’Capitalism thrives on the upward pressure produced by reserve labor because it enables employers to exploit the increasingly cheap, docile, and pliable work of those for whom the threat of being supplanted often overrides any progressive concerns regarding decent pay, regular hours, worker solidarity, or a shared humanity. To the enduring benefit of the bourgeoisie, anxieties surrounding personal expendability (of having to “deskill”) intensify in relation to perceptions of a flooded labor supply, producing a variety of disciplinary and reactionary divisions and antagonisms throughout any given labor market. Vocational modernity, then, is one such reaction to “reserve anxiety.” It describes a historical process whereby the exceptional “sovereign individual is formed in relation to precariously embodied representations of difference, a relation that intensifies at those junctures when the promises of personal calling seem most at risk of unravelling.’

(Reading, an automatism)

Adjuncts and the academy: of it but not in it.

Cavell's uses of the continental tradition are a form of philosophical arbitrage.

'One of my experiments has become a sort of legend. It consisted of photographing a white cup and saucer placed on a graduated scale of tones from pure white through light and dark grays to black velvet. This experiment I did at intervals over a whole summer, taking well over a thousand negatives. The cup and saucer experiment was to a photographer what a series of finger exercises is to a pianist. It had nothing directly to do with the conception or the art of photography.'

Neige.

Moins je pratique mon français, plus il devient authentiquement le mien, n'est-ce pas ? Je ne pratique jamais mon anglais, et aucune langue n'est plus proche de moi qu'elle.

Une chaude.

’Pourquoi avons-nous gardé nos noms ? Par habitude, uniquement par habitude.’