Novelty, Modernity, Adjacency

Abstract

"Novelty, Modernity, Adjacency" engages the culture of Modernism as a provocation to our theoretical understanding of context. The essay recovers the history of literary a-contextualism and re-contextualism (from the utopianism of the Word to that of the Relation); it addresses the unstable play between absorption and distraction; and it offers a theoretical account of the problem of context in the philosophy of language, as it is appears in the work of Russell, Austin, Wittgenstein, and Davidson. The argument suggests that we break free from images of container and content in order to grasp the more indeterminate play of "adjacencies" that allow us to assimilate the New.

On resistingplus ça changein the anthropology of religion

“…Both ‘catastrophe’ and ‘structuration’ theory have probably had their heyday, but I found myself thinking back to these conversations when reading an early draft of Naomi Richman and Derrick Lemons' ‘Introduction’ to this special issue. In summarising the underlying themes of the collection, they asked a question that remains both pertinent and potent: ‘Is there anything left to say about change in anthropology?’ One response might be to say that the tenor of their question reflects a characteristic scholarly—and more broadly modernist (Levenson, 2011)—search for novelty as virtue: expressing a default need to critique past perspectives. Another response might observe that, for those of us who recall the debates of the 1980s (or pretty much of any other decade of the past half century), the topic of transformation is indeed far from new: plus ça change … But such world‐weary rejoinders would surely miss the point of how the social and human sciences gain energy and inspiration.…”