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andrewmurphie

andrewmurphie has written 7 posts for The Fibreculture Journal : 30
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Issue 30 : Incalculable Experience

By ⋅ December 31, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

issue doi:10.15307/fcj.30 introduction doi:10.15307/fcj.30.222.2019 Introduction by Lone Bertelsen, Issue Editor. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything (Harney and Moten, 2013: 20). … What must remain incalculable is the very question of the being of relation. (Erin Manning, this issue) The theme of the issue: Incalculable Experience, emerged in encounter with the work published here – articles and propositions by Erin Manning, Maria Hynes, Andrew Goodman, Susan Ballard, and Glen Fuller. That the theme wasn’t preplanned but emerged from the experience of reading and listening isn’t insignificant. Within this process there was an attempt to resist the pre-determining pretences of the neoliberal education system. Thought and research, reading and writing are activities whose value should never be determined in advance. Neither should their value be reduced to the post-determinations of metrics. In the words of Manning, their value must ‘exceed the count’. The contributors to this […]

FCJ-228 University, Universitas

By ⋅ December 20, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Erin Manning SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightment. (Moten and Harney, 2009: 145) Nothing About Us Without Us! (Charlton, 2000) Universities have a long history. The mantra of the universitas – ‘the whole, the universe, the world’ – has moved thinkers across the centuries: the university of al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco, was founded in 859 followed by Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, Egypt, in 972. The first in Europe, the University of Bologna (the oldest university still in existence), opened its doors in 1088. In 1636, Harvard University became the first university in the United States. In The History of American Higher Education, Roger Geiger (2014) demonstrates how in the context of the United States, universities have evolved over ten or eleven generations from the religious college with […]

FCJ-224 Design Thinking, Design Activism, Design Study

By ⋅ March 16, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Maria Hynes The Australian National University, Australia But we won’t stand corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 20) In their consideration of the contribution of academic labour to what they call the ‘social reproduction of conquest denial’, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten isolate a number of factors. They examine modes of intellectual practice that deny: the ‘incessant and irreversible intellectuality’ that was already there; political practices that, claiming to engage in just redistribution, wish to think away the division of private and public and, with it, the unpayable debts at the heart of the social; and forms of criticality that deny the underlabour that makes the social being of critical academics possible. To these characteristic forms of labour practiced in the university they oppose a somewhat idiosyncratic sense of ‘study’: ‘study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and […]

FCJ-223 Fugitively, Approximately

By ⋅ March 16, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Erin Manning SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada Two phrases haunt my thinking. The first comes from Fred Moten: all black life is neurodiverse life. It might also have been black life is always neurodiverse life. The second is approximation of proximity. The feeling is that the ambiguity of memory in the first has a connection to the approximation of the second. Moten’s words, written in a manuscript review before the publication of The Minor Gesture in 2016 felt vitally important when I received them. But The Minor Gesture was already too close to completion to fully carry the force of the proposition, and so, while I did signal it in the book, I decided to make Moten’s words the fugitive force of the thinking to follow. I say fugitive force both to carry forward Moten and Harney’s concept of fugitivity, and to emphasize that this is how work comes into itself: […]

FCJ-227 Survey and Project: On the (Im)possibility of Scholarship in an Era of Networked Knowledge

By ⋅ March 16, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Glen Fuller University of Canberra, Australia Researchers concerned with networks have engaged with a variety of conceptual and technical problems and areas of interest. Fibreculture’s key focus has been any and all manifestations of network culture, with a particular interest in media. Our interest in scholarly publishing – both this journal, books and experimental forms – has long been as advocates for open access. We have critically engaged with shifts in the technologies of editorial production, publishing and then storage and retrieval. The changes to the systems of scholarly and intellectual publishing over the last 30 years mean that academics, scholars and intellectuals of all types now have access to a huge array of material either with open or closed (paid) access. Let’s call it the Google Scholar Effect. (Of course, it is more than the effect of Google Scholar and Google Scholar has its own specificities.) Writing in the […]

FCJ-226 ‘And they are like wild beasts’:[1] Violent Things in the Anthropocene

By ⋅ March 16, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Susan Ballard School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong Disappearance At the opening of the temporary Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2010 there was a room curtained off from all the others. Looking behind the curtain I found two chairs, headphones, a silently meditative voice, a highly-reflective dark blue leaning-yet-standing wooden panel, a rug, and a humming slide projection of an old ballroom. Of all the various objects somehow existing together for this moment, it was the chairs that held my attention. They were just chairs but they seemed important. The work was Circular Facts (2009, figure 2) by New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan: an installation based on the script of a performance Buchanan staged after researching the strange and highly publicised disappearance of British writer Agatha Christie. [2] In 1926 Christie vanished for eleven days until she ‘was found staying in a hotel under a pseudonym […]

FCJ-225 One Definite Note and the Anarchic Share of Listening

By ⋅ March 16, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Andrew Goodman La Trobe University, Australia What you listen to or what you’re reading is still moving and still living. It’s still forming. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 107) Music charms us, even though its beauty consists only in the harmonics of numbers and in a calculation that we are not aware of, but which the soul nevertheless carries out, a calculation concerned with the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies, which are encountered at certain intervals. (Leibniz, 1994: 212) Every room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made audible. (Lucier & Simon, 2012: 31) Introduction: A Sonic Can of Worms Alfred North Whitehead’s opus Process and Reality devotes slightly more than one page to the question of the audition of sound (1978: 233-5). [1] Whitehead slyly defines this as a ‘simple’ example that avoids any ‘unnecessary complexity’. In fact he opens a can of (vibratory) worms. Whitehead […]