Category: Social Theory
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duckrabbit, figureground, mirrorscreen
In this episode of Excerpts Of Other People’s Output Used For The Aggrandization Of Personal Theories Which Remain Stubbornly Underwritten, I will be quoting a newsletter from Drew Austin, riffing on Kyle Chayka’s “ambient TV” essay; the bolding is my own. Describing other ambient shows like Netflix’s “Chef’s Table,” which combines pleasant food imagery with…
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“A part of the world’s worlding”: Sofia (2000), Container Technologies
Sofia, Z. (2000). Container technologies. Hypatia, 15(2), 181-201. I first read this back in the heady days of 2016 or so, on the direct recommendation of its author; I don’t get to name-drop very often, but Zoe Sofoulis (writing here as Zo Sofia, as she sometimes does) is a good friend, and served as a…
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luma daze / nine notions of the metasystemic
Among the many things on my list of events to speak at in 2020 was Luma Days, which is a kind of annual arts-community-philosophy shindig in Arles, southern France. Of course, the prospect of actually going in person went the way of almost all long distance travel this year—but Maria Finders and her team have…
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all these words have been poisoned, right?
McKenzie Wark, interviewed at Believer: … in Capital is Dead I wanted to ask the question of how have we innovated language—god, I hate that word, innovate. All these words have been poisoned, right? What’s the art, if I can say that, what’s the literary dimension of writing theory? It’s a genre of literature, Marx…
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Fables of the deconstruction: Salmon (2020), An Event, Perhaps
Nice little biography of Derrida, this. A more manageable size than many of the man’s own books, it does a neat job of relating the philosopher and the philosophy, without being a hagiography in the case of the former, nor a full-bore “reading” in the case of the latter. Which makes it perhaps the ideal…