Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

Ex Machina helps make visible the effects of the technologically enabled economy that led to the historical convergence of theories of art and action that today appear as the stuff of common sense. The problem the movie presents is less about empathy for the other than it is about a society structured by an economy wherein the concept of intention no longer obtains. Ex Machina thus prompts viewers to consider the political significance of creating and interpreting a work of art today.

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

From the 1994 Crime Act through to the re-election of Donald Trump, liberal thought shapers and policymakers have tended to draw upon a moral righteousness that uncouples racial disparities from the material contexts that engender them, thereby obscuring neoliberalism’s inability to deliver for poor and working-class Americans—blacks being overrepresented among them. As the Trump administration aggressively moves to dismantle the gains that African Americans and other non-whites have made since the Civil Rights Movement if not Reconstruction, progressives should take seriously the counterproductive implications of a righteous, groupist social justice discourse that mistakes sermonizing for analysis while treating “races” as epigenetic identities (rather than ascriptive categories) with discrete interests.

Marxism and the Good Picture of Intention

No class analysis, no matter how precise or exhaustive, will provide the answers of the kind Chibber requires, and to invoke causal factors other than class only delays the issue, as no collection of causal accounts will ever account for all of the existing meanings because interpretation cannot be reduced to a causal account and meaning cannot be reduced to a sum of the work’s causes. Insofar as intention is not simply contained in the mind, no account of how it came to be may replace the interpretation of a meaningful totality of which it is part.

Revisiting Race, Politics, and Culture: A Symposium

Scholarship and popular memory has far too often taken on the role of hagiography or sought a pure and true 1960s spirit, “uncaptured” by elites and reflective of real, authentic radicalism. Rather than being critically analyzed as key nodes of causation in the defeat of an effective egalitarian politics and the subsequent turn toward reaction—as the contributors to Race, Politics, and Culture do, befitting the seriousness with which they took their charge as both scholars and political actors—the worst tendencies of sixties-era social movements are now almost religiously worshipped in nominally left organizing and thought.

The Man Who Would Be King: Method in Trump’s Madness, Contradictions in Trump’s Method

Trump can meet the expectations of those looking for a hard line on immigration and can grant his corporate backers the tax cuts and deregulation they greedily seek. But it is the economy that will be decisive for his populist base, and on this measure, Trump is very unlikely to succeed. As for the business elite, they have always assumed Trump was not so mad as to start a tariff war that risked undermining the American empire itself. As that danger materializes, business will rebel. The question will then shift from what Trump intends to do to what he will he do as his plans go astray.

Painter: Making A Modern Painting

With generous permission
from the filmmaker’s estate,
we are honored to share
this extraordinary short
documentary, completed in
2017 by Joseph De
Francesco with Michael
O’Connell. Framed as an
intimate interview with
Marioni, it also contains the
only known footage of him
painting.

The Dialectic of Liquid Light

In speech and in practice, the term “liquid light” binds together the material and the immaterial; indeed, this binding is at the core of all painting. And it is the dialectical acknowledgment performed by the notion of liquid light that, finally, gives Marioni pride of place at this epochal moment in the history of his art form.

The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism

Instead, a race-essentialist understanding of epistemology lies at the heart of both Robinson’s notions of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. In the former, we find racism intrinsic to “European” culture as early as antiquity and reaching maturation in the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, while he presents African medieval societies and black colonial subjects as innately peaceful and less violent. And in this regard, Robinson’s claims are consonant with a longer line of black nationalist thinking in the United States, which inverts the assumptions of white supremacy and holds that white domination is an endemic phenomenon.