I Can, Therefore I Shall: Identifications from the Novel to Facebook

Is there something to be said for looking at Facebook as one of a long genealogy of modes of reader/viewer identification?
Is there something to be said for looking at Facebook as one of a long genealogy of modes of reader/viewer identification?
Popularly known as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes won that title ostensibly by rejecting traditional modes of intellectual inquiry largely associated with commentary on prior texts, and replacing them with the first attempt at a kind of radical phenomenology.
Michel Houellebecq is quite a character. The bad boy of French letters has made his name building post-humanist novels where dogs and clones are the rare creatures achieving a modicum of happiness.
Previously, I wrote about a class on Media Archeology co-taught at NYU by Alexander Galloway, a media theorist and Ben Kafka, a historian.
In my last blog post, I wrote about the ways the Israeli artist Ohad Meromi’s recent installation “Creative Circle” allows its viewers to bodily encounter a set of objects that already exist in relationship. It’s understandable that we’d feel embodiment when we encounter performance (and, as Allison Carruth points out in her post on Jònsi, the gestural often hums along under the radar of critical engagement: when we attend to it, our own somatic encounters with performance can be startling).