Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century

Perhaps an insistence on Blackness as fully human rather overvalues the human. And if whiteness is supposedly most close to the human, then there’s every reason to think less of the human as a category in the first place. This rhetorical move is central to Black Accelerationism. The coupling of Blackness with the machinic is what is to be valued an

The interesting also assembles the social, but what is sociologically interesting also has an aesthetic aspect. It measures the tension between understanding and wonder.

“The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.”

The interesting is a moving target, tracking along with the difference between norms and anomalies.

“The best explanation for why the zany, the interesting, and the cute are our most pervasive and significant categories is that they are about the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume.”4 They are the material through which we can have perceptions and share judgments that seem most closely re

The interesting addresses a world of speeded-up information by asking for a slowed-down attention.

The aesthetic is still with us, but in banal form, lacking religious solemnity. You can cuddle up to it at night or glance it in a museum. “Hey…”, it says. It can be awesome but never inspire awe. It has no higher power to appeal to and not much up its sleeve.

If the zany is hot, and the cute is warm, then the interesting is cool, ironic, detached, even clinical.

The interesting can be irritating, with its repetitive flick between the familiar and the unfamiliar, identity and difference, continuity and break. But its variance from the norm can be small, its affect minimal, its risk manageable.