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The final comment is an allusion to the article it links, which is only tangentially related (in that it's also about tacos): http://www.kmjn.org/notes/specters
by mjn 14y ago
The final comment is an allusion to the article it links, which is only tangentially related (in that it's also about tacos): http://www.kmjn.org/notes/specters_of_tacology.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/specters_of_tacology.html
My goal in that article was to connect some comments I'd been hearing from philosophers, about taking things seriously in themselves (as opposed to only reducing things to their cultural roles) with an offhand comment a professor I know (Ian Bogost) had made about his hypothetical future career studying "tacology", the science of tacos and burritos, which he argued were woefully understudied.
So, I wrote a half-satirical "literature review" of the current academic study of tacos and burritos, surveying tacological references I could find in the literature. It really is a literature review, but many of the references I turned up are strangely ominous, discussing "mass psychogenic illness", violence in the parking lot of Taco Bell, and other such things. Thus, I weave them into a Lovecraftian hypothesis, which proposes that there is a hidden evil at the heart of tacology, which leads academics to study tacos and burritos only superficially, shrinking back at the instant they realize they have delved too deeply.
- meric 14y agoThanks for the explanation! I missed the link the first time.