Desks
Theory
The scarcity of critical resources has been deployed as a rationale denigrating interpretative modes of knowledge in favor of a new, data-based empiricism. Renewed calls for math and science education drown out the ongoing perspectives and needs of the Humanities. No moment stands in more pressing need of theory than one that has so brashly militated for its irrelevance.
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The New Feudal Lords: Jane Mayer Meets D/G
The current bizarre time-lock—of zany and destructive events, fake news and impotent, because always-belated incredulity, and punitive measures taken against the guardians of democracy, where making sense becomes an everyday struggle—is all […]
Home and Homelessness in Queer Poetry, Politics, Places: Reading Loma’s Sad Girl Poems
When the poet Christopher Soto, aka Loma, debuted their chapbook Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, January 2016), they took it on what they called a “Tour to End Queer Youth Homelessness.” […]
Incomparable: Richard A. Macksey, 1931-2019
It is with deepest sorrow but also with recharged inspiration and resolve, that the critical community has learned of Dick Macksey’s dying, on July 22, 2019, on the eve of his 88th […]
How Trump’s Followers Construct Alt-Truth from Lies, Part 2: Daemonic Invention
Commentators describe Trump as a leader who thinks he is telling the truth but who in fact lies constantly to followers, followers who know he lies but believe he does so intentionally […]
Grand Strategy and Curricular Politics: Book Review–John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, New York, Penguin Press, 2018, xi-xiv, 368 pp. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right […]
Notes on Turbidity (The Bay as It Is)
I. The Turbidity of Classification Turbid. Latin turbidus confused, turbid, from turba, confusion, crowd, probably from Greek tyrbē, confusion. Measuring turbidity, defined as the cloudiness or haziness of a liquid, is relatively straightforward. Submerge a Secchi […]
Back to the Critical Future: Romania
Exceptionality rules every attempt to narrativize the history or culture of the states (or quasi-national entities) making up the Balkans. And in this respect, Romania is no exception. Romania is the “Balkan” […]
Ontology, Trump, and the Truth of Professional Wrestling: Part II – Competing Ontologies
In our previous post we showed how Christopher RayAlexander’s account of the poetics and politics of professional wrestling suffered from two lacunae: (1) an unwillingness to engage with manner in which the […]
Reporting From the Smoking Ruins of an Argument
If Hegel was correct in asserting in the Philosophy of Right that “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk,” [1] my previous argument as to the […]
Ontology, Trump, and the Truth of Professional Wrestling: Part I – RayAlexander’s Argument
We actually started writing this essay on November 2, 2016. For the previous few weeks, we’d been discussing how our own work on the ontology of professional wrestling intersects with Christopher RayAlexander’s […]
Truth, Trump, and the Poetics of Professional Wrestling
Key terms. Work: 1) An event meant to perpetuate a story line. 2) To make someone believe something. Shoot: An event that presents a truth that seems to challenge or […]
The Force of Fiction
How do you relax at the end of a long day? Chances are you do something so commonplace to many of us that we seldom pause to think how strange it is. […]
The Ferguson/Ayotzinapa Dictionary (Encyclopedia of Oppression)
NOTE I started writing the attached FERGUSON AYOTZINAPA DICTIONARY while on de facto paternity leave, in lieu of being able to work on larger projects, often writing with my right hand while holding […]
Museum as Megamachine: On the 9/11 Memorial Museum, With a Nod to Lewis Mumford
The 9/11 Memorial Museum is a profoundly disorienting mash-up of recovery and loss, creation and destruction, holding on, letting go, righteous indignation, and if you’re not careful, some self-criticism, remembering, as well […]
The Architecture of Mourning
This September marks the thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and three years since the official opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, located in the footprint of the former World Trade towers. […]
The Love of What May Be Lost: Martin Hägglund’s Dying for Time
In his recent book Dying for Time, Yale Professor of Comparative Literature Martin Hägglund has articulated a philosophical understanding of our experience of life and death that he has developed over at least […]
The Platonic Academy (On the Oscars and Contemporary Biopics)
Despite the allegedly minor status of the genre, a very high number of Oscars have gone to actors and actresses engaged in biopic performances in recent years. These biographical reenactments are regarded […]
Truman Show Syndrome, Don Quixote, and Fiction
In recent years psychiatrists have begun to identify a new condition they are calling Truman Show Syndrome, after the 1998 Jim Carrey movie about a man whose life is the subject of […]
The Taste for True Stories
The idea of a true story functions as a fantasmatic inducement almost without equal. Movie studios like to green light projects that have a basis in actual historical events, and when they […]
Call/Appel/征集/Ruf—for Submissions
Feedback is a weblog publication of Open Humanities Press, a community of critics dedicated to writing at the generative interfaces between established disciplinary, institutional, and social territories and protocols. The […]
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