Jealousy of the Exchange

A humorously titled op-ed appeared in FT today (h/t to Vince Garton): “The ‘stonk’ bubble poses significant global risks”. It’s some grade-A Finacial Times doomsposting, bringing to my mind the wild days of the early coronacrunh, with its cacaophanous volley of doom loops, parabolic volatility, and inability to keep up with the minute-to-minute spiral of […]

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Note on Money and Taxation (#2)

A brief rejoinder to the previous post on Deleuze and Guattari’s neo-Chartalism— Alla Semenova and L. Randall Wray (of MMT) fame have a paper on the “Rise of Money and Class Society” that looks at the way that the state creation of money is historically tied to the emergence of class stratifications in society. It […]

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Note on Money and Taxation (ATP)

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 […]

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Market Theology

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 […]

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Money Games

Accelerationism 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 […]

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American Cartographies 3: Neoregionalism

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 […]

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Kentucky Degree Zero

…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 […]

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Empire at the End

Last 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 […]

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American Cartographies 2

In 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 […]

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Forgetting

A great bit from Leslie Fiedler’s The Return of the Vanishing American: If there still exists for us a Wilderness and a Place-out-of-time appropriate for renewal rather than recreation, then that place must be in the Future, not the Past: that Future toward which we have been pointed ever since the Super-Guy comic books and the […]

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