Alex Luke

Alex Luke

@alexluke.bsky.social

Workplace linguistic ethnographer | Socialist & unionist - current USyd NTEU branch committee member | EAP teacher. "Capire. Per meglio colpire" - Tronti. They/he

858 Followers 1,611 Following 618 Posts Joined Sep 2023
5 days ago
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When your own reference list places your work next to Marx 🥰

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5 days ago

almost as tho a system of government established by, for and of propertied white males is designed to serve the interests of propertied white males.

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5 days ago

every single time these politicians say “keeping people safe” and “community safety” and “keep Australians safe” the context will tell you that colonised and racialised people are not fully human to them, and nor are women and children.

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5 days ago

the Aust home affairs minister just told the ABC that meetings like one between Israeli President and Aust intelligence boss “happen all around the world” and “they keep people safe”. Which tells you who are considered “people” to our government.

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1 week ago
Language as a "free gift"
Alex Luke

In this seminar I would like to try and show how specifying the relations between language and political economy can benefit from drawing on Marxian concepts of political economy. Determining the role of language in political economy has been an ongoing project in sociocultural linguistics (e.g. Block, 2018; Gal, 1989), seeking to overcome reified distinctions that separate language from political economy. I believe these distinctions are further erased when we look at language at the point of production rather than exchange, and by drawing on Marx's notion of the formal and real subsumption of labour. Language can, at the point of production, be seen as a form of labour in a Marxist sense, and thus able to be subsumed into capitalist labour and valorisation processes. I will examine how the formal and real subsumption of language and semiosis might work by drawing on Battisoni's recent extension of the notion of subsumption as the use of 'free gifts' of human social labour, in this case language, in processes of valorisation. Examples of language use in the development and use of large language models, as well as my own research on the discourse of performance management in organisations, will be used to illustrate the formal and real subsumption of language.

Here's the abstract

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1 week ago
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Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

I'm delivering an online research seminar next Friday 6 March 1-2pm AEDT with WSU.

uws.zoom.us/j/8314940900...
Meeting ID: 831 4940 9001
Password: 469673

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2 weeks ago
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Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.

Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

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3 weeks ago

espresso machines

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3 weeks ago
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“Do I Have To Disclose I Used AI In My Query Letter?” And other things about which I’m vehement.

aliahabib.substack.com/p/do-i-have-...

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3 weeks ago

Forgot alt text so I'll add it here: There's a headshot of Sam Altman with the headline above the photo, OpenAI CEO Same Altman visits orphange. Underneath the photo is written, It's heartbreaking to look into those sad, hopeless eyes -said one of the kids

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3 weeks ago
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Massive W as a parent when your child sends you stuff like this

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3 weeks ago
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Non-Hegemony | Phenomenal World The neoliberal world order is collapsing. In its wake, powerful states have abandoned multilaterialism in pursuit of national aims.

www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/non...

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3 weeks ago

Yes, I got water on fast and luckily there were others about who knew what to do. My sinuses were a bit messed up the next day but that was it

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3 weeks ago

I saw this firsthand, after getting pepper-sprayed outside Town Hall

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3 weeks ago
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That's why the cops charged protesters on Bathurst St like this, and not those proceedin down George St

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3 weeks ago

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the city of Sydney, but Bathurst St is an important thoroughfare from the ICC where the Herzog event was, to the cuty & eastern suburbs

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3 weeks ago
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This guy

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3 weeks ago
Cartoon. Person says to other person „We invented a robot that answers questions.“, adding, „we just have to feed it 10 baby giraffes a day“. The other person asks „But it answers the questions correctly?“ Person responds „Oh my goodness, no. No no no no no.“

By Aram J. French

Appropriated due to missing alt text
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1 month ago

Thanks for sharing this. I've been thinking for sometime about 'feedback' along these lines and this is exactly what I needed

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1 month ago
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AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consisten...

Gosh, who could have seen that coming?!

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1 month ago
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I keep seeing all these "Aussie patriots" defending the cops actions at the Herzog rally, and I can't help but think of this artwork

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1 month ago
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Caption this

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1 month ago
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It's like living in the not-too-dystopian future! I got pepper-sprayed at the anti-Herzog protest yesterday, but it was actually some much less dramatic stuff today that gave me the ick;...

I wrote a gonzo thing on my last day or so as a err pro-Palestine activist ('activist' makes me sound better than I am though) lukestransmissionstoo.blogspot.com/2026/02/its-...

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1 month ago
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1 month ago
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Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time - Werner Bonefeld, 2010 Recent debates on labour have highlighted Marx’s ambivalent conception of this important term. This article criticises current physiological definitions of the ...

I'm back on my abstract labour reading thing. I know that semiosis occurs here somewhere doi.org/10.1177/0309...

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1 month ago
Richard Hanania
@RichardHanania • Feb 1
By obsessing over Epstein, they're attacking healthy heterosexuality.

Presented without comment. I just want everyone here to know.

I want you to know what you're looking at the next time you see this guy being interviewed or RTed by an Abundance bro.

1/8

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1 month ago

This is not Guenther's point exactly but lately I'm fascinated by how just the mention of 'pronoun' indexes a whole political philosophy to those on the right

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1 month ago
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Foreign Language Learners Show a Kinematic Accent in Their Co-Speech Hand Movements Abstract. Humans typically move and vocalize in a time-synchronized fashion, aligning prominence-lending hand movements to acoustically emphasized syllables. This requires complex coordination. When s...

Foreign language learners show a kinematic accent in their co-speech hand movements. New paper by Hans Rutger Bosker & al.
doi.org/10.1162/OPMI.a.321

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1 month ago
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2020 Taught Us the National Guard Is Not Our Ally, Whether in the Twin Cities or Elsewhere - Left Voice Drawing lessons from the 2020 Black Lives Matter struggle, we must clearly understand that the National Guard will never be our ally — their allegiance is to the capitalist government.

Drawing lessons from the 2020 Black Lives Matter struggle, we must clearly understand that the National Guard will never be our ally — their allegiance is to the capitalist government.

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1 year ago
A number of activists hold a banner at the Invasion Day rally on Gadigal land which reads, The Colony will Fall. I stand with themwith a raised fist

Fuck the colony, all my homies hate the colony

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