Humid, All Too Humid: Overheated Observations

I haven’t made a single mistake in my life. I’ve just made a lot of good decisions that went really badly. Try as we might, we simply can’t imagine what our world would now look like, had our forefathers decided to use asparagus instead of electricity. In Humid, All Too Humid, social commentator Dominic Pettman curates the overheated thoughts of his own feverish mind, in response to a world struggling with unprecedented levels of cultural climate change. Humanity is like that obnoxious bore that arrives at the party drunk — thinks he’s witty and charming and wise, but is in fact a complete psychotic loser. All the other creatures, however, are too polite to say anything. So they just watch us quietly, and hope that we disappear as quickly as we came. The book takes the form of aphorism, witticism, maxim, axiom, dictum, quip, jape, adage, proverb, pun, precept, reflection, suggestion, observation, paraphrase, bon mot, vagary, specificky, put-on, put-off, mummery, miscellany, aside, in-front, behind, knock-knock joke, one-liner, tweet, re-tweet, truism, and not-so-truism. When you think about it, how rude it is for people to get married in public. This whole ritual is set up so that one person can say they love this one other person more than you. More than anyone else in the room. Is this why people really cry at weddings? Is this why we cover their car with rubbish? A sublimated response to their ceremonial insult? Known for his scholarly work on love, sex, and the (post)human condition, Pettman now assembles this collection of humoristic micro-meditations on everything from the meaning of life to the “yoghurt of human unkindness.” Archaeologists in Turkey have uncovered a new fragment of Anaximander, which simply reads: “Because reasons.” Humid, All Too Humid reads as if Oscar Wilde had first written Minima Moralia, after binge-watching too many episodes of The Simpsons

The Humid Condition

The Humid Condition: (More) Overheated Observations continues on the clicking heels of Dominic Pettman’s Humid, All Too Humid (2016), providing a companion volume of pithy and witty observations for our overheated age. Covering topics from pop culture to academia to romance to politics to human mortality to everything in between, this collection of pointed musings aims to amuse, edify, instruct, provoke, tease, caution, and inspire. As with the first installment, the spirit of this book represents a fusion of Montaigne and Wilde; a mashup of Adorno and Yogi Berra; a parallel channeling of Marx and Marx (both Karl and Groucho). No doubt, Hannah Arendt would be appalled at the irreverence on display within these pages. Then again, “Heidegger has left the bildung.” And as the author himself notes: “I have nothing new to say. And I’m saying it!

The Mole and the Serpent: A Totemic Approach to Societies of Control

Animals are good to think with, or so they say. And animal totems have consistently found a hospitable ecosystem in Continental Philosophy. From Isaiah Berlin’s fox and hedgehog, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s menagerie of eagles and asses, to Donna Haraway’s companion species, different critters have been put to work at the service of The Concept. In Deleuze’s influential essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” we encounter two particular animals: the mole and the serpent. (“We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others.” [2011: 140f]) The former is the emblem of the disciplinary society, which, according to Deleuze’s argument, is evolving swiftly into a control society, overseen by the oily coilings of the latter. What to make of this totemic distinction? What can the mole and the serpent tell us about the present moment, thirty years after Deleuze released them into our minds in this context? Since it is hardly more than a suggestive throw-away line in the original piece, we can only speculate

Avoiding the Subject

What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell us about the fortification of the West? What can Reality TV tell us about the crisis of contemporary community? And what can unauthorized pictures of Osama Bin Laden tell us about new methods of popular propaganda? These are only some of the thought-provoking questions raised in this lively and erudite collection of inter-related essays on the postmillennial mediascape. Students and teachers of visual culture, critical theory, cultural studies, film theory, and new media, will find a wealth of ideas and insights in this fresh approach to the electronic environment. Avoiding the Subject argues for a new sensitivity and empathy towards objects (including, and especially, human objects - such as refugees, "enemy combatants," collateral damage, etc.). Whether the focus be on the specifically postcolonial trauma of Australian detention centers, or the viral mutations of propaganda in the age of the internet, each chapter attempts to "avoid the subject" in order to escape the egocentric confines of our own subjective perspectives.Wat vertelt Roger Rabbit ons over de Tweede Golfoorlog? Wat vertelt DJ Shadow ons over het einde der tijden? Wat kan onze lokale busroute ons vertellen over de verovering van het Wilde Westen? Produceert reality tv een nieuw soort gemeenschap of toont Big Brother ons slechts een nieuwe vorm van samenleven? En wat vertellen ongeautoriseerde foto's van Bin Laden ons over de nieuwe methodes van de populaire propaganda? Deze en andere vragen komen aan de orde in deze collectie essays over het medialandschap in het post-millennium en haar objecten. Avoiding the Subject analyseert onze hedendaagse cultuur die zich langzamer ontwikkelt dan de technologie en waardoor 'the world turns to film', zoals Deleuze dit passend heeft verwoord

Avoiding the Subject

What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell us about the fortification of the West? What can Reality TV tell us about the crisis of contemporary community? And what can unauthorized pictures of Osama Bin Laden tell us about new methods of popular propaganda? These are only some of the thought-provoking questions raised in this lively and erudite collection of inter-related essays on the postmillennial mediascape. Students and teachers of visual culture, critical theory, cultural studies, film theory, and new media, will find a wealth of ideas and insights in this fresh approach to the electronic environment. Avoiding the Subject argues for a new sensitivity and empathy towards objects (including, and especially, human objects - such as refugees, "enemy combatants," collateral damage, etc.). Whether the focus be on the specifically postcolonial trauma of Australian detention centers, or the viral mutations of propaganda in the age of the internet, each chapter attempts to "avoid the subject" in order to escape the egocentric confines of our own subjective perspectives

The Mole and the Serpent: A Totemic Approach to Societies of Control

Animals are good to think with, or so they say. And animal totems have consistently found a hospitable ecosystem in Continental Philosophy. From Isaiah Berlin’s fox and hedgehog, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s menagerie of eagles and asses, to Donna Haraway’s companion species, different critters have been put to work at the service of The Concept. In Deleuze’s influential essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” we encounter two particular animals: the mole and the serpent. (“We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others.” [2011: 140f]) The former is the emblem of the disciplinary society, which, according to Deleuze’s argument, is evolving swiftly into a control society, overseen by the oily coilings of the latter. What to make of this totemic distinction? What can the mole and the serpent tell us about the present moment, thirty years after Deleuze released them into our minds in this context? Since it is hardly more than a suggestive throw-away line in the original piece, we can only speculate

In Divisible Cities: A Phanto-Cartographical Missive

In Divisible Cities takes Italo Calvino’s classic re-imagining of Venice, viewed in the mind’s eye from many different metaphysical angles, and projects it on to the world at large. Where the Italian saw his favorite city as an impossible metropolis of many moods, shades, and ways of being, this unauthorized sequel unpacks the Escheresque streets in unexpected directions. In Divisible Cities is thus an exercise in cartographic origami: the reflective and poetic result of the narrator’s desire to map hidden cities, secret cities, imaginary cities, impossible cities, and overlapping cities, existing beneath the familiar Atlas of everyday perception. Stitching these different places and spaces together is a “double helix” or “Siamese seduction” between the traveler and his romantic shadow, revealing — step by step — a clandestine itinerary of hidden affinities, nestled within the habitual rhythm of things. Matter matters. That’s what the drone of the city tells us. And yet we dream of something beyond these invisible walls. Were I an architect-deity, I would create an Escheresque subway system, linking all the cities in the world. The tunnels themselves, and the people decanted from one place to the other, would eventually create an Ecumenopolis: a single and continuous city, enlaced and endless. Were this the case I could get on the F train at Delancey Street, Manhattan, and — after a couple of changes mid-town — emerge in the night-markets of Taipei, or near the Roman baths of Budapest. Or perhaps even downtown Urville

When Lulu met the Centaur: Photographic traces of creaturely love

The brief triangular love between Nietzche, Salomé, and Rée – as crystallised in the famous photograph of kitsch (literal) horse-play, where the woman is depicted as treating the two men as beasts of burden – allows us to consider the role of ‘creaturely love’ in our more general understanding of the lover’s discourse. That is to say, through such images we can explore the role and figure of the animal within ‘the anthropological machine’, itself designed to produce a sense of the human from the inhuman (especially through mediated forms of intimacy). Further, in the different intermedial relationships between photography, poetry, and philosophy, the Centaur – in the letters and texts circulated by this group (later including Rilke) – provides a charged specific totem for a libidinal ecology of souls, striving to understand themselves as simultaneously creaturely and spiritual. Such a figure allowed both a recognition and a disavowal of the nonhuman basis (and telos) of human affections