Archive for the ‘ cultural criticism ’ Category
Following an unwritten rule critics must take into account their position vis a vis the cultural objects they write about. Today this often means telling a story about a personal interaction with it. “When I first read Huck Fin…” “In Rome I saw Titian’s portrait of…” The first person pronoun is the minimum of reflection [ READ MORE ]
The enthusiast is carried away by an unrealizabe ideal; the fanatic by that which is most real, and yet does not yet seem real, since it remains a fragment — unintegrated into the world as the seamless context of meaning. The extreme intention of the enthusiast is political and utopian: he seeks to realize the [ READ MORE ]
The Gilmour Girls is the Hesiod of modern television. It is all about genealogy: the generations have proliferated with a wonton, incestuous power. The present moment barely exists in itself, but is inscribed into the history of birth: a novelty that has already been written over by what it has become. New children are born, [ READ MORE ]
The self-serving character of this appropriation should not be underestimated. Third culture, a name given to a principle for a new relationship between the human and the natural sciences. A new principle, implicitly to be compared to an old principle, that, they argue, never worked very well, ergo the division between the two disciplines that [ READ MORE ]
The traditional role of the game, once deprived of a pedagogic, let alone sacral, function, has been to waste time. Having to gamble is the fate imposed on those who do not labor: when all time is measured as labor time, then true leisure (rather than the recreation time of the laborer) is possible only [ READ MORE ]
Agamben wrote of the doctor who, terminally ill with leukemia, turns his body into a laboratory. This marks a certain extreme point in the production of the biopolitical body. But what are we to make of the plastic surgeons who operates on the mere surface of bodies, and even their own — or, rather, who [ READ MORE ]
The theme of all television is the tenuous relation of the public and private. Every essential genre of television involves a different relation to liminality: to the threshold that first constitutes the private and public through their reciprocal relations. In police and medical dramas, the gesture is always the same: violation. And the most important [ READ MORE ]
If the psychic has suddenly become such an important television personality, it is not only because of the rise of a vague “new age” spirituality. Nor is it that the psychic is essentially, radically telegenic: that the psychic’s vision is nothing but a form of tele-vision, and thus coincides perfectly with the medium that would [ READ MORE ]
Most celebrities are relatively simple. If the location of celebrity of is the triune relationship between the divine, the heroic, and the universal, the ordinary celebrity involves a simple connection with an aspect of this relationship. We, in turn, connect with the celebrity through this connection. The celebrity type involves a certain conflation of an [ READ MORE ]
One way in which religion is more rational than science. It says simply “because” and offers no further reasons for submitting to its code. The arbitrariness of the content of God’s will coincides with a historical view. These habits, customs, names, and — even — reasons have no other ground than the demand to submit [ READ MORE ]
Watching an American detective show with Korean subtitles, set in the Korea town of Las Vegas, I became witness to a most remarkable sleight of hand: the name 박 (Pak), anglicized into “Park,” became “바크” (pak’ŭ). A slight difference shatters the propriety of the proper name: a most remarkable property theft. Having passed through [ READ MORE ]
If the Virgilian gesture of constituting imperial time as remembered memory is now only possible through the uncanny synthesis of archetypal (which is to say originally productive, imaginary) memory and fantasy, it is above all because the memory had been transformed into pure imagination. The memory of memory gave way to the imagination of imagination. [ READ MORE ]
1.The logic of truth, and the even the logic of writing, is a special case of the logic of celebricity. 2.Truth is manifest appearance before it is correspondence, and it is the play of concealment and disclosure before it is manifest appearance. Uprooted from the modalities of celebricity that together constitute a constellation of differentia, [ READ MORE ]
A while ago we sent out the following notice (we’re going public) calling on all to submit to anonymity. No one answered for quite some time. But finally one brave soul has come out of the woodwork: the young H. von Teufelstier (we give his name only because we are almost sure it is fake), who [ READ MORE ]
Just a short note, inspired only by the image from the last post (the first image, which was deleted, but perhaps we should let this deletion stand — thinking needs its gaps): it is strange how a generation that grew of age with Star Wars, for whom Hitler is but a mask of Darth Vadar, has [ READ MORE ]
Althusser speaks of the reproduction of the relations of production, and of the ideology that ultimately supports these relations. But what about the relations of consumption? Perhaps consumption has its own ideology. The ideology of production involves the theological relation between the big Subject and the little subject. The ideology of consumption, in contrast, [ READ MORE ]
1.The magazine rack is the only place left where the entire world is laid bare before one’s eyes. 2.An order operates that is at once epistemological, ontological, sociological, political, temporal, geographic, linguistic, pornographic: here the foreign magazines are stashed away… over there serious magazines about politics… up on this rack magazines for music performers, [ READ MORE ]
In a recent piece for the New York Times, Stanley Fish lists all the cars he has owned in his long and illustrious life: “By the time I got out of High School, I had moved up first to a 1953 Chevy Bel-Air convertible (turquoise and white) and then to a 1955 MG TF 1500, [ READ MORE ]
I read this first in one local newspaper, then another. The author is Choe Sang-Hun — the first Korean to win a Pulitzer prize. I had many things to say about it, but I erased my words. Benjamin’s Erzähler came to mind. One should not try to explain everything: A homeless South Korean man died [ READ MORE ]
I quote this title not in order to satirize it, but in order to explain an error of excess that this blog is prone to, i am, you are, we are prone to, in a bid for celebrity through anonymity. While remaining nameless it is far too easy to call toward a mysterious to-come and, [ READ MORE ]
An abysmal lecture on national branding (no surprise, of course, that a business professor would be incapable of seeing into the strangeness of a gesture that — a true Schlegelian witticism — has the sovereign nation-state inflict upon itself a violence once reserved for the body of cattle and slaves) reminds me, once again, of [ READ MORE ]
For those who were in Seoul in the Spring and Summer of 2008, and who experienced first hand the massive rallies that followed the government’s decision to lift the import ban on American beef, perhaps the most strange, unsettling thing about the looming pandemic is the silence of the people. Of course, there is nothing surprising in this: one [ READ MORE ]
