…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 […]
Read More Kentucky Degree ZeroLast 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 […]
Read More Empire at the EndA 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 […]
Read More Forgetting“The history is unendurable, its contents need to be concealed, therefore myth appears inseparable from revolutionary crisis. Given the compulsion to create ‘something entirely new’ the nightmare of dead generations will overpower the consciousness, ghosts will walk, and whatever novelty comes into existence will be the unwilled and unpredicted effect of time’s ironical victory.” — […]
Read More Repetition, Innovation, Class WarI 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 BluesThe latest edition of the La Deleuziana journal is out—”Rhythm, Chaos, and the Nonpulsed Man”. It’s been put together by our friends over at Obsolete Capitalism/Rizosfera, and has some great contributors, including Ronald Bogue, Stefano Olivia, Claudio Kulesko and your’s truly. My paper, “Anti-History”, takes up some of the common themes of this blog (modern and non-modern […]
Read More “Anti-History”: La Deleuziana 10
Reciprocal Contradiction 