A nice, short response to my post on Subcultural Blues has been written by Rhett, which has highlighted a view places where I could clarify a few keys matters. He’s also stated that he wishes to keep his blog less heavy on theory and Marxism, so hopefully we can keep dragging him in that direction! […]
Read More Fragmentation and Its Discontents: A Reply & Other ConsiderationsRhett has a great new post up on his blog: “The Curse of the Silent Houses”, which has finally helped me to dislodge some thoughts that have been swirling about in my noggin, but haven’t been able to quite put into words (if I’m now able to is another story). The topic of the post, […]
Read More Subcultural BluesBelow is a translation of ‘General Observations’, the concluding passages of Georges Sorel’s 1903 work Introduction à l’économie moderne. It’s a piece that I find interesting for several reasons. Most importantly, it provides an early sketch of his particular concept of the myth, which will subsequently become important in his much better known Reflections on […]
Read More Georges Sorel: ‘General Observations’ (1903)I recently had a conversation that led me to revisit Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs, and in particular, its final chapter, where Fisher undertakes a reading of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness to illustrate the ‘strange loops’ that characterize contemporary ‘cybernetic capitalism’—and, by extension, illuminate the ways in which capitalism is inducing a “schizophrenization of culture”. It’s […]
Read More Paranoid Style, Take 2The latest edition of the La Deleuziana journal is out—”Rhythm, Chaos, and the Nonpulsed Man”. It’s been put together by our friends over at Obsolete Capitalism/Rizosfera, and has some great contributors, including Ronald Bogue, Stefano Olivia, Claudio Kulesko and your’s truly. My paper, “Anti-History”, takes up some of the common themes of this blog (modern and non-modern […]
Read More “Anti-History”: La Deleuziana 10“[We] should not reduce[conspiracy theorists] to the phenomenon of modern mass hysteria…. the problem is not that ufologists and conspiracy theorists regress to a paranoid attitude unable to accept (social) reality; the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac” – Zizek Great new post up from Cockydooody on paranoia, the proliferation of conspiracy […]
Read More Paranoid StyleI stayed up entirely too late last night reading about Russia’s Institute for Dynamic Conservatism (IDK) and it’s concept/agenda of ‘super-industrialism’. It’s the opening of a rabbit-hole leading through the avant-garde visions of Russia’s contemporary ‘neoconservative’ milieu to the problems facing the country’s long-term economic development, resulting from the crisis of the Soviet Union and […]
Read More ‘Super-Industrialism’A delicious bit from Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration (which inevitability comes to overlap with discussion of his notion of the ‘frenetic standstill’ that I wrote about in my last post, particularly in respect to the kind of retro-historical remixing that characterizes contemporary ‘chronosickness’): While history took on the character of a directed and politically shapable movement […]
Read More Repetition of the Demiurge: Time & Difference in Deleuze and DuginAt the extreme, signs and significations which are nothing more than significations will lose all meaning. At the extreme looms the shadow of what we will call ‘the great pleonasm’: the unmediated passing into the unmediated and the everyday recorded just as it is is everyday—the event grasped, pulverized and transmitted as rapidly as light […]
Read More Frenetic StandstillIts been a little over a week since the first industrial policy round-up, and new news in this go-round has come at a much slower pace—with the notable exception, of course, being the unexpected turns in the recent UK election, which has brought with it some surprising turns and uncertainties, particular where economic questions are […]
Read More Industrial Policy Round-Up #2
Reciprocal Contradiction 