."..as much as we may still love to superficially aestheticise history as a ‘style’ and a consumer ‘product’, we are also witnessing an engagement with nostalgia that is about ethics rather than simply style. Like postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, our current engagement with the past is consciously aware of what Fredric Jameson has termed its own “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past”, yet nevertheless seeks to say something beyond style in the process."

"The postmodern world is obscene since everything is made visible, broadcast, and so forth. The Internet is obscene because it is characterized by endless information and communication as well as never-ending social commentary..."

@justinpickard: Gutted to miss this. 'Computing, Philosophy and the Question of Bio-Machine Hybrids': http://t.co/xsiPon2K (July 2-6; Birmingham, UK) http://twitter.com/justinpickard/status/211546689146851328

"Undermining positions understand reality as smaller bits, be they quarks, DNA or mathematics. Ordinary things such as sheep or battleships become fictions, tricks that deceive minds too naive to understand their depths. Overmining positions take objects to be less real than the processes and circumstances that produce them. Generally, the sciences tend to undermine, and the humanities to overmine."

"But what OOO really says is as follows. Humans and animals do not confront reality directly, but only sensual caricatures of it. So far, that’s pretty much just basic Kant, and shouldn’t be too controversial. The controversial step is to say that the same is true of inanimate beings in confrontation with each other. However, keep in mind that this is not the same thing as ascribing “consciousness” to rocks."

Sent to me by Ian Bogost. Okay. More reading to do. Also, though, a thing Mr Bogost said to me on twitter (while being very kind to a slow mind like mine): "The smell of animism is there, but it's a calculated risk. At the end of the day, anthropocentrism is inescapable."