I think I’ve written about this before—and if not on the blog, then at least on twitter—but one of the bits in A Thousand Plateaus that has fascinated me for years now is a footnote to the introduction (on the rhizome). It takes place in the context of a short discussion of America, identified as a “special […]
Read More American CartographiesI’ve recently decided to read through a series of works that could be described as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ (or subjectivist anti-capitalist, vitalist anti-capitalism, though none of these really capture the nature of this constellation, often Marxist but also proto-Marxist, but whatever): the writings of the young Lukács, young Gramsci, Lucien Goldmann, Ernst Bloch, etc. Lukács’ The Theory […]
Read More Time and EpicThe 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 […]
Read More The Haze of PosthistorySum issues 13 & 14, dedicated to the strange temporalities of Shanghai and Ljubljana respectively, has dropped in conjunction with this year’s Fabula Festival. Sum 13: here Sum 14: here Between the two issues its a fun line-up: Mikkel Bindslev in dialogue with Amy Ireland, Bindslev in dialogue with Anna Greenspan and Nick Land, Primož Krašovec, […]
Read More Sum 13 & 14: Shanghai Frequencies + LjubljanastropheRhett 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, […]
Read More Subcultural BluesA delicious bit from Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration (which inevitability comes to overlap with discussion of his notion of the ‘frenetic standstill’ that I wrote about in my last post, particularly in respect to the kind of retro-historical remixing that characterizes contemporary ‘chronosickness’): While history took on the character of a directed and politically shapable movement […]
Read More Repetition of the Demiurge: Time & Difference in Deleuze and DuginAt 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 SpaceOn the tl, Moct chimes in on my post about capitalist space-times: https://twitter.com/Moctezuma_III/status/1193667057864368128 It’s an interesting point that says something about the distinct social and cultural patterning that typifies capitalist development. I would absolutely agree with Moct here in that the frozen desert of temporal spatialization is the defining characteristic of our current epoch. We can see […]
Read More Decadence & (Po)MoLast 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 Space
Reciprocal Contradiction 