Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century

“Pop always retroactively rescues unpop from the prison of its admirers.”

From the hard sciences to sociology to literary studies, the interesting thus seems to be a way of creating relays between affect-based judgement and concept-based explanation in a manner that binds heterogeneous agencies together and enables movement across disciplinary domains.

The interesting addresses a world of speeded-up information by asking for a slowed-down attention.

The cute: The word derives from the word acute. The word itself is a cute version of an edgier word. The zany is to be held at a distance; the cute is intimate, domestic. We have powers over cute things, and yet they still seem to make demands of us. The zany is about production; the cute is about consumption. The zany is about the worker; the cute

“The best explanation for why the zany, the interesting, and the cute are our most pervasive and significant categories is that they are about the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume.”4 They are the material through which we can have perceptions and share judgments that seem most closely re

the zany is more likely to convert triumph into failure than failure into triumph. Think the coyote’s endless labor of trying to catch the roadrunner.

The aesthetic is still with us, but in banal form, lacking religious solemnity. You can cuddle up to it at night or glance it in a museum. “Hey…”, it says. It can be awesome but never inspire awe. It has no higher power to appeal to and not much up its sleeve.

The second is a historical transformation in the internet that began in the mid-nineties, which went from being military and scientific (with some creative subcultures on the side) to a vast commercial complex.115 This led to the waning of the early nineties internet subcultures, some of whom thought of it as a utopian or at least alternative media

Even just as common words, zany, cute, and interesting seem intuitively right as keys to what many people want to look at, laugh with, sigh over, and share with others. If you want to make a meme, in the general sense of a unit of media that will be shared by others, those three all work.