Author: lilyscherlis

The games we play this week offer richly textured experiences. They also—as Patrick argues in the other article we read for Monday—manufacture world-creating, potentially subversive concepts. I want to see where the affective turn we've taken this week can take me in understanding some of these experiences and concepts.  Patrick and Peter McDonald put forward … Continue reading Some notes on affect and tedium in this week’s games

Radway describes how members of Dot‘s focus group use romance novels as shared examples to come to a collective understanding about which of men’s behaviors are acceptable in the eyes of the group, and which are over a collaboratively defined line: books are sites to contest and recalibrate shared norms. Phillips describes the very different … Continue reading Lulz as a way of life: the emotional firewall as a mode of togetherness

As we discussed briefly in class, Williams suggests that television turns the conversation into a medium unto itself. I‘d like to chew through this a little bit here. Though Williams derides the sub-genre of the talkshow as comprised of “contrived“ conversation, he‘s generally hopeful:  There are times in other kinds of discussions when a new … Continue reading Conversation as medium and the geometry of desire

“The citizens whose lives are split between business and private life, their private life between ostentation and intimacy, their intimacy between the sullen community of marriage and the bitter solace of being entirely alone, at odds with themselves and with everyone, are virtually already Nazis, who are at once enthusiastic and fed up, or the … Continue reading Intimacy, Friendship, and the Culture Industry