Capitalist Dogs II: Or, What Habit Makes in Smith and Marx

I remember a friend in graduate school saying that our task, at least when it came to writing dissertations, was to write something that a database could not produce. He was a bit ahead of the curve, this was sometime around the late nineties early two thousands. Databases could not write books then, but they are getting closer to it. Or, more to the point, a particular kind of academic monograph, the sort the traces the development of a concept in a single author oeuvre or a comparison of two thinkers, seems to be increasingly the kind of thing that a machine could write. That is the bad news. The good news, is that such monographs seemed useful to write, but never that fun to read in the first place. What if we could leave such books to the machines that generate them and consume them. What kind of writing should we do in the age of (seemingly) intelligent machines?

Just a Dog: Immediacy and Mediation at the Movies

Watching Superman at the drive-in with Bento (below)

I took my dog to the drive-in, something he loves, and this got me thinking about the status of dogs in contemporary films. James Gunn's Superman is, among many things, the first live action film to depict Superman's dog Krypto. The dog features prominently in the film, in its advertisements, and in its afterlife in memes and. jokes online. 

Master and Commander: Or, Must Love Dogs II

 

Commander 

In undergrad I got really into theory, all of it, reading Baudrillard, Deleuze, Debord, Foucault, etc., most definitely etc, all the time. My theory fascination was a byproduct of reading zines and little semiotextes, the more polemical, the more outlandish its claims, the more I loved it. One little book I particularly loved was First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot by Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi. It is an odd little book, a reading of the Reagan/Bush years framed as much by the legalist philosopher Shang Yang's The Book of Lord Shang as it is by the expected references to Deleuze and Guattari. (Brian Massumi of course translated A Thousand Plateaus). That odd idiosyncratic nature is precisely what I loved about it. I dreamt of writing something similar, not on Reagan and legalism but something which brought together a variety of disparate references to think through a specific problem. I guess my book which talks about Spinoza and Marx along with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, might be an attempt to realize that wish.