Many of the blog carnivals of the 2000s responded to moments and events; I remember them as informal, self-selective with regard to participation, and staggered in time so as to foster dialogue and cross-hatched linking to one another’s entries. Simply, conversations played out. The carnivals that have endured through University of Michigan’s Digital Rhetoric Collaborative…
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…
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…