Re: <nettime> The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual 1/4

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

I think the thing to do, given that an 'event' like what
people still quite appallingly describe as '911' is
predicated in any scholarship in cultural history or 
critical theory, was to respond at the time in a 
critical way, in any way. Not to do so was complicity in the
turn of 'events'. For all the teaching, learning,
preparation in understanding the convoluted nature
of contemporary geopolitical culture, 

One should not think we are quite out of the woods. 
The scarcity of response can only encourage 
those who would put an end to art, to culture
and to lists like Nettime. 

The same is true of academic bad practice in
Internet. See AIR-L, see my forthcoming work.

Adorno and Benjamin? Benjamin asked the members
of thr frankfurt school to help him. They refused
they 'had family matters to deal with', they
'didn't really know', they said 'no'.

Never Again?

We'll see.

Lachlan



The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual 1/4
McKenzie Wark [version 3.0]


1. Media Times

"The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power
of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us."
Theodor Adorno was writing of the intellectual's
challenge in comprehending Hitler, but perhaps the
same injunction might apply to events of more recent
times. As with Hitler, so with Osama Bin Laden: both
might be, to a psychologist, pathological cases, but
"people thinking in the form of free, detached,
disinterested appraisal" are "unable to accommodate
within those forms the experience of violence which
in reality annuls such thinking."
 <...>

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