Category: Social Theory
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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…
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pronunciation guidance
A big part of the life-in-a-new-country experience is exposure to and (if you refuse the specious role of the “ex-pat”) learning a new language. For reasons that are presumably obvious, I have not yet been able to take formal in-person lessons in Swedish, but I have done over 400 days of Du*ling* at this point;…