Money and language have something in common: they are nothing and yet they move everything. They are nothing but symbols, conventions, flatus vocis, but they have the power to persuade human beings to act, to work, and to transform physical things:
Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared, giving money the power of some sacred deity, demanding...
A 1952 photo of a purported UFO over Passaic, New Jersey. FBI document, July 31, 1952.
Issue #39
November 2012
With: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Jodi Dean, Jalal Toufic, Mark Beasley, Michael Baers, and Cédric Vincent
When Hurricane Sandy tore through the Eastern US on the eve of the presidential elections, it seemed that a certain fatigue had found a strange mirror image in the libidinal force of completely absurd weather patterns, that a tired resignation to a lack of options in the political sphere had actually mutated into an apocalyptic revolution in the atmosphere. It was as if a negative omen had come with the prospect that the next global insurgency could arrive by way of non-human forces altogether—t...
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7 EssaysNovember 2012
As Good as it Gets
A commonplace of media punditry in the twenty-first century concerns the deep divide in American politics. Whether in terms of political parties, red states and blue states, support or opposition to US militarism in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the ongoing culture war between the religious right and the secular left, the United States is depicted as a nation split in its fundamental ethico-political self-understanding.
This depiction is misleading. Each side of the divide ap...
“Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, ‘...
Let all mortal flesh keep silence
and with fear and trembling stand
ponder nothing earthly minded.
—“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” Liturgy of St. James1
I was mediated … I was Pop.
—Mike Kelley2
Mike Kelley’s engagement and rupture with popular music began as a teen in Detroit, in the candle-lit gloom of the Catholic Church, with such polyphonic choral chants as the revised fifth-century liturgy “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.” A piece of music that in “its dark a...
1.
Early in the afternoon of Wednesday, October 17, I got a call from a friend and fellow alumnus of CalArts with the news that Michael Asher had passed away. I set down the phone and quickly scanned the obituaries in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. And then that sinking feeling set in. I had not been in contact with Michael for some years, but in the nature of a death both expected and untimely (I was aware he was in poor health), I was not prepared for how the news hit me. I w...
On November 6, 2012, e-flux circulated an announcement with misleading information about a biennial or two in Benin. Cédric Vincent wrote this important essay on how that announcement gave form to the way information spins a dispersed and globalized art world in many directions simultaneously, for better or for worse. We didn't know to publish this essay in the November 2012 issue of e-flux journal because Cédric hadn't written it yet, but we can now include it in that issue as a message to the ...