discursive operations

Hi Marja, Just a quick question: the images in your post are missing. Could you please add them?

The way you draw a parallel between Heidegger and Keats is very original and convincing. I do have problem with your reading of Heidegger. You claim that: “Heidegger views the world picture as a consciously created image.” I would rephrase this sentence as follows: “Heidegger views the world picture as an image that created consciousness.”. [...]

You end your essay with a brillant quote from the documentary: “It was a way of looking at the future, it was utopian. It was a way of saying: If we had control of our lives, this is what it would look like.” In your essay, you mainly focus on the utopian part of this statement. [...]

It rarely happens that a theoretical essay makes me laugh out loud and presents a convincing argument at the same time. Yes You Did! My suggestion for further research is similar to the one that I gave you last time, but takes the same point one step further. Again, it is a methodological concern (rather [...]

I think the introduction of the concept of ‘atopos’ is very nice, since we haven’t discussed it in class. However, I would like to hear how this concept relates to some of the other, similar but not identical, concepts that we talked about before: utopia, heterotopia, etc. Chelsea suggestion to include the notion of play [...]

The Great Gatsby may be considered to be the great American Novel, but the topos of ‘going west’ is much older than than. Take, for instance, The Great Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), most western novels. Even Franz Kafka’s America (written in 1916) continuously plays with the topos. Still, I like your argument about the apple pie! [...]

Habermas’ critique, I would say, comes from a misunderstanding of Foucault. As Beatrijs correctly pointed out in her essay, power and resistance are always plural in Foucault. One position can therefore be criticized from another, but there is no metaposition that avoids power altogether. After reading your post Stephan, I am a bit confused about [...]

In your post, you describe the movement as a quality of the building, or more specifically Wilson’s design. In my opinion, it would be interesting to also have a look at the reversal of this statement: the building as an effect of the movement. In that case, this artwork might be less of a spatial [...]

The fact that the move westward is usually associated with the search for a better life, is something that you argue for yourself: “He romanticizes the discovery of the New World which has obviously also been a movement from East to West.” As Alexander in his posts also indicates, this idea has been a common topos [...]

Your post (and actually also those of a couple of others) had me wondering: is every ideal immediately a utopia, or – which is a slightly different question – utopian? And, if not, what is the difference between them? For instance, Plato describes the ideal table but I would not say that this a utopian [...]

Maybe in a future essay, you could extend your analysis of Koolhaas’ Generic City and relate it to a particular city. In a peculiar way – and I realize that this is part of the joke – the Generic City exactly describes any particular city. The airport sentence illustrates this perfectly, Amsterdam is a city [...]

In your essay, you make an interesting connection between ‘techniques of articulation’ and Martin Heidegger’s concept of technology. However, I think that there is still an interesting gap between these two terms that needs to be explained. The difference between technique and technology is logos, which can be understood as either speech or as…[Read more]

Really like your observation that in Kittler the physical becomes metaphysical and vice versa, but it immediately raises more questions. As you convincingly show, Kittler reversal is, in fact, not only an argument about media, but a significant distortion of the logic of representation. While a critique of representation has been a constant factor in [...]

Most of the many comments here focus on the relation between power and resistance in Foucault, and so does mine. To me, the notion of power in Foucault is always clear (despite the fact that it is abstract). His concept of resistance, on the other hand, always gives me a head ache. Although, I really [...]

At the end of your essay, you claim that the music of Treme is “not recorded and that is never repeated in exactly the same manner”. As it stands, you seem to suggest that noise (in Serres’ sense) is an aspect of musical performance rather than recorded music. Friedrich Kittler, however, argued that the concept [...]

Since the MJT so clearly reflects on its own status and even theoretical background, it becomes difficult to critically analyze this object. I really like the way you use Heidegger to look at the museum from another perspective. However – and here I agree with Miriam – maybe agency and determination are thought to much [...]

In your essay, the relation between east and west in The Great Gatsby confirms the stereotypical images that we have of them. I was wondering if there also elements in the book that – intentionally or unintentionally – undermine this dichotomy. Also, I wonder if a journey is really a movement or transformation, if you already [...]

The idea of a ‘belhuis’ as a micro-cosmos is great and it might be a good idea to juxtapose Foucault’s Heterotopia to Leibniz’s Monad. In the future, however, I want to encourage you to be even more specific. Maybe, THE belhuis is still too general. Why not choose A belhuis (or a couple of them) [...]