John Steppling

“Modern civilization suffers from a lack of principles, and it suffers from it in every domain. By a monstrous anomaly, it is, alone, among the others, a civilization without principles, or with only negative ones, which amounts to the same thing. It is as if an organism with its head cut off went on living a life that was at the same time intense and disordered.” Rene Guenon (East and West) “The twentieth century saw the crystallization of a process of enormous significance, which has affected all that goes under the name “religious.” Secular society, without any need for proclamations, has become the ultimate repository for all meaning, almost as if its form corresponded to the … [Read more...]

"Because there has not yet been any progress in the world, there is progress in art; ‘il faut continuer’ [it must continue].” Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory) “Deadly monotony and indeed a total absence of content thus characterise the reign of the commodity. Gradually, an abstract, empty and unchanging form, a pure quantity without quality—money—is imposed on the world’s infinite and concrete diversity. The commodity and money are indifferent to the world, which for them is nothing more than raw material to be used. The very existence of a concrete world, with its laws and its opposition, is ultimately an obstacle to the accumulation of capital, which has no other goal than itself. In … [Read more...]

"Maybe there really wasn't an America. Maybe it was only Frank Capra." John Cassevetes (Prologue to Frank Capra's American Dream) "I knew a wise guy who used to make fun of my painting, but he didn’t like the Abstract-Expressionists either. He said they would be good painters if they could only keep the paint as good as it is in the can. And that’s what I tried to do. I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can." Frank Stella (Interview with Lucy Lippard, 1966) “And yet the digital river is tediously familiar.” Dominic Pettman (Infinite Distraction). Kirk Douglas died this week. I was in Los Angeles for the previous two weeks. When I heard Douglas had died, at the age … [Read more...]

"First, at an ideological level, any movement away from social explanations, particularly wider economic and political ones, moved the debate away from looking for causes and solutions, particularly revolutionary political ones, in that area. Economic and political solutions, it could be argued, were not relevant where the problem is biological and individual weakness.{ } Second, the biological approach elevated the status of doctors and chemists as authorities and experts and undermined the standing of sociologists, psychologists, journalists and others with a more social and less individual approach. At the same time, doctors and chemists were just what the rising industrial power of Big … [Read more...]

"The patterns of displacement through prison, thus, sever social ties at the same time that they connect distinct places. Society’s margin set in stone, prisons render invisible the mix of poverty, crime, and racial inequality that mark actual punishment and put in its place a compelling mythology of law and order." Volker Janssen ( Sunbelt Lock-Up: Where theSuburbs Met the Super-Max ) "That which had a political face and imagined itself political will unmask itself one day and reveal itself to be a religious movement." Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling) "Who is the Dalai Lama? And why does so much of the Italian left tend to accept his “sanctification” and not see his reactionary … [Read more...]

"Moore:I don’t think that superheroes or superhero comics of today are aimed at children anymore. Q. Who are they aimed at? Teenagers? Moore: I would say it’s considerably older. I think that the average comics reader these days is probably in their 30s, their 40s, their 50s." Alan Moore (Interview with David Marchese, Vulture, 2016) "It is difficult now to put yourself in the shoes of people who were making decisions at that time [in 1938]. Obviously the government of that time, out of fear that German power might lead to complete victory, preferred to ally itself with Hitler’s Germany rather than opposing it. As part of this alliance, there were impositions, including combating and … [Read more...]

"[There] is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior or Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; that the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else will be found. This can progress to be a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one’s time “has not yet come.” The one situation dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatsoever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, or entering space and time completely, and of being the one human being that one is." Marie Louise von Franz (Interviews with Susan Wagner ) "But the … [Read more...]

"He thought of men as fallen, and likely to fall further if they did not defend the walls of civility against the armies of Dulness. He believed (and this is a doctrine valuable to satire) that moral was reflected in linguistic decay; hence his fanatical interest in the inanities of polite conversation and in slang..." Frank Kermode on Jonathan Swift (New Statesman 2012) "...I also had noted that psychopaths have difficulty understanding the emotional content of words that add color and interest to communication. " Robert D. Hare (Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, 1999) "The death drive and the repetition that it installs in the subject follow a … [Read more...]