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 TheologyIn the beginning of the second chapter of The Return of the Vanishing American, Leslie Fiedler wrote: For a long time, Europeans thought of themselves as inhabiting a world without a West: a threefold oecumene made up of Europe itself, Asia, and Libya, which is to say a ruling and redeemed North plus a subsidiary and […]
Read More American Cartographies 2Decadence is having something of a cultural moment. The Decadent Society, a book by NYT columnist Ross Douthat, is slated to come out at the end of this month, and several high-profile reviews of it have begun to appear on the internet. One notable piece has been penned by Peter Thiel, published by First Things under the wonderfully […]
Read More Stagnation ConsciousI 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 2While… 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 