Author: Echo

Following our discussion on Wednesday, I wanted to think more about affect and transcendence, especially with regard to the feeling of new media. I am still working through this but thought I would take a crack at articulating it. Massumi describes a disappearance of the concrete subject in (neo)liberal capitalism and the emphasis in this … Continue reading ecstasy and transcendence in internet communication

I found two threads in Hebdige's "Subculture: The Unnatural Break" chapter particularly interesting: a) the popular desire to link semiotic breaks (subcultural fashion, music, art, etc) with deviant behavior (crime and violence especially) and b) the relationship between subcultural subversion and its absorption into the commodity circulation process. I still take issue with Hebdige's conception … Continue reading Chief Keef and subcultural violence-realism in the system of commodity production

While I found Phillips's Toward a Method/ology interesting in its engagement with dimensions of the social world which are less often studied by academics, I felt that Phillips's consideration of her position and her orientation to the sight did not go far enough to overcome the observer/object problematic that still haunts the project of academic … Continue reading Transferring the Gaze, New Exoticization of Internet Deviants

In class Wednesday we touched on Stuart Hall's somewhat cautious critique of the institutionalization of Cultural Studies. Hall writes: "Some time ago, looking at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken American literary studies, in its formalist mode, I tried to distinguish the extremely important theoretical … Continue reading Hall and the narrative of the “deconstructive deluge”