Balancing the estrangement of technology and the undeniable hold these devices have over our mediated access to narrative meaning is the problematic of contemporary art. So far, the two films that most interestingly capture this problematic are Eddington and The Shrouds.
The trouble with pairing a criteria of impartiality with optimizing the good is that everyday ethical actions get minimized. Local goods, like being part of a network of care or helping a friend, encircle our lives and make up the majority of our difference-making activity.
Wokeness was a liberal pressure campaign whose gentle mechanism of consciousness-raising was social ostracism with a call to historical knowledge. It remains incomplete because what was needed (and this has been the case since 1864) is a total reconstruction of American society.
A curious pattern emerges from those who take issue with the political character of the novel. It is not that they think a novel shouldn’t evince any politics whatsoever, rather they desire a novel that doesn’t challenge their prejudices or make them uncomfortable—non-woke.
I was never fit for the socialite networking life. To start with I am repulsed by alcohol and sloshed behavior will instantly send me reeling towards the door. Growing up, I always imagined small gatherings at friends’ homes; good food and vigorous conversation.
Someone recently pointed out that Michael Schur owns the film rights to Infinite Jest and many of its dystopian conceits seem eerily prescient, but surely Schur knows that an adaptation would be anathemic to the ambitions of making an addictive book for readers mesmerized by visual media.
Glad to see you back.
I do think people reading less contributes to recurrent anxiety and depression. If you want a prolonged, enriched dopamine bath as opposed to stocking a bottomless hunger with a pittance of flickering images and repetitive motions, hide your phone and read for an hour.
The movement from what is to what ought to be—depends on consciousness’s essential freedom, its restlessness in transcendence, to posit a rearranged world.
Sartre indicates an ethics on the grounds of his ontology. The possibility of human action requires the apprehension of what the present situation fails to bring about and what ought to be realized as our end. On this basis only can a transformative political project begin.
“Uncool, earnest, and serious” encapsulates the kinds of critics and scholars I admire, those whose fidelity to stating what they believe to be true and worthy of care is a matter of not only aesthetic integrity but moral conviction and praxis.
Rereading Jane Eyre for the umpteenth time in PDF on my phone, squinting through my keratoconus at the bluish backlit text; bridging the chasm between the reading life of 19th-century candlelit gothic bibliomania and the schizoid dispersal of texts of the 21st.
I had a great time discussing the Schreber Case and sharing some of my personal experiences with psychosis with Lepht Hand! You can also find the my first entry in a series on Schreber, psychosis, and the mass psychology of fascism here: open.substack.com/pub/devingou...
This isn’t a hysterical prognosis. This is the cliff we find ourselves on, while the nominal opposition party shrugs its shoulders and reconfigures its investment portfolios.
Liberal democracy was pretty good for a lot of people, flaws and all. It’s current competitors (U.S. neomonarchical protectionism and ethnonationalism for example )are uniformly awful and represent a new dark age of ignorance, mass suffering, and enslavement.
“Ideology” in critical theory describes the complex of beliefs that constitute a group’s existential orientation towards their social role. Ideology is mystifying or “false” to the degree to which its conceals the normative content or ethical consequences of this complex.
The American Ideology, which includes intertwined beliefs about the unguided benevolent effects of laissez-faire, individualism, the inherent stability of the American constitution, and the unlimited prospect of prosperity, is the most ethically clouding drug ever concocted:
The first novel that enchanted me and made me believe that being a writer is a very good thing indeed was Jane Eyre. I read it as a 13-year old, artistic Virginian boy with the good fortune of having excellent English teachers who I wanted to impress above all.
The natural act of reading in public or any equivalent act of concentrated absorption might appear to a screen-addled generation as performative. If you’re not a reader, you might very well interpret it as a goofy an
I’m saying the party should be disbanded.
Gavin Newsom is the first openly Vichy Democrat. Here is a politician without principles; a slimy nihilist in moral parity with J.D. Vance who adopted progressive rhetoric for the sake of advancing his own personal power and abandoned it the moment the political winds shifted.
Using the threat and imposition of tariffs as a cudgel of faux-dominance and isolationist chauvinism is the most profoundly stupid, irrational, and destructive policy that any global power has ever attempted. The only possible result is devaluation and the erosion of trust.
My mood is sinking; capsizing. Despair interpenetrates my being, rendering my extremities stiff and aching and aswirl with modal possibilities. If only I could get up for a walk and keep walking without thought, or lasso a thought into restorative action.
With Newsom’s heel turn on trans rights the Democratic Party is immediately signaling that they believe opposition is impossible and would rather turn collaborationist to make sure they get a slice of the spoils. Moral cowardice doesn’t begin to encapsulate the disgrace.
It’s not surprising that AI endorses solipsism. The ostensible nihilism of the techno-utopian drive to the fantastical singularity when stripped of its grandiose pretensions is simply the dream of splendid isolation from all humanity; the snuffing out of any demands and desires.
The hardest part about working in the restaurant industry is keeping up the facade that serving people food and drink or providing excellent service matters at all and that we all wouldn’t be better off spending our days in the streets preparing for civil war.
It’s not impossible to avoid talking about politics and focus instead on personal fixations. I’m still reading, thinking, and hopefully writing more, but I cannot pretend that the political isn’t colliding with the everyday and the possibility of any future whatsoever.
Beginning to think that the options for salvaging American democracy and avoiding a geopolitical ticking time bomb are narrowing to a military coup or act of God.
If you think that the Democrats have an authoritarian red line rather than continued shrugging impotency, then you’re a credulous anachronism. Our nonplussed politicians are cozying up to fascists, tracking the new flows of capital in order to enrich themselves.
Political conservatism has undergone a transformation within my lifetime from a suspect, but at least ostensibly rational common sense morality of fidelity to principle and trust in traditional ways to an irrationalist, freewheeling ressentiment for all social change.