BeDeviled's Dictionary
Artsomnia
Artsomnia: when you are so creatively inspired that it is hard to sleep.
Blog
Deleuze
Change the Outside instead of being Fixed on Your Insides
A Facebook exchange about criticism and enjoyment sparks a larger point about critiquing systems in which you are enmeshed. [As I edit this, it will drift further and further from the original exchange, until with a pop, it gives birth to an essay.] WH: You could say this of so…
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Uncategorized
Chiaroscuro as Intensive Difference
Chiaroscuro helps me to think of light in terms of intensive differences and gradients, the intensive contrasts of light and dark that attract our eye, and the gradients of light and shadow upon which they move. Everything is a matter of intensities and thresholds—both in the light and in our…
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Acadimensions
Unhealthy Skepticism
Unhealthy Skepticism: Setting up unfamiliar developments as something "everybody" is excited about and positioning yourself as an independent thinker who refuses to get with the program. Saves you the trouble of actually having to engage with new ideas and making an informed critique. Instead you can read with a kind…
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Books
The Title of Chrstopher Hays' book, Twilight of the Elites, made me think of vampires. A silly coincidence, but then I started thinking about how portrayals of vampires as hidden influences on history (like the Authority on "True Blood") may mediate anxieties about actual economic elites. Most conspiracy theories share enough…
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Aphorisms
Inapt Neologisms
Recently I've been mulling over neologisms that aren't bad conceptually, but are so clunky and inelegant that I stop paying attention to ideas and start gaping at how ugly the words are. [insert examples] I think there's more in play here than simply a tin ear. Instead, I've noticed some…
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Cultural Studies
Cybernetic Desires
Think about Desiring-Production as Cybernetic--a loop between proliferating representations and desires. Two questions: Which cybernetic wave or paradigm? How are these representations/desires generated? that's where Deleuze (& Spinoza) come in. Representations & Desires as Phase Space, an exploration of what is immanent. New technologies are platform for expanding this phase…
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Cultural Studies
Data Platonism
I've been working through Katerine Hayles's book, "How We Became Posthuman." It looks like she's going to get to Plato in a few pages, but after a first fly-by of that account, I want to put this in my own words. I think what she's describing (and critiquing) is…
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Cultural Studies
In-Brain & Off-Brain Knowledge
On the boat back from his visit to America, Freud confessed to Jung that he thought the Americans must not have truly understood what he was saying, because they took it all in stride. Ideas worth grappling with perturb you, jostle you off your base and push you out of…
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Acadimensions
Angry Words Game Proposal
For a grammar game to actually be engaging, it would have to move beyond a simple right or wrong binary. Instead, the fail sequence would have to be entertaining enough that we keep trying. It would have to have a feedback mechanism that lets you know if you have a…