kriticulture

The Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt defined the sovereign as one who decides what is and what is not law. The Führer was, according to him, the source of law. He was not, for that ‘reason’, subject to any law, but existed in supreme abandon outside it all. The most loud-mouthed of all self-proclaimed pure Aryans, Hitler, might have been dead for over half a century, yet his shade continues to reappear time and again in lesser führers. Punjabi University , Patiala is currently saddled with an auditor, designated as Deputy Controller Local Audit (DCLA), who gleefully dismisses all lawful authority. And he does it with absolute impunity. One can empathise with him, because he sits in the University campus, for treating the University Syndicate as just another next-door institution; but even the University Grants Commission, the Government of Punjab (especially its Departments of Finance and Higher Education), the Parliament, the Punjab and Haryana High Court an...

T he scandalous state of the modern university can be attributed to various corruptions that have taken root in the disciplines of the humanities. The university was once the locus of humanistic education in the great books; today, one is more likely to find there indoctrination in multiculturalism, disability studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, a host of other victimization studies, and the usual insistence on the centrality of the categories of race, gender, and class. The humanities today seem to be waning in presence and power in the modern university in large part because of their solipsistic irrelevance, which has predictably increased students’ uninterest in them. Although critics of the hijacking of the humanities might be inclined to see their new irrelevance as a cause for celebration, it should be a deep source of concern and the impetus for renewed efforts to insist upon their central place in the liberal arts, rightly understood. However, to reclaim...

(From Democracy Now! ) We spend the hour with world-renowned linguist and dissident, Noam Chomsky. In a wide-ranging public conversation at the Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chomsky talks about President Obama’s foreign and national security policies, the lessons of Vietnam, and his own activism. “You just can’t become involved part-time in these things,” Chomsky says. “It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. Things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work.” Noam Chomsky on Obama's Foreign Policy, His Own History of Activism, and the Importance of Speaking Out

We were reporting from the Sundance Film Festival when news came of Howard Zinn's death on Wednesday, January 29 of a heart attack at the age of 87. Howard Zinn's classic work A Peoples History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. It has sold over a million copies and was recently made into a television special called "The People Speak." After he served as a bombardier in World War II back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: "Never again." Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. In a 2005 interview, he talked about his time in the Air Force . Link: ZCommunications | Howard Zinn (1922-2010) by Amy Goodman | ZMagazine Article

In Search of a Gramscian Critique By Rajesh Kumar Sharma I am making these noises a quarter century too late (I began teaching in 1985). Perhaps the ghosts have begun to refuse, finally and definitively, to yet again return to their beds. When I say ‘our pedagogic culture’, I mean a specific, limited and yet changing collectivity. It refers to the pedagogic culture of several (which is not ‘all’) departments of English, and particularly of the department of which I am a part. As well as a ‘parcel’ (having been ‘posted’ with a doctorate here, in Punjabi University , Patiala, only). From one pair of eyes to another, over a space of scarcely a few feet, I have often traversed vast spaces between passion and indifference and, maybe, unavowed refusal. Are those at the receiving end of our pedagogic deliveries refusing to play the game? Or are they just plain stupid, too uncouth to appreciate the precious wares we are hawking? An impassioned response, an engagement –once in a while– come...

By Anthony Grafton ( from New York Review of Books) British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy. As an “Occasional Student” at University College London in the early 1970s and a regular visitor to the Warburg Institute, Oxford, and Cambridge after that, I—like many American humanists—envied colleagues who taught at British universities. We had offices with linoleum; they had rooms with carpets. We worked at desks; they sat with their students on comfy chairs and gave them glasses of sherry. Above all, we felt under constant pressure to do the newest new thing, and show the world that we were doing it: to be endlessly innovative and interdisciplinary and industrious. British humanists innovated too. Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Frances Yates and Pete...

The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered , it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is , the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works . Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God". But theologians needn't lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow . Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct. ...

Robert Fisk’s <i>Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East</i> reviewed by Matthew Abraham The name “Robert Fisk” has become synonymous with dangerous truth-telling in his reporting about the Middle East—truth-telling of a kind so rare in journalistic circles that those seeking to suppress the facts about what the Western powers have done to the region and its people usually resort to the usual defamation about how Fisk is anti-American and anti-Semitic. Fisk’s truth-telling is of a sort that must be shunned and avoided by the cowardly corporate media and its host of watchdogs who seek to make the likes of Fisk ancient history. If telling the truth is considered a revolutionary act in deceitful times Fisk has consistently violated the central taboos on Middle East reporting, repeatedly putting U.S. journalists to shame for their participation in a large-scale cover-up. His example needs to be learned from and emulated. What does it...

My Sister’s Language | ShahidulNews His eyes flitted forward and back, and having surveyed the scene for possible danger, it stopped. The head stooped, and that was how he stayed. Crouched on the floor of a bus full of Bangalis, the Pahari (hill person) amongst us, was living in occupied land. Keeping out of trouble was his best chance for survival. It was only when the uniformed men with guns boarded the bus and prodded him that he raised his eyes. Scared, tired, hurt, angry eyes. But he knew enough to not express his anger. Meekly he obeyed the commands. His humiliation was also ours, but we did not complain. We were tourists in our own land, but the constitutional guarantees enshrined in our laws, while not fully respected anywhere, was particularly absent here. As well-connected Bangalis, we were far more safe than he was. But the rules of occupation are never generous, and they had guns. They left. We breathed more easily. He continued his journey with his head bowed. I took no p...

parrhesia :: a journal of critical philosophy Simondon, Stiegler, Thacker, Virilio . . .

March 1, 2010. Punjabi University, Patiala. The second day of the Conference on Transnational Punjabi Literature and Culture: Challenges and Opportunities organised by the well-meaning World Punjabi Centre and Sahitya Akademi. The young Finance Minister of Punjab, Manpreet Singh Badal walks in without the spectacular paraphernalia of gun-wielding security men. The calls made by all and sundry for nurturing Punjabi language move him deeply. And therefore, as he rises to speak, he is at his oratorical best. And most irrational. He unspools anecdote after anecdote to lace his very sincere speech. The climax comes with a call to the Punjabis to take a leaf from Ku Klux Klan, the American far right hate group which, in the Hon'ble Minister's judgement, showed enviable commitment to the threatened white supremacy. The Punjabis could form a society like the KKK, he innocently opines, to secure the supremacy of Punjabi. But he could just be using a metaphor, you may say. I agree. I ag...