Parade
Shakespeare and the Birth of Bourdieusian Capital
Gans, Bourdieu, Oldenburg, all that good stuff - I typically don't post academic stuff here, but Gans/this sort of thing has actually (actually) been coming up in conversation a lot recently, and I've been advised that this is of General Interest (possibly even Great Importance) to the public. - Shakespeare wrote in a time of... Continue Reading →
A Review of Carl Jung’s Black Books
Monday, suddenly confronted with an involuntary day off, I took it upon myself to read Carl Jung’s seven Black Books in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. On finishing the third I realized I’d made a mistake, but at that point had gone too far and committed to completing the series. The following is... Continue Reading →
Sam Pink, Sean Thor Conroe, and Institutional Rot (ExPat Press)
The controversy around Sean Thor Conroe and Sam Pink raises interesting questions about authenticity, and how the comparatively well-off have a tendency (which is maybe a particularly American tendency) to grasp at low-culture and reject their relative status.
Revolutionary Pedagogy and Its Subjects
What— and more importantly who— is at stake in a top down revolution? — Tyrone Williams’ short and very good essay "The Human Teacher" (which appears in UIP's Poets on Teaching) is a provocative examination of the teacher’s relationship to knowledge and the role institutions play in education. One of his main premises is a... Continue Reading →
Digital Excess: Community, Transgression, and Symbolic Exchange in Anonymous Online Spaces via B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis (MVU Press 2021)
This work originally appears in MVU Press' Plutonics Journal Volume :(::) — I highly recommend you check it out there, not only because it's more aesthetically pleasing but because so much other great work appears alongside it. In his 1987 work The Ecstasy of Communication Jean Baudrillard surveys the rise of an increasingly information based... Continue Reading →
Mass Media and the Vertigo of Interpretation
A truncated version of this piece appears on IM1776.com — The US media is, unsurprisingly, suffering historically low levels of public trust. Corporate restructuring and conglomeration, ethics scandals, and emergent technologies have all led to decades of tumultuous change in an industry so crucial to democracy, yet just that— an industry. But with the many... Continue Reading →
Capitalism and the Heterogeneous
The following is an adaptation of a verbal presentation given for Justin Murphy and Nina Power’s course ‘The Politics and Philosophy of Georges Bataille’ — The greatest harm that strikes men is perhaps the reduction of their existence to the state of a servile organ… There is no cure for the insufficiency that diminishes anyone... Continue Reading →
Bataille, Veblen and the Instinct of Workmanship
“With more or less sincerity, people currently avow an aversion to useful effort. The avowal does not cover all effort, but only such as is of some use; it is, more particularly, such effort as is vulgarly recognized to be useful labor. Less repugnance is expressed as regards effort which brings gain without giving a... Continue Reading →
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