i’m about to head up to the shandaken project for a week of talking, writing, and making with some lovely folks around questions of queer theory and cultural production. here are two lines of inquiry that i’m going there with:
What would a political practice that was not willing to keep everyone in their place look like? A political practice that accepted new trajectories, impossible encounters, and meetings between people who did not usually talk to each other?
-Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis
How exactly might aesthetic judgments inform criticism with explicitly extra-aesthetic goals? What role, if any, might judgments of aesthetic value play in a self-consciously ‘engaged’ work of cultural criticism, in particular.
-Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories
