Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century

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.

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

The second is a historical transformation in the internet that began in the mid-nineties, which went from being military and scientific (with some creative subcultures on the side) to a vast commercial complex.115 This led to the waning of the early nineties internet subcultures, some of whom thought of it as a utopian or at least alternative media

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.