Author Archives: noahbrewer
My Makers Thesis is DONE!
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve had a number of things on my plate, including my ongoing Masters Thesis project. Well, now it’s DONE, and you can read it here! It’s a real page-turner. I … Continue reading
Jameson’s Cultural Logic
The collapse of base into superstructure that Jameson posits in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism seems to have broad and unsettling implications for the Marxist model itself. After all, if political-economy has aligned itself completely with cultural … Continue reading
Tom Leddy’s Everyday Surface Aesthetics
Tom Leddy, in his article ” “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: ‘Neat,’ ‘Messy,’ ‘Clean,’ ‘Dirty’” (Published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (3), 259-268), attempts to position everyday notions of organization and cleanliness within the discourse of aesthetic … Continue reading
Toward a Material Consciousness
Kant’s “free play” of cognition (421) marks the outer bound of his liberal human. The free-play of cognition acts as a black box beyond the bounds of which we have no conscious access. For Kant, the best that this subject … Continue reading
On The Social Life of Things
In The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Arjun Appadurai argues for a “methodological fetishism” of commodities in analyzing the societies in which they circulate: …we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed … Continue reading
A Sociology of Things
Igor Kopytoff suggests a biography of things: “In doing the biography of a thing, one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and … Continue reading
The Sci-Fi Corridor
Kottke brought this article to my attention, all about the corridor in science-fiction film. The designs that Roger Christian synthesised from Ron Cobb’s prolific and extraordinary conceptual sketches for Alien (1979) are lingered over lovingly at the start of the … Continue reading
The Influence of the ‘Field’ on Literary Production
Two readings in the Sociology of Literature for today. The first is one an article by Frank de Glas entitled “Authors’ oeuvres as the backbone of publishers’ lists: Studying the literary publishing house after Bourdieu” published in the journal Poetics (Volume 25: 1998). … Continue reading
