Becoming Spider-Man: Deleuze and the Superhero Film

In the end of Cinema, Volume One: The Movement Image writes the following about the demise of the movement image:

Certainly people continue to make [movement image] films: the greatest commercial successes always take that route, but the soul of cinema no longer does. The soul of the cinema demands increasing thought even if thought begins by undoing the systems of actions, perceptions, and affections on which the cinema had fed up to that point. We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it—no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially.

It seems to me that Deleuze's picture of the movement image lingering on might be one way to make sense of the superhero film.

You Will Not Replace Us: On Jordan Peele's Latest

Us is a strange title for a horror film. "Them" and "It" are often the go to pronouns for horror, suggesting otherness and the unknown. In contrast to this "us" is often seen as the familiar, that which is generally threatened by some unknown "it" or "them." "Us" suggests unity not division, familiarity rather than fear, and would in general seem a more fitting title for a sappy romance than a horror movie. That Jordan Peele uses this title for his film suggests how uncanny it is, and how much the divisions between us and them are going to come under scrutiny. Jordan Peele's first film, Get Out hinged on the terror of the realization that one could be betrayed by one's most intimate relationships. While Us works with very different subtexts and cultural anxieties it takes that basic uncanny sense of the foreignness and hostility of what is most familiar to new and more twisted levels. 

The Devil is in the Details: Twilight Zone's Demonology of Capital

It is impossible to overstate how much a fan I was of The Twilight Zone.  I watched every episode of the old show, it was the reason that I had a small black and white TV in my bedroom growing up; subscribed to the magazine, a magazine which covered science fiction and published original short stories; and watched the movie and reboot. 

Boiling Frogbooks: Education's Past and Future

Portrait of the author as a Hampshire Student

I graduated from Hampshire College. Not only that, but I credit Hampshire for much of my early education. It is for this reason that I have followed the news about its current troubles very closely. Hampshire's troubles, and the possibility that the college could close, feel not just like the future being cancelled but the present as well. It is like watching one's very own condition of possibility disappear. I felt the same way about the elimination of the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program at Binghamton University. It is like that scene in Looper where the character in the future is literally dissected by the past. 

Class Monsters, Or Monsters of Class: Simone Weil's Contribution to a Bestiary of the Present

Simone Weil's "Sketch of Contemporary Social Life" is a text that seems oddly prescient at every turn, making Weil appear to be a seer as much as the saint she is often made out to be. There are references to what later generations would call "the culture industry," "financialization," and even the  theories that dominant contemporary politics. 

Working Alone in America: On Lodge 49

The rise of "prestige television" could also be told as a story of the decline of the American dream. From Tony Soprano's nagging suspicion that "The best is over" to Frank Sobotka's assertion on The Wire that "We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket," so called prestige TV has been as much about the growing awareness of industrial decline as it has been sustained by complex narratives and characterization. Like a kind of Borgesian fable, American television has improved as the thing that it was about, daily life of the middle class, has unraveled. When nuclear families do appear they are just as likely to be fronts for Soviet spies or held together by lies and brutality. No show has taken this decline more literally than Lodge 49. At one point a character even utters the line "post-industrial capitalism."

Welcome to Bizarro World: Part One

Lately, I have been thinking of Bizarro World. This is odd since I never really read many Superman comics growing up. I was mostly into Marvel comics. What I know of Bizarro world comes mainly from watching cartoons and the general cultural osmosis, despite being an obscure comic book character Bizarro even made it onto Seinfeld. What has provoked me into thinking about it is not the cultural history of the term, but its contemporary relevance. We seem to be living in an inverted world of sorts: capitalists call themselves workers, white supremacists claim to be an oppressed minority, and so on. Everything seems upside down and backwards. 

Its Competition All the Way Down: On the Spontaneous Anthropology of Contemporary Capitalism

As much as people love to cite that ubiquitous remark by Fredric Jameson about the end of the world and the end of capitalism. You know the one. There is another, less discussed line, that covers the same terrain of ideological struggle and the limits of the imagination that I prefer. It is, “The market is in human nature’ is the proposition that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time.”   

Lensgrinding: Spinoza on Work

With all of the attention on Spinoza by Marxists is is surprising how little is written about Spinoza and work. Spinoza has provided theories of ideology, of alienation, and even of the relation between forces and relations of production, it is surprising that few have remarked on what Spinoza actually says about labor or work. This is perhaps due to the fact that it would appear that there is little there, Spinoza's interests were elsewhere. There are only a few references to work in Spinoza, but I would argue that they are significant. 

Transvaluation of Values: On Lordon's La Condition Anarchique

A glimpse of the cover, title, and timing of Lordon's latest book, La Condition Anarchique might lead one to suspect that the anarchic condition it refers to has something to do with financial crises. Which goes to reaffirm what they say about books and covers. The anarchic condition that Lordon is writing about not only has nothing to do with anarchism, nor with some kind of chaos, but with the very existence of values and norms.