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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Haze of Posthistory

The plot of the third season of HBO’s Westworld takes an unexpected leap: in moving from the titular park to the external world, what is found is not the anarchic capitalism of the cyberpunk genre that so influenced it, but an earth held under the sway of an invisible regime of near-total planning and administration. Not […]

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