December 2011
0 posts
Benjamin on the future of the book
Couldn’t be more timely:
…already today, as the contemporary mode of knowledge-production demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card-filing systems. For everything essential is found in the note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his own note file.
Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, 1928
November 2011
2 posts
this is how you start a takedown!
The first paragraph of Matt Cartmill’s review of Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions book. It appeared in the International Journal of Primatology (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1991)
This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically...