Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Lucky
My MA cohort at SFAI is on the verge of turning in their written theses (symposium presentations still to come, no rest for the weary) and so this week and next are rather hectic. Over at Berkeley, Spring Break is over and I'm teaching Maus, and talking about what it means to assume an argumentative vantage on "literary" texts as well as to read legibly argumentative texts in a way that foregrounds figurative language and so seem to treat them as "literary." A bit old hat, but any opportunity to talk up graphic novels is a plus, anyway. But today in my graduate seminar over in the City we are turning to the second half of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. However precariously employed, ill-paid, unbenefited, debt-riddled, overclocked, deadline-menaced this chosen life of mine, it is easy to see why I chose it, gifted by that choice today with an occasion to devote another three of six hours to a discussion of one of my favorite books in the whole world with bright, passionate, earnest, creative, critical students encountering her for the first time.
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Dale, have you ever read the book _Seeing Like a State?_ If not, you really should--or at least, read a review of it. It's an extended excursion on some of your critiques of the high-modernist ideology apparent in transhumanism. It goes into all kinds of experiments in social engineering, showing repeatedly the failure to perceive how complicated contingency is, and the failure to accommodate the fact that humans are and should be autonomous.
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