Paris, c'est moi!

Well, I've been back from the University of East London's "Cultural Studies Now--An International Conference" for almost a couple of weeks. I'd intended to write sooner, but my head's just been dizzy trying to process the event--and getting caught up. Funny, isn't it, how you often need a break after returning from a trip?

Overall, the conference was a good show. Anything with a keynote by Stuart Hall is bound to be excellent, as far as I'm concerned. I also enjoyed the plenary sessions featuring Kuan-Hsing Chen, who talked about "Asia as Method," and Ien Ang, who offered a provocative reflection on where cultural studies might be headed. I regret having missed Rosi Braidotti, though I'd never been to London before and, well, London was calling. The panels I attended generally were quite good, and for my part I was pleased to present my work-in-progress on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. Gil "Revolution on Stick" Rodman and Melissa "Home Cooked Theory" Gregg have posted their thoughts on the conference, so you might want to check out their responses, too.

As you can see from the subject header, this post isn't really about London, or about "Cultural Studies Now." It's about the side-trip I made after the conference to Paris, France. It's an amazing city, and it's long been a dream of mine to go there. I wasn't disappointed. The art museums, the food, the architecture, the people, the language--it's just a remarkable place. I'll have to go back sometime soon...and maybe next time my near non-existent French will be a bit more existent.

Last year, when I traveled to Italy, I made a point of swinging by Rome's Protestant Cemetery, where the Marxist activist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci is interred. In the same spirit I tried tracking down the burial sites of some of my favorite French philosophers before heading to Paris. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far. Michel Foucault apparently is buried somewhere in northern France, Jacques Derrida in a Parisian suburb. Félix Guattari may be interred at La Borde Clinic, where he worked, and who knows where Gilles Deleuze is?

Anyway, I did discover that France, unlike the United States, cares a great deal about its intellectuals. As such, the country has a habit of naming public places after the most prominent among them. I visited two such spots. The first was the Place Sartre-Beauvoir, which is a good-sized square located off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. There I had coffee at Les Deux Magots, which, along with Cafe de Flore, was one of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's favorite hangouts back in the day. I also dropped by the College de France, where I had the pleasure of stumbling across the Square Michel Foucault. I'm sure there must have been other, similar sites that I missed. Even so, it was a treat just to find these two. Both seemed to embody how people and their ideas can matter.


P.S. This is post #100 on Differences & Repetitions. Thanks to all for your readership, comments, and encouragement.

Harry Potter...stolen!

I wasn't planning on writing for another week or so, but this one's too good to pass up. I just caught this article in The New York Times about the final installment of the Harry Potter book series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, having made its way onto the internet. Someone got their hands on a copy of the book sometime before this Saturday's highly-anticipated release, photographed a good chunk of the pages, and then posted them online. I've checked around and, sure enough, there they are--at least, that is, until Potter's publishers get their act together and the takedown notices start flying!

Now, to all you Potter fans out there, you can rest assured that I'm not going to spoil any of the secrets. I like the books myself and respect your love of the series too much to do that. And to those of you who are hoping I'll spill the beans, sorry. You'll have to go elsewhere for that. My point in writing is to comment a bit on the Harry Potter security phenomenon. I talk about this at length in my upcoming book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, which includes a chapter called "Harry Potter and the Culture of the Copy." Here I'll make just a few offhanded observations.

First, I take this security meltdown, and those preceding the release of the previous two Potter installments, as an effect of what in The Late Age of Print I call "the mass production of scarcity." Think about it: 12 million copies of Deathly Hallows have been printed in the U.S. alone. By now they're in bookstores all over the country, doing absolutely nothing as they sit locked away in stock rooms...other than generating hype.

Since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the boy wizard's publishers have been enforcing what the book industry calls "global lay-down dates," which, the publishers say, ensure that the books' surprises remain sacrosanct. Clearly, they don't. Even so, global lay-down dates do perform a kind of magic: they make Harry Potter, a mass-produced commodity if there ever was one, disappear despite his sheer ubiquity. And as anyone who's taken Business 101 will tell you, scarcity tends to augment demand.

My second observation pertains to the fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows made its way online in the form of digital photographs rather than, say, scans. The folks over at PC World have noted that, in doing so, the culprit may well have inadvertently revealed her or his identity:

In an interesting development it appears that the person who took the pictures of the book left his camera meta info attached to the image files. This is significant because with the camera meta data you can extrapolate the serial number of the camera. And with that information and time authorities could track down who took the pictures.

Little did I--someone who studies digital culture--know that digital photos contain this kind of personal information. I suppose it's naive of me not to have realized this, since privacy is nothing if not compromised online. In the end, what a cautionary tale it will be if the pernicious Potter pilferer is apprehended because of the digital trace she or he has left behind.

And finally, despite most, if not all, of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' secrets already having been revealed, I have nothing but confidence that all 12 million copies of the book will eventually sell--and then some.

An informed citizenry

As you can see from my recent post about summer reading, I've been spending a good deal of time these past few weeks getting caught up on all sorts of good books. One that didn't make it onto the previous list, which I just finished, is Lawrence Lessig's Code v2.0 (Basic Books, 2006). Like Kittler's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, it's one of those books I should have read ages ago (in its original edition [1999]) but never quite managed to. It's smart, accessible, and, honestly, something that everybody living at the dawn of the 21st century ought to read.

The book, in a nutshell, is about two types of "code": what Lessig calls "East Coast code," or law, and "West Coast code," or the algorithms that make computers and other digital technologies work. There's too much depth and subtlety for me to do justice to the argument, but suffice it to say that Lessig's interested in the ways in which both types of code are (or can be) used to regulate digital environments. He seems most anxious about the increasing use of "West Coast code," since it tends to be private/proprietary and therefore exists significantly outside of democratic process. (And here, there's an obvious resonance with my own rants about digital rights management [DRM] technology.)

It occurred to me in reading Code v2.0 just how ill-equipped the American citizenry (myself included) is when it comes to living in the world Lessig describes. I gather that the vast majority of computer classes taught these days are geared toward basic "computer literacy." This I take to mean general instruction in how to run major commercial applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others. More advanced training in actual programming tends to occur in the realm of post-secondary education, and only then with a small, largely self-selected group.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think learning how to run major commercial applications is a problem per se. What is a problem, though, is that most of us knows next to nothing about what goes on "behind" the windows we see. Really, these windows are also screens, because they hide at least as much as they reveal. Put differently, most of us at best have only a basic working knowledge of West Coast code. And given all the ways in which, as Lessig shows, this type of code is coming to regulate our lives--quietly in the background, as it were--we need to know much, much more about how it works, and about how to manipulate it, in order to become a better informed citizenry.

I'm not saying that all we need to do is to become computer programmers in order to be better citizens. I don't buy the "netizen" argument, and I haven't fallen under the spell of The Matrix trilogy that much. I am saying that computer programming ought to be a primary subject taught in our schools, just like math, science, foreign languages, and social studies. It's not just a practical skill anymore. Increasingly, it's a matter of civic responsibility.

Michael Moore's Sicko

This past weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Moore's latest documentary, Sicko. If you're living in the United States, or if you're living elsewhere and are mystified by the U.S. health care system, you ABSOLUTELY MUST SEE IT! It's moving, powerful, funny, informative, and revealing--everything you'd expect from a Michael Moore documentary.

A couple of parts stood out most to me. The first revolved around a young man who, after receiving a cancer diagnosis, returned to his native France for treatment after living for a decade or so in the United States. Upon completing chemotherapy, the man's doctor asked him how much time he wanted off from work. This type of leave is customary in France, I gather, and it's 100% paid (65% by the government, 35% by one's employer). The young man decided to spend his time convalescing on the beaches in the South of France.

Now, the story itself wasn't what jumped out at me per se (though it's always profound when someone shares a story about her or his struggle with cancer). What did jump out was my own reaction; initially, I felt myself scoffing at the man's decision to spend three subsidized months relaxing in the South of France. Shouldn't he just get back to work, I wondered? Wasn't that an abuse of the system? It was at that moment that I realized just how engrained American health care ideology and moralism have become, even in me--someone who bends Left and who therefore ought to know better. I mean, c'mon...isn't it sensible to give someone a little bit of time off to gather strength and regroup, especially after having to fight the fight of one's life?

What also struck me most about Sicko was one particular line. I don't recall now who uttered it, but basically, it went something like this: "In the United States, the people are afraid of the government. Elsewhere, the government is afraid of the people." Now, I realize this must be something of an over-statement. Yet, it does cut right to the heart of why (a) people in the U.S. feel so disempowered politically, and (b) why the government can get away with so many abuses of civil liberties and the like. This is especially true under the current administration.

In the spirit of Sicko, I'll share one health care "horror" story of my own. Thankfully it didn't affect me directly, but it's shameful nonetheless. A dispute involving doctors at my local hospital and my insurance company resulted in the latter refusing to cover hospitalizations here in Bloomington, albeit with some exceptions (e.g., pregnancy). Their dispute dragged on and on for months. The bottom line was that each party's greed resulted in people like me essentially losing coverage at our local hospital. I can't imagine what I would have had to do in the event of an emergency, or if I had become ill. I suppose I would have had to drive 40 miles to the next closest "in-network" hospital.

All that to say, those of us living in the United States not only need to see Sicko, but more importantly, we need to change this broken health care system of ours. It can work more or less well, sometimes, but too often it's a disgrace.

Consumerism, cultural politics, & the Supremes

...no...not Diana Ross and the Supremes. This post is about the Supreme Court of the United States, and what its recent decision in the case Leegin v. PSKS can tell us about the state of cultural politics today.

Now, I haven't had sufficient time to review the case or the decision closely, but according to The New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Thursday [June 28th] abandoned a 96-year-old ban on manufacturers and retailers setting price floors for products. In a 5-4 decision, the court said that agreements on minimum prices are legal if they promote competition. The ruling means that accusations of minimum pricing pacts will be evaluated case by case."

A few reactions:

First, I'd be curious to see on what economic grounds the Court was able to reason that price fixing can promote competition. That seems rather counter-intuitive to me.

Second, I'm intrigued that the law Leegin overturned, which passed in 1911, corresponded roughly with the "birth" of consumer capitalism in the United States. What might Thursday's decision say about the extent to which consumerism (or a particular version of it, specific to the early 20th century) continues to drive capitalism today?

Finally, and relatedly, I'm inclined to locate the Leegin decision within a broader context of changes that have been occurring over the last twenty to thirty years, in which the interests of consumers have gradually given way to those of business. Here I'm thinking of: recent revisions to bankruptcy law that have created conditions less favorable to ordinary folk who want to declare bankruptcy (and hence conditions more favorable for creditors); the growth of digital rights management technologies, which regulate what users can and cannot do with the digital items they've purchased; efforts to implement tort reform, which would make it more difficult for ordinary people to sue businesses; and more.

Back in September, I posted my thoughts on the film, V for Vendetta. I speculated there on how the movie and its reception might suggest not the end of cultural politics per se. They may, however, register something like a shift away from the prominence cultural politics enjoyed in the decades both immediately preceding and following the Second World War. Leegin v. PSKS, like V for Vendetta, only underscores that point. Our relationship to consumerism and culture are becoming more and more tenuous--juridically, economically, and technologically. Thus, it's becoming increasingly difficult for people like you and me to marshal the kinds of resources that have long made cultural politics possible. It also suggests that, in order to effect meaningful change these days, we might well need to direct more of our political energy beyond the realm of culture.

Summer reading

This summer's hardly been lazy, to be sure. That said, the break from teaching has given me some time to catch up on my reading. And in that spirit, I thought I'd say a few words about my summer reading list. I'm quite excited about it. They're all academic books, so for those of you anticipating literary recommendations, you'll have to look elsewhere (although recently I enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which just became an Oprah's Book Club selection).

I loved McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard U.P., 2004), and so I was thrilled to pick up Gamer Theory (Harvard U.P., 2007) at the Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa this past April. I wasn't disappointed. Though perhaps a tad uneven compared to Hacker, Gamer Theory is definitely worth reading if you're interested in everyday life, digital (and non-digital) gaming, and what it may be like to live in what Gilles Deleuze has called "a society of control." (This is a theme I develop in my forthcoming book, by the way.)

I met Alex Galloway, author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT Press, 2004), when we were graduate students (he at Duke, me at nearby UNC-Chapel Hill). At the time I didn't really know what he was working on, so I became intrigued when I ran across Protocol about a year or two ago. I knew I'd like it, but I just never had the time to read it--until now. It's a gem. Not only is it an insightful elaboration of how control works in contemporary networked societies, but it's smart about the technical aspects of computer programming and networking. I'd describe it as a "must read" for those interested in new/technology studies.

Friedrich A. Kittler's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford U.P., 1990) is a book that's been in my library for some years now. I've only just begun reading it, so I don't have a whole lot to say at the moment--except that I should have read Discourse Networks ages ago. The foreword provides a wonderful contextualization of Kittler's work, and I'm especially enjoying the "1900" part of the book.




There are two more books that I've been sent recently, both of which I'm hoping to get to before summer's end. Last year on D&R I reviewed Daniel Heller-Roazen's amazing book, Echolalias (Zone Books, 2005). By the good graces of the folks at Zone, Heller-Roazen's latest tome, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, arrived on my doorstep. I can't wait to read it. It's about the perception of perception--a heady topic that couldn't be in more capable hands.




Last but not least on my list is Tarleton Gillespie's Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2007). I had the good fortune of meeting Tarleton at an intellectual property symposium in Iowa in 2005, and we've corresponded off and on since then. As with several of the books on my summer reading list, I suspect it's going to have a lot to say about control. And did I mention I just love the title?




Okay--that's it for now. Of course, I'd welcome any suggestions for further reading.

Second class music?

First off, apologies, apologies. I've been swamped with writing projects of late, and so the prospect of writing still more just seemed too out of reach. Now that I'm out from under the really heavy stuff (at least for the moment), I figured I should get back into the swing of things on D&R. Thanks as always for your patience, dear readers.

I'm likely to get some smirks for telling the world this, but I download music from Apple iTunes. I know they're not the friendliest of companies when it comes to music downloading, especially since they've long maintained Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes that regulate what you can and cannot do with your paid-for music. I'm not a huge music downloader, though, and so I've never really bothered to look elsewhere, despite my professed uneasiness with DRM.

All that's just a lead-up to tell you that I receive regular emails from iTunes, telling me about new music releases and other pertinent news. The other day, this message arrived in my inbox:

Now you can download music and videos from EMI that are free of DRM rules and restrictions. With iTunes Plus, you can burn the music you download from iTunes to as many CDs as you need, transfer it to as many computers (Mac or PC) as you want, or sync it to as many devices as you like. And because it's encoded in 256 kbps AAC, your iTunes Plus music is virtually indistinguishable from the original recording. Hear it for yourself — you can preview all iTunes Plus songs before purchasing. iTunes Plus music is available now for many EMI artists, such as Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Coldplay, and many more. DRM-free EMI music videos are still $1.99 and music tracks are $1.29.

I'd been aware of Steve Jobs' mention a few months back of how he thought music should be stripped of its DRM. Needless to say, I was pleased to see some movement on the issue from Apple.

But then I started to think about it further. Regular, DRM-laden music downloads are 99 cents on iTunes. That means, if you want to be free of DRM, you have to pay 30 cents more per song. That's not a lot of money, admittedly, though if you're a real music aficionado, I suppose it could add up over time. Anyway, what bugs me is the principle; what's happening with schemes such as this is that Apple and other companies are creating (at least) a two-tier system of property owners. Those with more money can own their songs and videos more or less free-and-clear. Those unwilling to ante up the additional money, on the other hand, become indentured to iTunes and the record companies with respect to DRM-induced terms of use.

Something strange is happening to property, in other words. We're slowly creating a system in which there are "haves" and "don't quite haves." I'm also troubled by the way in which these companies are beginning to leverage the mere prospect of DRM to extract more money from consumers.

I'm not altogether sure what my solution to the issue would be. I'd be inclined to say get rid of the DRM altogether, though I'm sure that wouldn't sit well with intellectual property producers and distributors. Then again, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.

P.S. If you want a copy of the article to which I linked above, you can email me at: striphas@indiana.edu

Good advice

Because I'm knee deep in the trenches of academic book publishing right now, I couldn't be happier to have run across two OUTSTANDING blog posts about what it takes to get one's first book published. Claire B. Potter over at Tenured Radical details a host of things to think about as one transitions from dissertation to book--and let me tell you, it's a big transition. The other post, appended below, is from Siva Vaidhyanathan over at Sivacracy. Note in particular Siva's point about "writing short." What many people don't seem to tell first time authors is that long doesn't necessarily mean brilliant, and that because you're ostensibly producing a commodity, form to some degree determines content. Read, enjoy, and do share your own advice or experiences in the comments.
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• Do not be shy about asking senior colleagues you admire and trust to introduce you and your idea to her editors (or editors she knows and who want someday to publish her). Editors trust the judgement of respected people in the field. They know their blurbs help sales. And editors like to do favors for authors they would like to publish.

• Understand that academic presses are businesses, but not very efficient ones. Even if you convince an editor that your work is brilliant and important, the editor must convince her marketing people and board of directors that the book has a clear and definable market.

• Therefore, never claim in your proposal or cover letter that your market/audience is a "general readership." There is no such thing. Delineate your field, the courses in which your book might appear (very important), and professional or interest groups beyond the academy that might take a liking to your work. Be realistic.

• If you are writing regionally, publish regionally -- i.e. if you have written about Western Native American history, the first places you should go are the University of Oklahoma Press and the University of Nebraska Press.

• Expect rejection. Everyone knows there are too many books chasing too few buyers and the price of production only justifies books that can sell more than 5,000 copies. Of course, too much rejection can mean career death for an academic. But them's the breaks.

• Meet editors at conferences. They love to hear quick, clean, effective pitches from authors who are excited about their projects. When the editors are sitting at tables full of books, you can get a sense of whether your project would fit the trajectory of the list.

• Start early, but be patient. If you have just started a tenure track job, do not expect to have a real book in your hands by third-year review. But do plan to have a contract and many pages ready to show your department by third-year-review. Many academic books can take four years from contract to book.

• No dissertation is ready to be a book. If you are rewriting your diss for publication, wipe your committee from your mind. Write for your colleagues and students instead.

• Course assignments matter. That's how academic presses justify many of their titles. Tailor the writing and length to course-usable standards.

• Write short. Most academic publishers want their books (especiallly first books) to be shorter than 250 pages when published. More than 250 pages, the price of the book goes up.

• Talk to librarians early and often. They know which books are likely to get picked up by their peers. They know which presses do good work.

• Do not expect reviews beyond the scholarly journals. Do not expect scholarly journal review within a year of publication.

• Double dip. Get as much of your work out in journal form as possible. That way, if something goes wrong on the way to book publication, you can demonstrate that your work has passed muster.

• Read your publishing contract carefully. Cross out the "options clause" pledging your next book to the press. Be a free agent.

Oh, one more:

• A first -book author should not aim for the academic press pantheon (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, U of Chicago, California, Yale, etc.). These presses carry huge lists every season and do not treat books by first authors with care or interest. Instead, aim for the smaller university pressses that treat their authors with care and dignity and are deeply appreciative or honored to have those books (Rutgers, NYU, Minnesota, Columbia, Stanford, Oklahoma, Georgia, North Carolina, Penn State, UMass, etc.). A good editor is far more important to a young scholar than the brand name of the publisher. A quality book from a smaller press can have a much bigger effect on the field than a sloppy book remaindered by a big press. If your first book is a success, then consider Oxford.

And the winner is...

After sifting through what can only be desribed as an avalanche of entries (there were four), I'm pleased to report that the winner of the first ever D&R caption contest is "caraf." Her entry: "Daddy, it's not what my poop MEANS, but rather what it DOES that matters!" Smart, witty, and creative stuff. Her caption kind of reminds me of the line from A Thousand Plateaus, "Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give workers shovels and pickaxes" (p. 76).

Caraf is hereby bestowed with the title of WINNER!!! and is presented with the following certificate, which, no doubt, will find a prominent place among her other honors and awards.


Thanks to all of you who shared your time and creative energies. Please don't feel discouraged if you didn't win. It was, honestly, a pretty competitive pool. And besides, I'll probably have another caption contest next year, assuming that I can find an interesting enough image.

The first ever D&R caption contest!

A colleague of mine passed along the following photo to me, and I've been meaning to blog about it for awhile now. There's just one problem: I'm not particularly witty. So I leave it to you, dear readers, to come up with an appropriate caption for the photo--humorous or otherwise. The winner of the first ever D&R caption contest will garner the acclaim of dozens of blog readers from around the globe and will have conferred upon her/him by yours truly the euphonious title of...WINNER!!!!

You can enter by leaving a comment below. Have fun, keep it reasonably clean, and enjoy. The deadline for entries will be, well, whenever I decide....

"Bébé avec Deleuze" - 2000 © M/M (Paris)

Keep it cheap

Courtesy of the University of Illinois' Robert McChesney, here's important information about something really unsexy: postal rate hikes. Though we often hear about "big media" and their control of the instruments of production, what's less often talked about is the wellbeing of our instruments of media distribution--in this case, the mail. Please make sure to sign the petition below if you believe in helping to preseve relatively cheap access to small media in the United States.
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There is a major crisis in our media taking place right now; it is getting almost no attention and unless we act very soon the consequences for our society could well be disastrous. And it will only take place because it is being done without any public awareness or participation; it goes directly against the very foundations of freedom of the press in the entirety of American history.

The U.S. Post Office is in the process of implementing a radical reformulation of its rates for magazines, such that smaller periodicals will be hit with a much much larger increase than the largest magazines.

Because the Post Office is a monopoly, and because magazines must use it, the postal rates always have been skewed to make it cheaper for smaller publications to get launched and to survive. The whole idea has been to use the postal rates to keep publishing as competitive and wide open as possible. This bedrock principle was put in place by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. They considered it mandatory to create the press system, the Fourth Estate necessary for self-government.

It was postal policy that converted the free press clause in the First Amendment from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans. And it has served that role throughout our history.

What the Post Office is now proposing goes directly against 215 years of postal policy. The Post Office is in the process of implementing a radical reformulation of its mailing rates for magazines. Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than the big magazines, as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent.

The new rates, which go into effect on July 15, were developed with no public involvement or congressional oversight, and the increased costs could damage hundreds, even thousands, of smaller publications, possibly putting many out of business. This includes nearly every political journal in the nation. These are the magazines that often provide the most original journalism and analysis. These are the magazines that provide much of the content on Common Dreams. We desperately need them.

What the Post Office is planning to do now, in the dark of night, is implement a rate structure that gives the best prices to the biggest publishers, hence letting them lock in their market position and lessen the threat of any new competition. The new rates could make it almost impossible to launch a new magazine, unless it is spawned by a huge conglomerate.

Not surprisingly, the new scheme was drafted by Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the nation. All evidence available suggests the bureaucrats responsible have never considered the implications of their draconian reforms for small and independent publishers, or for citizens who depend upon a free press.

The corruption and sleaziness of this process is difficult to exaggerate. As one lawyer who works for a large magazine publisher admits, “It takes a publishing company several hundred thousand dollars to even participate in these rate cases. Some large corporations spend millions to influence these rates.” Little guys, and the general public who depend upon these magazines, are not at the table when the deal is being made.

The genius of the postal rate structure over the past 215 years was that it did not favor a particular viewpoint; it simply made it easier for smaller magazines to be launched and to survive. That is why the publications opposing the secretive Post Office rate hikes cross the political spectrum. This is not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue, it is a democracy issue. And it is about having competitive media markets that benefit all Americans. This reform will have disastrous effects for all small and mid-sized publications, be they on politics, music, sports or gardening.

This process was conducted with such little publicity and pitched only at the dominant players that we only learned about it a few weeks ago and it is very late in the game. But there is something you can do. Please go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com and sign the letter to the Postal Board protesting the new rate system and demanding a congressional hearing before any radical changes are made. The deadline for comments is April 23.

I know many of you are connected to publications that go through the mail, or libraries and bookstores that pay for subscriptions to magazines and periodicals. If you fall in these categories, it is imperative you get everyone connected to your magazine or operation to go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com.

We do not have a moment to lose. If everyone who reads this email responds at www.stoppostalratehikes.com, and then sends it along to their friends urging them to do the same, we can win. If there is one thing we have learned at Free Press over the past few years, it is that if enough people raise hell, we can force politicians to do the right thing. This is a time for serious hell-raising.

From the bottom of my heart, thanks.

Bob

Iowa-a-go-go

What a trip--and I mean that in two ways.

First, you've probably noticed that I haven't written in close to a month. Though I'm not the most frequent blogger by any means, I do try, when possible, to let no more than about two weeks elapse between posts. The last month has been--it would be an understatement to say--incredibly busy, so I've had to forego writing new material for D&R. I appreciate your patience as the semester winds way, way up for me before it starts to wind down.

But my "what a trip" comment also refers to something much more enjoyable--my recent visit to the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. There I had the good fortune of presenting my paper, "Harry Potter and the Culture of the Copy (Warning: Not Endorsed by J. K. Rowling!)," which looks at the Potter phenomenon, authorized and unauthorized works "derived" from the series, and clashes over intellectual property resulting from the boy wizard's global popularity. (The piece I presented is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Late Age of Print.).

What made the trip to Iowa memorable, though, beyond the hospitality and engaging dialogue I had there with faculty and grad students, was my getting to see some of the creative media/cultural activism going on. And in that vein I got to screen a rough cut of Kembrew McLeod's forthcoming documentary, Freedom of Expression®, which is based on his outstanding book by the same name. Mark Andrejevic, meanwhile, sent me link to a great audiovisual mash-up he's put together on the perils of watching too much Fox News. And last but not least, Kembrew alerted me to a recent intervention by a graduate student with whom he's working, Peter Schaefer, who's concerned by how all the championing of the Apple iPod has tended to eclipse the company's sometimes problematic relationship to workers' rights. Check out Peter's iPod and what he's had to say about it:

I attached a photo of my iPod with the inscription of "Apple exploits workers in Longhua, China." It's pretty amazing that Apple was willing to accept a message that is critical of their own suspect iPod labor practices. Working conditions at several sites in China were exposed by the London-based newspaper the Daily Mail last year. Yet Apple rejects inscriptions that condemn the Recording Industry Association of America, refusing messages such as "Rip, Mix, & Burn Down RIAA Headquarters" and "Screwing The RIAA One Download At A Time."

Or, as Kembrew put it to me: "Once again, we are reminded that, for the culture industry, copyrights are more important than human rights."

Like I said, what a privilege to have been privy to such smart and punchy work and to have shared the company of an engaging group of people.

Indeed, I am a math geek

For the last couple of years I've been running across references to, and colleagues talking about, philosopher Alain Badiou. I've been reluctant to pick up his work, however, owing largely to the fact that, as people tell me, a good deal of it's in dialogue with mathematical set theory. Don't get me wrong--I'm not frightened off by math. In fact, I'm just one course shy of a math minor at my undergraduate institution. But I figured it would be imprudent of me to read Badiou without first brushing up at least on set theory, which I don't think I've actually studied directly since the 7th or 8th grade.

So I've been reading here and there for the last couple of weeks various articles on mathematics, ranging from material on set theory to biographies of it's "inventor," Georg Cantor. I've even been dabbling a bit in topology, for whatever that's worth. A couple of things occurred to me in the course of reading these materials. First, boy am I rusty! I haven't taken a math class in well more than a decade, and though I used to be fairly fluent in at least some the discipline's many languages, these days I wouldn't know an integral if it hit me in the face. Second, I discovered just how much I miss math and why, way back when, I decided to give it up.

I left math because, truth be told, I got bored with it. I always was reasonably good at it, and indeed I enjoyed its many challenges. I especially liked integral calculus, which I learned at the knee of one of the best teachers I've ever had, Don Lester Lyons (a.k.a., D.L.²). But I got bored in the end largely because I never saw math as much more than the manipulation of symbols for the sake of solving pre-set problems. Granted, my teachers always stressed math's "real world" applications, but I was left wanting something more.

I never knew what, exactly, until I began revisiting math on my own just these past few weeks. Because I'm so out of the loop mathematically, most of what I've been reading has consisted of material that talks about the intellectual history of various branches of mathematics, rather than articles that get too in-depth into, well, the mathematics of it all. And this, I discovered, is exactly what I'd been missing--qualitative writings that situate math's historical and philosophical development.

The funny thing is, I realize now that this type of material had been right in front of my face all along. I recall when I was in 12th grade being intrigued by the work of a student who, preceding me by a few years, had written a term paper on the number zero. "Zero has history?" I pondered. A few years later, when I was in college slogging through differential equations and applied linear algebra, I remember wishing I had the time to enroll in a course on the history of math, which my friend and roommate, who was not a math whiz, was taking at the time. The trouble was, history of math wouldn't count toward my math minor, since the department I was studying in considered it, I suppose, not a "real" math class. I've also been somewhat taken of late by the TV show Numbers, which features a young mathematics professor who uses his skills to solve crimes for the F.B.I. Okay--I don't love the show, but what I do like is the way in which it helps to situate mathematical problems in concrete scenarios. (I have no idea how accurate the math is on the show, so if any mathematicians are reading, feel free to chime in.)

All that to say, I genuinely miss math as a humanist scholar and welcome the opportunity, at long last, to re-engage it. Indeed, I realize in looking back that it was the discipline of math that first instilled in me a willingness to "go" and work with quite abstract ideas, problems, and sets of principles. Math, I'm convinced, laid the groundwork for my love of philosophy, and now, through philosophy, I'm hoping to revisit that long-neglected ground.

Filmosophy®

Today I received the 2007 Columbia University Press "New and Noteworthy" catalog for film studies. Page six was especially noteworthy. There, listed under film criticism, was Daniel Frampton's book, Filmosophy. I was drawn to it in part because of (no surprise here) my interest in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and specifically his work on cinema, which the blurb for Frampton's book acknowledges explicitly. The volume sounds interesting enough, and I'd encourage folks to read it. What really struck me as noteworthy about the book, however, was this disclaimer following the blurb:

FILMOSOPHY® is a registered U. S. trademark owned by Valentin Stoilov (http://www.filmosophy.com) for educational services in the field of motion picture history, theory, and production. Mr. Stoilov is not the source or origin of this book and has not sponsored or endorsed its author.

Wow. I suppose I can understand, on one level, the desire not to confuse "products" in the marketplace. That, after all, is precisely what trademark law is supposed to do. But I get a bit twitchy when serviceable intellectual ideas become trademarked goods. I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere, perhaps in Jane Gaines' Contested Culture, that someone trademarked the term, "semiotics." So, if I now publish a book or an essay on semiotics (or "filmosophy," for that matter), does my work have to carry a disclaimer indicating that I'm not the legally-empowered trademark holder, but rather some interloper who's using this catchy-sounding brand/term to do some other, "competing" work?

What's even more disturbing, I suppose, are the ways in which intellectual property laws--or, really, misconceptions about how IP laws work--are insinuating themselves into and beginning to constrain scholarship in the humanities. This is occurring especially in the area of popular culture studies. Almost every academic book published on Harry Potter, for example, carries some sort of disclaimer to the effect of, "This book is not endorsed by J. K. Rowling, Warner Brothers, Scholastic, or Bloomsbury." Now, I understand that there's some remote possibility that an 11 year-old might confuse, say, Andrew Blake's The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, which is a tiny book published by the good leftist press, Verso, with the latest installment of the HP series. (Yeah, sure....) But since when have critical academic scholars sought "endorsement" from those about whom they write anyway? And why should we feel compelled all of a sudden to position our work as, essentially, an "unauthorized" pretender to the "real thing," or accept that some individual or corporation should be able to position our work as such?

...and an update...

For those of you interested in hearing more about The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies and the origins of the journal Cultural Studies, Jon Stratton has provided some follow up. Most intriguing to me is the proposal that Cultural Studies be published on a rotating basis in Australia, the UK, and the US. That reminds me a bit of what the Traces series aspires to do, though significantly without the commitment to translation. In any case, I hope you enjoy hearing more about cultural studies' intellectual and institutional history.
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Hi Everybody,

First of all, thank you to everybody who has emailed me with congratulations on getting the journal put up on the web. A couple of people have emailed me asking for some further information on the Editorial Board and such like. So, here goes.

The Editorial Board for the first issue was Peter O'Toole, Murdoch University, Brian Dibble and Graeme Turner, Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University of Technology) and Brian Shoesmith, Western Australian College of Advanced Education (now Edith Cowan University). The Editorial Advisors were Bill Bonney, Iain Chambers, John Hartley, and Horace Newcomb. By the final issues the Editorial Board had expanded. It was: John Frow, Anna Gibbs, John Hartley, Robert Hodge, Michael O'Toole all of Murdoch University; John Fiske, Barbara Milech, Graham Seal, all of WAIT (now Curtin); Brian Shoesmith of WACAE (now Edith Cowan); Graeme Turner of Queensland Institute of Technology (now Queensland University
of Technology).

You might also find interesting that there was an announcement in the final issue that was headed: "From The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies to Cultural Studies." The first paragraph reads: "The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies will undergo a transformation in 1987. It will become an international Journal with the title Cultural Studies and will produce three issues a year, normally one from Australia, one from the UK and one from the USA. It will be published by Methuen (London) Limited, which will relieve the board of our permanent problems of finance and marketing." The announcement continues for a further six or seven paragraphs. I should, perhaps, see about getting some of this material added to the website.

I hope this is of interest,
Jon

Archive fever

...courtesy of Jon Stratton, Curtin University of Technology, Australia. Apparently the complete contents of The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, which was (if the oral histories I've been told are correct) the precursor to the Routledge journal Cultural Studies, have been digitized and made available for free on the web. These are crucially important documents with respect to cultural studies' own intellectual history, which is to say nothing of the journal's significance relative to the field's institutionalization and internationalization. The link follows below. Check it out.
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Many years ago, in the early 1980s, before the journal Cultural Studies was a twinkle in anybody's eye, there was a journal in Australia called The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies. It was possibly the first refereed cultural studies journal. It ran for four years from 1983 to 1987 and was started by people at Curtin University of Technology and Murdoch University, both in Perth, Western Australia.

Originally, the journal was typed up and photocopied. Others can tell the history of the journal much better than I. The journal carried articles by people such as Graeme Turner, Stephen Muecke, John Hartley, Tom O'Regan and John Fiske. It also included, for example, a translation of an extract of Bakhtin's doctoral thesis.

The journal has both historical value as an artefact of early cultural studies in Australia and also a continuing intellectual importance. Through funding by the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture at Curtin University I have been able to have the contents of the journal scanned and put on the web. I would also like to acknowledge the help of Garry Gillard at Murdoch University who made available the material that he had already scanned in. The journal can be found at: http://info.ccs.curtin.edu.au/AJCSjournal_index.cfm.

Conflicts of interest

Okay--I know D&R hasn't ever been given over to sports, and I'm not planning on making a habit of it. But for whatever it's worth I do follow professional cycling, albeit infelicitously. And reading today's New York Times, I couldn't help but be struck by this story:

Organizers of the Tour of California, who boasted after last year’s race that no riders tested positive for banned substances, have acknowledged that riders were not tested for what has become the sport’s most abused drug--the blood booster known as EPO.

That failure is more surprising because the lead sponsor of the Tour of California is Amgen, the California biotechnology company that produces the genetically engineered version of EPO, which is sold primarily to help cancer and dialysis patients battle anemia.

Now, I can understand why Amgen would want to "educate" people about (and advertise) EPO and it's proper uses, but within the context of a professional cycling event that just seems to me a bad idea. If nothing else it ought to raise serious conflict of interest flags. I mean, who would want to associate your product with a sport or an event in which it's a banned substance? That's about as sensible as permitting baseball stadiums and games to become venues for marketing steroids and publicizing their proper medical uses.

Sounds like someone needs some remedial articulation theory here--stat!

Alfred Jarry

No, I hadn't heard of him, either...that is, until I ran across his name in Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical. I've owned the book since it first appeared in English in 1997 (has it been a decade already?), and I've trudged several times through the chapter called, "An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry." Admittedly, I never got it, owing largely to the fact that I had no idea who Alfred Jarry was. I assumed--erroneously--that he was a philosopher, given his pairing with Martin Heidegger, coupled with Deleuze's gesture toward phenomenology. I should have realized that Jarry was a writer, since most of the chapters in Essays Critical and Clinical concern literature and literary figures.

In any case, I returned to the book this past week while working on my essay, "What Is This Critical in 'Critical Cultural Studies?'" and decided to give the Jarry chapter a long-overdue rereading. And by the good graces of the folks at Google and Wikipedia, I was able finally to get some much-needed background on Alfred Jarry. Evidently he was a forerunner of the theater of the absurd, and as my extended but still preliminary research tells me, he's influenced radical puppet theater, spawned a mock institute, and even infiltrated the work of Michel de Certeau, among others.

Mostly, though, I'm intrigued by Jarry's notion of pataphysics, "the science of imaginary solutions...extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics." I should say, on a note of caution, that Jarry intended pataphysics to be something of an absurdist joke. Evidently those who take it too seriously open themselves up to all sorts of rebukes and recriminations by its self-appointed guardians--who, I'd suggest, probably take themselves much too seriously, as evidenced by the uncharitable review of Christian Bok's Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science appearing on Amazon.com. So what I'm about to say I say knowing full well that I'm probably not "getting" the joke: pataphysics seems to me a name for talking about a "science" or study of virtuality, in the Deleuzo-Bergsonian sense of the term.

Indeed, what I find most lacking in contemporary critical philosophy and practice is both a willingness and a vocabulary by which to talk about imagination, creativity, and what used to be called the classical canon of "invention." What I'm after is, I think, a speculative orientation that would embrace that which "is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract." And my sense, despite (or perhaps because of) the jokes, is that the notion of pataphysics might begin to point the way there.


For further reading: Gilles Deleuze, "How Jarry's Pataphysics Opened the Way for Phenomenology," in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) (Semiotext[e] 2003).

Save public broadcasting

...from the good folks at Moveon.org. Please click on the link below and do your part to rescue public broadcasting in the United States.
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George W. Bush is trying—yet again—to slash funding for NPR and PBS. This week, Bush proposed a new budget with devastating cuts to public broadcasting. Sesame Street and other ad-free kids' shows are under the knife. So is the independent journalism our country needs.

Enough is enough. We've fought this fight before and won—but we can't afford the risk anymore. With the new Congress, we can make sure this never happens again. We need Congress to insulate NPR and PBS from the political winds.

We can make it happen if enough of us sign this petition: "Congress must save NPR and PBS once and for all. Congress should guarantee permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling." Clicking here will add your name to the petition:

http://civ.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/o.pl?id=9851-6377474-L5dPf0j_gyEzG4IObMd1cQ&t=2

After you sign, please forward this email to your friends, family, and co-workers to keep this campaign going. We'll deliver the petition to members of Congress as they consider Bush's budget—offering a public counterpoint to this dangerous attack.

Congress can protect NPR and PBS from future cuts. The long-term solution to save public radio and TV is to:

fully restore this year's funding

guarantee a permanent funding stream free from political pressure

reform how the money is spent and keep partisan appointees from pushing a political bias

Bush's budget would cut federal funds for public broadcasting by nearly 25%. According to PBS, the cuts "could mean the end of our ability to support some of the most treasured educational children's series" like Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and Arthur."

As telecommunications chair Rep. Ed Markey said, "In a 24-7 television world with content often inappropriate for young children, the public broadcasting system represents an oasis of quality, child-oriented educational programming. We owe America's children and their parents this free, over-the-air resource."

The cuts could also decimate one of the last remaining sources of watchdog reporting on TV—continuing the partisan war on journalism led by the ex-chair of public broadcasting, Ken Tomlinson. More people trust public broadcasting than any corporate news media. President Bush would rather undermine our free press than face reporters who are asking tough questions.

Let's put an end to the constant threats to NPR and PBS. Let's ask Congress to guarantee funding and stop partisan meddling. Clicking here will add your name to the petition:

http://civ.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/o.pl?id=9851-6377474-L5dPf0j_gyEzG4IObMd1cQ&t=3

Thank you for all you do.

–Noah, Marika, Eli, Adam G. and the MoveOn.org Civic Action Team
Thursday, February 8th, 2007

P.S. Our friends at Free Press have more on how to save NPR and PBS once and for all:

http://www.freepress.net/publicbroadcasting/=policy

It's in the jeans

Busy, busy, busy! That seems to be the word around here these days and indeed the reason for my relative quiet on Differences & Repetitions. The semester began more than a month ago with a fantastic, graduate student-initiated symposium involving folks from IU, the Universities of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Northwestern, all of whom gathered here to discuss the relationship of rhetoric and democracy. Next came the job searches, which we've nearly wrapped up, and this week we have on tap the 11th annual IU cultural studies conference, where I'll be presenting a paper on cultural studies and academic journal publishing. Life's been something of a blur, needless to say.

I'm writing now to discuss an article I ran across recently in The Washington Times about the Levi-Strauss Company--you know, the apparel manufacturer best known for its jeans. Well, as it turns out, the company has fallen on something of hard times of late, owing to the declining popularity of its jeans and other clothing lines. What's intriguing to me is the strategy the company has adopted to get its act back together. Rather than seriously rethinking its brand associations or updating its designs, it's taken to suing competitors who've stitched arches on the back pockets of their jeans. Levi's evidently has trademarked that detail and, publicly, at least, says that it's convinced its economic downturn is related to the piggybacking of other companies on its design.

Really? I see this as a desperate measure on the part of a company that refuses to get creative. At bottom, I think, is the widespread presumption that Levi-Strauss--a company that's more than 130 years old--is frumpy...and I say that, admittedly, as someone who has a pair or two of Levi's hanging in my closet. Rather than spending millions of dollars to litigate arches stitched in gold thread, wouldn't it make more sense to try to create a hipper image or product line for Levi's jeans? I ask this not because I'm particularly concerned for the wellbeing of the Levi-Strauss Company, but rather because I'm discomforted by the company's leveraging its trademarks to forestall what in a reasonable world (as opposed to what Jane Gaines calls the "legal real") would amount to appropriate competition.