Essentialism abounds. Making absolute distinctions and doubling down on discrete identities and associations is part of what propaganda does: it makes everything about identity. It makes all issues about WHO said what, rather than what they said. It often concerns putting the person into question as a way of avoiding a dispassionate exploration of what […]
The establishment needs us arguing about race and demonizing each other. The current system needs us afraid of each other and nature and reliant on their products and their money because as long as we are doing that we are not challenging their system built on guilt and a debt that can never be repaid.
“Inverted totalitarianism” as a term has some descriptive value for sure, but things have rapidly changed since Wolin coined the term in 2003. Mostly in the last year, the State is rapidly taking on many of the trappings of traditional totalitarianism. In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, totalitarianism and fascism are the two extreme poles of
QAnon and the most crazy fringes of conspiracy culture and Trump’s base are being used to discredit the most important resistance movement in the history of this planet. It is most important because the biological commons of the planet is becoming completely enclosed as we speak. Important radical and liberal voices in this struggle like
The thinly veiled plot of the revenge-fantasy crime-melodrama film “The Gentlemen”(no joke):A salt-of-the-Earth American (played by Mathew McConaughey of course) crowns himself king of the empire he builds, funded by drug money, with the help of the British aristocracy, within the corpse of their own decaying kingdom. After a time he decides to retire and
The concepts of point particles and discrete linear waves are a bad problem–but also a badly posed one if all one can do is try to negate their negations. So many of our concepts–like “virus” or “particle”–are projections of our flawed form of identity and our tendency to think in terms of fundamental things or
Viruses don’t cause illness; they are a marker and a functional and adaptive pathway for dealing with stress and toxicity. “Cases” are just a positive PCR test, which mean little more than someone has a slightly elevated level of a relatively generic protein fragment we have decided to blame for certain changes in illness patterns,
Something strongly stirs in me whenever I hear someone being accused of selfishness for not doing what someone else wants them to do. I used to lash out at this most primordial of exploitation of natural childhood attachment, but I gradually came to understand that this refrain is as much a sign of the repressed
I think we could come up with a thoroughly relational astrological syntax. The semantics shouldn’t be grounded in any primary representations, but be an actual abstract alphabet–purely formal placeholders in an abstract series that only gets meaning within determinate contexts. It would then be scientific (formal, methodological, and abstract) and poetic and creative (completely dependent
Some of my favorite films in no particular order: Apocalypse Now, The Master, Perfume:Story of a Murderer, Antichrist, The Whale, Mother!, The Fountain, To The Wonder, The Thin Red Line, Tree of Life, Eyes Wide Shut, 2001, The Shining, Silence, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Synecdoche New York, Waking Life, Before Sunrise and the
