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Showing posts from July 4, 2021

on entanglement

  In 1991, an anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas, wrote a book entitled “Entangled Objects” in which he proposed that other dimensions of commodity exchange exist outside of what is usually analyzed in terms of production and circulation. That is, objects are entangled with other objects and situations to a degree that confounded both the theory of revealed preference and the Marxist analysis of surplus value, the latter of which held production and circulation too far apart, the former of which had forgotten production and overlapping markets altogether.   The idea of entanglement was taken up by two different economic sociologists, Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who have clashed about just what it means. Callon, who is better known, is one of the architects of Actor Network Theory, has made field studies of fishermen and stock brokers to study markets and producers. His theory of markets, based in this research, accords a great role to what he calls the performativity of economics mod

La Chambre (after Balthus)

  La Chambre (after Balthus) A stub fury stands drawing open the vast drapes letting in the accusatory light upon the sprawled, naked sleeper whose odalisque interiority is thus so rudely summoned. She blooms on her throne like a migraine in that cat fraught room. - K.C.

sad thoughts on the end of the school year

  I can’t hold together, in my head, these two things: on the one hand, my knowledge that myself and my cohort have loaded up the future with the unimaginable horror of climate change – the effects of which abound for anyone with the eyes to see – and on the other hand, my boy Adam, whose last day in third grade – CE2 – is today. In my regular life, my organic life, the second hand outweighs the first. Adam is looking forward to getting out and summer vacation. I have this feeling in my chest like my heart swallowed all the fallen leaves of autumn – or, at least one leaf. An ache of nostalgia, knowing that Adam is not passing by these monuments again, that he is growing up. For the first hand – I have only a cringing fear. I wrote a piece a long long time ago for the Austin Chronicle in which I compared humans to sperm whales. I love whales, but whales do not exist in the hundred millions. I’ll quote myself – a form of auto-affection one shouldn’t do in public, Louis CK  notwithstan