Public concern about ‘big data’ frequently comes down to a vague and ill-defined sense of ‘ickiness.’ I’d like to briefly suggest a way to provides structure to this vague sentiment — let’s call it data dread. Provisionally, I would argue that public distrust of ‘big data’ comes down to major tension between two promises of…
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Desire and the End of History: Repetition in Vico and Lacan
Central to both Giambattista Vico and Jacques Lacan is an account of history as cyclical, characterized by a repetitive ‘to and fro’ between proximity and distance, in relation to an object of desire whose achievement is tantamount to death. Lacan posits a subject that only comes to contract its subjectivity as a result of self-alienation….
Continue ReadingBacon, Vico, and the “Long Tail”
In his essay, “The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson observes that the our ability to overcome the ‘tyranny of physical space’ through the use of a combination of online databases and streaming services has fundamentally altered business models and, as a consequence, has radically increased our access to information. In the past, limited by the physical…
Continue ReadingRevisioning Argument?: Notes on “Theory in the Machine”
In her recent talk at Georgia Institute of Technology (February 13, 2013), entitled “Theory in the Machine: Or a Feminist in the Software Lab,” Tara McPherson described how she came to the digital humanities, her work as a founding editor of Vectors, and her current involvement in the development of Scalar, “a semantic web authoring…
Continue ReadingLearning to be Human from the Center of the Internet
Attending strictly to the more phenomenological aspects of the internet, it is easy to fall into a kind of idealism. Zygmunt Bauman (2005), for example, has argued that the era of space has come to an end, that the extraterrestrial realm of cyberspace has broken away from the realm of places and, consequently, social life…
Continue ReadingExposing Humanism: Prudence, Ingenium, and the Politics of the Posthuman
I am pleased to announce the publication of my article, “Exposing Humanism: Prudence, Ingenium, and the Politics of the Posthuman” in the Journal of Historical Sociology. The research for this paper was funded by the Laney Graduate School at Emory University and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship. I…
Continue ReadingThe Beast Without: Red Dragon, The Cleft Lip, and the Politics of Recognition
The film Red Dragon features a serial killer whose cleft lip is the primary factor motivating his murderous behaviour. Although the film initially capitalizes upon the tradition of linking cleft lip and palate with homicidal psychopathy, however, it does so through a keen awareness of the politics of identity formation, and so has the effect…
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