Rupert Read Writing

Having watched the film Fatal Assistance I found reading "Flesh Like One's Own": Benign Denials of Legitimate Complaint by Kaiama L. Glover a useful companion piece. While reading the article I found that certain passages caused me to question whether what was being stated was really true. As I read further, however, Glover seemed to acknowledge and answer most of my criticisms. I would still like to pick up on a few claims though together with with my own thoughts for further discussion. On page 236 Glover states that "I begin here by looking at a cast of thinly veiled "bad guys" - white men with broad media platforms whose rhetorical gestures of concern and empathy are, quite frankly, not fooling anyone." While later on Glover picks up on broad, reductionist claims such as these as being intrinsic to narratives on both sides of the argument I feel that Glover's deployment of such a statement at the start of the piece weakens their overall posit...

Calder-Williams' concept of salvage punk reminds me of Derrida's idea of hauntology. "Derrida's prior work in deconstruction, on concepts of trace and différance in particular, serves as the foundation of his formulation of hauntology, fundamentally asserting that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an "always-already absent present.."" (a) This description of hauntology seems to chime with Calder-Williams' assertion that the present we are living in is already the apocalyptic world that might occur as a result of capitalism. Calder-Williams writes: "In my consideration of salvage punk, a proposed cultural "movement" not yet fleshed out but present in scattered antecedents, the cataclysmic catastrophe (figured as a potential apocalypse whose revelations have been forgotten) has already happened." (b11) Similarly, in the 2000's, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term hauntology to describe art preoccupied...

I found some of Berlant’s writing to be relatively vague or requiring considerable thought to unpack in certain places, albeit still interesting. On page 24 she describes cruel optimism in one sentence: “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.” While watching Melancholia for the second time I remembered this definition when thinking about Kirsten Dunst’s character Justine. She states at one point in the film that the Earth is evil and that it is a good thing that the fictional planet Melancholia in the film will destroy Earth. The film’s director, Lars Von Trier, has stated that it is based on an episode of depression he suffered in his own life and that the character of Justine is based on his own experience. When reading this in combination with Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism I felt somewhat divided over whether Berlant is actually describing depression as oppose to cruel optimism. What is the difference between the two...

While I don't agree with Mark Fisher's politics, his writing is full of ideas and potential jumping off points for progress. In Reading Capitalist Realism he states that "Capitalism is good because it is based upon the "reality" of "human nature"; that is why capitalism allegedly "works" and no other system does." I think that this is a crucial point and has fundamentally destabilised the left's position previously and, increasingly more and more overtly, up to our present moment. I think we have to accept that capitalism is the most operable system for the time being and instead of thinking of ways to end it or replace it we should work with what we have and try and make it better.  The title of chapter 1 in Capitalist Realism "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." sums up the meaning and drive behind Fisher's concept. The whole idea starts from a position of negativity, a depre...

For this essay I am going analyse Facebook using the concepts of electronic colonialism, hidden pipelines and cyborg anthropology. I will take each of these one at a time and apply their thinking to Facebook and its activities to see to what extent Facebook propagates, either wittingly or unwittingly, electronic colonialism or colonialism of the mind. While physical or traditional colonialism as perpetrated by, for example, the British or Dutch has ceased, Jennifer Wenzel writes in Decolonization that "'Post-colonial' … was a periodising term, a historical and not an ideological concept." (450) I would like to see whether colonialism is, in fact, still occurring via new media platforms such as social media. To deepen my exploration I will bring in the additional concepts of hidden pipelines in relation to oil pipelines and the field of cyborg anthropology as explicated by Amber Rose. I am going to assume that most readers of this paper will be aware of Facebook and...