clemens. Clemens has just joined the Peer Preview Group. He has been with us for a while and has also shared some articles with us, such as this one:
http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/165 and also this one http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/520
Now Clemens is about to write chapter 1 of his thesis and once done will share it with us he said. So maybe others would also like to say hello to him and maybe Clemens might want to add to this introduction. As an Austrian living in Berlin, how do you get on with the Prussians?

This is a reading list featuring Marxist economists and theorists writing on the history and philosophy of science and technology. The list was compiled with the help of Richard Barbrook over two long evenings and consolidated by more research online.

As promised, Geert's chapter on media art from his book Zero Commments. I think some of points are valid, although on the whole the critique is too sweeping and presents a one sided picture of what media art is. Leaving all the critical threads out and then saying its all too conformistic if obviously a polemical move. My final opinion I have not been able to formulate as I feel I can currently not write an opinionated article. I would rather do more research and then write something well founded which does not need to be polemical to be convincing.

Non-radical notes from the beach.

This is a relatively short mental note to myself, an attempt to address a basic methodological issue which I have been thinking about while reading economic and political theory over the past few days. I don't mean to address all the issues relating to practice-led PhDs. This is also not specifically about my own work, although I am affected by it. The problem which poses myself in renewed urgency is as follows.

Towards a film; a few written notes from many mental ones that are mainly in my memory.

The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry

Animal becomes and animal succumbs.
Narrative allows a human place in a system devoid of explanation.
It was not our fault.
The mischievous spirit, the witch, the seal.
Misfortune in the village.
A woman who talks.

The skin is a beholden for the man who finds it.
man covets, man keeps, man writes.
The word is that She caused the trouble.
But there is a child.
The womb is troublesome as it tells its own history,

I just wanted to post something in uncommons that was not related wholly to any one topic but addressed a few points in a language that is not too formal. I am slowly getting around to the reading of your first chapter doll, a more detailed reading of armins chapter first then yours.

Notes on Das Altern der Moderne1 by Peter Bürger. Peter Bürger, Professor emeritus for literature and aesthtic theory, author of the Theory of the Avant-Garde2, a seminal text in art theory of the 20th century, in this collection of articles written between 1983 and 2000, re-examines some of the main concepts already at the heart of his earlier work, such as the difference between Modernism and the avant-garde, the historic avant-garde's often repeated ambition of bringing art and life together, and what constitutes the failure as well as the success of those movements. While the hopes of the historic avant-garde of permanent transformations of the social world were not rewarded, avant-garde ideas, slogans, strategies and aesthetic methodologies of the Futurists, dadaists and Surrealists have found a permanent place in the cultural 'history' by having entered the endless recycling relationships of contemporary culture via popular culture. Slightly different the case, then with Modernism, because it never had, or purpoted not to have, such a strong social agenda, yet here the name of the art movement is identical with the name of an age: modernity. In this respect, Bürger asks the fascinating question about the aging of modernity and how we became postmodern (or not).

• 1. Bürger P. 
  2001.  Das Altern der Moderne : Schriften zur bildenden Kunst.
• 2. Bürger, Peter. 
  1984.  Theory of the avant-garde.