Category: Social Theory
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music doesn’t matter so much (and that’s ok)
[ Editorial note: this is an essay I wrote in 2014 for the last weeks of sadly defunct rock’n’metal blog Demon Pigeon. I’m repubbing it here today in response to this piece at Louder Than War, which not unreasonably laments the disappearance of a sort of music fandom which, even in my own personal golden…
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the reader can always handle the full complexity of the idea
Sara Hendren, ladies and gentlemen: The opposite of jargon is not “plain language.” It is sparkling lucidity. Too many academics translate from theory to the everyday by employing a kind of verbal shrug — they say, Don’t be afraid of this fancy term here. It just means… [insert mealy-mouthed generalities]. The shrug is an attempt…
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the n-word
Storing this one away here against the next time some wise-arse starts going on about how some people bandy the term around without anyone being able to define it: ganked from yer man Phil Burton-Cartledge, here’s Wendy Brown’s (2015) definition of neoliberalism from Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution: … as a normative order of…
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climate change aesthetics and the logic of the spectacle
Via Andrew Curry’s reliably interesting Just Two Things newsletter, here’s a piece by the Magnum photography collective about the portrayal of climate change in contemporary photography, and in particular the work of a non-profit called Climate Visuals, which is… … founded in research in social science; they use evidence gathered from focus groups in Europe…
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Longtermism is merely a more acceptable mask for transhumanism
This longread by Phil Torres at Current Affairs on the Longtermism/x-risk/Effective-Altruism mob does a pretty good job of setting out the issues with what might be the ultimate in moral philosophies, namely a moral philosophy whose adherents have convinced themselves that it is not at all a moral philosophy, but rather the end-game of the…