The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

that sounds like hell

also potentially nihilistic.

feminist and marxist interrogations of the humanities felt hostile at the time, but they were ultimately about broadening our understanding of the human condition, uncovering suppressed experiences and perspectives embedded in the canon, etc. radical critiques focused on overturning anthropocentrism in western literature probably won't have this sort of effect. there is no hidden knowledge of the object.

sounds like an indication of really healthy field developing in v positive ways

on what non-authoritarian basis can you make those particular concerns the concerns of literature?

I don't think you have to make them concerns of literature -- they just already are concerns of literature! I mean I had some corny old Marxist lit profs when I was in lolcollege and they were like "when you read this novel don't just think about who's in love with who, think about who needs money from who and who has power of who" and that opened my mind a lot and I thought it was good advice about reading novels and I still think so

a lot of this can be chalked up to the larger trend of criticism seeking more and more marginal or excluded positions from which to engage with a text with which to get tenure

I don't think you have to make them concerns of literature -- they just already are concerns of literature! I mean I had some corny old Marxist lit profs when I was in lolcollege and they were like "when you read this novel don't just think about who's in love with who, think about who needs money from who and who has power of who" and that opened my mind a lot and I thought it was good advice about reading novels and I still think so

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

yah and Edward Said was doing int with Conrad and Austen thirty years ago. New generation, etc.

not in academia so idk how much of the object/ecology stuff is a parody of some kind, like what hidden systems are reified when juliet slut-shames the moon or whatever, and how much should be defended on the grounds that ways of thinking about ecology/"the environment"/relationships w the nonhuman sphere are hardly disconnected from ways of living, or more pointedly not-living, in modern society

this is another anecdotal claim but i get the feeling there's a real sense of cynicism and fatalism in the discipline right now.

if you step back into a Weberian kind of framework (something i've been trying to do lately) you don't really see a discipline developing positively or negatively, really, but just, "developing" as things are wont to do in modernity. this quote in particular interests me:

All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of data as an end in itself. It will discontinue assessing the value of the individual facts in terms of their relationships to ultimate value-ideas. Indeed, it will lose its awareness of its ultimate rootedness in value-ideas in general. And it is well this should be so. But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought. It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labors.

xp yes that's what they try for, the latter, tho you could hardly expect them to give up on the former while they're at it?

I don't think you have to make them concerns of literature -- they just already are concerns of literature!

i only meant that they need not be set in advance as the only concerns of literature.

i haven't figured out how all this relates to other institutional issues but it's something like when you're engaged in such moral decadence as not paying your teachers living wages and bilking your students for all their worth the only criticism you can do is bullshit criticism

It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labors.

prescient

xp to treeship: presumably popularity of this turn is anticipating that there WILL SOON be objects, namely machines, that enjoy a kind of subjective experience

ps also in lolcollege I took a course about animals in medieval europe which very much highlighted the way animals were seen as agents in ways they generally aren't in modern US. Where modern = 1990 so this turn is not such a new thing and if it were going to destroy the study of literature it would have done so by now

re: the object stuff, i think like most new trends there's a kernel of value/insight there. but there is a law of diminishing returns to consider.

mordy at the very least on the scent of some money imo

prescient

lol, again.

i'd have to read some of this stuff, but from the outside it seems like it would make a mockery of feminist and postcolonial critical projects. the marginalization of objects -- even animals -- is not the same thing as the marginalization of women and minorities.

i think you'd find quite a bit of argument to the contrary--the discourses of race and gender are not that distinct from discourses of species.

The way I look at it Fear of Music-era David Byrne presaged the analysis of objects by a generation.

objects, man. like OBJECTS.

this is what happens when you bring kids up on java

there's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore. the question is more pragmatic: why question that particular distinction at this particular juncture and to what end?

here's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore.

I think my tricks do this to me all the time.

Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella

a Soto Machine

key text:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/images.hitfix.com/assets/8749/hqdefault-2.jpg

no joke but "toasters" comes up a LOT from these guys.

as i posted that i thought "what are the odds this isn't literally the oldest joke in this field" but i did it anyway because of the picture

there's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore. the question is more pragmatic: why question that particular distinction at this particular juncture and to what end?

― ryan, Wednesday, June 1, 2016 4:44 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the end would be radical asceticism of the type practiced by jainist monks i guess

today's post grad students you mean

a good deal of the objects stuff is down to the notion that philosophy (or theory or whatever) has lost any claim to realist positions and instead is just about the circulation of discourses and identities. there probably is or at some point was a kernel of something useful in this observation, but i've never been quite clear why naive scientism and metaphysics is supposed to be the solution

i'm still waiting for my golden era...

When Is Someone Gonna Make A Sci-Fi Show Or Movie Without Any People In Them?

skott you really missed out on the chance to capitalise.

also xp to myself it's worth noting that one of the driving forces behind this is the idea that no one in the humanities had been talking about science or taking it seriously, a claim that only makes sense when you decide to ignore all of the people in the humanities talking about science and taking it seriously

I totally had to check the thread title here I'm so lost

What is a key text for this stuff?

I remember a few years ago Latour got spooked by the right wing's embrace of relativism especially as it related to their skepticism about climate change. His solution had something to do with a renewed commitment to "the thing" but he was interested in the social dimensions of the thing, not the part that exists apart from human relationships. This seems different than the deep ecology folks, also it didn't make sense as a solution to the particular problem he outlined.

Speaking of objects, thread became itself

thread is coddling someone? not sure that zinger works under fierce interrogation.

Youse couldnt fiercely interrogate a soft boiled egg youse degree-snorting navelgazers

ps enjoying thread fwiw

nobody knows how to read anymore anyway. canon fite in 2016 about as exciting as a 6 hour matthew barney film about rich people and shit. science/ecology/earth the only subjects worth studying at this late hell date right before we all explode.

yale firebrands should be starting some eco-anarcho-commune in the woods instead of going to yale anyway. fuck all books.

shout-out to my sister-in-law for finishing her first year of yale divinity school this year though! way to go, robin!

yay robin

when you read this novel don't just think about who's in love with who, think about who needs money from who and who has power of who" and that opened my mind a lot and I thought it was good advice about reading novels and I still think so (eephus)

Yeah in the distant nineties I remember hearing about how you need to read imperial Russian novels with a sense of the invisible serf / invisible peasant who enabled the lifestyles depicted in the text; I was like Whoa.

Then when you look at e.g. Woolf you might occasionally see the attempted seeing of the servants (however hazily sketched) but you still have to extrapolate the underlying economic structure that enabled all the introspection that the people were doing yeah blah blah zzzz. The politics of Glengarry Glen Ross yadda yadda, these schmucks are forced into their schmuckdom etc.

If you go down this road ad absurdum with objects, one can't really read Gone With the Wind without thinking of the oppression of the cotton plants. In Hamlet, the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Won't someone please think of the meat?

I'm not sure it helps anyone get smarter or the world get better, but I confess to feeling the pull of these lines of thought.

Trollope is a tonic.

the greatest trick derrida ever pulled was convincing the world deconstruction didn't exist

i need more trollope in my life.

People are not objects. Considering the oppression of cotton plants is not a natural extension of considering the oppression of slaves. There is no hidden story of the cotton plants because they are plants. This is my prospectus.

i need more trollope in my life.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 1, 2016

just read The Prime Minister. Never have I read 702 pages in five days.

i hate to admit this, but having kids made me SUPER critical of old movies and t.v. in a way that i never was previously because i was a nihilist and a drunken rotter. they also took my love of horror movies away from me because they made me value human life! damn kids.

also being married to a gender-fluid post-feminist wesleyan grad who was raised by radical feminist lesbians and whose doorstop-sized thesis was on east german women writers doesn't help. she doesn't miss a trick! having human reality checks around is a good thing though.

reading books and seeing movies through the eyes - even intermittently - of people who are not me is a late in life skill that i never even thought i would learn. and now i can't turn it off. it's not like i never noticed racism/sexism/etc in art before. i saw that everywhere. what i don't think i noticed before was how unaware and self-absorbed and incurious so many (mostly american) artists/filmmakers/writers are/were a lot of the time. nothing outside the bubble of whiteness matters/mattered much to them. if it did it was often a distraction or a threat. obviously there are exceptions, and i look for more curious art now. and art that challenges my perspectives. though i am finishing season two of The Last Ship right now...so, you know...

in the end, there are LOTS of ways to read a book! any book. and you can bring your own creativity to the process. and Yale lit and poetry professors can get more creative too. creativity in learning is key.

I looked at a discarded part of a stranger's meal today and thought, man, if that was part of my sister's leg, I would prefer it be treated better.

of course nobody in my family would ever get caught dead in a etc. etc.