Citing a crisis in radical thought, George Mason University English professor Paul Smith in 1988 seems to have embarked on a reconnaissance mission of sorts in his search for a consumable site of consumer resistance, one that could be named and affirmed. Smith, who served as Carnegie Mellon professor at the time, called for a […]
Cynical men bottle time for its predictive value in the form of the reactionary who, once activated, gratifies the violent impulse for instantaneity. Cynical time so produced, placed there by institutions of patriarchy, ensure against war’s final end. Cynical subjects so created enter domestic space to give in their turn SUDs and ACEs and NOWS […]
To the extent that democracy is an experiment, media pundits seem to confuse the control group with the intervention where they conclude the failings of electoral politics stem from constituents “voting their feelings.”If anything, the closest thing to a control in this scenario would be the pulling of levers that have long since ceased to […]
A passing familiarity with the work of Barthes and Proust, primarily, though likely there are others, suggests to me that either a fundamental misreading of libertinism as it is observed today has taken place, or that what we are dealing with is an expired set of justifications. Vitiated of its principles, its perversions profaned, to […]
It’s not that I disagree with D.H. Lawrence’s key insight on what must not be done concerning the subjection of the unknowable in the service of the will to know. His objection to “a culturally imposed oppression of prurient and sadistic puritanism” that seeks “not liberty, but a gloomy and tyrannical sense of power” is […]
Far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, and contrary to its reputation of being the greatest literary work ever produced aside from the Bible, T.S. Eliot maintained the play Hamlet is an artistic failure, that it is merely interesting as the “Mona Lisa” of Shakespeare’s works.Eliot’s reasoning followed the schema of stratification. Shakespeare’s character Hamlet has “that […]
Singularities can be differentiated by their shape – black hole singularities are collapsed in structure, “utterly different” from newly formed Big Bang singularities that are “completely uniform” in shape. Roger Penrose has made a point of drawing this distinction, but I’ve had some difficulty seeing the inspiration behind his point for the troubling tinge of […]
Memory is the fertile soil of a time capsule;It is what propagandists have every reason to fear,For they must know theirs are but imposed formsThat for a time only are the cause of our ceasing to be.Here, as in Pound’s “Histrion” (1908), the possessive determiner “our” references a retrievable tradition. It is what broadens our […]
A fragmented thought flashes up from a discarded issue of The Paris Review, dazzling in its clarity, and at once I am taken in: The only way to understand the sea is to drop a grid on it. Never mind the apparatus of a grid as one that cannot be used without being in ‘poor […]
Of the things considered radical, which are truly ‘incommensurable’ in the sense Thomas Kuhn used the term as that which requires a sudden or all-at-once shift in understanding? It occurs to me that our cultural preoccupation with marking the difference between Gen Z and millennials, between trans and non-binary individuals, between greater and lesser knowledge […]