In the middle of cleaning up the stuff I wrote in Chicago, which actually has a bit about the impulse to "clean up," I ended up clicking serially in a way that landed me here at Jodi Dean's blog. Now wait a second--how did I get there from my chapter? With effort I recreated my trail: I arrived in the chapter at a point about affect where I had inserted one of those lazy placeholders that reads "[more, more Rei Terada, Brennan, blah blah; Berlant]" I remembered that Lauren Berlant is going to be on campus in what? A couple of weeks?
Search-and-click for the answer (yes, a couple of weeks [add to calendar and make mental note to remind rhetoric reading group about her visit]), and also the citations of two articles that have been recommended to prepare for her visit. One is in this newish journal called Theory and Event in which the paragraphs get numbered so that it has the feel of reading a series of footnotes or a resolution or a manifesto or some combination of the three. It's probably to help obviate the interminable reference problem when dealing with online docs. I hadn't known T&E was digital.
In any event, I pulled up the Berlant piece which was part of a symposium on the 2004 election that Dean put together with someone called Thomas Dumm. And having just mailed out Dean's Zizek book for review, and having just learned that she is a new colleague of my good friend C (of E and C), I clicked. Her bio links to her blog--again, click. I see APSA and Jane Bennett and a critique of food chain talk, all of which connect in some way. Jane Bennett is after all in another chapter, and I just retrieved my friend T from the APSA train. Plus I do love discovering good bloggies.
And now that recreating these associative connections has taken far more work than making them in the first place, I need to get back to cleaning up. Oh, and saving that Berlant piece.
