jane dark's sugarhigh!

map graphs & trees

remake remake

The Village Voice, current issue:

Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington's shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it's only natural that Hollywood has followed suit...

In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films)...

if you're scoring at home

Immanent critique is a practice entirely distinct from (New Critical) formalism's holding that poetic language should be considered as autonomous from the knowability of an author's intentions and from its conditions of production. Neither is it an Adornian concept.

Rooted in Hegelian Marxism, the practice is made explicit by Adorno and Horkeimer writing together in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The book is a critique of the Enlightenment using Enlightenment methods, which defines the concept of immanent critique: "the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs."

Immanent critique is, thus, in no way proposed as a way of understanding art, much less poetry, in particular. And it surely doesn't mean to understand art as art, as self-sustaining and autonomous object. A central goal of immanent critique is rather to uncover the internal contradictions of a philosophy or text objectively, rather than incidentally imposing the inherent contradictions of a pre-determined method or ideology. This uncovering is done exactly so as to reveal the impress of social conditions on the reputedly but not actually objective or autonomous philosophy or text (and specifically, as articulated by Marx, Lukacs, Adorno & Horkheimer et al., the contradictions and deformations of capitalist relations). "As pointed out by Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness, the essence of immanent critique is therefore dialectics." Which reminds us that it means to understand its object not as an aesthetic object but a historical process.

The frictionless, immediate, and unremarked slippage from immanent critique to intentional fallacy is a useful index of the problematic of enlisting partial concepts from one philosophical practice to bolster a quite different aesthetic claim. Indeed, to register this very slippage in recent discussions on the Poetry Foundation's blog might well be the beginning of an immanent critique of the ideologies objectified there.

restaurant etiquette

Until you order, they give you bread and water — to remind you that you are, until you have committed to pay, a prisoner.

parts of speech

You cannot spell

Marxist without Matrix,
Marlo without Omar,
Beijing without Being.

Cheney + Oprah = Chopra

China + France = Chance

failed state

Out of humble origins in a dry region: immense, inconceivable success, first national and then international. A sense that the revenue torrent will never slow, that the capital couldn't even be real. First celebration and then the makeover begins: a project that will break the family structure on the wheel of fantastical development. At enormous cost in cash and misery, the physiognomy is Westernized, whitened: a series of radical modifications that smack of mad egotism and self-loathing at once, leaving a bizarrerie that can be seen from space. The body becomes a surface for the inscription of an architectural fantastic, a horror designed to seduce an imagined audience while demonstrating the pharaonic power to make the unamakeable. Eventually: disgust, boredom, desuetude, collapse. At the 25th anniversary of Thriller, so stand things with Michael Jackson.

But so stand things as well in his adopted exile of Dubai. Or at least they're halfway down the road. Neverland (now under the auctioneer's gavel) might be seen as an intermediate phase between MJ's visage and the "World Islands"/Burj Dubai. The story of Michael Jackson suggests to us that the story of Dubai will end in the not-terribly-distant future as a failed state, descending to darkness and dismay while its architects parade about in quasi-military garb, on to the next last appointment.