iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Along the way, reading Structuralism changes Marxism—partly by revealing its own Structuralist tendencies, such as the imagery of “base” and “superstructure.”

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All the same, Jameson insists that “a genuine critique of Structuralism commits us to working our way completely through it so as to emerge, on the other side, into some wholly different…perspective.’ To move beyond Structuralism you have to study it carefully.

Against this soul-destroying architecture, Jameson argues for the dialectics of historical development.

For Jameson, Structuralism expressed the nightmare of a media-saturated society where people had lost touch with reality. There was nothing left but symbol-systems. Without a feeling for historical change, Structuralism could not imagine any way out of the “prison-house.”

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Out now! New editions of 2 Jameson classics from Princeton University Press. ‘Marxism and Form,’ with a foreword by Sianne Ngai. ‘The Prison-House of Language,’ with a foreword by Paul North and me.

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One of these bots responded cheerfully and congenially to my auto-reply, and I watched from a distance as the simulacrum of a conversation unfolded, machine to machine.

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

‘Just wanted to follow up’

Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Reposted by Caleb Smith

An influential introduction to Marxist cultural criticism by the acclaimed literary theorist. Marxism and Form by Fredric Jameson is out now in #paperback with a new foreword by Sianne Ngai. Order yours: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... #Literature

Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature by Frederic Jameson

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Here is a big, weird essay by the novelist Tom McCarthy from the new Yale Review. It’s about Moby-Dick (sort of) and the opening lines might make you dizzy: ‘How do you write? I mean, at all.’ yalereview.org/article/tom-...

yalereview.org

Tom McCarthy on Moby-Dick and the Sublime

The novelist on Herman Melville's tale and the sublime.

Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I especially liked this restatement of the premises of Foucault’s genealogical method: ‘History doesn’t get better; things just change.’

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I liked this smart, sad, sweet essay about about a daughter and her mother, each one freaking out about the other’s sex life, each one claiming her own version of Michel Foucault. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-54/ess...

nplusonemag.com

Michel and Mom | Leigh Claire La Berge

Mom’s still here. I can call her and talk to her, though not about French medical history. Not about anything, really — we mostly exchange affective states and appreciate the fact of each other’s bein...

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I am so stoked to be working with my crew in Yale English and The Yale Review to host this new program, Writing in Public. Many events are free and open to the public. Let’s get together for the basic, beautiful human practices of thinking, talking, reading, and writing. Starting soon!

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Reposted by Caleb Smith

Leigh Claire La Berge @lclaberge.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Aujourd'hui, folks--My reminisces about family life as the daughter of someone who was transformed by reading Michel Foucault in @nplusonemag.com

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Back to school! It’s time to register yourself for this year’s gathering of The English Institute, happening at Yale October 2-3. Look at this killer lineup, and the shared reading is from Nietzsche. Come on up!

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Happy birthday to my beloved Henry Thoreau! A good day to get your laundry done and commit a little civil disobedience. He was a prophet of our nerve-jangling, mind-numbing attention economy, and he tried to craft new disciplines of attention to repair his soul. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

press.princeton.edu

Thoreau's Axe

How nineteenth-century “disciplines of attention” anticipated the contemporary concern with mindfulness and being “spiritual but not religious”

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

My talks are going to trace the genealogies of two ceremonial speech acts, avowal & disavowal, in modern literature and critical theory.

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Re-reading Packer’s ‘Emerson’s Fall,’ I see how it is both a close study of his essays, especially ‘Nature,’ and a meditation on spiritual life after secularism.

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Next week! What an honor to give this series of lectures named in honor of Barbara Packer, one of the all-time great scholars of the Transcendentalists.

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

This is Berlant as a literary critic, studying the shape and movement of Hawthorne’s fiction. It’s also a sustained analysis of a concept under pressure in our time—citizenship.

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Caleb Smith @c-also.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Coming soon! I wrote the Foreword to the new edition of Lauren Berlant’s first book, The Anatomy of National Fantasy. Dig the killer new cover design, where Liberty is in a scaffold that looks a lot like a cage.

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Reposted by Caleb Smith

Bonnie Honig @bonniehonig.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

My essay in this latest issue of Theory&Event offers a new reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem — and the surrounding furor over Arendt’s read of the event — as symptomatic of the til now unnoted context of the McCarthyite moment to which Arendt was subtly responding in her book /1

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE - Theory & Event-Volume 29, Number 2, April 2026

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"There is nothing to stop young, ambitious American artists from de-centering New York--divesting from its grind--and building new communities and new kinds of art on their own terms, literally anywhere else."

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For a way out, the essay looks to the small city music scenes of the 90s, when the best music was coming out of places like DC and Louisville and Olympia.

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But now that nostalgia is part of the marketing, the lifestyle fantasy that attracts young artists from elsewhere and keeps them in a city where they're never going to make it.

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Who can resits nostalgia for an older, grittier New York where people dwelt in burned-out warehouses and factories, where the subculture was edgy and bohemian, where art was more like a calling than self-branding--and where, nonetheless, artists ended up famous and successful?

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The overhead expenses at the major galleries are all so high that they can only really display safe, conservative art marketed to the rich.

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New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art*

In the new October, Josh Kline writes about how New York's real estate industry is killing its art world. No working artist can afford an apartment, much less a big studio to make ambitious work. direct.mit.edu/octo/article...

direct.mit.edu

Abstract. Part of October's “Art Communities at Risk” series, Josh Kline's essay examines key structural problems in the American art industry through the lens of class, tracing their origins back to ...

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