Quentin's Weeknotes 4/4/21-4/10/21
This Week:
- Not sure what happened, but this didn’t get published on schedule. Oh well.
- I taught care for works on paper, photographs, and paintings in collections management. We also started zeroing in on the final class projects.
- I finished reading the short essay “The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born” by political theorist Nancy Fraser. It gave me some language for thinking about the janus-face of neoliberalism’s emphases on economic freedom and “identity politics” but (perhaps because it’s meant to be short and readable) gave a short shrift to some of the rich intersectional thinking that is often cast as “identity politics.” Still, easily digestible and good to think with.
- Thanks to the Museum of Care, I re-read David Graeber’s brilliant and thoughtful essay “What’s the point if we can’t have fun?" which ponders why so many of our basic scientific metaphors are rooted in capitalist thinking, and instead wonders how we might think differently if we say the natural, physical world as held together by play and freedom. I came to Graeber very late in my intellectual life, but his clear and evocative writing, deeply anarchist commitment to freedom and joy, and his vast intellectual reach continue to inspire me.
