Susan Watkins (3)

Half of this was great (primers on all the bad shit that's gone down this last decade in Turkey that made this seem briefly like the leftist Economist I always dream of; a history of "Latin union"-type ideas on the left and beyond; a "pathos formula," or computer-clustered visual grammar of pathos based on arrangements of limbs and torsos in Any Warburg's "picture atlas" Mnemosyne by Leonardo Impett and Franco Moretti (now revealed as probably a piece of shit rapist but I guess still great, ughhh, I don't know how I feel about the whole "consider the work separate from the man" in our times, obviously they're not separate but whence then the question of value, ughhh). The other half was like weird gossip about the Frankfurt School. I feel like being a proper leftist intellectual or activist must be exhausting in that way, like you don't have to only keep up with your own contemporaries' social overproduction of gossip but also that of the talking theory heads of history, and their gossip is somehow connected to your gossip by strands of tradition, and Althusser killing his wife is Joseph Boyden pretending to be indigenous is your sex harasser professor and it's all tough to take in from outside in the same ways as one does from within. Guess I'm just not a cultural commentator (more a reader-with-interest).… (mehr)