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

From the hard sciences to sociology to literary studies, the interesting thus seems to be a way of creating relays between affect-based judgement and concept-based explanation in a manner that binds heterogeneous agencies together and enables movement across disciplinary domains.

During the Cold War, while much of American literature was basically suburban white boys talking about their dicks, science fiction did a lot of the real cultural work.

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

Cuteness lacks beauty’s novelty, singularity, and untouchability—and power. The cute can be handled and fondled. It is proximate to kitsch, to easy consumption, to the simulating of affect.

“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 zany: it’s a performative aesthetic that is hot and sweaty, anxious and excessive. It is physical and sometimes libidinal. It is about activities where play becomes a job or work gets too playful.

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.

In my reading, all of these general intellects manage to generate out of their particular ways of working some concepts that can be connected or contrasted with others derived from other kinds of knowledge work. That to me is what a general intellect is: someone who generates concepts out of particular knowledge work in particular departments of th