In the age of cynical reason, one of the ruling tropes is the presumed self-interest and sovereign indifference of institutions. A certain vulgar version of Foucault is the default assumption: institutions exist to reproduce themselves and their authority, and they do so by generating the very problems and conflicts that they propose to solve. Ironically, […]

It often strikes me that the contretemps around TW is miscast in crucial ways. The business of whether or not students are “coddled” and the like entirely misses the sort of discomfort many of us feel about the perfectly reasonable impulse to extend sympathy to students. It’s not only the equally reasonable intuition that education, […]

As I keep tediously insisting, there is a basic problem with the prevailing postulate of two competing alternatives: 1) Trumpism (and politics generally) is driven by economic factors masquerading as cultural ones (racism, xenophobia) or 2) it’s virulent political resentment, and economic factors supply a reassuring fiction that blinds us to this fact. The problem […]

“We need to change the culture.” So begins the prevailing script for political reflection and criticism of almost every sort today. Is the problem homophobia? We need to change the culture of masculinity. Is it financial malfeasance? We need to change the culture of Wall Street—or greed, or neoliberalism, or capitalism. Is it militarism? We […]

The standard story, now being recycled in the media, has two symmetrical sides. On the one hand, someone breaks through a barrier, setting an example and inspiring others to follow. We can all recite examples of the first woman this, or the first African-American that, or the first openly gay, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever something […]

Labor is “sticky,” the economists say. That’s another way of putting Polanyi’s insight that labor is a fictitious commodity—for a market economy, it is essential that labor be treated as a commodity (i.e., liquified) but also inevitable that it cannot be produced for the market in accordance with demand. This is why at the moment there’s […]

I’ve always liked Paul Krugman, despite the fact that he’s notably to my Right. And I even agree with most of this column. But then some weird logic creeps into his thinking: “Now I’m seeing suggestions that Trumpism is driven by concerns about political gridlock. No, it isn’t. It isn’t even mainly about “economic anxiety.” […]

It is a peculiar feature of the Turing test that in defining intelligence in functional and symbolic terms, it evades (but cannot escape) a longstanding problem in philosophy of mind: the role of the body. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ex Machina, fictional depictions of AI have often approached the problem from the opposite direction. Where philosophers puzzle over […]

I’ll be using this in my media course. In the meantime, it’s worth considering whether there’s a twist in the tale that this sort of analysis is missing. Is it possible that the Competent Female Sidekick actually is the hero in many of these stories? The mere fact that she is diegetically subordinated is not dispositive. Felicity […]