Author Spotlight
The Nation Spring Books Issue…
On the origin of awesome beards.
…is on stands now. I haven’t seen a hard copy yet, but if you click over to their website the top story is an essay by William Deresiewicz, for whose critical writing I expressed much love in a previous post. Here’s a meaty little excerpt from “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism.”
Human beings expend an enormous amount of energy doing things that don’t seem to have any survival value: singing, dancing, painting caves, decorating spears and, above all, telling stories. (Think how much time you spend consuming fictional narratives–novels, movies, TV shows–in one form or another.) The nascent field of Darwinian aesthetics seeks to account for the art-making impulse in evolutionary psychological terms. If art is a product of the mind, and the mind is a product of evolution, then art is a product of evolution. Again, as an intellectual project, this is perfectly valid. But there are also strong selection pressures pushing in the direction of such an approach. Evolutionary thinking is, at present, an aggressively expansive species within the academic world, a kind of emergent Homo sapiens outcompeting the old-school Neanderthals across a wide swath of intellectual territory. Having colonized the social sciences–where it has begun to displace the view, predominant throughout the twentieth century, that the mind is a highly malleable product of culture–it has now set its sights on the humanities, the last area of resistance.
Tags: the nation, William Deresiewicz
My subscription to The Nation just ran out and I forgot to renew it.
Fuck
My subscription to The Nation just ran out and I forgot to renew it.
Fuck
I love how he uses an evolution metaphor to talk about the spread of evolutionary thinking. If evolution as a meme were to die out, would that confirm or invalidate the concept?
I love how he uses an evolution metaphor to talk about the spread of evolutionary thinking. If evolution as a meme were to die out, would that confirm or invalidate the concept?
damn man, he talks wicked good shit. a rare display of intelligence and common sense. i was rooting for him the entire time and he came through shining with a gentle smile.
the succession of a darwinian aesthetics is as disturbing as the current reign of post-structuralism. christ, can we not swing to the opposite pole for once and gain a self-consciousness of our pinball ocd mentality as a temporal and cultural being that only knows how to react to that which historically preceded. and seriously, the bifurcation of existence into only the binary possibilities of materialism and transcendentalism is so unattractive and malnourishing. it lends credence to the notion that the human brain is a computer only capable of thinking in 1’s and 0’s. someone needs to pick up a sun-bleached and vulture-cleaned femur bone and beat back the onslaught of those mad darwinists foaming at the mouth. good job william. nice. very nice. but where do we go from here? can’t ignore the unprecedented duality of structuralism and post-structuralism, but a synthesis seems like a stereo-typecasted sitcom with cardboard dialogue. maybe we need stop motion animation?
damn man, he talks wicked good shit. a rare display of intelligence and common sense. i was rooting for him the entire time and he came through shining with a gentle smile.
the succession of a darwinian aesthetics is as disturbing as the current reign of post-structuralism. christ, can we not swing to the opposite pole for once and gain a self-consciousness of our pinball ocd mentality as a temporal and cultural being that only knows how to react to that which historically preceded. and seriously, the bifurcation of existence into only the binary possibilities of materialism and transcendentalism is so unattractive and malnourishing. it lends credence to the notion that the human brain is a computer only capable of thinking in 1’s and 0’s. someone needs to pick up a sun-bleached and vulture-cleaned femur bone and beat back the onslaught of those mad darwinists foaming at the mouth. good job william. nice. very nice. but where do we go from here? can’t ignore the unprecedented duality of structuralism and post-structuralism, but a synthesis seems like a stereo-typecasted sitcom with cardboard dialogue. maybe we need stop motion animation?
oh wait, a co-causal stop motion animation that is therefore irreducible to atomic instants or a handful of unassailable, discrete principles. nor endless flux. which i guess would be something along the lines of cake?
oh wait, a co-causal stop motion animation that is therefore irreducible to atomic instants or a handful of unassailable, discrete principles. nor endless flux. which i guess would be something along the lines of cake?