Inching Towards Utopia (Some Notes)

Three ‘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 […]

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 […]

Nostalgia for the End

Hypertelia: “a process of something surpassing its function or objective”. “With systems of economy, knowledge, and production, if they go too far in one direction they get carried away and over-reach their own limits, and at this moment lose themselves in reversal” — Baudrillard, Selected Interviews Kojève’s provocative suggestion was that the US, at its mad-Fordist […]

Everything Calls Out

The Library of Congress has just entered some 11,000 photographs of roadside attractions, gas stations, old buildings, and other obscured American novelties into the public domain. It’s a testament to the camerawork of architectural critic and photography John Margolies, whose life’s work was to criss-cross the country over the span of decades to capture these […]

Fragmentation and Its Discontents: A Reply & Other Considerations

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! […]

Subcultural Blues

Rhett 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, […]

Paranoid Style, Take 2

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 […]

Paranoid Style

“[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 […]

Frenetic Standstill

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 […]

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