2 documents
# 85
Driving the Golden Spike
Brian Holmes
Can a waste product marketed as a valuable fuel be treated proactively as both a clear and present danger and as a public monument? Such an approach is suggested by current philosophy and cultural critique. The materialist turn toward the “agency of things, “vibrant matter,” and “speculative realism” is driven by a need to come to grips with the suicidal overproduction that structures contemporary society. The handful of petcoke that you can pick up along the side of the river becomes the withdrawn index or impossible clue to the vast interlocking system of energy production and its consequences, on the scale of the planet earth and in the dimension of geological time.
e-flux Journal
Posted: October 4, 2017
Category
Aesthetics, Urbanism, Architecture
Subjects
Anthropocene, Public Space, Geology, Maps
# 22
Total Corruption: Report from the USA
Brian Holmes
If a reactionary is someone who answers the questions of the future with the mistakes of the past, then I gotta report there are a lot of reactionaries in the USA today. Here as in Europe, the specters of racism and xenophobia awoke to hail the new millennium, fueling a right-wing political dynamic that goes beyond each repressive law or police abuse. We like to blame these regressive trends on the wing-nuts, the Tea Partyers, the folks rotting their brains with Fox and CNN in the famous…
e-flux Journal
Posted: January 1, 2011
Category
Economy, Nationalism, Populism
Subjects
Corruption, USA, Wealth & Inequality, State & Government