Radio Echo

European Echo

European Echo aims to counter national frameworks and rehabilitate a progressive, popular idea of Europe through podcasts, stories and opinion

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  1. with fanfare ep.3 - Office for Workspace Studies (pt.2)

    2017. 03. 29.

    with fanfare ep.3 - Office for Workspace Studies (pt.2)

    Last week the saw the first in a two part discussion with Francois and Mirjam from the Office for Workspace Studies. Now we return for the second part. The conversation begins with me relating a relatively personal dilemma about some of the work I’m doing at the moment, specifically, consultancy, where it’s well paid but a bit sell out, since the thing they’re buying is not just my labour but also my cultural capital. Francois quite graciously points out that the money earned creates the opportunity to do other work that would otherwise have no space in the economic realm, although I’m still rather ambivalent about it. This then provides a foreground to the following discussion, in which we talk about the tendency to choose service work as a second job, this being something which has traditionally required you to give less of your self away, but now in fact increasingly employs people for their cultural capital as well.* Bringing things full circle, this infiltration of cultural capital into service work is something Francois and Mirjam's present concern for the term talent represents quite well. * I make reference to some articles at this point, one in Jacobin by Peter Frase, entitled "In Defence of Soviet Waiters", and another by Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books, which this first article links to, on the 17 principles for the ideal Pret-a-Manger worker. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/02/soviet-waiters-emotional-labor-customer-service/ https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts

    18분
  2. with fanfare ep.3 – Office for Workspace Studies (pt.1)

    2017. 03. 24.

    with fanfare ep.3 – Office for Workspace Studies (pt.1)

    This is the third instalment Radio Echo with fanfare, this time it;s with Mirjam Reilli and Francois Girard-Meunier of The Office for Workspace Studies, ahead of a presentation of their work at fanfare. As the name suggests, they’re interested in the peculiarities of modern workspaces and especially the language used to describe work in these spaces. As you’ll hear from the very start there was an interesting unspoken aspect to the conversation, inasmuch as we were all conscious that some of the things we were talking about could only be referred to in generalities. Furthermore, I was careful to cut out the bits where we do refer to our workplaces directly. Besides one instance which we figured was fine to keep in, no companies are mentioned. All in all, it makes for an interesting absence. I’ve decided to split this recording into two, since there were quite a lot of interesting subjects touched upon, too many for a single 20 minute episode. In this first part, it’s important to explain, again in non-specific terms, that before the recording began we were talking about one workplace in which all the workers, from those working in the back office and the front of house to the cleaning and catering staff, are referred to as “talents”. This led to an interesting discussion of how much we can speak about our work, the tendency of what David Graeber calls the b******t job and the difference between valuable work and useful work.

    20분
  3. with fanfare ep.2 – NXS

    2017. 03. 16.

    with fanfare ep.2 – NXS

    NXS is the product of the collective Goys & Birls, comprised of Juliette and Monika as well as Florian Mecklunburg and the conversation was recorded in advance of the first issue’s release, which is on the subject of Cyber Sensuality. The topic of cybernetics was not something I had considered for a while, but this was a good excuse to spend the week brushing up on things, mainly reading Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and a few bits and pieces by Bruce Stirling. I was also given a few texts to read from the issue, namely those of Raf Rennie, Agnieszka Zimolag, Trudie Barber and Jack Self. When I refer to the issue in the following conversation, it’s these texts that I’m talking about. Spotting keywords such as "ephemerality", "penetration" and "sadomasochism", what struck me most from these texts was their somewhat depressive capitalistic tone, quite understandable given the subject matter, but it reminded me of Mark Fisher’s discussion of Capitalist Realism, an ideological-aesthetic aspect of contemporary corporate capitalism in the West that suggests that capitalism is the natural order of things and that our behaviour should be understood and explained exclusively in accordance with this aspect. Fisher, who sadly died earlier this year, wrote extensively on his blog k-punk, and I would encourage everybody to delve into the blog for more on the idea of capitalist realism, for now this basic idea that we behave in every aspect of our lives according to capitalist ideology, should be seen as the main frame for my questions…

    21분

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European Echo aims to counter national frameworks and rehabilitate a progressive, popular idea of Europe through podcasts, stories and opinion