Recording Surface

The postwar expansion of the welfare state and of social guarantees — including access to higher education — can no more be ascribed to the era’s high level of taxation than it can to the state’s unilateral beneficence. (more…)

With every student occupation, teachers, bosses, and other responsible adults inevitably plead for reason to win out over emotion (the solution to the crisis “requires discipline and sacrifice, not the affective intensities of manifestoes and blockades”), attribute the students’ rash actions to their ignorance and inability to comprehend the complexity of the situation (”students are captured because they don’t read, don’t think”), and call for putting the institution’s survival before the students’ selfish demands (”What about making the university serve another function? What about making it function for common ends, for common futures?”)

That such reactions present themselves as a defense of (a fictive) social democracy makes them no less conservatizing and obstructive.

From We Want Everything, a blog of the occupation of the University of California–Santa Cruz: (more…)

“The dignified destruction of the Calais refugee jungle”

The Daily Mail’s decidedly more sensationalist take.

Also.

Setting affirmation against “the negative” to explain and argue for the latter’s persistence and necessity misses the point. (more…)

Rhizomes has published the essay on The Wire, Omar Little, and neoliberalism . The synopses part at the beginning probably goes on a little long, but it picks up steam after that, methinks.

It’s a little strange to see something you wrote a year ago finally hit print.