How does art stand in relation to the tradition and history which preceded it? How is the meaning of history made, un-made, or re-made? It is not that "history is written by the victors." No, the proper cliché to mention here is the moment in the classic adventure...
Random Convolutes
Art, Poetry, the Imagination and the Future
Is poetry a message in a bottle? A message from the future? Does it unearth the things we know, but cannot yet say? “In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we...
Slavoj Žižek on wrapping your head around Hegel
Standard Žižek. Vulgar jokes combined with an encouragement to not settle for your initial, first-glance interpretation. Also, the idea that Hegel somehow thought that history's over with him, that he comes at the end. It's -- I mean, it's empirically not true....
Žižek, the Coen Bros., and C.S. Peirce on the semiotic reality of math formulas
How do you represent what can't be represented? (Painfully inadequate metaphors, duh.) Then, the Symbolic Real. It's simply, for example, scientific discourse, scientific formulas, like quantum physics. Why is this Real? For a simple reason: the minimum definition of...
On fonts, mind control, contexts
Fonts control our minds. Everyone knows that. I feel like Roland Barthes' Mythologies really needs a chapter on The New Yorker's font and its connotations/myth. Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or...