While I work my way through your very interesting final projects, I wanted to share a piece in yesterday’s NYT** about “slop.” I was dimly aware of the term from my teens at home, but this piece stretches the boundaries of “slop” to embrace a wide range of cultural fields and practices in ways that resonate with a number of things that we read. The author points to “slop bowls”: the trend towards modular fast-food options that basically throw abstract selectable components into a uniform bowl, often with formulas on the wall–PROTEIN + GREEN + RICE + ADD-INs–like a chemistry lab. And to “fast fashion” as a form of “slop” dress: ultra-cheap mail order from Temu et al. makes it possible to continually wear new things that … all look the same, are ill-fitted, and have a bland color palette. And especially the algorithmically served and limitless procession of cheaply-produced (and often AI-made) video content that’s designed to keep us minimally engaged so we remain on the platform and have our “behavioral surplus” extracted, kind of like unwitting mental plasma donation.

The piece name-checks Lacan, briefly, on the babble or “filler” analysands sometimes produce, as a form of “slop,” but for me, the closer theoretical cousins are the “cruel optimism” of Berlant, where what we supposedly want (new ‘fits, dopamine hits) hurts us, and Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” revision of Marx’s “alienated labor.” In a slop-filled cultural sphere, we experience an alienation from even consumption, where the things we desire and buy have some of the empty/abstract qualities of abstract waged “labor power” that Marx attributes to mid-19thC modern labor.

Enjoy your slop, everyone, and have a great summer.

** You know, right, that you can get free digital access to the NYT via Hunter’s Library, right? Take advantage while you can!!