“Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components.” — Umberto Eco

2025 feels like an Eco novel: Normal persons everywhere.

Meet Schmalk’s patron saint — the man, the myth, the legend.

#Schmalk #UmbertoEco #Culture #Philosophy #MediaCritique #Postmodernism #InternetCulture #CulturalTheory

Public Lecture | Master MUSIC IN SOCIETY Lecture

CREATIVE WORK: FROM CRITIQUES OF ‘DIVERSITY’ TO ATTACKS ON DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
Rosalind Gill (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
Correspondent: Christina Scharff (King’s College London, UK)

20 November 2025 | 18:00
mdw Campus
Banquet Haal

More info: 👉 https://www.mdw.ac.at/ims/events/lecture-creative-work

#creativework #culturalwork #diversity #equity #inclusion #musicsociology #musicinsociety #culturalsociology #culturaltheory #socialtheory #sociology #culturalstudies #genderstudies #socialsciences #humanities #inequality #inequalities #class #race #ethnicity #gender #feminist #queer #antiracist #music #art #film #television #fashion #architecture #design #mdw

I'm not sure that I see the author's premise "What is wrong with hauntology?" sucessfully brought to a clear conclusion. But, I am generally curious to see folks attempt to seriously engage with the concept of "hauntology" and Mark Fisher's writings.

Perhaps the article is too brief to really get anywhere other than to point out that it's a white, Euro-centric position to be in opposition to other cultural currents. Which may be enough. Perhaps I should go back and re-read Fisher's "Ghosts in My Life".

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/collateral-damage/against-the-grain-robin-james-critiques-hauntology

#Philosophy #CulturalTheory #Hauntology

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

― Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2003

#SusanSontag #writers #essayists #journalists

#indie #authors #culturaltheory #critics #reflexivity #politics

Emotional intelligence is #political, and a #repressive 'invention'

We must #question and #queer the popular imaginations of, and #uncritical, #technocratic and #ahistorical #assumptions about, emotional intelligence.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/19/the-repressive-politics-of-emotional-intelligence

#criticaltheory #ilga #culturaltheory

"Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it
are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation."

#baudrillard #criticaltheory #pessimism #sociology #philosophy #culturaltheory #socialtheory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwbEsdwhG3I

"The ghostly emptiness of capitalist realism obscures the potential for collective joy and abundance. Mark Fisher’s writing offers a glimpse of the possibilities that lie beyond the seeming inevitability of the present."

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/mark-fisher-neoliberalism-acid-communism

#CapitalistRealism #MarkFisher #ArtificialScarcity #CulturalTheory