Monthly Archives: September 2011
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
Practical Aesthetics 