Pseudo-naturalized ethnico-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which fits global capitalism: in our age of 'post-politics', when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining legitimate source of conflict is cultural (ethnic, religious) tension. Today's rise of 'irrational' violence should therefore be conceived as strictly correlative to the depoliticization of our societies, that is, to the disappearance of the proper political dimension, its translation into different levels of 'administration' of social affairs: violence is accounted for in terms of social interest, and so on, and the unaccountable remainder cannot but appear to be 'irrational'... The proper Hegelian dialectic reversal is crucial here: what looks at first like the multitude of 'remainders of the past' which should be gradually overcome with the growth of a tolerant multiculturalist liberal order is all of a sudden, in a flash of insight, perceived as this liberal order's very mode of existence - in short, teleological temporal sucession is unmasked as structural contemporaneity. (In exactly the same way, what, in the realm of 'really existing socialism', looked like petty-bourgeois 'remainders of the past', that eternal excuse for all the failures of socialist regimes, was the inherent product of the regime itself.)
Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp 133-2
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Architecture and Ritual
It is not architecture’s role to fabricate ritual - it can however lend existing ritual a higher degree of coherence, framing it in relation to its often obscured cultural and psychological context.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
clinton smackdown on weeny fox news guy
ok, i'm not in any way trying to make this a political blog, but this is just too damn funny...
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