That ridiculous summer school...

[niveau]

If you've read this lj at all you've probably picked up on two things:

• My PhD deals in the blackmarket economy of intellectual labour
• And, I spend a lot of time dealing with the work of intellectuals from the EGS

As it turns out, the EGS have now set up a shiny new YouTube channel where you can get all the contemporary theory you can handle in a 9 to

Comments

[grrrlishgrin]

isn't it so awesome???

i discovered it a few weeks ago and i'm so glad to study in 2007! along with downloading audiolectures by berkeley theorists etc, this is just too multimedia to be true!!

[niveau]

I had a very quick disagreement (still unresolved) with one of my flatmates about this. Julie studies the coming boom of serious broadband to the urban environment - "fibre into the node" as she calls it. When I mentioned the EGS thing she started raving about the virtues of all this multimedia, the way we wouldn't need to fly in Agamben, we could just stream him in live.

To my mind there is a serious phenomenological difference here, technological mediation versus the immediacy of embodiment. And, in all honesty, I think there is more to be gained by meeting these people in person than merely listening to them online. Theory seems to lose its way when it gets stuck in this technophilia. Maybe I need to side with Lyotard on this count.

[grrrlishgrin]

personally i ended up not being as enchanted as i might be by a book or at a lecture. i mean, the sound quality is eh, you don't see the audience or get to participate in the atmosphere...and yet i just find it really fascinating. and there are one or two people of which i've always wondered how they might talk - would they be witty?, would they have a funny accent? - and i'm glad to see them.

it gets even crazier when they're already dead.