I’m on an academic work push this summer – the dissertation pretty much has to get done – so naturally it’s time to relanuch Icon Index Symbol. I was going to try to kickstart the process by writing “conspiracy theories” in the middle of a piece of paper and then playing with colored pencils, but I didn’t have any colored pencils in the studio. So writing in short bloggable bursts seemed like the next best option, and here we are.

I’m not sure how much actual dissertation text I can post online, since extended comments might put me on the wrong side of the University’s rather pointed “independent research” requirement. But IIS will probably have a bunch of topic-related tangents that, no matter how strikingly related, really have no place even in chapter footnotes. There’s also still some unfinished business from when the blog went on hiatus three years ago. The Lacanian Gaze / La Jette post needs to be cleaned up into an article, the Rhetoric of Science / climate science post obviously requires an update, and the Peirce / AI post drew an email pushback that’s been sitting at the bottom of my inbox for three years. It’s probably overdue for a response.

I’ve also got a backlog of academic blog posts that I’ve be wanting to get through. And there are those extended lectures on power and subjectivity that Zizek and Agamben have been giving at the EGS. That kind of stuff plus the occasional academic productivity tip – “what do you mean you don’t RSS journal feeds – how can you stay on top of the always-already destabilized late modern subject if you don’t RSS journal feeds?” – should mostly round things out.

Except probably also random science and tech posts, which mostly cash out as “deadly robots.”

And certainly also a smattering of music and photography, because this.

But other than that, laser focus.

References:
* Break Through Writer’s Block with Clusters [Lifehacker]
* What If The Lacanian Gaze Wasn’t Totally Stupid? [Icon Index Symbol]
* It Would Be Really Nice If Science Was What Chris Mooney Says It Is (Plus: Climate Scientists Learn The Hard Way That Making Scientific Method Into Collective Identity Is A Bad Idea) [Icon Index Symbol]
* A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence [Icon Index Symbol]
* The Republic (369b-372e) [Plato]

Related Icon Index Symbol Categories:
* University Life
* Rhetoric and Philosophy
* Communication