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Gavin Mueller

@gavinmueller.bsky.social

2.2K followers 830 following 360 posts

Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Critical Theory Tutor at the Sandberg Instituut. American, but slightly less so every passing day. Trying to keep it more professional here. Usually says yes.

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 21h

I thought students would be eager to discuss dating apps, while finding the reading from The Ordinal Society too dry, but it was the opposite. Apparently dating apps are so abject that they can scarcely bear to think about them, and the algorithmic transformation out of liberalism is more compelling

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 1d

I know, I always try to accept because there is a bad gender imbalance for doing peer review

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 1d

did something I almost never do: declined to do a peer review. i'm really overwhelmed right now!

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 3d

I have a running gag with my coteachers that we never use actual pictures of Foucault, but only pictures sourced from the "Every Bald Guy Is Foucault" twitter account. Pretty sure students are no longer able to reliably identify The Rock now

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 3d

I really hate how much the celebrity gossip has been incorporated into pop music, i associate this with swift but also kanye as he was falling off, and, while autobiography has been in lyrics for a long time, I mark Eminem as the inflection point to total TMZization

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 4d

mogging everyone at the gym by reading Minima Moralia on the elliptical machine

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 5d

What's the best part of being a member of the PMC? Hard to choose, but for me it's probably when I extend cultural and technological hegemony over the working class

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 5d

This translation of Adorno's late essay "Commitment" (which I've assigned to students) has a lot of footnotes, many dedicated to defining terms, that appear to me to be straight-up incorrect unhistoricacts.net/wp-content/u...

unhistoricacts.net

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 6d

That’s probably why we can’t have cats, it would just be too entertaining

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 6d

No, but we did have a mouse, which was very exciting

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 6d

Interview with my officemate www.folia.nl/en/wetenscha...

Animal-human scientist Maarten Reesink: “I am a cat, born in a human body”

www.folia.nl

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 9d

incredible! important and brave work, much respect!

Reposted by Gavin Mueller

James Crane @jamescrane.bsky.social · 10d

NEW: Two Unpublished Fragments (On The Tasks of Post-War Marxism) by Horkheimer & Adorno (1946)

- On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party
- The Curse of Writing Today

ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/HA...

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 10d

Not sure I've seen Foucault lay out his entire research program and approach so clearly in anything else I've read www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v0...

Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett · Sexuality and Solitude

A few years ago, we discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem...

www.lrb.co.uk

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 11d

sausages in germany are my son's proustian madeline

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 13d

"For the majority of the population, to become an economic
subject means no more than being compelled to manage declining wages and income, precarity, unemployment, and poverty in the same way one would manage a corporate balance-sheet." - Maurizio Lazzarato

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 14d

Today in seminar I drew a contrast between the notion of the subject in Descartes and Spinoza... I pointed out that they lived simultaneously, here in the Netherlands. That's what happens when you let in foreign refugees -- an intellectual golden age

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 17d

🙏

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 17d

Did you edit him too? Definitely an experience

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Reposted by Gavin Mueller

ProfAFinlayson @profafinlayson.bsky.social · 17d

Last week I had a bit in @theguardian.com about how rhetoric provides a vocabulary for people to think/argue with. Here's my colleague @robtoes.bsky.social explaining how exactly that was done by online reactionaries inventing 'Boriswave'. Read & learn.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Tuesday briefing: The online origins of ‘Boriswave’, the right’s favourite new phrase

In today’s newsletter: How a term created by the extremely online right made it into the mainstream press – and a major speech by Nigel Farage

www.theguardian.com

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 17d

is it ok to keep my gmail avatar the same self-portrait of Gustave Courbet I've had for 20 years?

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 18d

Mood

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 18d

have always found "real abstraction" somewhat reductive (trying to give it a chance in the coming months), but ASR's instinct that Marx is fundamentally doing an anthropology is spot on. i also find myself unable to quit kant completely so having historical materialist reasons for this is satisfying

Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 18d

perfect timing, i've been reading ASR

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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 18d

Syllabus for my Marxist theory seminar