Steven Connor
Biographic Data
| ID | 3635008 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven Connor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven |
| FAMILY NAME | Connor |
| SIGNATURE | CONNOR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4617-321X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Wishes of Human Vanity
Michel Serres and Glory
Dreamwork: Why All Work Is Imaginary
Asphyxiations
Asphyxiations Steven Connor (bio) Recent events and sociorhetorical expatiations upon them have reaffirmed breathing as the ideal form of free and unimpeded life, that struggles against the throttlings of oppression. The root meaning of oppression, from the past participle of Latin opprimere, is to press, crush or bear down upon, and the word oppression has commonly been used to signify the feeling of the difficulty of breathing, through some con…
Terry Eagleton's Divine Comedy
This essay reflects on the links between comedy and religion in Terry Eagle- ton’s writing since 2000. It proposes that religious thought provides the same kind of occasion and imperative to take comedy seriously as Marxist theory had done earlier in Eagleton’s career. The essay argues that the connecting principle between Marxism, Catholicism, criticism and comedy is the body, especially in its conjoining of absurdity and abasement. It proposes …
Consorting
Middle children are alleged to be calmer than first-borns because they make their entry in the second act – even if it is also in a sense as the second act – of a play that has already been going for some time. They assume that everybody else on the stage knows their lines and cues. Many inaugural enterprises depend on the shared confidence that others involved in them know why they are there and what they are doing, even if you don't. It often t…
Professing
Numbers/Data: A Roundtable
This Roundtable on Numbers/Data began life as a live, public event on the power and influence of numbers in contemporary visual, material, immaterial, and media cultures. 1 To imagine such an ambitious event, and to do it justice, the event’s programme brought together academics, industry professionals, and practitioners. Taking Steven Connor’s recently published book Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (2016) as a springboard, each contrib…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Decomposing the Humanities
Drawing deeply from the example of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour’s work represents a critique of the commitment to critique which has become the dominant mode of much work in the humanities. Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence attempts to move away from the negative mode of his We Have Never Been Modern into a more positive and generously accommodating stance, which can take more account of objects, and especially earthly objects, than has …
Guys and Dolls
The doll has become a figure for the objectification of women, especially in the form of the sex doll, which is routinely taken to be the image of the woman reduced to a condition of pure passivity. But the doll is also, and perhaps even predominantly, a means of 'guying' the putative man (the word 'guy' entering English with the burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy) and presenting the simplest possible idea of male desire in comically petrified form.…
Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination
The impossibility of the present: Or from the contemporary to the contemporal
This chapter reviews a number of perplexed or pessimistic accounts of the stalling of modem, progressive time. Carol Greenhouse has shown how, at the very beginning of the process whereby the secular, instrumentalised time of law and the State erupts into the recurrent time of archaic or theocratic society, there is also a powerful sharing of purpose and form between the two temporalities. David Harvey provides ample evidence of the operationalis…
Spelling Things Out
Up until quite recently, to interpret has meant to spell out what a text means to say, However, over the course of the last century and a half, the word, and the action, of interpreting have expanded remarkably. This new, expanded form of interpretation does not say what things say, but shows how they work, which is to say, how they might be worked out. Interpretation in this sense is not the doubling of a locution, but the realizing of a potenti…
Terror From the Air by Peter Sloterdijk, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran and Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation by Peter Sloterdijk, trans. Mario Wenning and God's Zeal: The Battle of…
Doing Without Art
In recent years, the idea of the "aesthetic" seems to have gathered a surprising new credibility and force. This essay resists this trend, maintaining that there are no features that are unique to artworks, nor any single feature that all artworks possess. This does not countermand the study of particular features of particular art forms, or necessarily cast doubt that these particular features or art forms might have particular kinds of value. B…
Thinking things
Strings in the Earth and Air
Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet; Strings by the river where The willows meet. James Joyce, Chamber Music The opening poem in Joyce's Chamber Music evokes an ideal of ubiquitous, sourceless, air-born music that reaches back, via the Aeolian harp, to Pythagoras and the doctrine of the music of the spheres. Joyce himself would give Leopold Bloom the opportunity for a parody of his rather perfumed little volume of poems in the 'Sirens' …
Absolute Levity
The Shakes: Conditions of Tremor
This paper describes shaking as an action-sensation, meaning that it is an action that connotes and corresponds to a sensation. The action becomes the object of a perception that participates in the sensation. Watching the trembling of a pair of hands, it is hard to retain our composure. We seem to feel a ripple of sympathy at work in us. Shaking, then, proliferates, becomes contagious. I consider how this mode of bodily vibration can be given di…
The Menagerie of the Senses
The term "menagerie" convenes two claims: firstly that our relation to our senses is one of active and constructive management (the old sense of the word "menagerie"), and that animal senses, or our idea of them, play an indispensable part in that management of the senses. While our senses mediate the world to us, animals mediate our senses to us; animals are thus the mediators of the mediation. A review of the use of animals as emblems of the fi…
The Cambridge companion to postmodernism
Maculate Conceptions
This article considers the signification of and affective response to spots, dots, blotches, and patches in a number of different areas of social and cultural history in Western Europe. It attempts to account for why it is so odd or difficult to clothe or surround oneself with patterns of spots in clothing, fabric and furnishings, approaching this analysis through reflections on the idiom and appearance of the spotted in nature, religion, cosmeti…
Men in Skirts
There are signs that the wearing of skirts by men appears to be on the increase in the West. Connor's essay provides a series of historical reflections on the signification and cultural phenomenology of male and female apparel. The first appearance of bifurcated dress in the late mediaeval period is considered, along with the struggle between men and women for command of lateral space during the seventeenth century in Europe, as attested to by co…
Itch or, The Gentle Stranger
The Menagerie of the Senses
The term "menagerie" convenes two claims: firstly that our relation to our senses is one of active and constructive management (the old sense of the word "menagerie"), and that animal senses, or our idea of them, play an indispensable part in that management of the senses. While our senses mediate the world to us, animals mediate our senses to us; animals are thus the mediators of the mediation. A review of the use of animals as emblems of the fi…
The Shakes: Conditions of Tremor
This paper describes shaking as an action-sensation, meaning that it is an action that connotes and corresponds to a sensation. The action becomes the object of a perception that participates in the sensation. Watching the trembling of a pair of hands, it is hard to retain our composure. We seem to feel a ripple of sympathy at work in us. Shaking, then, proliferates, becomes contagious. I consider how this mode of bodily vibration can be given di…
Cp: Or, A Few Don'ts By A Cultural Phenomenologist
1999). CP: or, A Few Don'ts By A Cultural Phenomenologist. Parallax: Vol. 5, Polemics: Against Cultural Studies, pp. 17-31
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Thinking things
The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music
New Literary History - Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001
Decomposing the Humanities
Drawing deeply from the example of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour’s work represents a critique of the commitment to critique which has become the dominant mode of much work in the humanities. Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence attempts to move away from the negative mode of his We Have Never Been Modern into a more positive and generously accommodating stance, which can take more account of objects, and especially earthly objects, than has …
Spelling Things Out
Up until quite recently, to interpret has meant to spell out what a text means to say, However, over the course of the last century and a half, the word, and the action, of interpreting have expanded remarkably. This new, expanded form of interpretation does not say what things say, but shows how they work, which is to say, how they might be worked out. Interpretation in this sense is not the doubling of a locution, but the realizing of a potenti…
Doing Without Art
In recent years, the idea of the "aesthetic" seems to have gathered a surprising new credibility and force. This essay resists this trend, maintaining that there are no features that are unique to artworks, nor any single feature that all artworks possess. This does not countermand the study of particular features of particular art forms, or necessarily cast doubt that these particular features or art forms might have particular kinds of value. B…
Absolute Levity
The Poetry of the Meantime: Terry Eagleton and the Politics of Style
The Poetry of the Meantime: Terry Eagleton and the Politics of Style Get access STEVEN CONNOR STEVEN CONNOR Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1991, Pages 243–264, https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/1.1.243 Published: 01 October 1991
Negativity and the question of value: Beckett's Worstward Ho
Cultural studies and philosophy: Questionnaire: Why cultural studies and philosophy
(1995). Cultural studies and philosophy. Parallax: Vol. 1, Cultural Studies and Philosophy, pp. 93-117
Fascination, skin and the screen
Cp: Or, A Few Don'ts By A Cultural Phenomenologist
1999). CP: or, A Few Don'ts By A Cultural Phenomenologist. Parallax: Vol. 5, Polemics: Against Cultural Studies, pp. 17-31
Dumbstruck
Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of ‘seeming to speak where one is not’, speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kind of questions which impel this inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. This book tracks the subject from its first r…
Speaking Parts: Diderot and Les Bijoux indiscrets
This chapter offers, as a kind of afterthought, a reference to Tertullian’s account of genital speech. The reference here is to Denis Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets of 1748. It tells the story of Mangogul, the bored sultan of an imaginary oriental kingdom. Diderot’s conception forms a intriguing compromise between archaic and modern conceptions of ventriloquism. During the 18th century, attention shifted away from the experience of the one posse…
The Abbé and the Ventriloque
Earth, Breath, Frenzy: The Delphic Oracle
The myths surrounding the Delphic oracle have lingered long enough even to continue to need refutation. The story that remains untold is that of the power of the oracle-myth itself, and of the cultural and imaginative work that it has been able to do in post-classical times. This chapter can only be a gesture towards that history, but it points to the foundational importance of the Delphic oracle in giving dynamic expression to powerful ideas abo…
Making an issue of cultural phenomenology
Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
"Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of 'seeming to speak where one is not', speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kinds of question which impel Steven Connor's wide-ranging, restlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. He track…
Itch or, The Gentle Stranger
The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music
New Literary History - Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001
Men in Skirts
There are signs that the wearing of skirts by men appears to be on the increase in the West. Connor's essay provides a series of historical reflections on the signification and cultural phenomenology of male and female apparel. The first appearance of bifurcated dress in the late mediaeval period is considered, along with the struggle between men and women for command of lateral space during the seventeenth century in Europe, as attested to by co…
Maculate Conceptions
This article considers the signification of and affective response to spots, dots, blotches, and patches in a number of different areas of social and cultural history in Western Europe. It attempts to account for why it is so odd or difficult to clothe or surround oneself with patterns of spots in clothing, fabric and furnishings, approaching this analysis through reflections on the idiom and appearance of the spotted in nature, religion, cosmeti…
The Cambridge companion to postmodernism
The Menagerie of the Senses
The term "menagerie" convenes two claims: firstly that our relation to our senses is one of active and constructive management (the old sense of the word "menagerie"), and that animal senses, or our idea of them, play an indispensable part in that management of the senses. While our senses mediate the world to us, animals mediate our senses to us; animals are thus the mediators of the mediation. A review of the use of animals as emblems of the fi…
The Shakes: Conditions of Tremor
This paper describes shaking as an action-sensation, meaning that it is an action that connotes and corresponds to a sensation. The action becomes the object of a perception that participates in the sensation. Watching the trembling of a pair of hands, it is hard to retain our composure. We seem to feel a ripple of sympathy at work in us. Shaking, then, proliferates, becomes contagious. I consider how this mode of bodily vibration can be given di…
Strings in the Earth and Air
Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet; Strings by the river where The willows meet. James Joyce, Chamber Music The opening poem in Joyce's Chamber Music evokes an ideal of ubiquitous, sourceless, air-born music that reaches back, via the Aeolian harp, to Pythagoras and the doctrine of the music of the spheres. Joyce himself would give Leopold Bloom the opportunity for a parody of his rather perfumed little volume of poems in the 'Sirens' …
Absolute Levity
Thinking things
Terror From the Air by Peter Sloterdijk, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran and Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation by Peter Sloterdijk, trans. Mario Wenning and God's Zeal: The Battle of…
Doing Without Art
In recent years, the idea of the "aesthetic" seems to have gathered a surprising new credibility and force. This essay resists this trend, maintaining that there are no features that are unique to artworks, nor any single feature that all artworks possess. This does not countermand the study of particular features of particular art forms, or necessarily cast doubt that these particular features or art forms might have particular kinds of value. B…
Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination
The impossibility of the present: Or from the contemporary to the contemporal
This chapter reviews a number of perplexed or pessimistic accounts of the stalling of modem, progressive time. Carol Greenhouse has shown how, at the very beginning of the process whereby the secular, instrumentalised time of law and the State erupts into the recurrent time of archaic or theocratic society, there is also a powerful sharing of purpose and form between the two temporalities. David Harvey provides ample evidence of the operationalis…
Art (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · History (13 works) · Literature (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Art history (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works)