Tamas, Sophie. “My Imaginary Friend: Writing, Community, and Responsibility.”

Tamas, Sophie. "My Imaginary Friend: Writing, Community, and Responsibility." Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 369-73. Abstract: I have a problem with collaborative writing; the words themselves put me on edge. This piece follows the line of that affect down and through identity, agency, power, intimacy, responsibility, representation, and the …

Panagia, Davide. “The Viewing Subject”

Panagia, Davide. The Political Life of Sensation. Durham And London, Duke University Press, 2009. To remember: in producing an effect of 'seeing,' the painting in question constitutes itself as a force, thereby distributing a series of visual effects (98). the self-referentiality of representation ... insists on an order of mimesis that is not likeness but intensity ... …

alternative proofs/divorcing logos

an impromptu rendering from yesterday's discussion of "alternative facts" with students in my wrtg121: researching the public experience class. wanting to save here to return for further development [and cleaner lines and better spacing].   update: made a thing.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. [Part II]

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, Hill and Wang, 2010. Summary: In the second part of Camera Lucida, Barthes's reflection centers on his mother's absence/presence [in photographs] as a means to get to the noeme [essence] of photography. Through personal reflection and subjective observation, he sifts through studium to locate punctum. Furthermore, he casts …

Mazzarella, William. “Affect: What is it Good for?”

Mazzarella, William. "Affect: What is it Good for?" Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, edited by Saurabh Dube, London, Routledge, 2009, pp. 291-309. To remember: Even in its relatively untheorized invocations, affect carries tactile, sensuous, and perhaps also involuntary connotations (291). I write in the belief that only those ideas that compel our desire as …

Massumi, Brian. “A Doing Done Through Me,” The Power at the End of the Economy

Massumi, Brian. The Power at the End of the Economy. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2015. To remember: It is the act of choice that is autonomous, in the dissociative dimension of the dividual [individual absorbed in its relation to itself] ... Choice spills from the readiness potential of the subject's affective blind spot, …

quantifying sensing

tonight, my daughter and i took in the lovely flavors of a new [to us] local thai joint. it was the kind of meal in which everything that sounded good was requested from the tiny kitchen, a few bites were taken from each dish, and everything else was packaged for days of delicious leftovers. my favorite …

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. [Part I]

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, Hill and Wang, 2010. Summary: In the first half of Camera Lucida, Barthes unpacks the experiential reading of photography. Uninterested in empirical, rhetorical or aesthetic perspectives, he not only offers language for the affective photography experience, but also asserts that the sensations produced and received [and intra-acting] …

Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, Rosetta Books, 1973, pp. 1-19. Summary: Sontag critiques the presence of photography/the photograph through a comparison to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." She highlights power dynamics, the difference [and distance] between experience and its capture, and the complications of understanding as flattening the camera's capability to capture Reality and Truth …

Massumi, Brian. “The Inmost End” The Power at the End of the Economy

Massumi, Brian. The Power at the End of the Economy. Durham And London, Duke University Press, 2015. To remember: the 'rationality of the economy' is a precarious art of snatching emergent order out of affect. The creeping suspicion is that the economy is best understood as a division of the affective arts (2). The implications …