I am from East Tennessee. According to the archives, we do not have a deep historical relationship with slavery. That fact is most likely the result of topography and white tyranny. Meaning, the hills will not support plantations and there has most assuredly been an erasure of minority presence through…

The Kink. The Knot. The Twist. These all evoke the sense of a string. They are terms often applied to textual derivatives and manipulations…as they are here in certain readings. It is as if they are simply lifted from their originary material contexts. Or, if they are treated as continuous…

I am fixated by a two part question. First, is there a perceptive, and erotic, look that births and builds? If there is, what does it see? I need to outline how I arrived at this question. D’Ignazio and Klein deftly describe the ways in which data ignores bodies. Poor…

Rhetoric never fails. At least, not so long as we have bodies. After a recent viewing of the Exorcist I would submit that it exemplifies the indefatigable nature of writing (and by that I mean something Ulmerian and grammatological). This fact becomes visible precisely at the point where commands fail…

Let me put forward an obscure thesis in summary here: decapitation is inversely recapitulation. That is, to do violence to a “victim” — by severing or traumatizing its head — inversely doubles the head of the perpetrator. We might even call this recapitulation a kind of consumption or absorption. In…

To hell with kairos…enter kheiros. — Kubrick’s odyssey takes us deep in to the art of rhetorical invention. What is more, Kubrick’s piece transforms the typical register of rhetorical invention by focusing on the relationship between hands/space rather than time/invention. What is critical, for my reading, is that the human future is not defined by discovery…

This past week in my cultural research seminar, no doubt, Ong fascinated most students by his honing a question that was prompted in the prior week. Namely, the relation of writing and social organization. Whereas Levi-Strauss had prompted discussion about the enslavement which inheres in writing, Ong suggested that the…

I write here as a reprise of an earlier email to my cohort colleagues wherein I asked about the nature of representation. Below, I reintroduce the question of, or the need for it. I suggest that stasis theory, and its historical corollary, are are linked in the emergence of representational…

Rather than proceed through a series of steps to arrive at a constructive possi- bility — which has been my typical method of writing — I want to throw two things side-by-side and see what shakes out. Namely, stasis theory and Kab- balistic accounts of creation. …