Notes

About 2 weeks ago it became horribly clear I was stalled on finishing my chapter on the Hong Kong case study. I had done 3/4 of it, but i had no ideas for the final section. Days of a blank screen.

So i eventually went to the library and borrowed some of those comforting books on how to write a thesis. many of them were quite dull, but one is great ..i had read it before but had forgotten some of the good, advice...title is "writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day" by joan bolker

The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge, by Francois Lyotard, first published in French in 1979, was not the first book to carry the word postmodern in its title, but probably one of the most influential ones in the long term, with both its warnings and sometimes its overly optimistic assumptions about the future of knowledge in a computerised society. Reading it now what is perplexing is the rather one-sided reception it has got. While Lyotard's critique of meta-narratives and the proposed switch to language games has characterised the postmodern debate, his ambiguity about the development of science and the university under the condition of neoliberalism appears to have been given much less consideration by his followers.

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.

Non-radical notes from the beach.

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,

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.

This book by the French master historian is probably one of the most influential in research methodologies. One point of critique to be kept in mind is by F.Kittler who says that Foucault's method only works for periods in history which are mainly marked by book production and that he had no way of transferring that methodology to the age of electronic media. Not entirely sure if Kittler is right as he puts so much emphasis on the 'media apriori'.

hello on a rainy sat morning in vienna,

as you may have noticed i did an upgrade yesterday, which was 3 hours of cold sweat but succeeded in the end. pictures now also can be edited again with all the tags, etc.

some further small improvements have been made:
pictures can now be posted also in groups, which means that if the right group is chosen and public uncheckled the image is only visible for logged in group members.

maybe it is neighbourly to share the fruits of some of the grunt labour we do as students...the typing up of notes from books .. in the hope that we can weave some of these notes from big brains and minor poets through our own writings ..or use them to generate new trains of thoughts and aesthetic experiments

in that spirit i hereby post the few quotes i got from latour today ..honestly i find his theory hard, but sometimes i think its ok to skate around theory, and interpret it in your own way ... he has a nice turn of phrase anyway...

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i have never done a detailed chapter breakdown

so all i have is this big-picture guide (which changes every year or so), and then the detailed chapter contents i do (and keep changing), as write up each chapter

i have posted a page of typical feedback from my principal supervisor -- sometimes he will email me 3 or 4 pages of typed notes ..othertimes ..if i am in sydney (where my uni is) we meet and he gives me hand written notes as marginalia on a print out of my chapter ..these seem legible when we talk thru them..but once i return to adelaide i realise i can't read his handwriting!