fragilekeys

Of the many sci-tech fictions to base their logic in “quantum mechanics,” the recent movie Source Code has to be one of the better attempts. Not at all because of their apt use of quantum mechanics as a theory, but rather because this movie shows us that what is possible can change. Said otherwise: there is not a “mechanics” to things that is already given. We do not live in a world where time passing is equal to the grinding of gears. Things are not determined. Or rather: through a creative thinking of what’s possible, we can get behind what was previously thought as possible, or determinable. We can “un-determine” the determined. We can reach back. Continue reading →

On the final pages of his book The Politics of Time, Peter Osborne says outright what he sees as the current cultural-political task: to “engage in the willed transformation of the social forms of subjectivity at their deepest structural levels,” to which he adds in parentheses, “Cultural politics is subject production.” Not accidentally, the production of social possibility is intimately linked to this production of subjectivities– and both of these are intimately linked to what he calls “the temporalization of historical time,” where “history is lived as the ongoing temporalization of existence.” I’d like to adequately portray the implications of this book, so I will quote here at length:

Radical politics depends upon the social production of possibility at the level of historical time. ‘Possibility’ is produced by and as the temporal structure of particular types of action; it is sustained by others, and eroded and undermined by others still. And it is produced in a variety of temporal forms.

And again:

How do the practices in which we engage structure and produce, enable or distort, different senses of time and possibility? What kinds of experience of history do they make possible or impede? Whose futures do they ensure? These are the questions to which a politics of time would attend, interrogating temporal structures about the possibilities they encode or foreclose, in specific temporal modes. Continue reading →

Excerpt from “Bread and Wine” by Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Michael Hamburger:

One thing is sure even now: at noon or just before midnight,
Whether it’s early or late, always a measure exists,
Common to all, though his own to each one is also allotted,
Each of us makes for the place, reaches the place that he can.
Well, then, may jubilant madness laugh at those who deride it,
When in hallowed Night poets are seized by its power; Continue reading →