Desks
Back to the Critical Future: Romania
Exceptionality rules every attempt to narrativize the history or culture of the states (or quasi-national entities) making up the Balkans. And in this respect, Romania is no exception. Romania is the “Balkan” […]
Landscape and Memory: A Review of The Word for World is Still Forest
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. […]
Freedom in the Wake of Autonomous Driving
President Barack Obama was the first guest in the seventh season of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which aired on December 30, 2015. The highly successful web series usually hosts […]
Ontology, Trump, and the Truth of Professional Wrestling: Part II – Competing Ontologies
In our previous post we showed how Christopher RayAlexander’s account of the poetics and politics of professional wrestling suffered from two lacunae: (1) an unwillingness to engage with manner in which the […]
Reporting From the Smoking Ruins of an Argument
If Hegel was correct in asserting in the Philosophy of Right that “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk,” [1] my previous argument as to the […]
Culturally Endangered: A Review of “Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species”
At a time when the destructiveness of human beings, as a crudely unified force of nature, is bulldozed across the digital and analog spheres of life on Earth, Imagining Extinction (2016) challenges […]
Ontology, Trump, and the Truth of Professional Wrestling: Part I – RayAlexander’s Argument
We actually started writing this essay on November 2, 2016. For the previous few weeks, we’d been discussing how our own work on the ontology of professional wrestling intersects with Christopher RayAlexander’s […]
The Other Colombia and the Urban Form
One of the principles that has from the beginning guided the “Urbanities” corner of Feedback is that the urban form is today found everywhere. This postulate seems relatively uncontroversial. Writing in 2013, […]
Political Slogans
LOVE TRUMPS HATE If this slogan claims to state a fact about the world, it is quite obviously false. If it offers a metaphysical principle, it is even falser: love and hate […]
Neoliberals, Neocons, and Neofascists Unite! Trumpism and the New Political Order
Much has rightly been made of how the US Election, like Brexit before it, represents a devastating rebuke of the status quo. Most famously, Michael Moore predicted the improbable vote “to be […]
The Industrial Fire of American Democracy
Today, the morning after the election of Donald Trump, the massive and abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, NY (just south of Buffalo) became engulfed in fire. I live in close proximity, in another […]
Remembrance of Things Past
The Jewish writer Edmond Amran El Maleh, also known in some academic circles in America as the James Joyce of Morocco, once wrote a novel with the symbolic title: Mille ans, un […]
A Triumph for the Dangerous Profession: New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2016
In the August 14, 2016 edition of its Magazine, devoted to the theme of “Fractured Lands,” the New York Times achieved new depth and scope in the coverage of perhaps the signal […]
Norbert’s Nightmares: On Zombie Wars, with a Nod to Cybernetics
There is no homeostasis whatsoever. We are in the business of cycles of booms and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in wars which everyone loses, which are so real […]
Tesla’s Model 3 as Ikon of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
March 31, 2016: Around the world people are queuing in front of Tesla stores in order to reserve a Model 3 for a $1000.00 US deposit—without knowing basic facts about the car, […]
Truth, Trump, and the Poetics of Professional Wrestling
Key terms. Work: 1) An event meant to perpetuate a story line. 2) To make someone believe something. Shoot: An event that presents a truth that seems to challenge or […]
Chernobyl, the place and the word
Following a brief delay due to the Soviet cover-up, Chernobyl has become —overnight and the world over—a symbol of tragedy, a disaster all the more fearsome because of its imperceptible and yet […]
An Unsolicited Donation to the Chernobyl Herbarium or: The Ruderal Poetics of Artemisia californica
The explosions that Michael Marder draws our attention to in Fragment 16 of The Chernobyl Herbarium (“Chernobyl, the place and the word”) are manifold. The site of a pogrom before it was […]
The Veil and the Jasmine Revolution
On a visit to New Orleans in 2012, I was amused to see on the restaurant menu of the hotel where I was staying, the name of a famous pastry called “Millefeuille.” […]
The Pharmacy of Plants
Janet Laurence’s artworks express her hopes for a life in union with nature. She cares for plants, and cures with plants, as they provide sustenance, shade and oxygen for other species. Laurence […]
An Anthropocene Observatory
I. The Geology of San Francisco During the summer of 2015 NASA made a startling announcement: Pluto has geology. Images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft indicated the presence of active geological processes […]
Algeria’s New Normal
Rare are Algerian filmmakers who have made it to the world stage without the issue of anti-colonial struggle as a background to their movie. Among this clique the names of novelist Assia […]