John Steppling

“Tarrou agreed he’d predicted a disaster, but reminded him that the event predicted by him was an earthquake. To which the old fellow replied: “Ah, if only it had been an earthquake! A good bad shock, and there you are! You count the dead and the living, and that’s the end of it.” Albert Camus (The Plague) "The Trump presidency can be understood in its totality through an examination of the administration’s cosmetic surgeries." Stan Goff (Plastic Surgery Politics) "I have killed lots of Arabs in my life and there is nothing wrong with that." Naftali Bennett (Speech to Knesset, 2015) “There were eight of us in the cell, and all of us in a state of panic and paranoia. There was … [Read more...]

"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.” Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation) “The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended.” Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory "But a word in a poem is transformed, its meaning made precise and unique, by its placing in relation to the words around it: in the same way a shot in a film is given its meaning by its context, and each shot modifies the meaning of the previous one … [Read more...]

"...an analysis of the simple surface manifestations of an epoch can contribute more to determining its place in the historical process than judgments of the epoch about itself." Sigfried Krakaur (The Mass Ornament) "The owner of labor-power is mortal." Karl Marx (Capital) "The new concern with self involved a new experience of self. The new form of the experience of the self is to be seen in the first and second century when introspection becomes more and more detailed. A relation developed between writing and vigilance." Michel Foucault (Technologies of the Self) I have been thinking lately about 'intelligence'. About what that word means. If you asked me the most 'intelligent' … [Read more...]

"The sun has never seen any shadow.” Leonardo Da Vinci (Notebooks) "...history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them." Vico (The New Science) "History begins with bestial giants." Vico (The New Science) "Though the things of Nature are given in common, man (by being master of himself and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property." John Locke (Two Treatises of Civil Government) There are several seemingly disparate points I want to connect here. For some reason I feel they have emerged into the zeitgeist, as it were, together over the last few months. One has … [Read more...]

"300 of the dead in Boot Hill died violently 200 by guns, over 50 by knives some were pushed under trains—a popular and overlooked form of murder in the west. Some from brain haemorrhages resulting from bar fights at least 10 killed in barbed wire. In Boot Hill there are only 2 graves that belong to women and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard.” Michael Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid) “When I was a child, a peculiar question occurred to me: how do we picture the world as it existed before consciousness evolved? There was such a world, of course, but how do you picture it – the world as it was before picturing things became possible?” Mark Solms (The … [Read more...]

"In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,” Postman wrote. “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” At the time, the average American household watched more than seven hours of television every day, a number that would rise to nearly nine hours by 2010." Rose Horowitch (The End of Reading is Here, The Atlantic 2026) "Evil denies the reality of death and all human … [Read more...]

"The French Revolution began as the result of an overall crisis of society, as we shall see. Among other factors inherent to the crisis of 1789, was the fact that the existing social and political order had become a barrier to the further accumulation of profit." Henry Heller (The Bourgeois Revolution in France) "The question is not how did we get here but what is the “here” at which we have arrived." Johanna Drucker (Recognizing Complicity, LARB 2015) “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” G.W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics) "Think, pig! (Pozzo jerks the rope. Lucky looks at Pozzo.) Think, pig! " Samuel Beckett (Waiting for … [Read more...]

"Psychoanalysis, originally a revolutionary theory of sex and of the psychology of the unconscious, began to adapt itself, insofar as the theory of sex was concerned, to the authoritarian conditions of existence, thus becoming acceptable to a reactionary society." Wilhelm Reich (introduction to The Invasion of Compulsive Sex-Morality) "The portrait serves to preserve the physical likeness of the person for the afterlife. In Egypt, the entire body is preserved for the other world by embalming it, and the mummy, in turn, carries a panel portrait of the person, which is placed on top of the face." Hans Belting (Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art ) "Night … [Read more...]