The semester is over! If that’s not a cause for celebration than I don’t know what is (though it was by far the most stimulating four months of my intellectual collegiate life).

Now, I spend my summer teaching (inner-city for Buffalo Public Schools, always interesting) and MA thesis writing, due in mid July.  I’ve written (but not edited) the introduction and part of the first chapter, so I’ve got lots of work ahead of me.

I wanted to share the video I worked on with a few friends of mine for our ENG: 585 Digital Rhetorics and Pedagogies class at the University of Buffalo this spring.  Here it is, explaining the electracy theories of Gregory Ulmer and Sarah Arroyo:

And the full website, complete with assignment information on an HTML site I personally coded: 

I’ve been hard at work finishing out my first year of Graduate School here in Buffalo, so I’ve been having trouble finding time to update this site.  I’m doing a lot of video editing lately, and look forward to sharing my scholarly video with you here… but for now, take a look at the title and a little teaser (just the opening paragraph) from one of my grad classes (Fiction Intensifying) and let me know of you have any suggestions or comments!

Also, I’ll be posting my scholarly video here in a few days, so keep a heads up.  It covers Gregory Ulmer and Sarah Arroyo’s theories concerning electracy, the continuation of the orality-literacy progression within human technological cognition.

Empire Intensified: Post-Postmodern Signifiers, Transnational Neologism and the Neoliberal Economic Reality

            When Matt Taibbi referred to investment bank firm Goldman Sachs in a now-famous Rolling Stone article as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” he neglected to mention two crucial details of the squid’s dynamism: 1. the ecosystem of the squid in question happens to encompass every one of the earth’s major oceans, and 2. lurking deep within the ocean’s darkest depths, the vampire squid is, for most purposes, nearly invisible.[1] Taibbi’s metaphor, then, follows its banking counterpart quite nicely, though Goldman Sachs is arguably far more impactful on the ecosystem than a single cephalopod species could ever be.  Similar to the sperm of a male squid as it encroaches on the female’s body during reproduction generation after generation, capital reproduces itself endlessly, and envelops everything it comes into contact with.[2]  Like a squid to the torso of an engulfed crustacean, capital is an entity that is perpetually “relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”[3]  Also like the vampire squid, which if threatened will release a mucasy cloud of bioluminescent material into the otherwise dark waters, massive agents of capital like Goldman Sachs occasionally draw great attention to themselves.  In addition, the vampire squid has the largest eyes proportional to its body of any creature in the animal kingdom; as such, the ability to conquer a thing is directly tied to the ability to perceive and exploit weakness, something hungry squid and unquenchable capital thirst each seem to be uncommonly well-suited to do.

If you’d like to read the final, completed, full-length paper, send me an email (Jdrichte@buffalo.edu) or leave a comment on this page.