𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗫𝗜𝗦đť—
My article, published in Cosmonaut magazine, explains why human labour, and human labour alone, is the cause of profit.
𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗫𝗜𝗦đť—
My article, published in Cosmonaut magazine, explains why human labour, and human labour alone, is the cause of profit.
Have you ever played that game where everyone tries to keep a balloon in the air as long as possible?
Lots of people are discussing the lack of a political agenda in neoliberalism’s policies based on this post by Doug Henwood: Crooked Timber (I, II), Will Wilkinson, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, The American Scene, Jacobin (I, II), Arin Dube, Brad Delong, JW Mason/Pitkin with good comments (I, II), Corey Robin, Elias IsQuith at LoEG, and I’m sure a ton more.
Most of the posts examine the lack of a unified theory of politics in neoliberalism’s current policy focus. I want to focus on a critique of neoliberalism’s higher-level policy agenda from a liberal point of view. I’m not much of a politics thinker, so I’ll leave it to others to tease out the…
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By ann summers
Here are some examples of cultural substitution in the built environment that articulate multiple meanings and identify an axis or axes of more than geodetic importance. Every historical site is both monumental and documentary and connected by a visible, invisible and visual logic appropriate to the accumulated cultural production and reproduction in and on those sited places. Their axes are found in the historical logic of spaces as one interprets both a structural replacement/displacement and a substitution/transference of modern power. Every place has not only its sense, but its agency and structure, constructed and deconstructed by its history.
“In social terms, a bourgeois space and cosmopolitan society has a new layer of urban order and meaning imposed – with a nationalist ideology and modern state-building – that is not only visual and symbolic, but also real and instrumental.”
Whether facadism or roof-ism,  It…
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(2015) Artist Michael Heizer, in the Nevada desert for 43 years, returns to New York City with a pair of $2 million rocks
Dwan Gallery donated “Double Negative” to the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, in the eighties, and Heizer hasn’t visited it for years. The degradation there depresses him: its clean, deep cuts have filled with boulders calved from the sides. Though he originally intended the piece to respond to time and ultimately be reclaimed by geologic processes, at some point he changed his mind, and now hopes to find the money to restore it. Govan thinks that this reversal came partly because Smithson championed the principle of entropy, and Heizer wanted nothing to do…
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One of the most attractive, problematic, and astonishing features of Badiou’s ontology is his strictly extensional understanding of sets or multiplicities. A set is not defined by its members sharing a common predicate or quality, nor by the relations among members of the set. Rather, a set is defined strictly by its extension or the members that belong to that set. From the standpoint of 20th Century French and German Continental philosophy, this thesis cannot but be a heresy, for the predominant trend in Continental thought has been a relational conception of entities. Whether we are speaking of language as a diacritical set of negative oppositions as defended by the structuralists and the post-structuralists, or Heidegger’s being-in-the-world where entities, the ready-to-hand, are defined by the relational networks to which they belong, the predominant trend has been to treat beings as bundles of relations such that the entity is nothing apart…
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By ann summers
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who watches the watchers) Juvenal
Recently, a US rancher with unfortunate racist and fascist tendencies came to the attention of US media with unfortunate consequences but an interesting discourse path. I won’t repeat those issues here except to note that the concerns on which this dispute hinged were issues of common-pool resources. Those are publicly owned assets used by that rancher under a contractual agreement to pay for those property rights to the tune of $1 million.
In this case the rancher refused on anachronistic ideological grounds to pay those fees with the contradictory premise that his citizenship beliefs were historically special and autonomously sovereign and therefore exempt from the obligations to his original contract. The Rancher was first lionized by conservative media as a hero resisting an “overreaching” oppressive federal state by privileging the authority of the local state but at…
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This site will occasionally feature some musings about my current research and include monographs as well as serve to collect the literature related to this topic