MITPressLog

Shulamith Firestone Leaves A Lucid and Trenchant Legacy

We note, with sadness, the passing of Semiotext(e) author, Shulamith Firestone, who passed away of natural causes, though at a date that has not yet been determined. Firestone was a major voice in the second wave of the feminist movement in the United States that also included such figures as Germaine Greer and Kate Millet; her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, offered a brilliant and radical analysis of biological reproduction and the role of women in society that remains as relevant today as it had been over forty years ago when it first came out (particularly with the rekindled political debates over reproductive rights that have arisen over the last year).

 Her only other book, Airless Spaces, was a more personal account of lives experienced in the margins and ensnared by the institutions of psychiatry and medication. The New York Times concludes its obituary with an extract from this collection of stories: a passage that communicates the devastating personal struggles Firestone had to undergo in her own life. We take comfort in her having left us with an intellectual legacy that remains as lucid and trenchant as ever.

2012 Guggenheim Fellows

We are pleased to announce that several MIT Press and Semiotext(e) authors and editors have been named Guggenheim Fellows for 2012. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation website states, "Often characterized as 'midcareer' awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." The MIT Press 2012 Guggenheim Fellows are as follows:

John Bowen, author of Blaming Islam;

Susan Landau, author of Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies and (with Whitfield Diffie) of Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption;

Eileen Myles, author of Not Me and The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art and editor (with Liz Kotz) of The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading;

Alva Noë, editor (with Evan Thompson) of Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception and author of Action in Perception;

David A. Rosenbaum, editor (with Charles E. Collyer) of Timing of Behavior: Neural, Psychological, and Computational Perspectives;

Eldar Shafir, editor of Preference, Belief, and Similarity: Selected Writings (by Amos Tversky);

Beth A. Simmons, editor (with Lisa L. Martin) of International Institutions: An International Organization Reader.

Congratulations to these winners, as well as to all of the 2012 Guggenheim Fellows! Check out the Guggenheim Foundation website for a complete list of this year's Guggenheim Fellows.

Thomas J. Sargent: Nobel Prize Winner

 

 

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of NYU Stern

Congratulations to Thomas J. Sargent, coauthor (with Lars Ljungqvist) of Recursive Macroeconomic Theory and one of two Americans awarded The 2011 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences Nobel Prize on October 10, 2011 “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.”[1]  Currently a macroeconomics professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Sargent has made a name for himself in the economic world with his theory of rational expectations and dynamic macroeconomics. 

 

To celebrate Sargent's award, here's an excerpt from Recursive Macroeconomic Theory that describes the methodology of dynamic macroeconomics:

 

 

Dynamic programming is now recognized as a powerful method for studying private agents’ decisions and also decisions of a government that wants to design an optimal policy in the face of constraints imposed on it by private agents’ best responses to that government policy. But it has taken a long time for the power of dynamic programming to be realized for government policy design problems.

Dynamic programming has been applied since the late 1950s to design government decision rules to control an economy whose transition laws included rules that described the decisions of private agents.  In 1976 Robert E. Lucas, Jr., published his now famous critique of dynamic-programming-based econometric policy evaluation procedures. The heart of Lucas’s critique was the implication for government policy evaluation of a basic property that pertains to any optimal decision rule for private agents with a form that attains a Bellman equation like…Therefore, Lucas asserted that econometric policy evaluation procedures that assumed that private agents’ decision rules are fixed in the face of alterations in government policy are flawed. Most econometric policy evaluation procedures at the time were vulnerable to Lucas’ criticism. To construct valid policy evaluation procedures, Lucas advocated building new models that would attribute rational expectations to decision makers. Lucas’s discussant Robert Gordon implied that after that ambitious task had been accomplished, we could then use dynamic programming to compute optimal policies, i.e., to solve Ramsey problems.

 But Edward C. Prescott’s 1977 paper entitled “Should Control Theory Be Used for Economic Stabilization?” asserted that Gordon was too optimistic. Prescott claimed that in his 1977 JPE paper with Kydland he had proved that it was “logically impossible” to use dynamic programming to find optimal government policies in settings where private traders face genuinely dynamic problems…

Much of the subsequent history of macroeconomics belies Prescott’s claim of “logical impossibility.” More and more problems that smart people like Prescott in 1977 thought could not be attacked with dynamic programming can now be solved with dynamic programming. Prescott didn’t put it this way, but now we would: in 1977 we lacked a way to handle history dependence within a dynamic programming framework. Finding a recursive way to handle history dependence is a major achievement of the past 25 years…

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[1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2011/sargent.html

 

Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week One

We are excited to launch a series of recordings that are excerpted from Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows and voiced by its author, Samuel Jay Keyser. Samuel Jay Keyser is Professor Emeritus in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and Special Assistant to the Chancellor. In Mens et Mania, Jay gives us glimpses into MIT's culture during his time there (beginning in 1977), including his part in negotiating student grievances--from the legality of showing Deep Throat in a dormitory to the uproar caused by the arrests of students for antiapartheid demonstrations--and explaining "hacking" and the specal student-faculty bond at MIT.

We will post a new recording each Wednesday for eight weeks (up through November 30th) along with a mix of Q&As with Jay about the recordings and passages from the book.

Without further ado, here's the first recording--an excerpt from Chapter 1: The Wrecking Ball--and a brief Q&A with Jay.

 

Ch. 1. The Wrecking Ball

 

Do you think that watching your old office be destroyed gave you a sense of closure, or did it make you want to further your presence at MIT in new territories/fields?

Definitely the former; a sense of closure. As it happened, I had taken a walk through Building 20 just after the workers had festooned its insides with plastic barriers that made it look like a model of the internal organs of a sea monster. They were making safe workspaces for themselves.That way they could dismantle the building without suffering the dangers of asbestos inhalation. I walked all over the building, saying goodbye, as it were. A chapter in MIT’s history was about to close. The wrecking ball turned the page.

Throughout Mens et Mania, you make various remarks about the importance of buildings at MIT. How do you think your attitude toward the seven years of experiences you had at the “rat’s nest of a building,” or “Magic Incubator” compares to the students’ feelings toward their housing, as you describe in Chapter 10?

I hadn’t thought of it that way. But it is a terrific comparison. Thank you for that. When I think of MIT now, I don’t think of teak row or the Stata Center, I think of Building 20. Whenever I go to the faculty lunchroom, I make a point of running my hand along the wooden walls that were constructed from Building 20 timber. I don’t think there is enough nostalgia at MIT. But that is not surprising in an institution devoted to pushing the barriers of knowledge forward. The past is always wrong.

 

 

No Tech-fix for Justice

Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, on the Arab Spring and whether social media promotes radical political change. 

On my recent book tour supporting Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, audiences from Montréal, QC to Washington, DC asked incisive, insightful questions about the relationship between information technology and social justice. Audience members were particularly interested in how the high-tech equity agenda that I develop in the book applies to the thrilling revolts that took place across the Middle East and North Africa this spring. They wanted to know: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media fosters radical political change?

Social media were undoubtedly useful tools in the recent pro-democracy uprisings, and will continue to play a role in liberation movements around the globe. As Xiaolin Zhuo, Barry Wellman, and Justine Yu point out in their article “Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?,” published in the July 2011 issue of Peace Magazine, networked tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs facilitated rapid mobilization of protesters, developed a sense of community under a repressive regime with limited freedom of the press, and garnered global attention once protests had started.

However, as Zhuo, Wellman and Yu show, organized groups, informal networks, and formal organizing training played an equally (if not more) crucial role in these not-so-spontaneous protests. Established political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the April 6 Youth Movement were central to organizing the Tahrir Square protests. Word of mouth and television spread more information and mobilized more protesters than social media and internet sources. Egyptian activists received face-to-face training and support from international allies such as CANVAS (the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) in Serbia. So social media supported and supplemented on-the-ground organizing, rather than simply unleashing democratic forces. Even in Asmaa Mahfouz's now-famous video blog, which some credit with launching the January 25 protests, she informs watchers that she's to get off the internet, because she’s on her way to hand out fliers in the street.

In cases beyond Egypt, the use of social media has markedly negative impacts on radical organizing, as Evgeny Morozov has persuasively argued in the cases of China, where the authoritarian regime deploys a small army of internet users to post pro-government propaganda, or Iran, where the Ahmadinejad government used internet and mobile device records to track down dissidents after the 2009-2010 election protests.

The focus on technology in the international media may also misrepresent the character of liberation movements -- hiding, for example, the important role played by women in the Arab Spring. Robin Morgan argues in “Women of the Arab Spring,” her article in the most recent Ms. Magazine, that when the mainstream media talked blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they focused on Zeid Al Heni and Google employee Wael Ghonim, not Tunisian feminist blogger Lina Ben Mhenni or even Asmaa Mahfouz and her viral video blog. That the face of “Facebook Revolutions” tends to be male says more about our perceptions of technology than about the reality of who is using online tools for progressive change.

While social media undoubtedly shaped the unfolding of liberation struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, to say that these were Facebook or Twitter revolutions is misleading. The focus on technical aspects of the Arab Spring marginalizes and minimizes the role of traditional organizing and downplays the risks and commitments made by ordinary people who put themselves, embodied and in real time, on the line for freedom.

The most troubling aspect of the myopic focus on “Liberation Technology” is the suggestion that if you add internet, you can produce instant revolution.* We need better stories about the relationship between technology and social change. As I write in  Digital Dead End,

[W]e do not have many stories that show us how hard, and how rewarding, it is to actually forge and maintain alliances across difference...Easier just to posit some mythical “Movement Moment” when differences are put aside, to deify a superhuman charismatic leader who turns divisiveness into coalition, or to mourn the sacrificial lambs who become a rallying cry for unity. Easier to ignore or forget the day-to-day heroism of ordinary people coming together to transform their world...This unattainable myth misrepresents collective process; it is a pale imitation of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.” We should demand more.

In the book, I also describe a model of liberatory technology education my collaborators and I called "Popular Technology." Grounded in popular education, it focuses on resisting oppression, building coalition across difference, and fostering participatory decision-making. Fighting exploitation, imperialism and violence may sound so last century, but there simply is no tech-fix for justice. As Andrew Feenberg reminds us, technology is not a destiny; it is a site of struggle.

 

*See, for example, New York Times reporting on the US State Department's “Wi-Fi in a Box” project.

References:

Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?

Women of the Arab Spring

Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, Oxford UP: 1991.  

 

 

A Social Justice Tour

Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, fills us in on the highlights of her tour.

I’ve been lucky to spend much of the spring and early summer touring in support of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. It’s an especially exciting time to be thinking and talking about the relationship between technology and social justice. The questions asked by audiences from Concord, NH to New York City to Philadelphia made it clear that, despite differences in race, gender and class, many of us are curious and concerned about the impact of technology on social, political and economic inequities. I was asked tough, insightful questions: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media can create radical political change? How does technology affect workers in the sagging American economy? Can we use new IT tools to increase governmental transparency and accountability?

What truly stood out for me, though, was the extraordinary on-the-ground work being done by social justice organizations in the cities that I visited. In Montréal, my event at the Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore was supported by both the Concordia Women's Studies Student Association and the wonderful Simone de Beauvoir Institute, which is dedicated to exploring feminism as a tool for understanding social justice and fighting for social change. While in Canada, I was hosted by the delightful Christina Haralanova, who co-authored the WITT training toolkit, Strategic ICT for the Empowerment of Women, and introduced me to Montréal's hackerspace, Foulab, which teaches people to repurpose and redesign everything from wearable electronics to analog robots to mustard.

In Baltimore, my event at Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse was co-sponsored by Hollaback! Baltimore, a brash and refreshingly witty group dedicated to using online tools to end street harassment of women and girls. In Washington DC, my event at Busboys and Poets  was sponsored by DC Jobs with Justice, the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and Teaching for Change. I stayed a few extra days in DC to undertake a “social justice tour” of my own, meeting with members of a number of community organizations. Though I learned from all the people I met, the highlight was undoubtedly my visit to ONE DC, whose steadfast commitment to shared leadership and healing in the midst of difficult struggles for housing and economic justice astonished and inspired me.

Though my book offers some uncomfortable truths about the “real world of IT” in the lives of poor and working-class women and families, my intention has always been to highlight popular technology—approaches that help all people develop critical technological citizenship and engage with technology as a site of political struggle. We can make an extraordinary impact on the inequities of the information age when we think, and practice, technological development and social justice together. What my tour proved to me is that liberation technologies are possible; in fact, they are everywhere you look.

 ***

If you’d like to hear audio of Virginia Eubanks’ book event at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, you can access it here. You can also follow Eubanks’ writing through her blog, PopTech.

 

A Graceful Event

The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum, will be celebrating that grand foremother of computing, Grace Hopper, on Thursday January 28, with a talk from Kurt Beyer, author of Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age.

For more information, or to book your tickets now, go to the Commonwealth Club website.

Performing Downtown

A recent Bookforum article ("East Village People") from John Rockwell reminds us of the performing arts explosion that Lower Manhattan witnessed from the 1960s to the 1990s. It was a wild scene, an offbeat and avant-garde refuge for poets, artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians.

Rockwell writes that the entirety of the lower-Manhattan arts scene awaits its definitive chronicler. But there is no need to wait. Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series has been chronicling performers and characters of Lower Manhattan from that era such as Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, The Wooster Group, and David Wojnarowicz (the book on the latter—David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side—being in fact less a portrait of the man than a portrait of the entire scene that coalesced around him). Semiotext(e) itself played a significant role in that downtown scene era, when founding member Sylvère Lotringer organized the now infamous 1975 “Schizo-Culture” conference that quickly burst out of its academic framework into something of a large-scale performance of theory that proved to be both the last gasp of 1970s counterculturism and the opening salvo to French Theory’s infiltration of the Manhattan art scene in the 1980s.

The latest book in the Native Agents series, Bad Reputation, focuses on Penny Arcade, perhaps one of the biggest icons of that downtown performance scene. As a performer in the legendary NYC Playhouse of the Ridiculous at age seventeen, and an escapee from Andy Warhol's Factory scene at nineteen, Penny Arcade (born Susana Ventura) emerged in the 1980s as a primal force on the downtown art scene and as an originator of what came to be called performance art.
 
On Monday, January 25th, Penny will be celebrating the publication of her book in her own style, an "atmospheric extravaganza gala of erotic dancers, and performances". The event will feature Debbie Harry among other special guests, and will be held at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street - the former location of The Village Gate, whose 1993 marquee is preserved as a landmark and still advertises “Penny Arcade: Politics, Sex, Reality.”

Don't miss this one. More information can be found at http://lepoissonrouge.com/events/view/915.

And if you can't make it: Penny will be reading at St. Mark's Bookshop Reading Series at Solas on February 4th, in the From Here to the Corner reading series (focusing on "hidden and vanishing histories of New York City") on January 19th, and more events to be announced soon.

[photo of Penny Arcade © Jasmine Hirst 2010]

Award News: MLA Publication Awards

Three MIT Press authors will be honored with awards for their books at the upcoming Modern Language Association (MLA) convention. The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. These awards are three of eighteen awards that will be presented on December 28th during the association's annual convention, held this year in Philadelphia

Below is a list of the awards and the books, along with the committee citation for each of them:

The sixteenth annual Prize for a First Book will be given to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, for Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

Mechanisms is a genuinely original, field-defining contribution to media studies, promising to have a major impact on the fields of literary studies, book history, and digital culture. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum brilliantly puts new media studies into dialogue with book history and textual studies, teaching readers anew how to think about materiality, form, durability, and ephemerality in a digital age, while offering a primer in how to read and teach digital works, including works of literature. The book tracks the fate and transformations of electronic works by William Gibson and Michael Joyce, among others, in a manner somewhere between technical bibliography and detective work. Kirschenbaum engagingly and efficiently educates-and thus may help to produce-a new audience for digital literatures.

The tenth Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters will go to William G. Holzberger for The Letters of George Santayana, Book Seven, 1941-1947 and Book Eight, 1948-1952.

These volumes complete an important project, publishing a scholarly edition of the complete correspondence of George Santayana, a major figure in the history of American philosophy and cultural criticism. The letters cover the last years of Santayana's life-spent in Rome, where he was in effect trapped by World War II-and the years after the war during which he prepared his final publications and was visited by many American admirers. William G. Holzberger admirably documents this period of Santayana's life with carefully edited texts, thoughtful and comprehensive introductions, and supporting notes and apparatuses that are never obtrusive and invariably helpful.

The nineteenth annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures will be given to Nicolás Wey Gómez, of Brown University, for The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies.

The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, by Nicolás Wey Gómez, is already gaining recognition as a landmark study. The book's main argument is supported by an astonishing knowledge of the development of cosmography, geography, history, literature, geometry, astrology, and philosophy. The analysis combines meticulous archival research (in several languages) as well as contemporary theoretical concepts of space and place and the North-South divide. Few would have imagined it possible to say anything new about Columbus or his enterprise, yet Wey Gómez not only says something new, he also challenges the foundation of what is commonly accepted as the logic that conferred legitimacy on the European discovery and colonization of the Americas.

 More information can be found at http://www.mla.org/resources/awards/awards_winners.

Would you go to Art School?

How should artists be educated? And is it worth attending a $35,000-a-year art school so that one graduates in debt into an uncertain market?

The last major change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world, combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today's artists. Nevertheless, an estimated 30,000 Master of Fine Arts degrees are granted each year.

Those in New York can join a discussion about the future of art schools with the editor and contributors of Art School, a book that looks at these issues. All are invited to join the conversation this Sunday, November 15, in the Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union's incredible new 41 Cooper Square building.

Three conversations will take place, discussing the most pressing issues facing the transmission of cultural knowledge today and for the future. Speakers and moderators include Dennis Adams, Thierry de Duve, Shirin Neshat, Hans Haacke, Boris Groys, Liam Gillick, Saskia Bos, Steven Henry Madoff, Ernesto Pujol, Ute Meta Bauer, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Jeffrey Schnapp, Anton Vidokle, Matthew Higgs, Charles Renfro, Dana Schutz, and Brian Sholis.

Schedule:

1:00 p.m.
Flows of Knowledge, Infections, Temporary States
Steven Henry Madoff, moderator
Ute Meta Bauer
Thierry de Duve
Boris Groys
Jeffrey Schnapp
Anton Vidokle

2:15 p.m.
The Usefulness of the Academy, Learning and Doing—or Nobody Asked You to Do Nothing
Brian Sholis, moderator
Paul Ramirez Jonas
Matthew Higgs
Shirin Neshat
Dana Schutz

3:30 p.m.
Social Context and the Role of the Academy in the 21st Century
Saskia Bos, moderator
Dennis Adams
Liam Gillick
Hans Haacke
Ernesto Pujol
Charles Renfro

Free and open to the public.

Frederick P. Rose Auditorium
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
41 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003