The first time I read Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” I dwelt some time on the following footnote: . Without spending too much time on the ball, Wilson is that tricky object-subject resisting full objectification, even in the theater of relationality Viveiros de Castro outlines above. Wilson, Brown—and Taylor—might argue, is a thing, what Viveiros de Castro calls an […]
In-institutional
I remember reading William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep a few years back and thinking: This is about me? It’s not that he’s completely wrong in his analysis of the student-as-customer model of higher education; I think in many respects Deresiewicz is correct, but wide-sweeping claims about an entire generation hardly seem productive, even beyond what Eve Sedgwick has labeled which extend […]
spirit in the mask-making
“Can we be presente in masks? At first it seems impossible. Within the mask not only the face but the heart is encased, one is separate and separated through concealment. Can there be a heartening beneath the hardness of stoicism? Can you be one with a mask (to be me, I have to walk and […]
Pathways
Thinking with Juan López Intzín and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, throughout this week’s texts a certain political urgency (in-)surges up: writing, acting, feeling-thinking between the two impossibilities of writing that exceeds rational categorization and writing collectively (de Sousa Santos 5). Or as the Zapatistas put it: “a world where many worlds are possible” . Grosfoguel […]
Eurocentric id and entity
I’d like to linger on the following sentence from Aníbal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”: Thinking through this id-entity, then: Europe constitutes the id—the Freudian understanding of unconscious drives and instinctual forces—of coloniality. European coloniality is its own personality, its own agential entity governed by the “natural” and “given” laws of the […]
Ca(n)non
I’m interested in the contiguity of these texts. There’s a degree to which the dialogism between Freire and Boal is readily given to us—Boal’s book, following Freire’s, deviates in title by a single word: “pedagogy” becomes “theatre.” And what better way to practice the pedagogy of the oppressed than to perform it theatrically? Freire writes […]