At some point in the course of running a business, the need for professional technological help will arise. Very few businesses, no matter how small, can afford to ignore the growing demand for instant information and rapid response to their clientele. Computerization is a standard tool of competition, and if used correctly, it should rapidly pay for itself in a reduction of people-hours and an increase in efficiency. Your options are: assigning a current employee to select, purchase, install, configure and maintain computer hardware, software and networking (providing him/her with, of course, formal training); hiring a full time information systems expert; or, you can commission or out source the work to a computer consulting firm—a company that provides complete computer systems solutions including analysis, planning, hardware, software, networking, training and support.

The only realistic solution, for businesses under 40 to 50 employees, is to utilize a consulting firm. It is not possible for a current employee, working full time as, say, an administrator, to be qualified, competent and up to date with the latest technology. It is also not realistic for a business to hire a full time systems manager, who, at $50,000 to $80,000 annually, will still need to out source the more complicated tasks.

Skills To Look For When Hiring a Consultant

Businesses faced with the task of selecting a consulting firm need to address many different factors. Most companies need a consultancy that can provide an initial analysis and description of a companies’ computer system needs, including hardware, software, networking, training, and support, and then be able to provide all that is needed. Companies also need a consultant who will provide a complete, start to finish solution, spend the necessary time to explore options, explain technology and answer questions, and make repeated, adjusted recommendations.  Employers should anticipate working with the consultants to clearly define the companies’ needs and goals, and the specific requirements to meet them. This will take work on both sides. The employer will need to analyze, with the help of the consultant, the type of work routinely performed in the company in terms of computer automation. The employer should request a written, detailed proposal including all hardware, software, networking and services, with pricing, description and timeline.

Temperament and Personality

Just as important as the consultant’s technical skills are his/her personality traits. Are you comfortable dealing with the consultant? Does the consultant speak plain English, or just techno-babble? Does the consultant seem interested in hearing about your specific needs or telling you what they are? Introduce the consultant to others in the firm to see how well they interact. The psychological, personal, and communicative fit between consultant and director in charge of computers is probably the most crucial aspect to a successful implementation and maintenance of a computer system. The development of a long-term relationship with a computer consultant is crucial to the ongoing efficient use of computers. Computers need routine work, which includes upgrades, maintenance, training users and planning for developing trends in the computer industry, your industry and your company.

Confidence

Confidence in a consultant, that he/she will be stable, committed, professional, attentive, honest and responsive, as well, of course, as competent in the specific computer related tasks, is of utmost importance. An employer will need to rely on the consultant’s knowledge of business and the computer industry in order to most wisely implement new systems, upgrades, etc.

References

Can the consultant provide solid references? Ask for references and see how they have performed in the past.

Expense

The expense of full service computer consulting can be substantial. Rates range between $95 and $175 per hour. The price, however, is a foolish area on which to skimp. It is perfectly clear that the old saying “you get what you pay for” is applicable here. First of all, regardless of what Microsoft’s media hype people would have you believe, installing, configuring, training and maintaining computers are not simple jobs. They are, in fact, complex and require an educated, patient and intelligent person. There is a reason that $175 per hour consultants get that fee – she’s/he’s worth it. Do not fall into the trap of saying “oh, but we only have a simple network—nothing that hasn’t been done many times before.” Computers are not simple, but the proper selection of a consultant will nullify the complexity. A competent consultant will get the work completed quicker, with fewer mistakes and fewer ongoing maintenance issues.

People Skills

What does the consultant do when meeting with resistance from employees to new hardware or software? A wise consultant realizes that the only way in which a computer system installation will be successful is if it is used properly. And the only way it will be used properly is through training and education. It is therefore imperative to find a consultancy that realizes this importance and is willing to provide the necessary training with the psychological delicacy needed to achieve a fit between user and computer on all levels.

Ongoing Requirements

When evaluating a consultant, imagine developing a long-term relationship with this person and the company. You will be working together for years to come, with the common goal of the success of your business. It will be required of you to trust this person with sensitive data, with the proper spending of the company’s money on computer systems and operation and with the most efficient implementation of computer technology. If the consultant seems like a fly by night, or in it for a quick dollar, he/she will without a doubt not serve the firm’s needs.

It is also necessary to understand the level of flexibility of the consultant and consultancy—they should feel responsibility for the continued, proper operation of the company’s computers, along with knowing when to provide continued training, virus updates, backup spot inspections, route or preventative maintenance. In addition, in time of crises, such as during a hardware failure or natural disaster (power outage, floods, etc.), the consultant should still take it upon himself to ensure the health of the computer system. Again, if you do not get the sense and referrals that will support this vision of the prospective consultant, look further.

Business Characteristics

Examine how long the consultancy has been in business. Remember, the field is young, so you will not likely find many 20 year-old firms, but 3 to 5 years of work shows stability and commitment.

Find out if the consultancy deals exclusively with one or two vendors (or manufacturers) of hardware or software. There very well might be a financial incentive to the consultant to recommend a particular solution. On the other hand, the consultant should be fully aware (and act accordingly) that his responsibility is to provide the best solution for the client, and not the one with the greatest profit. Trust and faith in the character of the consultant is what must be relied on here, too, to a great extent.

Conclusion

Choosing a computer consultant should involve considering a number of issues:

The expertise of the consultant in the hardware, software and networking required for your company; the stability and reliability of the consultant; and the ability of the consultant to work with you and your staff.

If these three aspects are met, a successful, advantageous and harmonious implementation of computers will ensue.

I’ve just been asked about the Terms and Conditions for submission; I’ll make it clear – we’re not out to steal your work, only to use your submissions to raise the most amount of money for St John’s. So the T&Cs are:

• We retain exclusive printing rights to the poems chosen for one year after publication (open to negotation if the poet comes forth with a case, with due notice given, of course)
• The poems will be published only in Poetry Against Cancer and no further volumes, unless permission is given from the author to do so – all authors will be given this option and are not obliged to accept second publication of the poem
• We, the organisers, will make no monetary gain from submissions – all profits will go to St John’s Ward at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin, Dublin (Their oncology ward)

If authors have any further queries regarding the T&Cs, please get in touch at the usual email address: poetry.against.cancer(at)gmail(dot)com.

Authors must have all the rights to their poems prior to submission; the same rights will be returned following a year after the publication date (unless, as it is stated, specific circumstances call for republication in another form).

Note that poems will be available in print form only through Poetry Against Cancer. We ask authors not to spread their submissions freely following submission so that St John’s may benefit the most from it.

Best wishes,
Paul Carroll.

(Also, one week to Christmas! Have a nice break writers!)

For the past two days i was waitng for a call..
sadly i dint get any calls
instead got an email stating that “Come and collect your OFFER Letter”
this is it..i got it finally.i will be joining TCS in a month.hoping to have great future..and wishing to do something BIG in my technology !!

Cheeeers to ME

In recent news, Microsoft New England has apparently hired Boaz Barak. (Though I could not find any announcement by Microsoft, or any indication on Boaz’s webpage.) This comes on top of Microsoft’s recent hires of Madhu Sudan and Omer Reingold (in Silicon Valley). One could argue that were MSR New England an academic department, it would rank among the top 3 in theoretical computer science. (Of course, one could also argue that were MSR New England an academic department many of the people would leave and the productivity of those who remain would be cut by half…)

I have to admit to feeling a bit jealous, as MSR New England is one place I would love to go… (and yes, I’ve “applied”).

I don’t want to re-hash the debates about academia vs. industry. (Anyway, it is not a fair comparison in any of these cases since Boaz, Madhu, and Omer are getting the benefits of industry without having to give up the benefits of tenure.) I’m more interested in the question of what Microsoft expects to get out of these hires? Or, more bluntly, how does Microsoft expect any of these hires to impact its bottom line? I am not asking about the value of TCS research in general, which I think is clear. I am asking, in particular, about hiring people who are about as far from practice as possible. I don’t think comparisons to “the old Bell labs” work here: the fundamental physics work done at Bell labs seems, to me, much closer to yielding practical benefits than fundamental work on complexity theory. I also don’t buy the arguments about these hires being public relations coups: how many people, outside of the attendees of STOC/FOCS, would recognize these people’s names? And for how many people will this affect their decision of whether to apply to Microsoft for a job, or buy Microsoft products?

But maybe I’m missing something. Any thoughts?

Everything I’m saying here is my opinion after spending one year at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology: IT SUCKS, IT’S NOT PROFESSIONAL, SAVE YOUR MONEY, IT’S A SCAM, IT’S A JOKE, DON’T LET THE PAINT JOB AND BIG TV’S FOOL YOU.

The Chicago School of Professional Psychology is not where you want to go if you’re pursuing a career in professional psychology. Here’s some reasons why:

-They’re spreading almost as quickly as the University of Phoenix. Now they have campuses in downtown Los Angeles, Westwood Los Angeles, Irvine (another place in Southern California), and Santa Barbra. When I applied to the Chicago School they had one, guess where it was? Chicago! Now they’re spreading themselves so thin that they didn’t even have a teacher for one of my first classes.

-Most of the classes are easier than high-school joke classes. Some require you to break out the crayons to plot your family tree and explore what this means to your psychological composure blah blah blah. Craziness runs in families, you don’t need to fork over $200 an hour or more for someone to tell you that.

-The faculty is horrible.

-They will repeatedly call you again and again regarding your interest in the program.

-They have another campus opening in Washington D.C.

-The school is not appropriately forecasting the labor market for psychologists of the future and has falsely misled students on multiple occasions. The school is so horribly disorganized it’s disgusting.

-Since they are a not for profit, they can’t technically have a profit. They can however have an endowment (untaxed profit) that can be used for direct reinvestment, faculty wages (which they weren’t spending a lot on when I was there), and brochures to make the school look good on paper and when you visit. It isn’t.

-They use the same books for GRADUATE LEVEL COURSE WORK that many students used in UNDERGRAD. It’s not new information, and you can easily get by most classes by skimming the power-points or writing a 5 page double spaced paper about whatever you want. It’s a degree mill. An expensive one at that.

-Teachers coming in from other graduate schools of professional psychology have been told to dumb down their curriculum.

-Some DOCTORAL level classes are being taught in only 2 classes that meet for 9 hours twice a month. If you have a heart surgeon I hope they had more experience than that.

-It’s a waste of money. The school is not APA accredited. The people on the phones are given talking points to play this down but a number of students were told it would be by the time they graduated (which is technically impossible because they’d need the data from the first class going through to make our decision to grant the approval). The approval is also based on how well students place into APA approved sites, which are already EXTREMELY EXTREMELY competitive, and a degree from the new University of Phoenix or a degree in “workplace diversity” is only going to land your resume in the shredder. The APA also has to go back and interview some of the students, and everyone is going to have some pretty big complaints given the number of times we were lied to by the school. In the words of a fellow student still in the program who is already in a massive amount of student debt “Yes, we’re F’d, but what can we do about it now?”

-TELL PEOPLE NOT TO COME HERE. It’s horrible, it’s a joke, if you’re considering The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, reconsider with this information in hand (assume I’m leaving out some even worse stuff), and apply somewhere else. They now have what 6-7 campuses if you count online, and the market for therapists is already beyond saturated. Seriously: for one of the psychology of aging classes I had to write a “10 page, double spaced, free writing,” assignment about how I felt about us watching Tuesday’s with Morrie. We had to do the same thing with “On Golden Pond” (Hallmark movie). We had to watch both of these movies in class. I could have taken girls on two $300 dates for the cost of watching those corny movies.

It’s such a scam, you don’t even know. Oh yes you do, now I told you!

And at every new campus they open up they pump students in there as quickly as humanly possible. It’s spreading faster than cancer. Which is essentially what their degrees will have in 4-5 years time (right when those student debts are due!) It’s worse than Argosy, and everyone already knows Argosy is a joke anyway.

The Chicago School outside of Chicago is so bad you can’t even transfer credits from their CA campuses back to their own school. That’s them actively saying we won’t take our own credits. They can’t even pass their own reality checks without them bouncing. Then they’d say, well it’s not from an APA accredited program blah blah blah APA accreditation isn’t that important anyway blah blah blah. But is. I checked the APA website and there’s at least 5 states that won’t even look at your resume if you’re not from an APA program. They weren’t even cool states! (e.g. Oklahoma).

I’ve been busy wrapping up the semester (and working on grant applications), in addition to traveling to Tokyo for Asiacrypt last week.

In lieu of a “real” post, here are two announcements.

• The second Women in Theory (WIT) Workshop will be held at Princeton on June 19-23, 2010. The format will be similar to the WIT 2008 workshop; video here
• A Workshop on Statistical and Learning-Theoretic Challenges in Data Privacy will be held February 22-26, 2010 at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA. Limited funding is available for students and junior researchers to attend.

  This workshop is being organized by Adam Smith, and looks really exciting — I’m hoping to attend.

To those of you who have very little or no idea of topcoder : It is one of the fastest and powerful crowdsourcing communities which aims at delivering software through competitions , a strategy that has been working successfully so far. My involvement in topcoder dates back to college life (2 or 3 years ago) when algorithm competitions gave us the same kind of adrenalin rush you get from a F1 racing. After over an year in a web-based startup company i have come to realize the importance of writing code that should be read and appreciated by others and what better way to start than with topcoder software component development competitions. After a few unsuccessful attempts and valuable learning i decided to give a best shot at an export file writer development competition at topcoder

The technology expertise required to build the component was somewhat familiar to me. The configuration based, bean to xls,ods,xml,csv,html formats didn’t require much of learning or research for me. The important thing was to get familiarized with the component development process of the TCS. A flash demo, sample review scorecard, a list of tools used gave me a rough idea of how to go about the whole process. Some of the things  like ant targets along with testing tools used became clear before hand but i missed the most important tool called cobertura which i figured out just before making my first auto screen submission. After dropping in the required libraries and executing ant coveragereport cobertura gives a complete report of the lines of the code that were not executed after executing test cases. This gave a  guiding light towards writing efficient test cases. Next thing was checkstyle tool which was available as a plugin in Jetbrain’s IDEA and i found it useful. Only problem was it reported nearly 100 warnings in my code which i was more than happy to ignore given that it was only my first competition in TCS.

The libraries used by the components required some running around to get them. A little bit of maven integration would have been useful but there is always a next time rite! I plan to plug-in maven with ant integeration and don’t have to worry about these dependencies any more. TCS advices developers not to spend too much time configuring ant but i feel having it setup in the first place (irrespective of support by your IDE) can save a lot of last minute falls. Its good to have “ant test” , “ant compile_targets” execute successfully right from the beginning and hey .. don’t forget about the good friend “ant coveragereport“.

Ok. I got my project setup and ready to write some useful code.! what? where are the skeleton codes ? thats right. TCS provides you the tcuml file of the project which you can open with Topcoder UML tool, generate the code in the right package and you have all the java doced code in you package. Then it was time to fill up the code. I was surprised to notice most of the code already written in java doc and most of the time a copy paste would work. Life can’t be simpler. But topcoder’s software process is always one step ahead . Designer is expected to think about development and developer is expected to write lots of test cases. Of the 4 days to complete the component i spent about 1 day understanding the component spec, requirement spec, design diagrams, 1 day on development and 2 days on writing test cases. The component had some rough edges when it came to testing. In the forums (where you are expected to raise questions and designer answers them)  people raised questions mostly oriented towards the types of exceptions that needs to thrown/caught which was ironic but i enjoyed it. In all my components i developed i never worried about exceptions and logging them . But when you are developing in a crowdsource/open source environment logging / exceptions and documents are of paramount importance however annoying they are.

TCS expects 4 kinds of test cases for the component you are developing.

1. Unit tests – which tests the component’s functionality – this is mandatory.
2. Failure tests – which tests whether the methods are throwing the right kind of exception for the appropriate input
3. Stress tests – which tests the component on very large inputs and logs the time taken
4. Accuracy tests – which tests the accuracy . For example if the decimal digits in the exported xls file are accurate to some degree.

At the end of the fourth day of component development i had around 200 test cases including unit,failure,stress and i din’t have much time for accuracy tests.

You can make several submissions in the online review tool of the topcoder and each submission is auto-screened using cobertura and  it passes only if the line and branch coverages are above 85%.  Hurray !!! i made my first submission which passed auto screening. Then i ran checkstyle and cleaned up the annotations a little bit but i din’t have much experience / knowledge on what was expected in them which i came to regret later!

Each submission gets assigned a reviewer who takes the auto screened submission and evaluates the submission based on a TCS score card for development. Unfortunately my submission din’t make it through the manual screening but gave me a good understanding of the entire process and I thoroughly enjoyed. It might be too early to discuss about my score card as i am not yet rated but one of them was the use of wrong version of the third party library which resulted in reviewer test cases failing with flare   .

I will write about the list of mistakes i made and how i could have caught them earlier in my future posts. No charges for bookmarking and checking back later

Im waiting for a call. a very particullar call …
wishing to get a good news through the phone.
and waiting to start a new life…. lemme keep my fingers crossed.

TCS Kolkata walkin interview for Freshers in December 2009

About TCS India:
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is one of the world’s leading information technology companies. Through its Global Network Delivery Model, Innovation Network, and Solution Accelerators, TCS focuses on helping global organizations address their business challenges effectively.

TCS continues to invest in new technologies, processes, and people which can help its customers succeed. From generating novel concepts through TCS Innovation Labs and academic alliances, to drawing on the expertise of key partners, it keeps clients operating at the very edge of technological possibility.

Designation: Data Process Executive

Experience: 1 – 3 Years

Job Location: Kolkata

Walkin Date: 8 December 209 to 11 December, 2009

Walkin Time: 10.00 AM – 12.00 Noon

Find More Details at TCS Kolkata Walkin

Abstract:

This Introduction to the Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Michel Foucault draws out the possibilities for new critiques of the present and points to new directions for the future, both for research in the social sciences and for imagining alternative ways of being. It highlights the innovative contributions which all the papers make, particularly in the excavation of neoliberalism to expose the mechanisms whereby it achieves its ends, and in indicating the costs for human well-being that are implicated in its recruitment of the domain of the social to serve its ends. The Special Issue demonstrates that, in spite of the short-comings in Foucault’s work which are picked out in the papers, his explorations of power, subjectivity, and what it means to be and to think continue to be relevant as a starting point for a range of reflections about our own times.

Keywords:  biopolitics, neoliberalism, power, subjectivity, life, race, methodology.

Foucault as public intellectual

The publication of a special issue on Michel Foucault to mark the 25^th anniversary of his death is more than a simple retrospective examination of his immense legacy for the social sciences, for, although it is in part a response to the ongoing publication of his courses at the College de France from 1970 to 1984, it is mostly a way of using indications in these works in order to address a series of questions that fundamentally problematize ‘what we are, what we think, and what we do today’ [Foucault, 1984: 32].  So, whilst this special issue has arisen in the context of the transcription, publication and translation of these courses, the papers gathered here go to the heart of an engagement with the issues that trouble contemporary societies at a moment of deep political, economic, environmental, intellectual and cultural crises. This is in keeping with the spirit that animated his lectures, for, whilst dealing with ‘specialist’, ‘academic’ subjects, they constitute ‘histories of the present’ in the sense of presenting analyses that have a purchase, through genealogical reconstructions, on the key problems of our times. It is perhaps why his courses, that were meant to be formal reports to a general public of his research, attracted a wide public, though the established format meant there was no place for dialogue or debate, something he regretted. It is worth noting that we have as yet only partial access to these lecture series, as several are yet to appear in French, whilst the translation in English has lagged behind. We should point out too that the print versions we have are edited versions, under the general direction of Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, so that they are to some extent reconstructions, and we miss the tone, rhythms, hesitations, irony in the voice, though we benefit from a referential apparatus at the end of each lecture.

When looking at the whole list of Foucault courses it is possible to suggest three interconnecting series reflecting the shifting focus from 1970 until his death, namely a series on normalization and disciplining, which, as we know, resulted in the books on penal institutions and the first volume of the history of sexuality; a series that turn to political economy and biopolitics, particularly from 1975 to 1979, which forms the bulk of the works that have incited most of the papers in this issue, and which are translated as Society Must Be Defended in 2003; Security, Territory and Population in 2007; and The Birth of Biopolitics in 2008; finally, an ethics and aesthetics of the self series, from 1980 to 1984, one of which, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, appeared in 2005, though the books relating to the theme of the government of the self developed in the final series, have generated volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality, dealing with the uses of pleasure and the care of the self, and that have been available in English since 1987. Foucault, however, preferred to present his research in interviews and lectures where his thoughts could give rise to exchanges, expressing both the desire for a dialogical form of communicating ideas, and, to some extent, his role as public intellectual, a function which is fast dying – unless the intellectual combines the role of ‘expert’ with that of entertainer and media ‘personality’; this material has been collected in the Dits et Ecrits series – as 4 volumes initially, reprinted in 2 volumes in 1994.

In the light of these shifts, one may well wonder if one can detect a big or core project animating the multiplicity of themes, perhaps grounded in the concern with the subject in relation to power, the topic which, according to his own assessment, has remained his primary concern throughout his research [Foucault, 1982]. It is possible to see the essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ [Foucault, 1984] as a kind of reflection on this trajectory, so that the relative neglect of political economy after the critique of liberalism and neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics could be understood by locating it as one element in the development of a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ that informs both the analysis of the political economy of liberal capitalism and the search for alternatives ways of being. This is so especially if one thinks of neoliberalism as the accomplishment of one of the two possibilities immanent in the utopian ambition of modernity, namely, the emergence of the calculating, instrumentally-driven ‘enterprise man’ of ‘enterprise society’, elaborated in The Birth of Biopolitics, against the becoming of a subject who is framed by ‘an ethics and aesthetics of ourselves’.  Enterprise man is in many ways the logical outcome of that curious figure, ‘Man’, and the Cartesian subject which functions as his epistemological double, who appeared with European modernity and is destined to disappear with the tide of time, as Foucault expressed it at the end of the Order of Things. What survives, or could, is an older figure, the one who ‘speaks truth to power’ [Foucault, 2001b], who is the figure Foucault intimated when speaking about a critical ontology as a task of self-reflection which has an ethical and an aesthetic dimension. In his research at least – bearing in mind its European horizon and limit – this figure has a beginning in the Greek ethos of making oneself, or self-transformation [see Rabinow, this issue] through reflection and through an experimentation with oneself that transgresses the limitations placed upon the subject by historically specific conditions. These are the themes in the lectures of the 1980s, say The Hermeneutics of the Subject, that open onto questions about the future of humans as specific beings, questions which have become urgent in the light of the impasse to which an instrumental and totalising modernity coupled to the logic of the [capitalist] enterprise has brought us.

The labour of becoming

These questions have no clear answers in Foucault, rather we find problematizations and parables, including in many of the essays on particular writers, the ‘accursed’ like Lautreamont, Sade, Artaud, Roussel; they trail the underlying ‘big issues’ when we look at his oeuvre as a whole. To that extent, the turn to the critique of political economy from 1976 to 1979 may seem eccentric, unless we view this critique, prescient in so many ways, as a warning: to signal the dangers introduced by the transformation of society into ‘enterprise society’ and the transformation of ‘Man’ into the ‘entrepreneur of oneself’ or new homo oeconomicus. The result, we surmise, threaten humans as ethical beings. So, power and its changing modalities cannot be separated from the issue of self-transformation and becoming, a thesis which is most clearly stated in the 1984 essay on the legacy of the Enlightenment for the problem of the future as a new project of transformation. The implication is that the Kantian theme of the ‘maturity’ of ‘humanity’ through critique and self-reflection in open societies would come to an end with the triumph of neoliberal political economy.

Several of the authors in this issue, particularly Rabinow, Revel, and McNay, seem to concur in finding in Foucault’s reflections on Kant and the Enlightenment project a source in the alignment of the critique of power, thus politics, with the question of ‘who we are’ and what we might become. For Rabinow [2009], in his reflections on the spiritual undercurrent in Foucault’s ‘untimely struggle’, this experimentation passes through new forms of friendship and sociability through which transformations of the self take place, a theme that has an important place in Foucault’s [2005] analysis of the ‘care of the self and of others’ where he relates it to friendship, to an ascesis, and to a spiritual dimension. The practice of self-reflection, as summarised in Rabinow, asks what it means to think, what mode is appropriate to this thinking, what venue should it seek and the form in which it can be appropriately expressed. This work upon oneself, however, is far from being an individualistic enterprise; indeed the 1982-3 lectures were explorations of the ‘government of the self and others’ followed in 1983-4 by the excavation of what the Greek Cynics meant in urging people to ‘speak truth to power’, in public, at the risk of the consequences – this condition for the advancement of ‘humanity’, we recall, was essential in Kant’s own understanding of freedom as the unshackled power of ‘reason’ to speak the truth without hindrance, a theme developed in his essay on the Enlightenment. Rabinow argues that the concepts Foucault introduces in his exploration, such as salvation, care of the self, equipment, and so on, rekindle within political philosophy issues that may today help us think about the ‘exit towards maturity’.

So, we are not on the terrain of the ‘politics of identity’’ here, a point which is emphasised in Revel critique of the essentialisation of identity, nature and life and the metaphysics that support it [Revel, 2009].  She turns the problem of ‘identity’ into a question about different becomings through a constructive and historicised genealogy of individuation that refuses the reduction of identity to sameness. The radical critique of identities needs to recognise the effects of power on subjectivation, with the implication that solipsistic or egocentric projects are open to be re-inscribed within the stratagems of knowledge/power. Similarly she counsels against the metaphysical temptation in some approaches to biopolitics that ground concepts of nature and life in appeals to some primordial life-force that would animate subjective expression. Instead she proposes modes of being and ways of life that integrate and preserve difference in the creative and collaborative constitution of singularities-in-difference. This, she says, agrees with Foucault’s understanding of way of life as a set of relations that does not exclude difference but preserves them in the mode of relating to the other, a mode that puts differences to work in the construction of commonality – suggestive of the work of friendship too, as in Rabinow’s discussion. The issue of access to the other is intrinsic to this way of thinking about the role of difference in individuation, so that the problem of the future radical becoming of the human subject is located within a political as much as an ethically-informed project, consistent with Foucault’s critical ontology. Incidentally, by allying becoming with a politics, Revel, it could be argued, signals the important difference that one should make between becoming and change, in that whilst change – in ‘identity’ and the world generally – happens all the time, becoming in Foucault is aligned with a radical project of social transformation.

Rather different, though complementary, conclusions are drawn in McNay’s elaboration of the problem of subjectivity in the era of neoliberalism. She begins with a lucid exposition of what the neoliberal generalisation of the enterprise form to social relations means for the problem of constructing democratic politics, inasmuch as the latter assumes an individual able to exercise a degree of autonomy in the exercise of political judgement. The argument is that the insidious economisation of the social consistent with marketised social relations has become such a pervasive  process that subjectivity itself is held fast within its matrix, creating a problem for finding unterritorialized or unconquered spaces for practices of resistance. She contends that the idea of the self as enterprise problematises the viability of Foucault’s view of counter-conducts that would be grounded in an ethics of the self, since the experimental process of self formation that is implicated in the idea of ethics is analogous in structure to what emergent biopower achieves through the planned proliferation of differences around its view of individual autonomy. McNay’s point makes one think of the mantra of individual ‘choice’, exercised by the ‘consumer’ or ‘client’ in neoliberal-speak, that assumes difference and autonomy, yet inveigles every individual into its stratagem of power. McNay suggests instead that a productive tension within civil society between norm and law promises to open up grounds for opposition to normalising bio- power. This opposition, for her, must have a collective dimension, even if it operates through variations of a rights discourse, echoing Revel emphasis on collective action, yet putting greater store in organised political action.

The critique of political economy.

We have noted the unexpectedness of Foucault’s turn to political economy as part of the exploration of the forms that power has taken over the centuries, especially because the theme seems to slip into the background in his research after 1979. Yet, his approach to political economy retains the concern with life at its core, for it is largely by reference to the elaboration of the point of view of biopolitics as one modality or ‘diagram’ of power [Thacker, 2009], the form of power that becomes dominant in the 19^th century, that  the relation of economy to power is rethought. The addition of the themes of race and the ‘discourse of race war’ as mechanisms in the exercise of power alter how we utilise Foucault’s corpus of work around the subject, normalization, discipline, knowledge, modernity that we encounter in his other works. Interestingly, the role played by the ‘discourse of race war’ changes from the sovereign form of power associated with subjugation – that is the power based on the right of the sovereign ‘to kill’ or ‘let live’ as Foucault explains in Society Must be Defended – to the mutations in the functioning of different conceptualizations of race in biopolitical governmentality, that is, different forms of othering produced through different mechanisms, particularly those of normalisation and exclusion. Not surprisingly, the standpoint of political economy also underlies Foucault’s lectures on Alternatives to the Prison, given in 1976, the same year as the ‘Society Must Be Defended’ course of lectures, which, coincidentally, appears in its first English translation in this Special Issue. In it, Foucault partly reformulates the analysis of prisons in his Discipline and Punish, so that he is able to locate incarceration more clearly by reference to the benefits derived from the system by those in power. Indeed, one of his conclusions, or provocative challenges, is to think the political economy of criminality, for, he argues, the prison serves not only to produce a population of criminals or to institutionalise law-breakers as a permanent category of people who can be kept under surveillance and be used as a ready source of information and knowledge: it should make us problematise the need for the prison as a form of punishment, and wonder about the relationship between criminality and capitalism. One must be wary, he counsels, of assuming that alternatives mark a break with the techniques of surveillance and classification put in place through the prison as a system, and the values of work, family and self-culpabilisation that form the backbone of the regulatory apparatuses of biopolitics. His approach in this lecture begins to point towards the developments and innovations in the methodology that are more clearly present in the analysis of biopolitics where the concept of dispositif – that is, the purposeful combination of a number of heterogenous mechanisms into an apparatus to achieve known ends – occupies a central place. One aspect of this methodological shift is the reframing of the notion of power/knowledge and of historical analysis such that they are now reconfigured not in terms of epochal shifts, as in the Order of Things or Madness and Civilization, but within a ‘topological’ approach to genealogy that recognizes ‘patterns of correlations’ and the strategic disposition of heterogenous elements in the formation of the dispositifs that constitute societies as particular realities or assemblages, as Collier [2009] argues in this Issue. According to this standpoint, civil society itself has become the site for the transmission of new technologies of surveillance and regulation invented by ‘alternatives’ to the prison, implicating all of society in the government of conduct and the exclusions it institutionalises and interiorises within the social.

We find an extension of this standpoint in Lazzarato’s exposition of the means whereby neoliberalism has perfected the apparatuses for inveigling civil society itself into participating into its project of remaking society in the form of what Foucault calls an enterprise society, with a new self-interested, solipsistic individual at its core. These apparatuses operate through strategies of individualisation, insecuritisation and depoliticisation that sabotage the principles and practices of mutualisation and redistribution that the Welfare State had promoted. He shows that the dispositifs for controlling individual conduct rely on a generalised financialisation of every aspect of society, as aspect of neoliberalism which Foucault neglected. This financialisation functions by binding the security of the individual – in relation to finding and holding a job, to pensions, and the benefit system – to the efficacious functioning of these new financial mechanisms, so that the latter double as economic apparatuses serving capital, say, the investment of pension funds in financial institutions like banks, insurance companies and new financial instruments, whilst at the same time binding individual conduct to the exercise of power through the government of conduct. His analysis uses the case of workers in the culture industry in France to illustrate the operation of these mechanisms of insecuritisation in practice. The case makes visible the new role of the state as an ensemble of apparatuses constituting both the conditions for neoliberal market capitalism and the new type of individual appropriate for it. Financialisation in effect coerces every individual into ‘enterprise society’, which leaves little space within the system for counter-conducts. Lazzarato goes on to argue that the latter requires the forging of new constituencies, or ‘existential territories’, through the constitution of communities based upon ‘disinterested interest’, like sympathy and benevolence, and affective values that re-construct social bonds through concrete collective and cooperative activity, in place of the abstract bonds that the law establishes, and instead of the bonds that nationalism and racism foster as a strategy for tempering the socially disruptive effects of competition as the organizing principle of society.

Life itself

The clear implications is that the neoliberal reconstitution of society once more puts on the agenda the question of ways of life, and thus the problem of power over life, or biopower; they trigger a range of responses that papers in this Issue address from different points of view. The changes signal a shift from biopolitics as Foucault described it in Security, Territory, Population by reference to pastoral power and the standpoint of normalisation, towards a reconstituted governmentality whereby the questions of subjectivity and of power are increasingly refigured in terms of a reconceptualization of life itself. Thus, Thacker’s paper, ‘The Shadows of Atheology’, proposes that biopolitics be understood not just in terms of the population or of the individual body, but as a governance of ‘life itself’, implicating a reconceptualisation of life. He argues that bio has both a temporal and juridical dimension, as life, as living labour and as the site of inscription and application of the law. Different modalities of power apply to these different dimensions, categorized in Foucault in terms of sovereign and juridical power – mainly eleborated in Society Must be Defended – disciplinary power and biopolitical power. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault had characterised biopolitics in terms of the politicisation of life based upon the interpenetration of political economy and liberalism in framing the rationality underlying governmentality. For Thacker this shift can be thought in terms of multiplicities inscribed in the ‘correlation between a distributed power and a distributed life’. If one understands life as flow, flux and circulation, an approach increasingly dominant in the period of the emergence of biopolitics, as Foucault shows in both Security, Territory, Population and in The Birth of Biopolitics,  it is possible to imagine the government and management of life in terms of what Thacker calls a ‘demonology’, that is, in terms of an imaginary premised on securitisation against threats from (indeterminate and ubiquitous) alien, invasive, pervasive forces that take hold of the social body, from diseases to foreigners.

It may well be that it is biopolitics itself which is problematized in these shifts, as Massumi in National Enterprise Emergency [2009, this issue] conjectures in his study of contemporary condition of global metastability and instability that confronts power today. His argument is that complex systems such as we have today – one could think of for example: the global economy, urban conglomerates, the human-nature matrix, viral circulation and dispersion, weather systems, etc – secrete endemic threat-forms that produce large-scale disruptions and cataclysms, affecting indeterminately and simultaneously the social and the ‘environment’; indeed, they force us, and governmental power, to reframe the ‘environment’ as including ‘natural’ and biological realities as well as socio-economic reality. Massumi says that the dominant regime of neoliberalism is an environmental one, since it is no longer a matter of normalization but a government of conduct, as Lazzarato also claims, as we have seen. This is achieved through a control of the rules of the game and the framework, as Foucault’s anlysis of ordo-liberalism makes clear, leaving individuals to act within the parameters set up by the dispositifs of governance. This ‘becoming-environmental’ of power works through the ‘regulation of effects’; it is in this sense that we may be entering a period of post- or neo-biopolitical politics, or at least a moment when forms of power that had become institutionalized in the course of the 19th century are being problematised at both the theoretical and the practical levels. It is worth noting here that this tendency was already immanent in biopolitics, as Foucault emphasises, when speaking about the new mechanisms of security, different from disciplinary mechanisms, that intervene at the level of the ‘generality’ of phenomena of life, for ‘security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life … they work in very different ways …using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way as to achieve overall states of equilibration or regularity; it is, in a word, a matter of taking control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized’ [Foucault, 2003: 246, 247]. What is different is that man-as-species can no longer be considered as a relatively autonomous or separable element of the ‘environment’.

It is possible also that the perception of endemic ‘threat-forms’ and the move towards a generalised securitisation implicate a return to the ‘discourse of race war’, that is, a discourse that operates a radical binary division of the polity between ‘them and us, the unjust and the just, the masters and those who must obey them, the rich and the poor, the mighty and those who have to work in order to live, those who invade lands and those who tremble before them, the despots and the groaning people, the men of today’s law and those of the homeland of the future’ [Foucault, 2003: 74]. All systems of exclusion put into play one or more of elements of this binary matrix. At the limit, the ‘discourse of race war’, and the sovereign form of power consistent with it, authorises killing the other as an expression of sovereign might and right. One should bear in mind too that for Foucault there are many forms of ‘killing’, including ‘the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ [Foucault: 2003: 256]. We have seen many examples of this kind of political liquidation in recent times, from the the treatment of migrants, ‘asylum seekers’, or those escaping postcolonial wars, to the hounding of specific groups of people, on the basis of race, ethne/caste, religion, sexuality, class and so on. These forms of othering of the other that cast them outside of the sphere of responsibility of the state are now aligned with the topography of ‘threat-forms’ and thus brought within the framework of security. At its extreme it authorises ‘a new racism modeled on war’ [Foucault, 2003: 258] that easily slips under the signifier of ‘war againt terror’.

Foucault’s approach to race and racism does not begin with discrimination, abjection or forms of othering, but with the relation of war and dispossession, that is, with  the idea of power as the relation of force established to consolidate the inequality created by the ‘contingency and injustice of battles’ [2003: 72]. This is a starting point for Macey’s [2009] study of the relation of biopolitics, race, and power in which he extends the idea of security emerging in Europe as an element of biopolitical governmentality to encompass projects for the protection of a population against threats to its unity or strength. He shows that a politico-administrative and cultural imaginary developed alongside different conceptualisations of disease and of the body as biological entity that bound together several signifiers of threat such as contagion, the alien, the other, the degenerate. This imaginary enabled the tropes of race to be inscribed within the sciences and technologies of the social that formed part of emergent biopolitics in the 19th century. They can be seen to be at work in projects of public health, including aspects of eugenics, and, in its purest form, in Nazi state racism. One could argue that this politico-cultural imaginary has remained immanent in the body politic, irrupting at moments of crisis.

The point of view of the ‘discourse of race war’, that is, a discourse that takes the violence of dispossession to be at the basis of systems that institutionalise inequality, also informs Venn’s genealogy of the political economy of inequality. Racism plays its part in this – ‘Racism first develops with colonization’, says Foucault [2003: 257], but it is the constitutive functioning of colonialism, and the rest of Europe, as condition of possibility for liberal capitalism and modern apparatuses of the state that Venn is keen to establish. To the extent that neoliberal capitalism requires inequality as regulative mechanism enabling competition to work, it must incite difference-as-division, producing conflicts that institutionalises a state of insecurity and fear – the fear of the other, of losing one’s job, of particular groups constituted as the new dangerous classes, of indeterminate risks in the environment, etc – a point Lazzarato develops in a different context, as we saw. Venn contends that liberalism, as well as neoliberalism, continue to work according to an economic zero-sum game, that is, a game of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’; this game now operates through new, ‘modernized’ apparatuses, including new financial instruments, whereby the enrichment of some proceed from the dispossession of others of one form or another of the values of life: common forms of wealth, individual rights and liberties, secure ways of being. The way out of this compact between forms of violence and inequality – the sign of humanity’s immaturity, as Foucault [1984] allows us to propose – is the construction of alternative forms of socialities grounded on the collaborative, co-constitutive  and cooperative character of being-in-common, indeed of all life [see Venn 2010 forthcoming], an issue which also motivates Terranova’s [2009] search for ‘Another Life’.

Her analysis begins with the connection between biopolitics, political economy, ‘nature’, ‘life’, and ‘market’ that Foucault reconstructs in his interrogation of the mechanisms whereby the political rationalities of liberalism and neoliberalism frame the individuation of the vital, the natural, and the physical. Biopolitics, when understood from the standpoint of political economy, resonates with current arguments and controversies around the ‘biology’ of the free market, the ‘real subsumption of life under capital’, and ‘bioeconomy and cognitive capitalism’. Foucault’s lectures, she argues, allow us to think about the process whereby the economic-institutional reality of capitalism recruits life to reconstitute a political rationality grounded in the intertwinement of economic and vital processes. This situation of the co-constitution of life and the economy introduces greater complexity in the system, and conditions the emergence of ‘network governmentalities’ as the kind of dispositifs adequate to the role of regulating complex milieus. Recent technological and communicational developments means that power is confronted with the increasing intersection of network governmentalities that regulate on the one hand territorialized milieus of sovereignty and citizenship and on the other hand more ‘deterritorialized milieus’ of information and communication [Terranova, 2004]. She claims that one consequence of this second shift is that the bios of economic processes that was central to liberal governmentality has increasingly become abstract and machinic. In its wake, the ‘life’ of markets becomes increasingly indexed, formalised and virtualised by means of mathematical formalisations; additionally, it is also concretely actualised in the form of serial acts of communication through which such formalisations unfold within specific milieus. The market itself increasingly becomes both more abstract and machinic-one could note the neglected importance of digital technologies in producing this new situation, allowing catastrophic detachment from actual values to happen; the machinic market is the re-incarnation of the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith.  Against this abstract machine of universal competition, which is also ‘cold’ and ‘calculating’, as Lazzarato pointed out, drawing from Foucault’s analysis of Ordo- and neoliberalism, Terranova  proposes social cooperation as the key mechanism in the production of a value that can no longer be abstractly economic. What is asserted instead are truth-values, aesthetic-values, utility-values, existential-values whhich are inseparable from social and subjective values, gesturing towards an immanent ethics within a social-economic life.

Finally, we would like to highlight the fact that most of the authors in this issue have introduced innovative methodological developments that point towards the emergence of a post-Foucaldian analytical apparatus in the social sciences, inspired by the approach initiated in Foucault’s research, but responding to current impasses and crises affecting the social sciences as much as wider issues in society. Thus Collier’s view about a shift in Foucault’s own work towards a topological approach echoes Lazzarato’s emphasis on dispositifs and their strategic mutations and Massumi’s emphasis on complexity and multiplicities and the Simondonian concept of associated milieu as a way of indicating the co-constitution and co-emergence of objects and situations that the social sciences tend to isolate. One can associate these different but related emphases to Thacker’s notion of [mobile and strategic] diagrams of power and Terranova’s network governmentalities and socialities. What is put on the agenda for research is the need to disrupt disciplinary boundaries partly to break out of methodological limitations that bind one to unproductive paradigms, but also as a necessary step towards tackling problems that have a global or ‘environmental’ scope beyond the narrow confines of separate disciplines.

It is clear also that the papers add up to, on the one hand, a fundamental challenge to current governmental rationality founded in the logic of the market and ‘enterprise culture’, and a dystopian vision of society, and , on the other hand, the assertion of the possibility of new forms of sociality and ways of being constructed on the basis of a view of the human as an essentially collaborative, convivial, spiritual and historically located social being. This ontology is in solidarity with the view of life itself as grounded in the dynamic compossibility of all creatures. It follows that such a view is diametrically opposed to all ontologies founded on egocentric, self-interested, individualistic, atomised and abstract views of the human and of life generally.

References.

Foucault, Michel (1984) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (1984) The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin Books.

Foucault, Michel (2001a) The Order of Things. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel (2001b) Fearless Speech, ed Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Foucault, Michel (2003) Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.

Foucault, Michel (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador.

Foucault, Michel (2007)  Security, Territory, Population. Trans. by Graham Burchell. Houndmills: PalgraveMacmillan.

Foucault, Michel (2008) Birth of Biopolitics. Trans. Graham Burchell. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Terranova, Tiziana (2004) Network Culture: Politics in the Information Age. London: Macmillan.

Venn, Couze (2010) ‘Individuation, Relationality, Affect. Rethinking the Human in Relation to the Living’, in Body & Society, vol.    .

At long last, TCS IT Wiz finally arrived at Delhi. It felt like the most awaited event of the century. Everyone was waiting for it. And it brought back horrific memories of previous year. I really didn’t want this to happen again. But fate had other ideas.

With the noticeable absence of Mridul, our quizzing team had become relatively weaker. Saumey (my current quizzing partner) is only in ninth-class (which was the same class I was in last year), and he is still raw. But he does have a remarkably wide knowledge field.

Gyaan.in had threads on TCS IT Wiz, and questions on how to prepare about it even before you could say “Giri”. I felt really amused at all this. Because you really cannot “prepare” for this competition. Its that knowledge of all previous years and current affairs snowballed into a large one.

Just the day before TCS (30th October) was Dad’s birthday, so I was up quite late. Next morning, I reached school all excited and jumpy. Meena Ma’am informed me that TCS guys had requested us to send thirty teams. That is not a typo. Thirty teams! Too much. We were sending six. Under no circumstances am I going to list them here. Before leaving, I took Sir Alex Ferguson’s aashirwad. It really helped, though the potency was a little low (he has other important matters at hand as well).

Shikhar and his brother turned up late. He claims he was late and his driver did Burnout-style driving to get him there.

Puts Paul Walker to shame

School arranged only a Qualis for us. They obviously thought twelve people would sit comfortably in a eight-seater. With a driver.

Pictured: Comfort

This was the second-last image. I promise. Second-last.

So we stole Jaikishan’s Civic and Vedant’s Verna, and accommodated people into the Verna (the Civic was for return). It took a lotta time, and we finally reached the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

There was hardly any crowd. My guess was only four-hundred teams. After registration (and a quick chat with New Era guys), we made it to Dogra Hall, and grabbed seats. There was that usual survey and stuff, which could be exchanged for refreshments.

I looked around, and saw that the hall was full. But no people sitting on the floor like last time. Less people, better chances.

Giri made his trademark entry, and announced:

Due to overwhelming response, for the first time in the history of TCS IT Wiz, we are holding two prelims.

My heart sank. So there were a large number of people outside as well! Phew. My estimate was so wrong…

The prelims began, and it was easier than last time. We screwed up on that “decision engine” question, and wrote WolframAlpha, which was a common mistake many made. It was Bing. Saumey was excellent – contributing more than expected. He gave four out of twenty, which is quite good for a ninth class guy. He answered crucial questions like MNP and LinkedIn, which few knew. Kudos, kid.

Then we left for refreshments, and recession was visible. Pathetic food. Miserable sandwich, passable pattice, and, most importantly, Oyes wafers. Yes. OYES! The USP of Oyes was free points on cards, and ten would fetch us another Oyes! We immediately began collecting them, and accumulated eleven! Woot!

The second prelims were underway, and we waited forever. We were looking at the institute (where practically all of us wanted to be). Some kids had reached to the top of a building.

After a really, really long time, it was time to enter Dogra Hall once again. There was lot of pushing, and the entire stairway was jam-packed. TCS volunteers failed to control the crowd, which soon turned into a mob. Now, according to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, a crowd becomes a mob if it breaks something. Naturally, the crowd broke a glass pane, much to the anger of TCS guys.

Meanwhile, Shubham and Arvind did something great. They entered through another gate (which was closed for us, dunno why), pretending to have lost a water bottle.

When we finally reached Dogra Hall, they had reserved an entire row for us. Giri returned, and announced the results.

For the first time,  we have had nine-hundred-and-nine papers to check! I don’t think any quizmaster has had so many papers to check before. First, the answers.

Saumey and I had pretended to have got only eight or nine correct. At the end of the answers, we had got fourteen. Not enough, I thought. Fifteen weren’t enough last time.

Before I announce the qualifiers, I would like to recognize the top ten teams. The team which finished tenth is…

The entire hall is quiet. Nobody even breathes.

… Aditya and Saumey Jain of Montfort School.

NO!

We went on to the stage to collect a t-shirt, a book and a Rubik’s cube.

Which class are you in?

I’m in tenth and he’s in ninth.

To the audience : I just found out that the level of quizzing improves so rapidly in Delhi. These quizzers are from ninth and tenth. Give them a round of applause!

I don’t remember the other teams, but Sopandev from DPS Dwarka finished seventh. What was really agonizing was that he had exactly the same marks as that of the sixth qualifier, but lost out on starred questions.

New Era qualified, but not Prateek’s team! Young Arnav and Apratim had. DPS Noida, who finished second last year, were also on stage. DPS R K Puram qualified yet again, with quizzers from ninth and eighth. That was something. Even Vivek Nair and Karthik qualified; they finished eighth last year.

The finals were really easy. We got seventy percent of the questions right. Especially in the connect round.

DPS Noida won the finals. It was a great experience for all of us.

On the return journey, Shubham disfigured my Rubik’s cube.

Złożyło się tak, że dopadła mnie studencka bida. Typu chleb z masłem na niedzielny obiad. Stąd musiałem zrezygnować z paru rzeczy. W tym z jutrzejszych Editors w Krakowie. OK, to Kraków, więc -10 do zadowolenia z życia. OK, żałować może nie ma czego, bo widziałem ich w Jarocinie (albo: na Jarocinie),  jednak to była miniaturka koncertu. Z wielkich zagranicznych gwiazd można zrezygnować, ale 10 złotych, chocby ostatnie, na koncert dwa kroki od akademika wydam.
Przyszedłem z nastawieneim… albo inaczej. Przyszedłem bez nastawienia. Słuchałem pobieżnie, znałem tylko najważniejsze (bo słowo: najbardziej popularne w stosunku do tego zespołu nie pasuje) kawałki. Te najbardziej imprezowe i taneczne.

I fajnie jest czasem przyjść na gig w takim właśnie nastroju. Bez oczekiwań, bez znajomości materiału. w ten sam sposób powaliło mnie Crystal Castles. Tym razem aż tak hardkorowo nie było, ale eksperyment (wberw hasłu “No Experiments” lansującego zespół) było czuć. Tak samo jak kontakt z publicznością. To już specyfika Tekty. Można patrzeć muzykom na ręce z odległości 2 centymetrów. A potem taby niepotrzebne.

Przekonali mnie pełnym luzem, tym, że czerpią z tej muzyki radość. Przekonali mnie tez samą muzyką, mimo, że Tekta jak zwykle za głośna i ogólnie nagłośniona fatalnie. Cóż, specyfika miejsca.

Moment wieczoru? TCS grają sobie kompletnie akustycznie, kompletnie nienagłośnieni (co w Tekcie wychodzi akurat na dobre) w odległości dosłownie 2 centymetrów ode mnie. A ja (przyznam, ciut spity, ale tylko ciut) traktuję kulę dyskotekową zawieszoną na niskim suficie jako instrument perkusyjny. Zresztą, nie tylko ja.

Aha. Do tego mają śliczną gitarzystkę.

Me complace anunciarles que a partir de 2010 estaré acompañándolos con un nuevo show de cine en Telecorporación Salvadoreña (TCS).

Actualmente, estamos en plena preproducción: preparando sets, imágenes gráficas, música, definiendo contenidos y creando nuevas secciones. La verdad, es un proceso creativo emocionante y me siento muy contento con los avances hasta el momento.

Por lo pronto, no puedo revelar más, pero en cuanto pueda, se los comentaré acá en el blog. ¡Saludos!