“If the factory oscillates between pre-inscription and the unsayable, this is because it is caught in the trappings of its function as a machine and subtracted from its true essence, which is to be a political place, a production of truths.” – Alain Badiou
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Two-time Oscar winning Czech chief Milos Forman has died at 86 years old as per Reuters and reports. Forman's significant other Martina educated Czech news organization CTK that the movie producer go after a short sickness in the U.S.
Some portion of the Czech new wave, Forman moved on from the Prague Film Faculty of the Academy of Dramatic Arts, and got worldwide consideration with so much titles as Black Peter (1964), The Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen's Ball(1967), the last two Oscar chosen people for best outside film. In 1968 he fled Czechoslovakia amid the Prague spring for the U.S. The Fireman's Ball, around a doomed occasion in a commonplace town, was a thump on Eastern European Communism and drummed up some excitement in his country with the administration. His 1971 parody, Taking Off, his first American title, won the 1971 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and featured Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin as guardians whose little girl flees. They soon start to bond with different guardians whose children have additionally fled from home. Before becoming famous in highlights, Forman cut his teeth in docs with one prominent title being Audition around two contending artist
Forman was known for his furious shows, getting both hazardous and nuanced exhibitions out of his performing artists, particularly Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Will Sampson, a youthful Danny DeVito and Brad Dourif in his component adjustment of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest about a psychological patient played by Nicholson who challenges the healing center's the present state of affairs led by Fletcher's Nurse Ratched. The Movie earned five Oscar wins for best picture, executive, performing artist, on-screen character and adjusted screenplay; the initial five premium breadth since 1934's It Happened One Night. Notwithstanding being an Oscar victor, Cuckoo's Nest was a hit in the cinematic world in 1975 making near $109M.
Pauline Kael in her New Yorker audit expressed, "Milos Forman appears to have recognized the strong realistic material within Kesey’s conception. We all fear being locked up among the insane, helpless to prove our sanity, perhaps being driven mad; this fear is almost as basic as that of being buried alive. And we can’t formulate a clear-cut difference between sane and insane…the story and the acting make the movie emotionally powerful." Forman fan Baby Driver executive Edgar Wright tweeted today "“He had a tremendous filmography that documented the rebel heart and human spirit.” Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive
The challenge of this book is thinking critically about media practices in a setting where they are fast, fun, and ubiquitous. As an avowedly engaged and political approach to thought, critical theory of any sort encounters challenges. Attempting to analyze and intervene in the present, it nonetheless adopts a backward gaze, an idea G.W.F. Hegel figures with the owl of Minerva flying at dawn, Michel Foucault practices through his historical methods of archaeology and genealogy, and Slavoj Žižek conceptualizes with the notion of “retroactive determination.” A problem specific to critical media theory is the turbulence of networked communications: that is, the rapidity of innovation, adoption, adaptation, and obsolescence.1 The object of one’s theoretical focus and critical ire quickly changes or even vanishes. The time of theory is over-taken, even taken over, by ever-morphing, interlinking, media.
Since books can easily be surpassed by events, they appear particularly ill chosen as a medium through which to present a critical media theory. A theory that is current, if it is possible at all, seems confined to presentation within the forms and circuits it analyzes. It can be presented in face-to-face conferences, workshops, or meet-ups; it can be posted on discussion lists or blogs. It can be visualized, videoed, shared and distributed, critiqued, amended, sampled, and forwarded. Thought can be made immediate, an element of its moment or, more precisely, of the fantasy that attempts to delimit a moment out of the present’s rush to the future and absorption into the past.
A book that makes critical-theoretical claims about blogging thus encounters a double problem of its object and its form of presentation. Each side of the problem entraps theory in its setting. To address its object in a timely fashion, the book has to be new, fresh, up-to-the-minute, fashion-forward, bleedingedge. It needs to predict or at least hazard a guess as to where things are going, what’s going to happen. The book is pushed to adopt, in other words, the entrepreneurial expectations of the venture capitalist, racing to be the first out of the block. This side of the problem highlights one of the specific ways communicative capitalism captures critique and resistance, formatting them as contributions to the circuits in which it thrives.3 The temporal take-over of theory displaces sustained critical thought, replacing it with the sense that there isn’t time for thinking, that there are only emergencies to which one must react, that one can’t keep up and might as well not try.
he second side of the problem, the form of theory’s presentation, likewise highlights how communicative capitalism fragments thought into ever smaller bits, bits that can be distributed and sampled, even ingested and enjoyed, but that in the glut of multiple, circulating contributions tend to resist recombination into longer, more demanding theories. It’s like today we can have and share insights, but these insights must not add up to something like a theory that might aid us in understanding, critically confronting, and politically restructuring the present. Theodor Adorno’s criticism of the passion for information in mass culture applies more to contemporary communication and entertainment networks than it did to film and radio, the mass media he has in mind when he writes, “However useful it might be from a practical point of view to have as much information as possible at one’s disposal, there still prevails the iron law that the information in question shall never touch the essential, shall never degenerate into thought.”4 As multiple-recombinant ideas and images circulate, stimulate, they distract us from the antagonisms constitutive of contemporary society, inviting us to think that each opinion is equally valid, each option is equally likely, and each click is a significant political intervention. The deluge of images and announcements, enjoining us to react, to feel, to forward them to our friends, erodes critical-theoretical capacities – aren’t they really just opinions anyway? Feelings dressed up in jargon? Drowning in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system. React and forward, but don’t by any means think.
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February 2020
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