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In his September 2008 keynote address for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Bruno Latour described, with typical circumspection, the implications of the on-going expansion of design. The sheer range of things now subject to it — objects, cities, and everything in between — shows just how momentous, and total, this [...]
In a post on Robert Fisk’s recent talk on Obama, Palestine, and the Middle East, Maximilian Forte picks-up on the widening gap between the neo-luddite old guard left and the emerging tech-savvy leftist blogger-journalist. I’ve always been a fan of Fisk — he’s one of only a few able to describe the Palestine-Israel conflict accurately [...]
Though the two lectures comprising Pierre Bourdieu’s short work On Television (1996) more or less exclusively focus on news programming, and predate the blogosphere, if not the internet — which is important to the extent that so much of what he has to say here concerns ownership of the means of information production, — the [...]
In a thought-provoking post on I cite, Jodi Dean describes the proliferation and popularity of ‘tag clouds’ as capturing “the shift from message to contribution characteristic of communicative capitalism”. That is, in place of meaning and context, which in actuality govern discourse, tag clouds display information in terms of repetition, frequency, and intensity.
“The meaning of [...]
Joanne Faulkner of What Sorts of People has a post up on what ought to now be known as the Gould affair, in reference to the well-known Sokal hoax — which continues to haunt the postmodern left more than ten years after its perpetration. Faulkner summarizes the turn of events thus far:
Keith Windschuttle, editor of [...]
Void Manufacturing has posted a translation, by Patrice Riemens, of an interview with Paul Virilio, where he discusses the ongoing financial collapse. He begins by applying his well-known theory of accidents to the current crisis:
“With Tchernobyl, we have entered the era of global accidents, whose consequences are in the realm of the long term. The [...]
Reviewing Roberto Esposito’s Bios, Steven Shaviro of The Pinocchio Theory gives an excellent two-fold argument for how biopolitics scholarship generally fails to adequately reflect on global shifts in medical and economic practices since Foucault first put forth the theory in the late 70s/early 80s.
It is telling that Esposito says nothing whatsoever about the ways in [...]
In his recent Reason article on “justice porn” Greg Beato notes, in passing, that the realistic sets of tv courtrooms reimagine real courts as so many “fetish props” assembled.
“But instead of emphasizing their status as private arbitrators who offer a different approach to dispute resolution than the U.S. court system, they present themselves as that [...]
The “Introduction” to Edward Skidelsky’s recently published Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture paints a sad, timely portrait of that now familiar, ominous shift in German thought, circa 1929. Needless to say, the image of a powdered Levinas mocking pacifism and the virtues of civic engagement can’t help but strike a foreboding note.
On April [...]
Prompted by a recent PC and Pixel cartoon, Mark Liberman over at Language Log gives a quick overview of the state of ‘linguistic profiling’ technology. (”As you can see, the best of the systems are doing pretty well at recognizing languages, but not so well at distinguishing one dialect from another.”)
What’s especially interesting about the [...]
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