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Showing posts from January, 2025

The Fascist Playbook IX: Dissonance or what 'One Battle After Another' Misses that Pynchon gets

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    There is perhaps a strange similarity between Antigone and the fate of the revolutionaries in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), a novel which recently acquired a second life through Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Both works are concerned with the extraordinary difficulty of distinguishing a revolutionary subject from the conditions through which he or she becomes its opposite.  Vineland begins in California in 1984, where a certain Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie, must perform an annual act of public insanity in order to continue receiving disability benefits. This year he has decided to wear a woman's dress and attack a bar with a chainsaw, a performance which must be witnessed by television cameras if he is to continue being recognised by the welfare state as a lunatic. Unfortunately, the bar has been gentrified, the loggers have developed expensive tastes and his entire performance has been moved by somebody else to another location. Even ...

And why a qualitative Sociology?

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 ' Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days .' - A Parable by Kafka ' Modern thought is advancing towards that region where man's Other must become the same as himself ' - A preface to transgression, Foucault The yearning for reason as an instantaneous gratification of the intellect is far more bizarre than the methodical deconstruction of it. Without making much ado about the term ...

Recycling Victor Turner's Liminality: Finding Sociology under Discourse

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“The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.” Bataille on love- Story of the eye It is curious to read Victor Turner's presentation of 'liminality' in his essay on communitas. Curious and funny because it takes on the tone rather of a television screen you happen to be watching through a window in a house adjacent to yours, too far away to hear the sound. Dance without the music: absurd. Perhaps this is the way in which Turner himself is liminal. He even talks about the beat generation with all the charm of an ageing old man, eager to assure his young, eager-to-be-old audience, which side of the liminal he falls on, which is the general tone of so much of early Social Anthropology, barring perhaps Pritchard, who at the very least is weird. We are never given a sense of the performative linguistic dimension of liminlaity: how does it feel. One can still ...