It is not surprising that the etymology of the term “deadline” is allegedly derived from the use of a line drawn around prisons during the American Civil War. They did not have walls and prisoners would be killed if they crossed it. And he, the said Wirz, still wickedly pursuing his evil purpose, did establish […]
Category Archives: Academia
Do objects work?
A recent exchange with Ian Bogost on twitter has got me thinking about possible productive engagements with OOO again. Context: Basically I’ve been working on questions of ‘know how’ and the way we (humans) mobilise to engage with given challenges, enthusiasm at the centre of this process. Traditionally, enthusiasm has been expunged from epistemology as […]
Francois Zourabichvili and Deleuze
I am looking forward to the forthcoming publication in English of two of Francois Zourabichvili’s works in a single volume Deleuze: a Philosophy of the Event: Together with the Vocabulary of Deleuze. To be honest I had not really heard of Zourabichvili’s work until some online discussion alerted me to the presentation at the Deleuze 2012 conference […]
Contemporary Nihilism
“With the emergence of a privileged mediocrity, the innocent life became accessible to the masses.” One of the more interesting essays in the Media Archive collection is on Contemporary Nihilism: Innocence Reorganised. I have elsewhere described a quality of this as ‘performative stupidity’. From ‘Contemporary Nihilism’: The innocent thrive on everyday ritual; it’s what makes […]
The Alien and Its Media
When I teach journalism students how to do SEO (and the tensions around it etc) I begin with Google’s Adwords Keywords tool so they get a sense of how the ‘Google algorithm’ indexes (‘experiences’/’perceives’?) the language we use in keyword searches. I want the students to understand that when a journalist uses SEO they are […]