...but a few successful books might
Via my colleague Mark Guzdial, I’ve just learned that Rice University Press is being shut down entirely. It’s unfortunate to see a university press shuttered, but it comes as no surprise that some will fall given the perfect storm of a terrible current economic climate in both universities and in the book industry. But Rice UP is unique because it… read more
Uhm, freeplay is the disruption of presence?
Finally! A way to connect the recent “Derrida Debates” to videogames! Behold Modernauts. It’s inspired by the well-received Nintendo DS puzzle game Scribblenauts, in which the player solved puzzles by typing in the names of objects, which would appear for use in the puzzle. To complete it, the player would have to reach the goal, a star. Modernauts works similarly,… read more
On the "adjunct problem"
Brian Croxall writes in response to Anthony Grafton’s New Republic review of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas. In brief, one of Menand’s suggestions is to admit fewer graduate students and shorten the time to the PhD to combat the lack of job opportunities; Grafton responds that grad school should be hard because it’s supposed to “test people who… read more
Or is that De(rrida)bate?
This is the post in which I point to the latest installment in the almost-infamous 2010 Derrida Debates without commenting on them: Derrida’s supposed textualism, by Adam Kotso at An und für sich Realism is de rigueur, by Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects What, you didn’t believe me?
On the different sorts of satire
What is Cow Clicker? Is it a satire? Yes, but it’s more complicated than that: it’s also a real game that people can (and as it would seem, many thousands do) play “in earnest.” That’s caused a number of people to ask if it ought to be taken seriously as satire. We tend to throw around words like “satire” and… read more
Interview with Eric McLuhan
Harman points to Figure-Ground Communication’s interview with Eric McLuhan. It includes a question from Harman about Laws of Media, namely “why did they they the tetrad to human artifacts?” Of course, this is also the question Levi and I will pose in our planned book on McLuhan. McLuhan doesn’t really answer the question, from the very beginning seeming not to… read more
On Jason Mittell on Mad Men
Television scholar Jason Mittell doesn’t like the television show Mad Men, and he’s written an article about why. It wasn’t news to me; indeed, I’m one of the interlocutors he mentions having argued with about the show on Twitter and elsewhere. I knew Jason was writing this piece and I’ve been eager to read it. Now that I have done,… read more
Two Teasers
I’m behind in keeping up with my corner of the philosophy blogosphere. In part I’ve been distracted by cow clickery, but more so I’ve been spending as much time as possible writing Alien Phenomenology, which I fully intend to complete before the end of August. I’m thus offering two teasers today, in lieu of earnest content. The first is related… read more
New stuff and new ways to get it
A few housekeeping notes this weekend. First, I’ve updated the Speculative Realism Aggregator to include the blogs of Jeff Bell (“Aberrant Monism) and Tim Morton (“The Ecological Thought”). If there are any other blogs that belong in the system that I’m missing, let me know. Second, you may not know it, but you can access a mobile version of this… read more
The Making of Obsession
I made a Facebook game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You can go play it on Facebook now, or you can see some screenshots on on this site. Here’s the short description, from the page just linked: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games,… read more