In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari take up Marx’s “trinity formula”—that which “comprises all the secrets of the social production process”, unifying the differing dynamics of land, labor and capital—and, through significant modification, offer a picture of the  tripartite structure that underpinned the economic logic of the ‘archaic Urstaat‘. The Urstaat, organized around the gaze and […]
Read More Note on Money and Taxation (ATP)An interesting paper was making the rounds on twitter yesterday: “Hayekian Neoliberalism as Negative Political Theology” by Scott A. Kirkland (what’s novel here is that Kirkland’s specialty isn’t the history of economic thought, but ethical theology). What Scott focuses on, contra the pop-histories of neoliberalism that look to Reagan, Friedman, etc, is a line that […]
Read More Market TheologyAccelerationism is having an interesting moment of re-assessment, if not reconceptualization. Aly’s recent reading list emphasized the cyberfeminist and non-Western lines that have fed into its non-history, which has subsequently been overcoded by a masculinist cult of Land (with much anger about her work now raging in the twittersphere). My last post tried to put […]
Read More Money GamesI’ve been trying to use twitter less. As this state’s on-again, off-again quasi-lockdowns slowly lumber through their eternal returns, boredom has translated into days spent simply scrolling, refreshing, hour after hour, day after day. It’s a cliched thing to say at this point, but my attention span is in shambles—a recent read-through of Faulkner’s As I […]
Read More Turning On the Eternal NetworkThree ‘brief’ thoughts, leaping off from yesterday’s post: 1) The pastoral urbanism of the ‘heritage industry’ (which is but aesthetic ornamentation for speculative endeavors, motored by the vicious cyclone of finance capital) re-imagines the city in terms of a future-without-futurity—see the wonkish, green-dipped powerpoints from any current development program—while also scrambling the classic division between […]
Read More Inching Towards Utopia (Some Notes)Back for round three! A brief recap of the Leslie Fiedler-D&Gian literary psychogeography of America: East—Decoding from/recoding with Europe—Henry James, Eliot, Pound North—Capitalist decoding—Dos Passos, Dreiser South—Overcode of the slave system, post-Civil War ruin—Faulkner, Caldwell West—Line of flight, escape, madness—Kesey, beat generation, etc with further correspondences to East—Desire as Jouissance; phantasy North—Desire as lack; castration […]
Read More American Cartographies 3: NeoregionalismA wonderful description of David Lynch in The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus—notable in particular for the reference to Natty Bumppo, invoked by Leslie Fiedler to describe the sort mythical figure that arises in the Westward direction: …for thirty years Lynch has been as much a frontiersman as Natty […]
Read More Greil Marcus on David Lynch…what characterizes these spaces is that their nature cannot be explained in a simply spatial way. They imply non-localizable relations. These are direct presentations of time—Deleuze, Cinema II. I’ve recently been replaying the now well-known adventure game Kentucky Route Zero in preparation for the recently-released final act (for those unfamiliar, the various acts of the game’s stories have […]
Read More Kentucky Degree ZeroFor the sake of organizing the various bits and pieces scattered around this blog on ‘weird America’, the ‘West’, etc—to try and build them towards a more cohesive project?—here’s a little index of what’s been scribbled so far: The New Religion and Its Schisms The Invisible Landscape American Cartographies Everything Calls Out The Humor of […]
Read More Strange America Round-UpLast night realized that I missed a golden opportunity in my last post—which began with the relationship/contrast between the delirium of the West and the imperial ecumenon as described by Deleuze and Guattari, and which ended at the weird of the 1970s—to mention Philip K. Dick and his time-scrambling suggestion that us (post)moderns are, in […]
Read More Empire at the End
Reciprocal Contradiction 