RELATED TERMS: “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.” Ricoeur, 1970: 32) By way of generalContinue reading “Hermeneutics”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Deconstruction – Derrida
RELATED TERMS: Heidegger; “Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules — other conventions — for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assuranceContinue reading “Deconstruction – Derrida”
Povinelli
RELATED TERMS: Critical Thinking; Deconstruction – Derrida; Entanglement; Hermeneutics; New Materialism; Ontological Turn; Posthumanism Since the beginning of the 21st century, Elizabeth Povinelli argues, critical theoretical discourses have been marked by a particular style and approach. They have shifted, she suggests, from hermeneutic and deconstructive methods of reading towards a set of methods of knowledgeContinue reading “Povinelli”
Literary Theory
RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Reception theory and reader response criticism; Interaction Design Literary theory is the study and analysis of literature in general. Narratology can be considered a branch of literary theory. More recent literary theory tends to move away from earlier critical approaches, for example, Russian Formalism, New Criticism and French structuralist narratology of theContinue reading “Literary Theory”
Ergodic
RELATED TERMS: Aleatory The term ‘ergodic’ might be said to occupy a similar territory to that of aleatory. Bringing together two Greek roots, ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path, ergodic is a term borrowed from physics by Espen Aarseth (1997: 2) who uses it to suggest that a, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverseContinue reading “Ergodic”
Critical Race Theory
RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Black Studies; Intersectionality Critical race theory, as a movement, is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. While traditional civil rights discourse stresses incrementalism and gradual progress, by contrast critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order,Continue reading “Critical Race Theory”
The Everyday and Design
RELATED TERMS: Alltäglichkeit; Dasein; De Certeau; Feminism and Materialism; Heidegger; Lefebvre; Lifeworld, Lebenswelt, Umwelt; Modernism; Sabi and Wabi-Sabi; Situationist International Use for: le quotidien “Ordinary life, [Barry Cryer] used to say, is badly written, so he infused it with jokes.” (Andrew Martin, 2023) “Design and the everyday are inextricably intertwined. Because it plays such aContinue reading “The Everyday and Design”
Fiction
RELATED TERMS: (Of) Grammatography In the early 15th century, ficcioun meant that which is invented or imagined in the mind. The word derived from the Old French ficcion, which meant dissimulation, ruse; or invention and fabrication in the 13th century. This, in turn derived directly from the Latin fictionem, meaning a fashioning or feigning. ThisContinue reading “Fiction”
Libidinal Economy – Part 1
RELATED TERMS: Design, Axiology and Value – Part 1; Fordism and Post-Fordism; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control “It is said that the reader of an American magazine was so disturbed by an article on the subject of smoking and cancer that he decided to give up reading.” (Anecdote cited by Tim Harford, 2025) InContinue reading “Libidinal Economy – Part 1”
Mimesis and Diegesis
RELATED TERMS: Diégèse and Diegesis Plato and Aristotle define literary and dramatic genres in terms of the form of enunciation. They distinguish between diegesis, reported speech which articulates the writer’s authorial voice, and mimesis, in which the writer speaks, as if directly, through the characters. This sense of diegesis differs from that developed by EtienneContinue reading “Mimesis and Diegesis”
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