en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:31:37 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7529241090 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:31:37 -0700 /review/show/7529241090 Nat has read See/Saw: Looking at Photographs (Paperback) by Geoff Dyer
The essay making fun of Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by itself is worth the price of admission. ]]> Review7517365560 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 04:29:13 -0700 /review/show/7517365560 Nat has read The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Paperback) by Erving Goffman
I cannot believe I am only reading this now—this is clearly relevant to speech act theory and Austin's work in particular, and was written around the same time as How to Do Things with Words, and it deepens and expands Austin's conception of felicity and success conditions for speech acts. Plus it provides a straightforward way of defending the idea that there is not a sharp separation between "serious" and "unserious" speech acts. Derrida said something like that in Limited Inc, but as far as I understand his argument for it, it's bad. Goffman provides the resources for a good argument for that conclusion.

I'm definitely gonna write a paper about that. ]]> Review7489226664 Mon, 14 Apr 2025 17:59:48 -0700 /review/show/7489226664 Nat gave 5 stars to Those Passions: On Art and Politics (Hardcover) by T.J. Clark
I am so grateful for learning about T.J. Clark while reading Robert Pippin's After the Beautiful--Pippin describes Clark as a "left Hegelian" theorist of art (which from Pippin is complimentary), in contrast with the more familiar (to analytic philosophers anyway) work of Arthur Danto, who theorized a pseudo-Hegelian "end of art" arriving when Andy Warhol showed that the only thing essential to art was the concept of art itself (Danto's central example is the fact that Warhol's Brillo Boxes could be physically indistinguishable from the real thing and all that matters is that they are deemed art).

Here is what Pippin says about Clark (and Fried too):

One can say simply that there is a great deal more at stake in Hegel when the question is the historical fate of art and, accordingly, a great deal more at stake in the accounts of Clark and Fried, something tied to the historical, civilizational project definitive of the world in which such art was made. The question that animates all three accounts and others like them is the simple, sweeping question of what it means that human beings make art, how it is that this activity is so significant to them, how it could be that this sense of its significance could change, often radically, and still be identified as the making of significant art. (After the Beautiful, p. 71)

That understanding of art as world-historical, as a concentrated form of human self-consciousness, of working out political, philosophical self-understanding, is expressed throughout this collection of essays. And the Hegelian idea that art's distinctive contribution to Absolute Spirit (distinguishing it from philosophy and religion) is the place of "sensuous particularity" is so clearly demonstrated by Clark's pointing to details of paintings and photographs that are so easy to overlook but once pointed out so obvious that it conclusively proves the Hegelian point. ]]> Review7480675140 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:41:02 -0700 /review/show/7480675140 Nat has read Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Hardcover) by Malcolm Harris
Learned a lot from this, from the fact that Muybridge's famous shots of the running horse were made in collaboration with Leland Stanford's horse farm (what became the grounds of Stanford University), to the fact that "Cisco" systems is just a shortened version of "San Francisco" (their logo is a stylized Golden Gate Bridge), to the fact that there's a 2001 movie that allegorizes Bill Gates's monopolistic tendencies as a kind of serial murder of start ups (Anti-Trust, which is terrible, but ultimately a very realistic picture of tech competition).

But one weird aspect of reading this now, in the chaos of this admin's tariffs, I'm wondering where all of the Hooverite free trade warriors are? ]]> Review7451089881 Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:30:45 -0700 /review/show/7451089881 Nat has read We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (Audiobook) by David Howarth
Halfway through this totally bonkers story of escape and evasion in the Norwegian fjords and alps and plateaus, I realized that I had watched a pretty good movie about it years ago: The 12th Man. I followed along on google maps to see where all the action was taking place and I located the cabin where Balsruud recuperates/cuts off his own toes:

]]> Review7451060924 Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:25:56 -0700 /review/show/7451060924 Nat has read Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Paperback) by Mark Fisher
I found myself constantly amused by the fact that Fisher's go-to examples of the dehumanizing effects of capitalism are its effects on lecturers in British universities! I can definitely vouch for that being true.

For example, on p.41, he writes:

'For each module,' De Angelis and Harvie write,

the 'module leader' (ML, i.e., lecturer) must complete various paperwork, in particular a 'module specification' (at the module's start) which lists the module's 'aims and objectives', (ILOs, 'modes and methods of assessment', amongst other information; and a 'module review' document (at the end of the module), in which the ML reports their own assessment of the module's strengths and weaknesses and their suggested changes for the following year; a summary of student feedback; and average marks for their dispersion.

This is only the beginning, however. For the degree program as a whole, academics must prepare a 'program specification', as well as producing 'annual program reports', which record student performance according to 'progression rates', 'withdrawal rates', location and spread of marks. All student's marks have to be graded against a 'matrix'. This auto-surveillance is complemented by assessments carried out by external authorities. The marking of student assignments is monitored by 'external examiners' who are supposed to maintain consistency of standards across the university sector. Lecturers have to be observed by their peers, while departments are subject to periodic three or four day inspections by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). If they are 'research active', lecturers must submit their 'best four publications' every four or five years to be graded by panel as part of the Research Assessment Exercise (replaced in 2008 by the equally controversial Research Excellence Framework). ]]> Review7434082685 Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:26:44 -0700 /review/show/7434082685 Nat has read Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Paperback) by Michael Baxandall
Reading the philosophically-minded art historians like Baxandall and T.J. Clark is so much more rewarding than reading the contemporary philosophers of art. So I'm just gonna keep doing that for a while. Plus they have lots more illustrations.

This does what some of the best history of science writing also does—make weird old practices make sense. Why do 15th century Italian paintings look they way that they do? Some mix of the economics of the patron/artist relationship, the fact that because of standard training and its use in commerce everyone was super familiar with the math used to calculate volumes and surface areas, and everyone knew some ritualized gestures from popular preachers and dancing (there's a particular weird "come here" gesture that's everywhere once you see it, including Venus in Botticelli's Primavera). ]]> Review7428052947 Sun, 23 Mar 2025 11:20:58 -0700 /review/show/7428052947 Nat has read On Close Reading (Paperback) by John Guillory
I wish I had read this before writing my review of Kramnick's account of close reading as a kind of *writing* in his Criticism and Truth. Guillory gives a concise history of the varied and contested ways that close reading has been understood in literary studies. Guillory himself endorses "explicitation" as his preferred understanding of close reading, whicch involves "a showing of the work of reading" (59).

There is a useful coda that discusses close reading in the context of worries about attention—it makes for a helpful companion to other recent attempts to say how we should approach art in the age of "disordered attention" (Claire Bishop's term).

An annotated bibliography by Scott Newstock gives a fascinating overview of all of the diverse domains in which theorists have argued about how to understand close reading. ]]> Review7386950867 Sat, 08 Mar 2025 15:10:31 -0800 /review/show/7386950867 Nat has read American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Hardcover) by D.W. Pasulka
This held my attention like an Art Bell Coast to Coast radio show about aliens—I started reading it hours before the sun came up while super jet lagged and that enhanced its appeal.

The descriptions about looking at original accounts of catholics who saw the Virgin Mary or levitated or "bilocated" and it turns out they’re just like UFO reports is fantastic. ]]> Review7386906198 Sat, 08 Mar 2025 15:01:28 -0800 /review/show/7386906198 Nat has read Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Paperback) by Anna Kornbluh
I'm a philosopher, and I don't do "theory" in the sense that is the topic of the "antitheory" chapter in this book, but I'm interested in what's been going on recently in literary theory/critical theory. The feeling I had reading the account of recent trends in theory is best captured by the Community gif where Donald Glover's character, holding a stack of pizzas, comes back into a room that is chaotically on fire:

This unwitting corroboration of the hegemonic episteme unifies a wave of turns in theory and method that might at first appear unrelated. The flat metaphysics of actor-network theory (ANT), object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, and romantic ecological fusionism all directly aim to oust analyses of class relations with maps of distributed agency and to enmesh the knowing subject in hypercomplexity. The affective turn in literary study, anthropology, and political psychology de-emphasizes the subject...emphasizing autonomic response, bodily force, and pre- and trans-individuality, along with felt experience, irrational choice, and theaters of cruelty as all more real and intense than the administered world (p. 171)

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