I once wrote about our reliance on depictions of greatness in the wake of failure. Because we’re prone to fail–and failure being verboten, nor accounted for all that well in our social systems, if at all–human beings must bounce back from failure. Bouncing back is hard. Heroes, however, make it look easy. The ease with…
Movie cameras give us the “optical unconscious” (Benjamin). In a way, they’re like Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens. Because people perceive the world differently through language and symbols that lend themselves to abiding certain beliefs, we could think of Burke’s screens as revealing the “rhetorical unconscious”; or capturing interpretations that we otherwise take for granted. The…
It’s awfully presumptive of Dataists to say humans would prefer a robot to the same democracy that gave them the robot. The Marvel character Ultron once observed that humans always create things that supplant them: “Men of peace create engines of war and people create children” (Avengers: Age of Ultron). He then turned around and…
It’s funny because I’d been working on my duck face all summer only to encounter Han and get told that my engagement with an informaton turns my countenance in a non-thing that is information, or a digital illusion. But so what? If we must abide a terrestrial order, why can’t our lives be optimized to…
In a scene from The Deerhunter (1978), a disillusioned “Nick,” played by Christopher Walken, steps onto the veranda of the hospital where he was convalescing alongside other Vietnam War soldiers. He absorbs a scene of uniformity-in-death: countless metal coffins are being stacked so that the bodies of the dead could be returned home. Nick then…
My brother and I are home for our grandma’s 90th. We sit on the floor, tailbones aching, paging through dusty stacks of family albums. We trace faces through the protective gloss of picture sleeves. We smile. We laugh. But we also complain: why is it so hard to eliminate the material glare of each photo…
One of my warmest memories is a pattern: me in the passenger’s seat of my grandpa’s (Bobo’s) dusty, wood-paneled station wagon, Bobo behind the wheel, sun glinting off his square framed glasses, telling me a story (probably something comedically jarring, like that time he complimented a villager’s cat in rural Burma, mistakenly using a word…
In a post-globalization world, when the horizon of cultural mixing is rapidly expanding and we are renegotiating our understanding of values, perceptions, and habits—Byung-chul Han sees this cultural shifting through a lens of optimism and names it Hyperculture. The definition of culture is varied and anthropologists, sociologists, or literary critics explain the term from different…
When I think about the resistance of material things—those tactile objects giving shape and texture to physical reality—I think about how I bought a home in the forest on a small plot of land, where I put things into the earth so that it yields things in return. I think of how the invasive creep…
Would you characterize Byung-Chul Han’s Non-things as a critical theory, a productive theory, or something else? Why? This week while reading “A Portrait of a Scholar…In Progress” in Composition Forum, the distinction Louise Phelps draws between critical and productive theories queued these questions. If we grant “theory” its etymology, the trace gives us theorein, or…