jacobhleveton.bsky.social
Scholar of visual culture, sound, & political aesthetics.
Philosophy of literature, ecological form, post-Romantic media.
Anti-obscurantist.
Architect and Strategist for the School of Materialist Research
đ http://www.schoolofmaterialistresearch.org
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Listening to this DinĂŠ opera composed to speak across worldsâIâm trying to unlearn assumptions: tone, poetics, linear healing
It shimmers without resolution:
flutes like wind, violins like memory, harp like water
It honored peace in 2008âand still does
I'm glad to think with the work today
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What remains with me isnât just Samâs scholarship,
or his presence, or the support he offersâ
but the mode of being his work models:
Rigor without dominance.
Holding the line of differenceâto refuse erasure and retreat.
And in that space,
perhaps outside that room,
to live with breath. Lâesprit.
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And to my mind,
thatâs the most profound resistance to deconstructionâs latent flirtation withâat bestâand slow drift towardâat worstâ
a fascist-tinged ontology.
Against the pull toward closure,
Sam offered something quieter:
a holding of otherness, even in catastrophe.
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I only heard the first two talks
so I wonât claim the whole day missed it.
But what I didnât hear
was perhaps Samâs most enduring gift:
Bringing Derrida and Adorno into proximity.
Not to synthesize, but to let each illuminate the otherâs potential.
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There was the moment:
the wink, the disclaimer:
âI know weâre not supposed to talk about Heidegger anymoreâŚâ
And then, of course,
he did.
Not to confront what remains unlivable in the ontology,
but to luxuriate in it as if critique were
a dare
not a duty.
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Lineage flattens
It codes for legitimacy
But Samâs thinking rarely hews to de Manâ
it veers gently away
Toward something more generous,
careful,
and capacious
To frame it otherwise
is to miss how his work continues to culminate
in an alterity shaped by the trace,
and opened through iterability
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At one point, the name de Man was offered,
as if to signal a lineage,
to secure a kind of capital.
But to name a dissertation advisor
as though that could explain a lifeâs work
is to miss the work entirely.
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The prestige circuit was humming:
Johns Hopkins. Northwestern. Paris.
Each name not just a credential,
but a shibbolethâ
signaling self-gratification by proximity
to the institutional nom de père.
As if that ever meant anything.
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The line between honoring and sealing off is razor-thin.
What makes Sam vital (attunement, risk, presence), as I witnessed, was becoming flattened into lineage.
A closed system of citation, no breath left for the radical.
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I left:
Not because the names werenât luminous.
Not because the room lacked care.
But because something in the structure had already closed.
Closed around a form of homage that was too certain of itself.
Closed to rupture, to surprise, to the kind of trouble Samâs work taught me to stay with.
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And, so in the spirit of Derrida:
"I confess it
to my shame"
I left after the first two talks.
Though perhaps also to my clarity.
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To truly honor a legacy isn't to ask what's said, but what kind of saying is made possible:
Who gets to speak?
How is authority staged?
What forms are privileged?
Lecture?
Readings that rupture in real time?
or, Worse, the festschrift farce that eulogizes the living while silencing the present?
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Sam Weberâs work has shaped generations. He changed my life. But legacies donât just persist through citation or ceremon.
They continue through interpretation. And interpretation, as Sam would say, is never neutral.
It demands attunement to form, force, and the conditions of speech.
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Adrian Randolphâs intro captures the spirit of Samâs work and mentorship perfectly:
The fearless pursuit of theory and criticism, wherever it might lead;
Moving to interpret a world always and already in flux.
A fictive/friction that âsparklesâ â¨
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Super kind of you to say đ
And yes, most definitely: Jameson and Krauss caught something uncanny at the threshold.
Iâd honestly love to read anything you('ve) write/written on this.
It feels like a crucial angle in the long unworking weâre all trying to do despite the everything.
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This rly resonates. Theory's collapse absolutely is a shared scaffolding.
What you're doing now is already inspiring tbh. Appreciate the recalibration.
Trying to think about how I'll structure my visual culture intro for the fall, and this seems exactly right.
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The work ahead doesnât need to be total.
Just attentive.
Situated.
Alive to its own constraints.
/
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I'm optimistic now, for:
Theory that keeps pace with the present, revising the vocabularies of the past.
That holds one question at a time
and holds it long enough to be felt.
Social-critical practice that doesnât overwhelm.
with no allegiance to a code
but opens a clear path through the tangle.
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Cognitive overload wasnât named because it didnât exist.
It wasnât seenâbecause the structure absorbed it.
Seminars gave time.
Institutions gave sequence.
Now?
Overload is the ground condition.
Criticism doesnât just risk being misunderstood.
It risks not being read at all.
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But maybe
something like granite.
Ideas that hold under pressure.
Forms that resist liquidation.
Thought that didnât vanish, but grew quieter.
More open.
More exact.
Sharper.
Expansively discerning.
Implacably precise.
Receptive and uncompromisingâat once.
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Now, what remains for critical theory, social-critical art history, and a better, comparative humanities that meets the needs of the critical present?
Not the seminar.
Not the syllabus.
Not the slow, recursive prestige loop.
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But that could never point us towards how to live under unjust conditions.
Couldnât help us organize a union.
Couldnât explain why our job talks vanished.
Couldnât stop the fascism.
Couldnât even really say âcapitalismâ out loud.
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Even when theory was floating, institutions crumbling under the weight of 2008 and the threat of a double-dip recession, and no one had time and stable academic employment evaporated and conditions for a resurgent fascism arrived,
there it was:
Being and Time.
Still on the syllabus
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Strangest of all, perhaps:
In the 2010s, Heideggerianism somehow held, even when Adorno was categorically called for.
In Literary Studies,
Art History,
Theology,
The Humanities at large.
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In art history, something similar took shape.
Social history once meant militancy on the level of method.
Class, labor, ideologyâall on the table.
But over time, it softened. Got absorbed.
For âdiversification, read disintegration,â as Clark put it.
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The â90s extended this logic to its institutional climax.
Theory became a career.
Poststructuralism was structurally professionalized.
A conference paper was a job talk.
Deleuze, Hardt, & Negri read as rites of ascent.
No one truly understood it.
But you were made to know who "understood" them.
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By the â80s, Lacanâs Ăcrits and Clarkâs Painting of Modern Life landed in departments that still assumed a protected reader.
You had time to re-read the same page five times.
And the institutional expectation you ignore the ambient racism in the former and the explicit racism in the latter.
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Althusser and his students in the â70s: recursive density, methodological flamboyance, the inescapable ideological state apparatus.
You didnât browse Reading Capitalâbut you were assigned it.
Horizonless abstraction and inherited structure.
Reader exhaustion is a rite of passage, and not a risk.
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Derridaâs reception in the late â60s was electrifyingâand slow.
Of Grammatology took a decade+ to hit syllabi.
It entered through the classroom, not the timeline.
You had to read the whole thing.
Its world moved at the speed of the footnote, where much of the best of its arguments are still found
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A truism to say, but merits saying:
Both rooms collapsed
Now we write with the noise, against the currentâ
The institutional space (grad seminar, tenure-track, the journal) erodes;
The theory salon (longue durĂŠes of Marx, Freud, Saussure) is a desert mountain, and only the granite can stay