The Long Counter-Revolution

I like to peek at what other people in coffee-shops are doing on their laptops. Sometimes it is spreadsheets. Very, vary rarely it is code. Practically everyone else is doing the sort of stuff that might get them labeled in today culture as 'creatives'. A 'creative' seems to mean anyone ...
Read More
The Long Counter-Revolution

Alan Baas | Philosophy Talk Series | @NSSR

A reading of On the Cult of Fetish Gods

Since Marx' and Freud's influential usage of the term, we became accustomed to talk about fetishism as a topic for psychology and social theory. It is rarely remembered that the topic was originally a topic in theology and ethnology. Why has fetishism assumed such a wide meaning? Why do theorists ...

Read More
Alan Baas | Philosophy Talk Series | @NSSR

#Accelerate and inertia

Thinking historically and systematically would appear to be something of an urgent requirement for critical theory in the Anthropocene. Yet there was a great allergic reaction to all such lines of thought in the late twentieth century from which social thought never really recovered. Recently, there has been some attempt to ...
Read More
#Accelerate and inertia

#Accelerate in reverse

Nothing seems more urgent now than to find useful ways of thinking what Donna Haraway calls naturecultures, and to do so historically. The elimination in advance of the problem of the continuities from the natural to the cultural that is such an ingrained prejudice in the humanities and social sciences ...
Read More
#Accelerate in reverse

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...
Read More
Extrapolation, not Acceleration

Joseph Needham, the Great Amphibian

Like most people who teach in the humanities, I think that there are ways of understanding the present through the past. We return again and again to certain key authors as touchstones. There are two different ways of going about this, however. One is to take the succession of key authors ...
Read More
Joseph Needham, the Great Amphibian

Heidegger and Geology

A small, handmade green book mysteriously appeared in my New School mail slot, with the intriguing title: The Anthropocene, or “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”  Its author is Woodbine, which turns out to be an address in Brooklyn where ...
Read More
Heidegger and Geology