/2008/02/the-gogarty-affair/ THE FREE ASSOCIATION Fri, 13 Nov 2015 11:17:04 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.3 /2008/02/the-gogarty-affair/#comment-100 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:59:35 +0000 http://freelyassociating.org/2008/02/the-gogarty-affair/#comment-100 Keir, that’s bang on. Just compare the Gogarty affair to the problem of climate change: that field is completely saturated (bogged-down, if you like), and you can’t move without tripping over someone offering some half-baked solution. Whereas things like the Gogarty affair (Christ, it’s starting to sound really sinister, like the Dreyfus affair) come out of left-field and have the potential to open things up in a really accelerated fashion. It also reminds me that the most interesting stuff often happens in the least obvious places: the 1905 strike wave in Russia was sparked by typesetters demanding better piece rates for punctuation. All power to the semi-colons.

]]> /2008/02/the-gogarty-affair/#comment-99 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:21:00 +0000 http://freelyassociating.org/2008/02/the-gogarty-affair/#comment-99 I don’t want to waste any more time on something so unimportant but I was just thinking that it’s precisely because the Gogarty affair was unimportant that allowed it to bring up meta-issues. Most “discussions” on blogs attached to mainstream media and perhaps most discussion on blogs everywhere, get trapped in the particularities of “issues”. Different “commenters” take up entrenched positions and then fight polemically by misrepresenting the others position. This time the issue was empty to start with which didn’t allow much venom between posters instead the only target was the concrete practices of the press itself. The nepotistic hiring of journalists, the class reproduction through class bias, the censoring, trumping and misrepresenting of the online medium and debate by the printed press. At their best the comments even attacked the way the press tries to focuses attention and desires self referentially upon itself and the milieu it’s drawn from. In a sense it really was old media versus new media. More widely though, and I’m surprised to hear myself say this, it seems to agree with Laclau’s theory of hegemony, where issues have to become empty before they can stand in for the totality. The counter point being, of course, that hegemony doesn’t exhaust politics and that we have to take account of affect and desire which occur on a level below the hegemonic.

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