At 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 StandstillKoselleck’s essay “Does History Accelerate?”—to be found in the recently-published collection of his late works, Sediments of Time—is full of brilliant historical notes on the “annihilation of space by time”, highlighting the importance of revolutions in transportation and communication in producing these socially-palpable effects. Hat tip to MF Doomer for drawing my attention to this paper! […]
Read More Annihilation of SpaceLast night I came across this interview with Moishe Postone via Ross Wolfe’s Charnel House blog. I’m a bit surprised that I hadn’t seen it before—it’s definitely an example of Postone at his best, and (like many of his other interviews and shorter articles) brings into relief the positive political dimensions that are often missed if […]
Read More Spatialization of Time/Temporalization of SpaceWhile… productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. —Engels, preface to the 1886 English edition of Capital Vol. 1 Change and Progress Theories of ‘accelerating change’ are mostly commonly associated with a particular strain of techno-utopian thought, concentrated primarily on the libertarian—and perhaps at this point, postlibertarian—side […]
Read More Marx on Geometric Change (1. The Rate of Profit)
Reciprocal Contradiction 