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jrab.bsky.social
jrab
@jrab.bsky.social
53 followers 110 following 160 posts
let there be a writing on the wall
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jrab.bsky.social
from a few days ago
The Matter of Capital Christopher Nealon
June 6, 2025 at 4:09 PM
jrab.bsky.social
Sartre Search for a Method and Giovanni Arrighi The Long Twentieth Century
May 30, 2025 at 1:34 AM
jrab.bsky.social
Finally got around to these—Andrea Brady on the arrangement poem in Fence 40 is so important
FENCE issues 40 and 41
April 15, 2025 at 6:52 AM
jrab.bsky.social
much worse than Foucault’s Pendulum, unfortunately—frustrating to write a postmodern pastiche of the detective novel in a medieval envelope about semiotic theory when I’d much prefer a Semiotic Novel (whatever that might look like)
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
April 12, 2025 at 6:41 AM
jrab.bsky.social
feat. this poem abt Benjamin hitting on Gretel Adorno lol
THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE It's too much, B writing to A's wife of her resemblance to Katharine Hepburn. We think of the pressed paper crossing the Straits of Lavender, dragging an entire boat behind it, racing October into the city before it comes to rest on a foyer table at the heart of the world of things: What's this, a love letter? Well—. Such a thing could turn a ring of Saturn into an iron hotel railing. Ten weeks later A to B (arctically): You there, Felizitas sends her finest, much blue has departed our celestial quarters, the conspiring waitresses downstairs are named Beatriz and Laura, think of it! Next year will be a joke.
April 7, 2025 at 5:19 AM
jrab.bsky.social
Energetic! and the New American Directness, when it appears, feels earned
Madonna anno domini by Joshua Clover
April 7, 2025 at 5:03 AM
jrab.bsky.social
Hard to muster enthusiasm about this but I gotta respect its totally synthetic approach. I probably have things to learn from anthropology
What Kinship Is And Is Not Marshall Sahlins
April 7, 2025 at 1:32 AM
jrab.bsky.social
April 2, 2025 at 5:06 AM
jrab.bsky.social
I think the emphasis on the commune as dual power *not* as enclave could be stronger here but overall excellent, especially to think abt the encampment, whose memory feels so alien now
The Commune Form by Kristin Ross
March 29, 2025 at 11:32 PM
jrab.bsky.social
I ❤️ ADORNO
Aesthetics and Politics (Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács)
March 29, 2025 at 7:37 AM
jrab.bsky.social
another 20 trillion to historical materialism series. gets better as it goes along / economic stuff gets more rigorous. Political horizon is nearish, for better or worse (solidarity rather than utopia, eg). Doubts abt the Prynne essay (might over-identify him with Adorno), but not prepared to say fs
Infinity for Marxists by Christopher Nealon
March 25, 2025 at 11:45 PM
jrab.bsky.social
As for the relationship of Marxism to such descriptions, it would surely be preferable not to substitute edifying sermons for them: that life is meaningless is not a proposition that need be inconsistent with Marxism, whose affirmation is the quite different one that History is meaningful, however absurd organic life may happen to be. The real issue is not the propositions of existentialism, but rather their charge of affect: in future societies people will still grow old and die, but the Pascalian wager of Marxism lies elsewhere, namely in the idea that death in a fragmented and individualized society is far more frightening and anxiety-laden than in a genuine community, in which dying is something that happens to the group more intensely than it happens to the individual subject. The hypothesis is that time will be no less structurally empty, or to use a current version, presence will be no less of a structural and ontological illusion, in a future communal social life, but rather that this particular "fundamental revelation of the nothingness of existence" will have lost its sharpness and pain and be of less consequence.
March 17, 2025 at 6:23 AM
jrab.bsky.social
🤍🤍🤍
The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson
March 17, 2025 at 6:19 AM
jrab.bsky.social
⛽️⛽️⛽️⛽️⛽️—answers so many questions I’ve felt unable to form via hard-headed attention to the usage of key terms
Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams
March 11, 2025 at 5:22 AM
jrab.bsky.social
But surely the most important achievement of any such exercise in discursive struggle is the rehabilitation of nationalization, and behind that, the replacement of the universally detested target of "big government" with the more stirring realities of collective commitment. It is the rehabilitation as well of that even more viscerally repugnant social entity called "bureaucracy," by way of a historical reminder of the glorious roles that social stratum has played in the great literacy campaigns, in the struggles for unionization, in the commitment of teachers to the displacement of superstition-ridden clerical schools in the France of the early Third Republic, or the self-sacrifice of socialist doctors in the first days of the national health services in Britain and in Canada—in short, some welcome renewal of an acknowledgement of the altruistic fervor and sacrifice such as we witness historically in the movements of social workers through the ages.
March 9, 2025 at 6:49 PM
jrab.bsky.social
Goest by Cole Swensen
March 4, 2025 at 2:32 AM
jrab.bsky.social
liked this rather more than I expected, and good to practice my Spanish
Sunstone by Octavio Paz trans. Eliot Weinberger
March 3, 2025 at 9:32 PM
jrab.bsky.social
Keston Sutherland is the greatest poet of the 21st century.
Keston Sutherland Poetical Works 1999-2015
March 3, 2025 at 7:58 PM
jrab.bsky.social
February 25, 2025 at 3:05 AM
jrab.bsky.social
epigraph to Neocosis
Neither death nor crime exists in the polymorphous world of the burlesque where everybody gives and receives blows at will, where cream cakes fly and where, in the midst of the general laughter, buildings fall down. In this world of pure gesticularity, which is also the world of cartoons (a substitute for lost slapstick), the protagonists are generally immortal ... violence is universal and without consequences, there is no guilt. Pascal Bonitzer, Le Champ aveugle (1982)
February 25, 2025 at 2:29 AM
jrab.bsky.social
Raymond Williams on Vico
Yet the whole question of the distinction between 'language' and 'reality' was eventually forced into consciousness, initially in a surprising way. Descartes, in reinforcing the distinction and making it more precise, and in demanding that the criterion of connection should be not metaphysical or conventional but grounded in scientific knowledge, provoked new questions by the very force of his scepticism about the old answers. It was in response to Descartes that Vico proposed his criterion that we can have full knowledge only of what we can ourselves make or do. In one decisive respect this response was reactionary. Since men have not in any obvious sense made the physical world, a powerful new conception of scientific knowledge was ruled out a priori and was, as before, reserved to God. Yet on the other hand, by insisting that we can understand society because we have made it, indeed that we understand it not abstractly but in the very process of making it, and that the activity of language is central in this process, Vico opened a whole new dimension.
February 25, 2025 at 12:49 AM
jrab.bsky.social
Keston Sutherland’s so good dog
February 23, 2025 at 2:56 AM
jrab.bsky.social
really funny to post this with this display name
February 17, 2025 at 12:04 AM
jrab.bsky.social
Ronald Johnson I see the light
Advance reader’s copy of The Valley of Many-Colored Grasses by Ronald Johnson
February 16, 2025 at 3:09 AM
jrab.bsky.social
And is it still possible to reconcile this kind of governing institu-tion, however benign, with the structure of the universal army as a new kind of non-state, a kind of network or exoskeleton of the social needs and functions: something somewhere between a universal democracy, a political party, and a bureaucracy in which everyone is his own bureaucrat, an organizational framework on the order of the kinship system in so-called primitive communism or tribal society? For the kinship system also had the function of assigning tasks in such a fashion that they were not to be seen as the arbitrary result of individual decisions nor grasped as privileges. In a sense we already live a radical split between base and super-structure, which we call public and private. It is always a delicate matter, in utopianizing, to distinguish between the utopian modification of reality and the symbolic replication of what already exists. Adorno liked to quote the Jewish proverb which describes AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 83 the world after the coming of Messiah: "The same as this one, only just slightly different." Perhaps, indeed, something like that would hold for a world from which money suddenly disappeared. Still, it would be worthwhile trying out more strenuous propos-als. I envisage a utopia of the double life, in which social reproduc-tion, albeit only involving a few hours a day, is performed in work clothes and in teams, a little like going for army reserve duty. These shifts could be vertical or horizontal, that is, a shift every morning or night, or else a concentrated period of several weeks followed by an equal stretch of what we used to call free time. Each of these temporal rhythms would no doubt generate a habitus, a kind of culture of its own, but what must be insisted on is that, whatever the labor, material or immaterial, it will in one way or another be collective and involve a distinct ontology, that of the collective project, collective life, the team as social being.
February 15, 2025 at 7:42 AM