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Notes for Week 10 Presentation

Robert Horsfield — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 14:43:06 GMT

Notes for week 10 presentation

Attachments (follow link to download)

week_10_notes_for_presentation.docx (132 KB)

Re: The Agony of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Ada Cheong — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 21:50:56 GMT

This was the article I mentioned in class, about the garment company that tried to pay more ethical wages: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/factory-apparel-industry-ethical/546419/

- It presents an alternative to the problem that Lucy raised, about ethical consumption being a luxury: consumers only have to pay 90 cents more.

- On the other hand, this could allow consumers (admittedly a very generalised category in my usage) to feel ethical while still underpaying labour. It allows them to feel good while overlooking the still-existing gulf, between wages and the socially necessary labour time which goes into producing a commodity. 'Living-wage' is better than before, tripling wages in this case - but is this good enough?

- It blames exploitative conditions on structural processes rather than villanising certain players: "I think what we learned from Alta Gracia is that managers often are tasked with the industry's dirty work. They are given an untenable amount of money to produce goods, and then they have to push workers to work off the clock, and long garments."

- In facing such systemic forces, any sense of agency thus disappears and there is a resulting sense of determinism and fatalism. On the one hand, this absolves us from playing the 'blame game' which isn't always productive. On the other, it lulls us into a false sense of inertia since no single agent is responsible and can be seen as a starting point to improve the system.

The Agony of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Nicholas Lawrence — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 13:29:16 GMT

A few links regarding the controversy over the factual integrity of Daisey's monologue, below:

A 2012 CBS story, “The Dark Side of Shiny Apple Products,” on Mike Daisey’s performance piece (with excerpts), positioning it within the frame of investigative journalism:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57367950/

The original adapted-for-radio broadcast of Mike Daisey’s piece on This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

The subsequent retraction of the broadcast, itself taking up an entire episode of This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction?act=0#play

A Washington Post ‘opinion blog’ detailing the ‘truth vs. facts’ of Daisey’s performance:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/mike-daisey-truth-vs-facts/2012/03/16/gIQA0T3uGS_blog.html

A New York Times article, “In China, Human Costs are Built into an iPad,” by reporter Charles Duhigg:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all

A handwringing piece by James Fallows of The Atlantic on the fallout from the Daisey affair:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-sad-and-infuriating-mike-daisey-case/254661/

And one of the few critical examinations of the story, drawing attention to some of the contexts for the firestorm over Daisey’s show, including corporate support for National Public Radio shows like Marketplace:

http://theatreideas.blogspot.co.uk/2012_04_15_archive.html

In light of the NPR episode, and in keeping with our focus on the environmental aspect of media communications, a few points for consideration:

- Daisey’s play belongs to a genre of performance monologues that includes the work of writers and actors such as Wallace Shawn and Spaulding Gray, as well as that of activist filmmakers such as Michael Moore. Comparing Daisey with these artists, we might ask what the ‘rules’ of the genre entail.

- Consider the various institutions implicated in the Daisey affair – corporations, journalism outlets, governments, trade associations, NGOs, etc. Exercise: draw a ‘map of the field,’ Bourdieu-style, involving the various players in the story.

- The retraction episode aired on This American Life lays great emphasis on Daisey’s departure from the facts of what he witnessed first-hand during his visit to Foxconn in Shenzen. In both journalist and theatre circles Daisey’s inventions are often referred to as a ‘betrayal.’ What is the nature of this betrayal?

- The Daisey affair has parallels with a famous episode involving the testimonial narrative I, Rigoberta Menchú, the story of a peasant woman recounting her witness of US-supported government killings in 1980s Guatemala. With the Menchú story in mind, it may be useful to discuss the implications of truth-telling as a function of personal life-narrative vs. the accountability of collective testimony.

Weather

Ada Cheong — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 15:53:37 GMT

Lisa Robertson: A Report on Sincerity http://www.dcpoetry.com/anthology/242

Kenneth Goldsmith reading the weather - http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Goldsmith-Weather.html

Week 7 - The Forgotten Space

Philippa Towlson — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:46:54 GMT

World Literature and the Anthropocene - Week 7

Clip from ‘The Forgotten Space’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDyD40-cyk

Selected quotes from/notes on the clip:
- ‘The unlikely story of a steel box that changed the world trading system…’
- ‘Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of exploit and adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery?’
- Does the shipping container ‘…throw the world out of balance?’
- ‘the centre of gravity in the maritime world has shifted East’
- ‘By the late 1970s, containers were the standard way of moving manufactured goods between the capitalist economies.’
- ‘Automation does not guarantee freedom from drudgery, it merely raises drudgery to a higher power.’
- ‘Between 1950-2010…global shipping tonnages increased by a rate more than nearly three times the population.’
- ‘The war against rust: washing, chipping, painting; washing, chipping, painting.’
- ‘The ability to ship these goods, has made it possible to produce large volumes, and the production of large volumes has brought down the prices.’
- constant shifting and shipping of production, labour and wealth, in the search of cheap labour - case in point: China and its increased economic dependence on ‘the maritime world’
- 13:10 / start- ‘A necessary condition is that capitalism must have high profits…The capitalist will relocate capital to areas where wages are lower.’ end / 14:04
- ’60% of China’s exports to the US are produced by American-owned multinational companies.’
- 100,000,000 young migrants from poor, rural areas of China currently fulfilling the industrial need for cheap labour
- 17:16 / start - ‘One question we can raise now…that will have serious implications for the viability of global capitalism in the future.’ end / 17:45

Other things that may be intersting look at:

* Website for ’The Forgotten Space’: http://www.theforgottenspace.net/static/photos.html
* Dona Haraway on the Chthulucene: http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf
* Blue Planet II controversy: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/23/captive-wildlife-footage-blue-planet-2-bbc1-totally-true-to-nature-say-producers
* David Harvey, The Space and Time of Value (Lecture): http://davidharvey.org/2016/11/david-harvey-marx-capital-lecture-4-space-time-value/

Sea Narratives

Lucy White — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:28:27 GMT

Hi gang, this is the Nature is Talking video I was thinking of where Harrison Ford is the Ocean https://www.conservation.org/nature-is-speaking/Pages/Harrison-Ford-Is-the-Ocean.aspx there are quite a few of them.

Re: Supplementary to Week 6

Lucy White — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 23:54:19 GMT

Hey - so these are some notes I put together on The Water Knife

Week 6- The Water Knife - Paolo Bacigalupi

Background: ”The Water Knife" grew out of a short story, "The Tamarisk Hunters," that first appeared in the environmental journal High Country News. In that story, Bacigalupi imagined a drought-plagued Southwest where "water ticks" eked out a dessicated existence next to an aqueduct that hurtled water to the wealthy, sealed-off city of Los Angeles. The penalty for stealing water: forced labor and death.” (Hamilton, 2015). Paolo Bacigalupi is generally a YA writer, writing alternative lifeworld fiction.

Genre-bending: The text is quite difficult to categorise or describe in a particular genre or movement. There are elements of neo-noir, Sci-fi, Speculative fiction, Distopian Fiction and Biopunk.

The Water Knife presents caricatured late-capitalism. The idolatry of ‘the Skinny Woman’ and the aspirational goals of an LA residency permit. The book also works into the idea of depletion and overconsumption leading to centralisation.

There are clear parallels between the opium wars, the oil wars and these — the water wars. From gang style turf warfare to corporate espionage and police bribing, for every ‘water knife’ there is an arms dealer or spy in previous commodity wars.
Differences - largely female character set, which is interesting given the masculinity associated with late capital. I don’t really understand this creative decision. Given the regimes in the text are fascistic is this female leadership realistic? (c.f. Adorno - Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda) Interesting too is the gender inversion of natural disasters, natural disasters such as storms are often described ‘she’, but in the text the drought is called "Big Daddy Drought,” perhaps laying the blame at the feet of capitalist patriarchy.

I was interested in Lucy Monroe as a character, her profession reminded me of the ruin-porn in Detroit (One example is Moore’s Detroit project) and what it looks like being post-industrial.

Problematic elements of the text: The Geisha style AI sex-robots — The idea of AI and its limitations is discussed across Bacigalupi’s work — particularly in Future Tense, a slate project in which he discussed whether an AI sex robot is capable of murder both manifestly and legally. However, within the context of the novel, what is this trying to say? Sex the next natural thing to be commodified? The next war after water? Interesting that the street girls’ services could be bought with a shower. Is the text guilty of ‘sexing up politics’ and titillation — do the gender issues in the text serve any purpose?

Interesting Reading
Hamilton, Denise. Amid a real drought, thriller 'Water Knife' cuts to the quick. LA Times. Web. 2015. <http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-paolo-bacigalupi-20150524-story.html>
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense.html
http://www.andrewlmoore.com/photography/detroit/

Adorno on masculinity in fascism - http://0-www.pep-web.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk

Supplementary to Week 6

Nicholas Lawrence — Sat, 04 Nov 2017 23:12:34 GMT

Several works offer useful context for reading Bacigalupi's dystopian novel: Cadillac Desert (1988) by Marc Reisner remains the classic environmental history of water politics in the American Southwest, while Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire provides a more scholarly wide-focus look at the links between US imperial expansion and control over water. Cadillac Desert was made into a documentary series in the late 1990s, available on Youtube -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkbebOhnCjA

I've attached reviews of Worster's book and an article of his comparing US and Chinese water systems. Note also that Andrew Ross's Bird on Fire gives a vivid overview of the grim future awaiting the nation's fastest-growing city, Phoenix, Arizona, a future that The Water Knife depicts in unsparing detail.

Attachments (follow link to download)

2011_5_the_flow_of_empire.pdf (1.4 MB)
stroshane-review_of_worster.pdf (1.4 MB)

Talk - “Bearing Witness to the Anthropocene”

Nicholas Lawrence — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 12:11:06 GMT

A talk sponsored by the European History Centre, “Bearing Witness to the Anthropocene” by Prof. Stef Craps (Ghent), takes place on Tuesday 24th October from 12 to 1pm in the Wolfson Research Exchange -

https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/research/priorities/connectingcultures/events/?calendarItem=8a17841a5ea40245015ebacdd0b71556

Presentations

Nicholas Lawrence — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 16:14:42 GMT

As James reminded me at the induction, we neglected to sign up for presentations last week. We can do so on Monday, but can I request a volunteer for the Week 2 readings?

The format is simple: summarise the argument as concisely as you can (with critical texts), then offer a few reflections and/or questions arising. The aim is to feed into class discussion rather than present a high-gloss stand-alone piece of research.

Please get in touch via email if you're willing to go up first.

Robert Macfarlane's "Generation Anthropocene"

Nicholas Lawrence — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 17:47:20 GMT

The literary environmentalist Robert Macfarlane published an influential essay in the Guardian last year, "Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet Forever" -

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever

and a followup roundtable was convened by the Open Library of Humanities, available here -

https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.153/

Welcome to the EN9B5 forum

Nicholas Lawrence — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 17:42:15 GMT

This is the space for exchanging notes, readings and links to items of interest for the module.