Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century

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

That aspect of art that really did fuse with the everyday becomes almost indistinguishable from neurotic symptoms: Interest cycles through irritating obsessions and boredom; cuteness reeks of manipulation that provokes phobias and disgust; zaniness performs hysteria or mania. Everyday art is the kipple of once-great genre tropes: cuteness is the pa

As a narrative device, crisis focuses attention, but it can short-circuit the common task of producing a knowledge of this world of the Anthropocene.

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.

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

Black Accelerationism is a willful pushing forward that includes an attempt to clear away certain habits of thought and feeling in order to be open to a future that is attempting to realize itself in the present.

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

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