Ex-Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has had a number of news pieces recently published about his career and work in light of his new book After Words. His invocation of Kant is absolutely striking. Can you imagine any contemporary political leader drawing intellectual inspiration from Kant? Keating is isolating the tension between modernist, rational scientific progress […]
Category Archives: Enthusiasm
Occupy Wall Street, Social Media, Gladwell and Risk
Shay O’Reilly has an article on the Campus Progress online media outlet that critiques comments made by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker magazine about the role of social media in social protests and movements more generally. O’Reilly points out that the Occupy Wall Street and now Occupy Everywhere protests have disproved Gladwell’s dismissive critique […]
Matters of Concern
In Bruno Latour’s now relatively famous paper “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” he launches into a scathing critique of most of the methodology that defines cultural studies: When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because […]
Writing on Nationalisms
I am working on two papers that require a rigorous conceptualisation of the ‘nation’. One is hopefully going to be a group effort from some of my colleagues here and it is about an event space in Canberra. I am constructing a draft introduction so we are have a shared reference point. The other paper […]
Adorno as a critical theorist of temporality
Any critique of Adorno’s concept of the culture industry or mass culture that begins by introducing the notion of identity and the relation between identity and any segment of culture focuses on what is essentially the weakest, if not inconsequential, part of Adorno’s critique. The ‘identity’ critique is based on an overvaluation of the importance […]