Tag Archives: Theory
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
>Schiller’s Aesthetic Education
>I recently took issue with Kant for insisting that an aesthetic education was possible, while entirely avoiding any actual explanation of such an education. I have found, in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man (excepted in The Norton Anthology of Theory … Continue reading
>Reception in Distraction, or the Habitual Aesthetic
>Walter Benjamin is extremely interested in the phenomenon he calls “reception in distraction” (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduciblity and Other Writings on Media, Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 40). He sees this sort of … Continue reading
Some Conceptions of the Sublime
Kant’s description of the Sublime is given short shrift in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (at least so far as it is anthologized in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism). Mostly, his understanding of the Sublime has … Continue reading
>Kant’s Beauty
>This post concerns the selections by Kant in the 2nd edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. The selection is taken from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, which I understand to be his ’3rd Critique’. I … Continue reading
