I hate that name
So I'm changing it. Haven't decided yet. Maybe just back to Brainmortgage. It still applies.
IQ/IC-Refi
So I'm changing it. Haven't decided yet. Maybe just back to Brainmortgage. It still applies.
Posted by Jeffrey Fisher at 8:56 AM 0 comments
For anyone who comes across this and, seeing what I did on this blog, still wants to see what I'm writing now, please do check out "Scarce Resources" -- my dabbling in the world of Substack -- and I'm on Mastodon <@jeffreyfisher@tldr.nettime.org>.
Beyond that, I hope you are at least briefly diverted by what you find here.
Posted by Jeffrey Fisher at 4:49 PM 0 comments
Huh. Maybe I'll start blogging again. Something longer form than Twitter or Facebook (usually), but not on Huffpost or Medium, because for real.
It's been a long time, friends.
Posted by Jeffrey Fisher at 11:47 PM 0 comments
(((living impossible lives; Marco Roth's paean/elegy/no-something-else to Derrida upon the latter's death in 2004; me and Derrida and Kierkegaard -- if you don't care about either me or Derrida, you will probably find this hopelessly boring; also some Badiou)))
Posted by Jeffrey Fisher at 4:24 PM 2 comments
Labels: Badiou, death, deconstruction, Derrida, living, Me, Philosophy
(((Donna Haraway and "A Cyborg Manifesto;" cyborgs and blasphemy; religion, faith, and irony.)))
I came back to this today as part of a(n e-mail) conversation I was having about feminism and freedom (I am resisting the urge to put that word in quotation marks). There's a particularly great line about "the fathers of illegitimate offspring [like cyborgs]" being "inessential" that I remembered and wanted to grab. But in the course of doing so, I found myself once again for the first time in a long time re-reading parts of the essay. The opening is, well, lovely. It could go on a religion blog, like that other one I'm working on, but not before that blog has established a character and voice of its own that is not just this blog somewhere else. So I'll put it here for now, because (a) it fits, and (b) it's time to also revive this one and start posting again. But I do a lot with irony in my classes, and it occurs to me that they really probably should read this, as difficult as it is. Maybe not in 100 courses, but in 200 and up they should try to wrestle with it.
This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.It could be taken as a reading of Colbert before Congress, come to think of it . . .
Posted by Jeffrey Fisher at 2:46 PM 0 comments
(((Ayn Rand is wrong; more money does not lead to better performance in skilled work; autonomy, mastery, and making a contribution matter more.)))
Posted by Jeffrey Fisher at 11:14 AM 0 comments
Labels: capitalism, education, Self-destructive tendencies, stupid capitalists
(((Extending the principles of K-12 to college; soon also grad schools -- why not?; all the stifling institutional crap that makes our students so bad when they get to college is about to ruin their college educations, too.)))
A Chronicle article by the policy director of an education think tank makes the case that Obama's "Race to the Top" should be extended to colleges, including a set of 60 standardized credits-worth of courses at all public universities, which would be accepted at all public universities (of course, this would happen at the state level, but it would be mandated at the federal level, and would not at all mean that everyone essentially goes to the same university, wherever they are); annual "audits" of "student learning" which would be where colleges prove that (and what) their students are learning (since it's just like proving that you mop your restaurant floors properly, or that you pay your bills); and "work-force outcome" measurement, where you prove that your students get jobs and make money "in their fields," ('cause lit majors who don't go to grad school in lit are failures, and anyway the point of college is just to make money).
Posted by Jeffrey Fisher at 2:13 PM 0 comments
Labels: bureaucracy and free markets, education, teaching