Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'Collection: Politics
The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there.Collection: Knowledge
What many students most want from college, although they would never admit it, is an authority structure. There is a demand for an authority which they can then reject; they want to be told what to do, so they can disobey. It is a textbook case of bad faith, a flight from freedom.Collection: Faith
Identitarianism assumes that people are condemned to identify with the positive (ethnic/ gender/ nationalistic) predicates they possess, as if their subjectivity were exhausted by those properties. Exactly the opposite is the case: the authentic dimension of subjectivity consists not in any positive identity but in that which makes identifications.Collection: Positive
The 1890s was perhaps the most Gothic decade ever: 'Dracula,' 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Time Machine,' not to mention 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' were all written between 1890 and 1899.Collection: Dreams
The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture 'War' with 'Terror' in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without 'legitimate authority' to wage war.Collection: War
Roxy Music' and 'For Your Pleasure,' those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop's equivalent of 'The Talented Mr Ripley.' The clothes , the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly.Collection: Learning
While football embarrassingly exposes the excesses of capitalism, the Olympic sports have been used to propagate the neoliberal mantra that success is simply a matter of hard work.Collection: Sports
The sustaining fantasy of Nolan's Batman films - which does chime uncomfortably with Romney -is that the excesses of finance capital can be curbed by a combination of philanthropy, off-the-books violence and symbolism.Collection: Finance
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.
Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism's anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.
The moment that most fascinated me in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' was its descriptions of times of transition from one reality to another.
To be able to function in late capitalism without being a psychological wreck, it is necessary to accept the insane as standard.
Play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
We all know that the 'reality' of reality TV is an artful construction, an effect not only of editing but of a Lorenzian rat-in-a-mirrored-labyrinth artificial environment which attenuates psychology into a series of territorial twitches.
Little Axe's records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption.
Like all of Moore's work, 'V for Vendetta' is considerably less than the sum of its parts.
Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts - but one of its role is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.
Just because something is current doesn't mean it is new.
Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.
What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?
In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognized that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless.
What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing and supplication.
Anti-capitalism is nothing new in Hollywood. From 'Wall-E' to 'Avatar,' corporations are routinely depicted as evil. The contradiction of corporate-funded films denouncing corporations is an irony capitalism cannot just absorb, but thrive on. Yet this anti-capitalism is only allowed within limits.
The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.
It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated. But this says nothing about their causation.
Basic Instinct 2' is an uneasy experience because, although it is hyper-reflexive to the point where it is hard to think of one character, one scene, one plot twist that isn't a reference or an echo, there is nothing knowing about it. No matter how absurd the film gets, it refuses to raise its eyebrows.
The ruling ideology prefers to talk about individual ethics rather than the capitalist system.
Some of the Junior Boys' textures may be borrowed from synthpop but, formally, their songs would be impossible without twenty years of the rave discontinuum. And where synthpop was self-consciously European, the Junior Boys have pioneered an electronic Pop that speaks in a Canadian accent.
Capitalism does not require us to hold a particular set of cognitive beliefs; it only requires that we act as if certain beliefs (about money, commodities etc) are true. The rituals are the beliefs, beliefs which, at the level of subjective self-description, may well be disavowed.
De Palma's great theme, obsessively reiterated, is betrayal.
OK, so we all know that 'Borat' is humiliatingly, career-endingly unfunny (one trick too many for one-trick pony Sacha Double-Barelled) - but can anyone explain why the 'character' isn't roundly condemned for being as unacceptably racist as the one-dimensional stereotypes from 70s sitcoms such as 'Mind Your Language?'
On the Junior Boys' 'When No-one Cares' beats are abandoned altogether, the track's 'endless night' lit only by the dying-star flares and stalactite-by-flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics.
The story of Basinski's 'Disintegration Loops' - tapes that destroyed themselves in the transfer to digital - is a parable (again almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital.
What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.
The discussion of 'V for Vendetta' - on Pinocchio Theory in particular - has been far more interesting than the film deserved. Yes, there is a certain frission in seeing a major Hollywood movie refusing to unequivocally condemn terrorism, but the political analysis in the film (as in the original comic) is really rather threadbare.
The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.
I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.
We once turned to popular culture because it produced fantasy objects; now, we are asked to 'identify with' the fantasising subject itself.
If, as is certainly the case, capitalism cannot do without nationality, that is precisely why accelerating and intensifying the deterritorializing, de-ethnicizing and anti-national impulses within (but inhibited by) capitalism constitutes an anti-capitalist strategy.
Children of Men' reinforces what few would doubt, but which British cinema would seldom lead you to suspect: the British landscape bristles with cinematic potential.
The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky's 'Solaris.' When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another of the simulations produced by the inscrutable planet.
Sinatra's melancholy was the melancholy of mass (old) media technology - the 'extimacy' of the records facilitated by the phonograph and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and urban sadness.
Crucially, Marxist atheism is only achieved once the theological critique of capitalism is completed. This is what separates Marxist atheism from the gliberal platitudes of the likes of Nick Cohen, who proclaim secularism while remaining attached to the theology of capital (liberal commonsense).
In a world of niches, we are enchained by our own consumer preferences.
Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.
Now that we are used to globalisation it's hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if 'the Russians love their children too.'
Pele featured in the Brazilophile imaginary as the a figure of non-utile excess, a carefree artist in the Nietzschean sense, indifferent to the narrow teleology of winning matches... check the way that most of the endlessly replayed footage we see of Pele is not of him scoring goals, but audaciously missing chances contrived by force of wit.
A Scanner Darkly' is one of Dick's bleakest novels, and almost certainly his saddest.
It will come as no surprise that I would count Nietzsche the perspectivist - he who questioned not only the possibility but the value of Truth - as the enemy. There will be even fewer surprises that I would reject the Dionysian Nietzsche, the celebrant of transgressive desire.