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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.
What kind of meaning can machines make — and why does it matter that it’s not the same as ours?
Anthropologist Paul Kockelman's Last Words (2024) offers a rigorous but accessible account of how large language models actually work — and why the meaning they produce is fundamentally different from human meaning-making. Drawing on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, Kockelman’s witty and insightful pamphlet shows how LLMs are trained to predict word-word relations, not word-world relations, which explains both their uncanny fluency and their systematic blind spots. The result is a compact, essential guide to cutting through the hype: not a dismissal of AI, but a precise account of what it can and cannot do — and who profits from the confusion.
Adapting the discontinuous and multi-tonal critical procedures of works like Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Laura Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, Jerome McGann subjects current literary studies to a patacritical investigation. The investigation centers in the interpretation of a notorious modern riddle: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Working by indirection and from multiple points of view, the book argues that aesthetics is always a science of exceptions, and that any given critical practice is also always an exception from itself. The book works from two assumptions: first, that the riddle of the dog conceals an allegory about book culture and is addressed to the academic custodians of book culture; and second, that any explanation of the riddle is necessarily implicated in the problem posed by the riddle. It therefore remains to be seen—it is the reader’s part to decide—whether the book is a friend to man or—perhaps like the riddle of the dog—“too dark to read.”
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.