Category: Social Theory
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honeymoon objectivity
Serendipity, thy name is INTERNET. Currently in the midst of working up a big old grant application*, and what should appear but this piece from Sun-Ha Hong at Real Life, neatly filling a reference gap that’s been bugging me for a few weeks? Preach it, brother: Fredric Jameson once wrote that science fiction has become…
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Solnit’s hope vs. Arendt’s natality
Rebecca Solnit’s definition of hope is so succinct a summary of my own definition that I assume I must have picked it up from her (and from others who got it from the same source). This version is from a new interview at LARB, which I’m stashing here so I can cite it properly going…
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the most animal of all human abilities
It is perfectly possible, then, that far from being an exclusively human attribute, the narrative faculty is the most animal of human abilities, a product of one of the traits that humans indisputably share with animals and many other beings—attachments to place. Perhaps, then, storytelling, far from setting humans apart from animals, is actually the most important…
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feral empiricism
Not sure if the title term is Mark Carrigan’s own coining, here—it seems to be a g**glewhack, so maybe it is?—but I like it enough that I’m stashing it here, with some of the material for context: The phrase “do your research!” is ubiquitous across the subcultures which have popped up amidst platform capitalism’s epistemic…
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wreckage upon wreckage
Eagleton on (Jameson on) Benjamin, and specifically on his Angelus Novus: The angel can’t move because his wings have become entangled in a storm, and Jameson seems uncertain about what this storm represents. Benjamin actually tells us: it is the myth of perpetual progress. What stops the angel from waking the dead here and now,…