You guys, I feel like the parts of my brain that understand theory are atrophying.  My new department is not open to theoretical discourse.  I don't think they're actively hostile toward it, but there's no one to have conversations with about this stuff.  Except for you, Theory Is Hot Crew.  Our attempts at group reads don't seem to work out so ( Read more... )

[Unlocked post]

Thought some of the crew might be interested in this interview -- I'm particularly interested in the idea of what kinds of communication are necessary for real, deliberative democracy. None of the things in the interview will be a surprise if you know her work, especially the widely-anthologized "The General and Concrete Other" ( ( Read more... )

Here's a question for you all: name a text from your field/discipline that is ABSOLUTELY STANDARD and EVERYONE READS IT by at least their first or second year of grad school or so, such that you forget that most folks outside your field/discipline probably haven't read it (or haven't read more than, say, a brief excerpt or so). Do you find it ( Read more... )

What is the provenance of the idea of subject position? To give a stripped-down example-- the discursive practice of "interview" assigns to its participants the subect positions "interviewer" and "interviewee". I'm familiar with the idea from critical discourse analysis as practiced by Norman Fairclough and others, but either a hunch or a half- ( Read more... )

This question came up in another thread (maybe even another comm, I don't know), but now I can't get it out of my head. Especially after reading an interesting article this morning on Piraha (pronounced pee-da-HAN), a language spoken in the Amazon. From "The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?" The New ( Read more... )

"Literary studies characteristically teach complexity and respect for minute particulars, where psychology in the past sought hard statistical facts and universals. Respective methodologies have been marked by these aims. Psychologists, then, often suspect the literary workers of complexifying unnecessarily, where the latter remain suspicious of ( Read more... )

Some initial key concepts and notes / attempts to describe:

-"multiple / multiplicity" - Constructed or "made" (6); an escape from binary and/or hierarchical ("up-and-down") structures, hence the alternative landscape of the "rhizome" (horizontal, but not strictly so); subterranean; continuous; emphasizing the position of the collective as a ( Read more... )

Dear theoryishotcrew,

Have any of you read Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux)? If so, would you be willing to start a thread and discuss it here with me ( Read more... )

While the DVD of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is out of print and thus prohibitively expensive, I bought the VHS tape recently since I missed it, and also noticed that the whole thing seems to be up on YouTube. Since yesterday was 75 anniversary of his birth & October 4th is the 25th anniversary since his death, I thought I might post this clip ( Read more... )

I think this is worth its own post and discussion separate from the current application. What is the role and importance of the context of a theorist/philosopher in understanding his or her ideas? Can we read an essay by someone in isolation and get something useful out of it even without knowing who and what they are responding to? How incumbent ( Read more... )