Odd Notes

A critical notebook. A sociological gaze. And a question: 'How is it possible?'

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#Marbles back to Athens, dignity back to #Greece

Greece’s bid to reclaim the Parthenon Marbles is about to be taken for a ride. To raise awareness for the repatriation of Greece’s most prized historical relics, Dr Luca Lo Sicco plans to bike next July from the steps of the British Museum in London to the entrance of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. “I strongly feel that there is a moral duty to return to the Marbles to Athens,” writes Sicco, who is currently a professor of fashion at the University of Southampton. “The recent way that certain countries – England, Germany – have been attacking Greece and its crisis is deeply unfair. The European Union is a family. We should be supportive of each other’s difficulties – difficulties that, in this instance, were caused by bankers and corrupt politicians.

Full story: http://ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite6_1_04/11/2013_525459

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#Marx reloaded

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#vulnerability #personaldata

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What is cultural #capitalism?

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#creativeeconomy #digitaleconomy #exploitation

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The Žižek Dictionary

The #Žižek Dictionary. Edited by Rex Butler, Acumen Publishing

From Act and Althusser to Yugoslavia and Žižek (of course).

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Magic precarity and amiability capital in the fashion field

A contribution by Giulia Mensitieri on the conditions of #workers in the creative industry of #fashion.

Abstract. The world of fashion is evocative of glamour, and working in this sector seems to be something to ‘dream about.’ But what is going on behind the curtains? What are the working conditions, the internal dynamics of power, the identity issues backstage, behind the glamorous catwalks and media? Based on an ethnography of the fashion industries in Paris and Brussels, this presentation will address these questions. My fieldwork was carried out with creators, designers, stylists, top models, photographs, as well as others professionals involved in the sector. Through an examination of these actors’ perception of the sector, their working conditions, my analysis will highlight how they participate in the construction of  ‘glamour.’ This insight into fashion, drawn from insiders, reveals many contradictions. There is a gap between the worsening of working conditions, as well as growing precariousness and hierarchy on one hand, and the display of strong symbolic power and significant social capital through the positive image of fashion in contemporary society, on the other. This chapter will address the role played by the ‘creative work ideology’ in the construction of subjectivities and in the dynamics of domination. I will analyse how the balance between self-fulfillment and social fulfilment is negotiated within structural conditions that often put these objectives out of reach.

Full text: http://www.academia.edu/4875710/Working_in_the_Fashion_World_A_Kind_of_Magic_Precarity

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A (forthcoming) book we can not miss.

How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and “social media” such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies – from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo – Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.

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Proletarised professors

From ACADEMY FIGHT SONG, by Thomas Frank | The Baffler, https://www.thebaffler.com/past/academy_fight_song

#academicfield #exploitation

What can I add to this dreadful tale? That it continues to get worse, twenty years after it began? Is there anything new to be said about the humiliation that the lumpen-profs suffer at the hands of their so-called colleagues? Can I shock anyone by describing the shabby, desperate lives they lead as they chase their own university dream? Will it do any good to remind readers how the tenured English dons of thirty years ago helped to set the forces of destruction in motion simply because producing more PhDs meant a lighter workload for themselves?

No. What matters now is that the deed has been done. We have all seen how it went down and which disciplines have fared the worst—as it happens, the very disciplines that, back in the 1980s, housed the most fashionable, the most respected, the most theoretically advanced, the most aggressive, the most intimidating people on campus. Their heirs—their own students—have been transformed into minimum-wage flunkies. They were once the consummate academic players, and look at them now.

What their downfall shows us is just how easily systems of this kind can be made to crumble. There is zero solidarity in a meritocracy, even a fake one, as the anthropologist Sarah Kendzior demonstrates in a recent series of hard-hitting articles on the adjunct situation. Just about everyone in academia believes that they were the smartest kid in their class, the one with the good grades and the awesome test scores. They believe, by definition, that they are where they are because they deserve it. They’re the best. So tenured faculty find it easy to dismiss the de-professionalization of their field as the whining of second-raters who can’t make the grade. Too many of the adjuncts themselves, meanwhile, find it difficult to blame the system as they apply fruitlessly for another tenure-track position or race across town to their second or third teaching job—maybe they just don’t have what it takes after all. Then again, they will all be together, assuredly, as they sink finally into the briny deep».

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«La sociologie est un sport de combat». More or less: sociology is a martial art. A 2002 documentary on the French sociologist Pierre #Bourdieu.

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Jodi #Dean on web and #communicative #capitalism - to be seen after (of before) reading her 2010 book «Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive» (Polity Press).

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Major hypermarket chains accused of selling products harvested by exploiting illegal labor of #migrants in conditions of #slavery. A French TV report on how food travels from Puglia to supermarkets.

#boycott