Definitions by ANDY

RFID 

Spy-chip - possibly the scariest technology coming into use right now. They're tiny chips, some as small as a third of a millimetre, which can be hidden inside objects, packaging and even people, and which give a unique identity symbol if triggered by a scanner. In other words, every banknote, shoe or pair of jeans might have a unique ID allowing anyone with a scanner to track it - the government could find out your whereabouts and where you bought your clothes, criminals could scan you to find out how much money you were carrying and ID cards, passports etc could contain chips which could be scanned from a distance.

Currently being introduced by WalMart in products and packaging, with 100 other companies interested. Euro banknotes might contain the chips. A version which can be injected in humans, the VeriChip, is now being tested, and several US states including New York are discussing forcibly injecting the chips in homeless people.

It stands for Radio Frequency ID.

RFID by Andy May 7, 2004

Blunkett 

Blind as a bat, probably from having his head jammed so far up his own arse.

Blunkett is a cunt.

Blunkett by Andy May 7, 2004

malapropism 

This is when someone abuses the wrong worm so you can't understudy what they're crying to play.

Named after someone called Mrs Malaprop in some classical something or other.

malapropism by Andy May 7, 2004

pomo 

Abbreviation for postmodernism. Usually hostile.

The journal took a pomo turn round about 1990, but it seems to have recovered since.

pomo by Andy May 7, 2004

poststructuralism 

A clearer collective term for many of the texts and trends often subsumed under the misleading label postmodernism. Poststructuralism means theories which arise after the structuralist period in continental philosophy, which draw on structuralism but do not accept all of its ideas. Poststructuralists believe in the importance of discourse for understanding social life and question the idea of the self-determining individual, but they do not believe that people's actions can be entirely reduced to an external structure. Often, they study the ways in which structures can be subverted and broken down through their own limits or through ironic reinterpretation or reconfiguration of the structure itself. See power/knowledge, writerly, differance, line of flight.

Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard are the best-known poststructuralists.

poststructuralism by Andy May 7, 2004

master-signifier 

In Lacanian theory, a signifier which stops the slippage of the signified under the signifier and fixes meaning, thereby forming a stable symbolic order. It is a particular signifier with no signified of its own, which stands in for the "fullness" of the meaning of the symbolic system itself. However, since contingency and lack are taken to be primary in Lacanian theory, it is necessarily arbitrary and is unable to guarantee its own primacy except through arbitrary and ungrounded violence. It is always haunted by the return of the Real.

In my view, this concept is useful but its basis is mistaken. What is repressed is active desire, held down for fear of punishment, and not some kind of ontological void. Lacan is wrong to pose his problems on such a metaphysical level.

master-signifier by Andy May 7, 2004

stress and duress

Newspeak for torture, used by the CIA and its allies. "Stress and duress" tactics are used in interrogations, and refer to a variety of tortures and forms of mistreatment which the CIA thinks are OK. These include:
sleep deprivation
overload of light
complete darkness
stripping and sexually humiliating prisoners
threatening to torture and rape prisoners
threatening prisoners' families
making prisoners stand, sit etc. in uncomfortable positions to induce pain
denial of satisfaction of basic rights and needs such as food, bedding, clothing and exercise
deliberate cultural insensitivity and intolerance
verbal abuse
use of painful "restraint" techniques
beatings

These techniques are widespread also in US prisons, although nominally illegal. They are more widely used in deregulated offshore gulags such as Guantanamo Bay, abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.

Don't be fooled - these tactics ARE TORTURE, and are defined as such both by the UN and by experts in trauma. Their role is to break down the sense of personality of the prisoner and to deliberately induce psychological trauma and crisis.

They are directly referred to in CIA handbooks - so the photos from abu Ghraib show a systematic pattern of torture, NOT rogue acts by a few stupid/evil/misguided soldiers.

stress and duress by Andy May 7, 2004