John Steppling

"Challenged, the coherence of myth became the myth of coherence. Magnified by history, the incoherence of the spectacle turns into the spectacle of incoherence (eg, pop art, a contemporary form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the contemporary putrefaction of consumption). The poverty of 'the drama' as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonization of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatize everyday behaviour. Lived experience is poured into the moulds of roles. The job of perfecting roles has been turned over to experts." Raoul Vaneigem "...let’s assume that there is a … [Read more...]

"Militarism is closely intertwined with the interests of U.S. capital. U.S. leaders are not misguided when they impose sanctions against some poor nation or launch a war. As dreadful as the consequences may be for the victims, such aggressive measures have been remarkably effective in achieving the aims of Western elites: control over the labor, resources and markets of other nations. No challenge to the political orthodoxy of the free market can be tolerated and no corner of the globe can be allowed to remain free of from plunder and exploitation by private interests." Greg Elich "The US’s psychopathology of strength, dominance, hatred of difference, driving America into a cul-de-sac of … [Read more...]

"But after all, it is perhaps to this inhuman condition, to this inescapable arrangement that we owe our nostalgia for a civilization that attempts to venture elsewhere than into the realm of the measurable” Jean Genet "The thinking that aesthetic presentation can open up for us is thus not meant to explain and, by extension, to explain out of existence, what in fact remains irreducible, singular, and resistant within the work. Rather, learning to think aesthetically, to think with and through the work of art, means learning to see what exactly the enigma or riddle is. Thinking means remaining open to what threatens to make thinking impossible." Gerhard Richter There was a debate … [Read more...]

"Autistic barriers are erected in order to avoid the pain linked to the traumatic awareness of the gap between self and object. They would appear to involve an overly-narcissistic relationship between the infant and one or other of the parents, a relationship based on the illusion of continuity." Prof. Didier Houzel "Frances Tustin's (1986) description of autistic barriers took this a step further. She showed that the autistic manoeuvres which are triggered in order to counter the experience of the intolerable gap between self and other not only highlight the traumatic trace of primitive experiences that have not been transformed but also create an obstacle to any new attempt at … [Read more...]

"This house is far away, it is lost, we inhabit it no more; we are, alas, certain of inhabiting it never again. It is however, more than a memory. It is a house of dreams, our oneiric house." Gaston Bachelard "Important works of art are the ones that aim for an extreme; they are destroyed in the process and their broken outlines survive as ciphers of a supreme, unnameable truth." Adorno, Sacred Fragment, Schoenberg's Moses and Aron I want to write about aesthetics more, because I think often there is such a huge neglected political aspect to this topic, and because far more than pure political science, or left dissident criticism, hardly anything is really written about it. When I … [Read more...]

"You have to hand it to them. The United States media machine is unequaled at producing and disseminating misinformation. It begins in the bowels of the State Department or White House or Pentagon and is filtered out through the government’s front organizations, otherwise known as Mainstream Media (MSM). In 2014 the U.S. has succeeded in demonizing Vladimir Putin and Russia, precipitating a New Cold War that may yet become a hot one. The evil empire is back. The White House has made proficient use of mass media propaganda to get the job done. First, they’ve controlled the narrative. This is critical for two reasons: one, because it permits the White House to sweep the February coup in Kiev … [Read more...]

"We live in an age in which violence and the logic of disposability mutually reinforce each other. For example, unarmed and with his hands raised, Michael Brown was not only shot by a white policeman, but his body was also left in the street for four hours, a reminder of the same treatment given to the low income inhabitants of Katrina whose bodies, rendered worthless and underserving of compassion, were also left in the streets after the hurricane swept through New Orleans. The disposable are the new living dead, invisible, and relegated to zones of terminal exclusion and impoverishment. The disposable are the unknowable, invisible, and powerless marginalized by class and race and forced … [Read more...]

"Institutionally, social services developed out of the bourgeoisie's need to stabilize the forces of capitalism and white supremacy. US industrial capitalism's tendency to consolidate and monopolize threatened to undo the white supremacist system of African chattel bondage. The Homestead Act of 1862 was in a way a "social service" legislated in response to the displacement of white farmers and the inability of industrial capital to provide full employment to the white proletariat. This Act gave government subsidies and land allotments to White Americans and European immigrants, provided they settle West of the Mississippi river. To pave way for White settlement, the US government brutally … [Read more...]