The Treadmill Affect | Marxism, Subjectivity, and the Present
A critical synthesis of the work of Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein. The Treadmill Affect draws upon the work of three University of Chicago professors, each a former program director at the Center for Transcultural Studies. Through this intellectual synthesis, Benjamin Lee demonstrates the critical possibilities of uniting a revived linguistic turn with Marxist accounts of affect and subjectivity, adding new dimensions to the “treadmill” affective structure of cruel optimism.
Last Words | Large Language Models and the AI Apocalypse
A critical exegesis of large language models, like ChatGPT, and recent advances in artificial intelligence. This slim text lays out a critical genealogy of the highly contested relation between human values, machinic parameters, and corporate powers. It also provides a theory of the reasons for, and effects of, our current social and technological horizon.
Time and Human Language Now
What can you say after you say that the world—or at least human life on it—looks like it’s nearing its end? How about starting with wonder at the possibility that dialogue and subjectivity—the bases of human language—are possible now? In Time and Human Language Now two lifelong friends share, in the form of a long-distance e-mail correspondence, a conversation about the relation between cosmos and consciousness, and about the possibility of being responsibly open toward the future without either despair or unreasoning hope. The urgency that underlies this dialogue is the conviction that there can only be reason for hope if the members of homo sapiens can learn—soon—how vital and astonishing is the phenomenon of shared human presence through language.