The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.) Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of “large context.” The same method applies, in essence, to the consideration of great things from the past—the cathedral of Chartres, the temple of Paestum—when, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself; the method of receiving the things into our space. We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life.

— Benjamin, The Arcades Project, H2,3

A while back, I was listening to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” in which Kathleen Hanna performs the hysterical subject demanded by contemporary gender roles, and it occoured to me that this would be a good direction for Britney Spears. Everyone thinks she’s mad anyway; why not embrace that madness?

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You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over.

— William Gibson,Virtual Light, p. 101

Is politics something historically specific? Put that way, the answer is obviously “yes.” What isn’t historically specific, after all? But that does carry with it the suggestion that Gibson’s character could be right, that maybe politics would be “over,” and that seems hard to comprehend.

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The disadvantage of not posting anything for a while is that whatever post you write inevitably takes on the mantle of being a post worth breaking your silence for. Luckily, this problem was solved for me by finding something I couldn’t not post: a preview of the tATu film.

Aside from that, I’ve been: Read more↴

In the wake of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy some time ago, I’ve finally got round to listening to this CBS program about Milbank and Pickstock, two of the movement’s founders. It’s an extraordinarily good radio show - I can’t imagine the militantly middlebrow Radio 4, or it’s repetition-as-farce NPR, producing something half as intellectually serious. Great podcast though it is, it’s obviously not a complete account of Radical Orthodoxy; still, if it was accurate I can see where some of infinite thought’s concerns come from. Milbank and Pickstock put forward some interesting and persuasive criticisms of modernity; but there seemed to be an absence of the kind of thinking necessary to move forward from that critique, leaving Radical Orthodoxy in the end, as IT says, reactionary. Read more↴

Feminism thus stands in relation to marxism as marxism does to classical political economy: its final conclusion and ultimate critique.

I think this may be MacKinnon’s most exciting suggestion in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. The idea of a critique of politics which would also in part be a critique of marxism seems to be animating a lot of people right now: Žižek (so I hear); Wendy Brown’s work on sovereignty; or Enrique Dussell’s 20 Theses on Politics. Interesting, then, that MacKinnon was making the suggestion 20 years ago; unfortunately, though, this attempt to use feminism to move beyond marxism brings into particularly sharp relief the limitations of MacKinnon’s use of marxism. Read more↴