So I managed to skip a whole month without blogging. I apologize for this but the reason was (finally!) the launch of my baby, Anni Zola. She’s got bugs and there are a ton of things we still have to do (like, for example, adding actual illustrations to the “Illustrated Story Blog”), but we decided to launch anyway with a creature design challenge, and see how we’d do. Got a press release up right here. Wish us luck!
To those of you who don’t know, Anni Zola is basically a literary project I’m doing. I’ve always wanted to have a story up and running, and as you know I’ve always been fascinated by database narratives, social meda storytelling, and the copyright battle scene. By a stroke of luck I met LA-based singer/songwriter Zuriani Zonneveld who wanted to build her own virtual idol 2.0 (I created my own virtual idol, The Feline Complex, back in late 2006 and early 2007) and we sorta merged our concept together and Anni Zola was born.
Now that’s probably some boring information, but anyway, please do check us out. We’re hoping to get more and more awesome and if a dream to merge traditional copyright-conservative Hollywood content industry with the open-source-liberals of the social media industry isn’t crazy enough then we don’t know what is. Have a look at our presentation video below.
Anyway. That’s not all I’ve been doing, though. On January I finally managed to write my undergrad thesis and passed the exam. I’ll finally have a degree higher than high school this year, which is pretty awesome I guess. I wrote about Serial Experiments Lain, to those wondering. I’ll be uploading my thesis along with other writings of mine once I finish my main site, hopefully within this month or the next.
Serial Experiments Lain
Among those “other writings” should be an article for Paraflows 2009 I finished last month. It’s terribly late to do a writeup of it but I might do it shortly just to give an overview of the very very interesting discussion that took place in Vienna in September last year. I’ll be writing more articles for monochrom but hopefully you can expect a lot more activity on this blog from this month onwards.
A very late Happy New Year to you readers Let’s hope this year works out great for our critical brains. Cheerios!
As with every Christmas, not everyone’s all sunshine and daisies, snowflakes and honeys with their families. Being a confidant I hear a lot of stuff from people around me, and one of the more frequent cases I hear is that in which a kid goes out with a certain someone she doesn’t really love or even in tune with just to rebel against a parent. Being a good confidant I like to go all Lacanian and Marxist with people to troll the shit out of them and make them stronger (fuck yeah!). And just as I like to explain cultural-political situations with a love relationship analogy, so too I often find myself seeing State situations as larger projections of such human, all too human relationships.
As is most often the case with adolescents who rebel in the aforementioned way, the boyfriend/girlfriend character is usually just arbitrarily taken as a symptom of the protest, as the embodiment of the impossibility of the parent-child relationship. Every protest is of course a demand for love, and as the adolescent get more mature, as communication grows between the parent and the child, the boyfriend/girlfriend character finds itself dissolving until he/she is completely out of the picture, sublated in the maturing process of the two key actors.
And is this not, in fact, Marx’s analysis of the State in its core? Lacan said that it was Marx who invented the symptom, and I would argue further that it was also Marx who developed the dialectical process of symptom dissolution that was soon assumed (and later thrown away) by psychoanalysis. Is not the Marxian State nothing but the largest possible set of the symptoms of class struggle? The dialectical process, Communism’s task, would therefore in the end aim to dissolve the State by creating a harmonious society free from class struggle–a classless society.
In other words, we can say that the State is in fact always deemed to be in a love-hate relationship with the commons, for it is nothing but a figure that the proletariat (child) assume as its symptom to communicate its protest against the capital owners (parent), who seem to stubbornly have all the say as to what kind of State (spouse) society should live with. The true aim of the proletariat’s speech is therefore not to finally create the socialist-welfare State, but to have their rights on an equal footing with the bourgeoisie–i.e. to assume the means of production as their own, to be productive commons without being dictated by other parties, regardless of what kind of State we end up with.
Of course, one should be critical of Marx himself since the notion of the classless society itself is problematic, just as the sexual relationship is impossible. However, fidelity to a cause is nonetheless a viable procedure–which is why love functions nonetheless. And I do think that this time of the year is a good time to reflect on what Truths we have chosen to vow our fidelity to, on the dreams we have inherited, on our loved ones and on the future we aspire to. Let us realize our symptoms and dissolve it–not through naive hopes in finite representations, but through clarity in the infinite presentations and possibilities that we are. Let us build and collaborate in the open culture of the decade ahead, let us run lines and make rhizomes, let us be everything from the nothing that we are. Have a very merry Christmas and an epic new decade!
I’m not dead. And I didn’t start a new blog just to stop blogging after the first post. What happened was that I pretty much got sent to Singapore just a couple of days after that first post, to do this. A writeup is coming really soon, with a Flickr photo set. After that Paraflows writeup I promised months ago. I’m a typical male, I know.
So anyway, this is just to let you know I’m fine, and please keep in touch with this blog, and don’t be down if I don’t post for two weeks or so. I’m making my best effort to be a better blogger. Not to make excuses, but in case I haven’t told you, I’m now also doing an Idol 2.0 startup, which takes a great deal of my time and energy. I’ll be shamelessly plugging in some stuff about her here in the posts to come, since it’s directly connected with the things I believe in and a form of my real-world action as an open world commons enthusiast.
Just so I don’t waste your time with a useless post I’ll direct you my most recent article in The Jakarta Post here. You can find other, older writings of mine in that site by entering my name in the search field like this, if you’re ever interested.
And in the light of Christmas I’ll leave you with a happy holidays from Azusa Itagaki’s ass.
This blog is pretty much a continuation of my old one, The Posthuman Marxist. I moved due to a couple of reasons:
I’m no longer that big of a fan of my old writings. They had theoretical flaws which I’m not proud of–not much, but I felt they were rather immature. I’m also not proud of the fact that many of them contained too many name-droppings and unfunny jokes. I want to write to the public, not as high theory but as something that people can better relate to.
Relating to that, I felt too restricted in my old writings since I had some sort of formal publication format in mind, with certain references and word count and categories that must be made clear. This blog right now is more personal and a mashup, and I hope you’ll like this format better.
I’m writing a book. So, no, I’m not going all pop and dropping my controversial posthumanist and Marxist orientations, but they do have a different and better place now, which is a book I will hopefully have out within the next year or two. Also, the more serious political analyses now go to newspapers.
All in all I wanna make my writings more accessible and reader-friendly, gaining more readers, having more people being able to relate to what I write. I don’t wanna be just another theory blogger who engage in theoretical masturbations nobody can relate to and attack other theory bloggers with abstract debates and endless name-droppings and jargons. Rest assured they do have their own niche, but my desire tells me to provide value in other ways. I hope you like this new format better and I hope my writings can still be of inspiration, and better ones, too.
I’m Bonni Rambatan. You might have known me before from my writings on my old blog, newspaper articles, or from my lectures here and there. Or perhaps you know me through my illustrations or fashion designs or dance routines or from the Anni Zola project. I like to call myself a scientist of desires, I’m [...]more →
