The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude
Perhaps it makes sense, then, to acknowledge that the impersonal has always been part of the personal; perhaps the generic and anonymity have been part of the private all along. When, in his discussion of Clarissa, Ian Watt describes the cult of letter-writing that motivated Fielding as a “microphone already tuned to the tones of private experience,” we might be tempted to claim that all novels, at least as filtered through Watt, are rock novels.
Musicophobia, or Sound Art and the Demands of Art Theory
When Suzan Philipsz won the 2010 Turner Prize, it was the first time in the award’s history that it went to a sound artist. The mere fact of Philipz’s victory often overshadowed critical assessment of Lowlands, her winning piece. It was as if her victory were not simply her own, but a victory for sound art altogether.
The (Super)Naturalistic Turn in Contemporary Theory
My point, of course, is an anti-reductionist one. No amount of mapping of which synaptic vectors alight when can explain why I think that I should interpret a passage (or character, or author) one way rather than another. Nor can visual mapping, in and of itself, explain what I mean to do by interpreting a passage one way rather than another. And that’s because neither normative significance nor meaning is something that synapses, simply, have, and so normative significance and meaning aren’t things that we can, simply, see. Stating the position a bit more carefully: at least in the case of human perception—say, listening to a work of art or, more ordinarily, conversing with a familiar foe—there certainly are cases when normative significance and meaning can be seen and heard straightaway. Moreover, there are interpretive contexts when would-be explainers immediately perceive, and so can intelligibly claim to know, that a given subject is herself immediately perceiving the meaning of some object. But our best account of those instances proceeds…by placing those instances in the space of reasons.
Miró’s Politics
So we have two modes of politics. One that depends on your subject position and one that doesn’t. And we have two kinds of art: one that depends on your subject position and one that doesn’t. And they align themselves, one with the other, according to what they assume about representation and about truth. Which kind of art is Miró’s? Or is it another kind altogether? And what kind of politics does it embody?
What Do We Mean by Autonomy?
A review of Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Dude, Where’s My Job?
…if we wanted the unrich to stop being such a (vastly) underrepresented minority in our universities, we’d have to throw most of our current students out. From this standpoint, the most effective version of an occupy movement on campuses like Michigan’s would be one in which the students stopped occupying it and made way for not the 99% but the 75% who have been systematically denied admission.
Beyond JSTOR: nonsite.org as Digital Publisher
Video from talk given at Publishing and the PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, October 18.
To Yield a Body
It is a facsimile. It is facial angle: European woman. It is stomach simple, similar to a box. It is on either side of inside. It is grapple. It is extracted from lignite and peat. It is worn by women. It is whether with gloves, a moveable roof. It is concerned with whalebone. It is a […]
Issue #7: Formalism/Post-Formalism
New accounts of Picasso, Léger, Beckmann, Pollock, Bearden and we ask: What are the stakes of formalism today?
Issue #7: Formalism/Post-Formalism
New accounts of Picasso, Léger, Beckmann, Pollock, Bearden and we ask: What are the stakes of formalism today?
