Sublime

1. Pre-modern information environments were locally shared common worlds mediated chiefly by our embodied experience.


2. Modernity offered instead a de-situated public sphere built on a shared institutional and expert knowledge mediated by print and mass media.


3. What we are now living through is the collapse of the modern arrangement and the emergence of

It is also a broader cultural sensibility composed out of the steady drip-drip of bureaucratic acts, a loose constellation of practices and postures that is diffused throughout society via the legal and executive branches of the modern state. In short, suspicion is less heroic and more humdrum and routinized than we might think.

thinking about alterity and difference that has become a useful critical tool for feminist, antiracist, and other political work.

It and programs like it have become part of the texture of gay life, part of the media ecologies that shape our daily practices and desires, that transform how we think of ourselves and how we move through the world.

Cultural critic Lauren Berlant puts it eloquently: “There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.”

Cultural critic Lauren Berlant puts it eloquently: “There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.”

some forms of sex, like those in public or online, become the castigated and fascinating objects of mass culture, while simultaneously representing the birth of new forms of sociality.