My itunes library has 3,797 items, totaling 13.5 days of uninterupted sound (it cannot all be described as music).
Having said that, I was listening to some tunes today on shuffle and this is what came on: N.W.A (Dopeman (Remix)), Ol’ Dirty Bastard (Raw Hide), and 2Pac (Last Wordz). Three consecutive songs, three dead rappers (if you count Eazy, of course). Turning up back-to-back-to-back, posthumously rocking it against all odds.
Keeping in mind my last post, I thought it might also be helpful to offer up a list of the books that I checked out today from the library:
A Brief History of Neoliberalism- David Harvey (who else?!?)
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water- Marc Reisner
Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles For Water and Power- Sanjeev Khagram
China Shakes the World- James Kynge
Experience and Nature- John Dewey
Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West- Donald Worster
It’s funny actually, but after nearly two semesters of reading, writing, researching, thinking, talking, and so on about my thesis project, I feel like I am only now—with one semester to go no less!—getting to the point where I actually know what the thing is about. Sort of. In an effort to stave off the anxiety associated with this ever-present uncertainty, I can only continue to tell myself that “it will eventually emerge out of the research,” like the enlightened prisoner-philosopher emerged from Plato’s cave. Or something…
Anyway, for the handful of you that are interested in the trajectory of the project—its dramatic twists, turns, pathologies, befuddlements, revelations, break-throughs—I offer up its current form (in a nutshell):
Could Foucault’s counternarrative of the Enlightenment (best elucidated in Discipline and Punish)—his suggestion that the modern institutions we imagine to be freeing us are in fact enslaving us in insidious ways—also be applied to our contemporary relationship with “nature?” In other words, could our increasingly sophisticated (scientific and engineered) efforts to emancipate ourselves from the grips of nature, instead be rendering us more vulnerable to or exposing our reliance upon the fragility of natural systems, while we at the same time irrevocably disrupt or destroy them. Are we simply rendering ourselves endlessly more precarious?
I have been thinking about this one for quite some time and only now am beginning to get to a point where I can put it into words. I am looking forward to having more time to think through this pickle over the winter break. Good times…
2009 Adam Prince