First, a word about what these thoughts, and we, are not. We write not as archivists, historians, or even critics of what has been called the Occupy Movement, nor for that matter as particularly historicizing readers of Walt Whitman’s … Continue reading “Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st Century Occupations”
Marcia D. works at a suicide prevention center in California. Her job is emotionally draining and requires a great deal of dedication. As with other social workers, Marcia probably got involved in such work because of her commitment to … Continue reading “Burnout, Reaganomics, and the Waning of Empire”
In perhaps the jauntiest Broadway ditty ever written to punctuate that precious moment before everything falls apart — “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” from Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot (1960) — King Arthur and Guinevere, speculate about the amusements … Continue reading “Downton Abbey and the Fantasy of Structured Idleness”
“What does Occupy Wall Street want?” This anxious media meme was yoked to the increase of Occupy protests in 2011. Against the backdrop of other, more angry, characterizations of the Occupy protestors as deservedly unemployed, lazy, or overinvested[1] in idealistic … Continue reading “"Preferring Not To" in the Age of Occupy”
“What if they say I’m no good?” Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) asks his girlfriend Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells) during an early scene from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future. “What if they say, ‘Get outta here kid, … Continue reading “Back to the Future and the Politics of Potential”
As expected, twenty cigarettes are consumed in James Benning’s latest experimental feature, 20 Cigarettes (2011). In a series of portraits that borrow from (as Benning has explained in interviews) but also depart from Andy Warhol’s iconic Screen Tests, the … Continue reading “Smoke Break”
If the events of history, as Karl Marx once famously argued, happen first as tragedy and recur as re-enacted farce, the reoccurrence of any number of harbingers of doom typical of the last great global recession of the 1970s … Continue reading “Retromania, the Canon, the Refusal to Work and the Present: The Crassical Connection”
The concept of a “jobless recovery” offers just one more example of the many ways that work is not working as a system of income allocation, pathway to individual achievement, or mode of social belonging. And yet, the only … Continue reading “Imagining Non-Work”
Bishnupriya Ghosh’s new book Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular is a thorough but at times confounding account of the Icon in our media-saturated global age. In her book, Ghosh treats dominant and popular representations of three women — Mother … Continue reading “On Icons and Their Critics”
Teaching “Sex in Public” (1998) a few months ago while in the middle of reading Cruel Optimism, I was struck anew by the moment when Berlant and Warner confront Biddy Martin’s critique of an aversion to the ordinary in … Continue reading “On Cruel Optimism”
In 1969 Pittsburgh Courier cartoonist Sam Milai published a political cartoon, “September Morn,” a riff on the Paul Chabas painting that depicts a young woman bathing nude. The erotic painting positions the viewer as voyeur who looks on her … Continue reading “Other People's Precarity”
Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism has the uncanny quality of illuminating for readers what we believe we already knew. Her renderings of the affective quality of everyday life at the center of a declining US American empire, offered to us … Continue reading “Optimistic Cruelty”
The subject of the combover stands in front of the mirror just so, to appear as a person with a full head (of hair/ideas of the world). Harsh lighting, back views, nothing inconvenient is bearable in order for the … Continue reading “on (not) mentoring”
Cruel optimism is the provocative concept Lauren Berlant has given to a phenomenon endemic to the present political and affective moment: the holding up of hope as a means of stifling dissent, forestalling change, and ultimately rendering any array of … Continue reading “Cruel Optimism for the Neurologically Queer”
Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism risks thinking the utopian in ways that are both bold and revelatory. My reflections on Berlant’s already influential book open with me taking the liberty of positioning Berlant’s work alongside my own writing on utopia. … Continue reading “Living the Wrong Life Otherwise”
