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About
Omri Ceren is a PhD candidate studying Rhetoric at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.
Email: omri@iconindexsymbol.com
Skype: omricerenAIM: iisblog
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Archive for September, 2007
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IIS Begs Science: Please Stop Making Robots That Creep Us The Hell Out
No… … and no… … and absolutely not: -
Believe! Lacanian Theory Wiki
We were going to wrap this link into a longer post about online research and organization in the 21st century: the growth of specialized online communities (listservs, blogs etc), the merging of communication artifacts with sites of knowledge production (a science blog is both a place where science happens and an artifact for rhetoric of [...] -
Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
Lacanian theory can be justified simply as an approach that reveals interesting problematics and generates tensions with conventional wisdom. But that’s almost certainly unnecessarily modest. Lacan’s ontological assumptions are philosophically rigorous, especially when refracted through Zizek’s Hegelian rereading of the real as the Night of the World, etc. Far downstream, Lacanian social theory converges with [...] -
![Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]](http://www.iconindexsymbol.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/20100529avalon_640-110x110.jpg "Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]")
Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]
Our interest in psychoanalysis is strictly theoretical, which is to say that we have no background or training in anything clinical or diagnostic. But even we can see that Mickey Avalon’s lifestyle is (a) unhealthy and (b) totally awesome.. Content warning for language and images: video is probably NSFW and definitely NSF2WF (second wave [...] -
![Desperate Attempt to Make Michael Jackson Cool Again… Succeeds? [Video]](http://www.iconindexsymbol.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/20100529michaeljackson_640-110x110.jpg "Desperate Attempt to Make Michael Jackson Cool Again… Succeeds? [Video]")
Desperate Attempt to Make Michael Jackson Cool Again… Succeeds? [Video]
The song is “Michael Jackson” by The Mitchell Brothers. Inexplicably listenable and entertaining: We, on the other hand, are unable to move like Michael Jackson. FYI for the curious. References: * The Mitchell Brothers – Michael Jackson prod. Calvin Harris [thebeats / YouTube] Previously: * The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars * Arnold Pouteau’s View Of NYC [...] -
Anthimeria – Linguists Uncover “Garden-Variety Typo” In Rhetorical Landscape
The only thing that annoys us more than non-rhetoricians rampaging through the rhetorical china shop is when they’re obviously right. Language Hat recently tried to hunt down the etymology of anthimeria, which seems malformed. Silva Rhetoricae defines the figure as “substitution of one part of speech for another (such as a noun used as a [...] -
Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents – New Books We Can’t Afford
Now they’re just being cruel: You’d think their marketing algorithms would also cross-check for “likelihood of max’d credit cards given previous shopping patterns”. Or do you think that doesn’t really matter to them? If you’ve got a job though, you really ought hook yourself up because this sounds awesome. References: * Missiou, Anna. The Subversive Oratory of Andokides: [...] -
Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings – Medical Studies Edition
Fetishized social scientific methodologies from dissimilar fields are adapted by grant-hungry researchers and applied to unrepresentative samples of 18-21 year olds in large Midwestern universities before being coded by untrained and apathetic work studies – and you’re saying this doesn’t produce robust results? This is a preview of Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings – [...] -
Psychoanalytic Theory – Come For The Answers, But Stay For The Questions
We understand that there are disputes about the degree to which Lacanian theory provides the right answers to basic ontological, epistemological, and psychological questions. We happen to think that there’s something quite suggestive about a robust Continental theory that converges with so much of the American rhetorical and pragmatic tradition (Burke and Lacan’s emphasis on [...] -
Pentadic Ratios In The Rhetoric Of Addiction
The Burkean pentad has a bad reputation for lending itself to cookie-cutter “this is the agent, this is the scene, etc” pseudo-book reports. But there are at least a couple of interesting ways to do pentadic analysis, one which is to try to emulate Burke by analyzing rhetorical moves from within pentadic ratios. The manipulation [...] -
A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
Anti-cognitivst curmudgeon David Gelernter has a sustained critique of digital AI in Technology Review: I believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly [...] -
Cog Sci Blog Roundup
We’ve got a couple posts in the hopper – a Peirce vs. Deleuze post (of all things) and a post about how scientific triumphalism empowering anti-science right and the left – but little time to clean them up right now. Plus we’re still working our way through posts going back to May – quals was [...] -
Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents – Red Bull And… Wait, What?
Sometimes Amazon’s algorithms do a really good job. Sometimes they suggest things about American shopping patterns that might have been better left unknown: There are millions and millions of data points that gave rise to this suggestion. Awesome. References: * Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents – Collected Works Of Freud Published [IIS] Previously: * The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of [...] -
Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents – Collected Works Of Freud Published
Sigh. About a minute and a half elapsed between Amazon’s server firing this email off and us purchasing the book. This – despite already having most of it in various pieces from various classes. We apparently have what marketers refer to as “low self-control”. And what creditors refer to as “debt”. So it goes: Get yours. [...] -
The Psychoanalytic Pushback Against Philosophy Of Consciousness
Studies like that consciousness of bacteria one from a couple of days ago sometimes get appropriated for “see, humans aren’t all that special” kinds of moves. But everything rhetorical – everything that reserves a special place for the intersubjective relationship mediated by discourse – militates against that kind of leveling. Now the trivial answer to [...]
