should have said so much

Remember the “public sphere?” Time was, at the agora or the fireside, the tavern or the coffee shop, in the newspaper or on the radio or maybe even the Facebook wall, good citizens would project commonality and air out difference, scaffolding their shared identity as a people, and so on.

mad enough to stay

“A love overgrown/ A quiet surrender/ Like roots among stones/ We carry on.” After more than twenty years of arguing about it, I don’t have much time for artists or musicians who claim their work “isn’t political.” I remain very much invested, however, in conversations about how such

out in the open

"To be in the room with them firing on all cylinders was to feel like taking on the world was not only possible, but a duty one could enthusiastically embrace." - Joe Gross Although there's no shortage of worthy contenders, if forced to name a single favourite

a difficult and narrow space

"Every one of us knows from experience that radical political activity contains as much impetus towards fragmentation as towards unity, and that when ‘people are united,’ despite the slogan, they still are regularly defeated." - Don Hamerquist “The magnitude of our failure is beyond our ability to know.” - Sarah

commençons par l'honnêteté

“At the triumphal ‘end of history’ in the West," wrote Wendy Brown just over a decade ago, "most have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world that is humane, free, sustainable, and above all, modestly under human control.” The apparent demise of

as in engines

“Blackout at the terror trials It’s the sixth year of their wars I’m pacing shotgun hallways While my fucking neighbour snores” - A Silver Mt Zion (2008) As part of its definition of “direct,” the Oxford English Dictionary gives for the adjective: “Effected or existing without intermediation or intervening

the fires that fence in the world

Of course it’s worthwhile to say the thing out loud every so often, to feel it settle into words instead of ghosting about the inside of your head as frightening abstraction. You wrap your tongue around that shadow, mime belief in finitude, however fleeting: you hold your breath and

on interregna

What’s the word for that tendency to initially dismiss forecasts of great calamity, followed by a gradual, quiet, and generalized acceptance of their conclusions, such that it undercuts the impact for which a sudden dramatic revelation might once have held the potential? We disbelieve the signs of the approaching

change of state

For the record, and contrary to my more extremist instincts, I do in fact believe that incremental changes are meaningful and worth celebrating. The quantitative can decisively shift towards the qualitative, as the effects of many dispersed, tiny actions accumulate over time, slowly but surely chipping away at the defences

old boss / new boss

Of course it’ll always be necessary to try and define where and when one thing ends and another begins, but nothing just drops out of the sky: the characteristics of any given phenomenon – ideologies, institutions, subjectivities – are never going to be wholly discrete or self-contained, but will always

such as it is

Don't confuse the way things have happened for the way things happen. It's a little axiom I've tried to keep close to my heart over the years, shoring up my resolve against all that pressure towards determinist metaphysics and "political science." Nothing

nowhere left to go

If anything positive can be said to have come out of the horror of the last couple of years, it’s that the West’s inability to reconcile its liberal fantasies about itself with the exigencies of maintaining a settler-colonial empire has been laid bare with shocking clarity and

under construction

"You don't win just because you're right.” - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor  I've put a content filter on what's left of my social media feeds, blocking anything related to future Democratic presidential candidate Jon Stewart. Obviously I, too, crave that sense of smarmy

gravity well

We’ve all known for a minute now that Spotify is, broadly speaking, evil, but Liz Pelly’s excellent Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist goes well beyond a retread of the familiar arguments. There’s plenty of fuel in there for righteous

the fellow that sings

“Being able to sing good ain’t all about having a good singing voice a’tall. A good singing voice helps. But when you come up in the Hard Shell Baptist Church like I did you understand early that the fellow that sings is the singer. Them that waits for

we are going to get through

Of all the dualities constantly rattling around in my brain – form and content, structure and agency, ideal and material – the tension between individual and collective feels among the most foundational, the most likely to cast its shadow over conversation and filter the ways I’m weighing things. We can’t

after the after

It’s all base and superstructure again these days in the group chat: the material versus the discursive, the economic versus the cultural, whether a clear delineation between them is ever actually possible, or if either can ever be understood without the other. I think we can all agree that

future perfect

Soon it will have been a year. Of course, it had already been sixteen, and seventy five, and one hundred, and neither had those accretions crossed the threshold we’ve all nonetheless been holding out for – that elusive enough, khalas, ya basta that could finally turn the tide. We'

good works

I seem to be meeting a lot of new people these days, and thus fairly frequently testing out little nutshell explanations of what I’m doing with my life. Being asked “Qu’est-ce que tu fais dans ta vie?” has always struck my WASPy neural pathways as a little

get disaggregated

Your tax dollars at work, comrades: Once you start looking you see it everywhere, but it’s different everywhere it appears, and it never stays the same for very long. It's also never purely itself: capital has never been alone in the field of relations facing any given

eyes of the storm

Just naming the thing is half the battle, but to do that you've got to learn to see it from a distance. That's the strategy I try to use, anyway. You've got to be able to find the edges, to know it has an

I know you know

Look, you know I love indulging in all the discourse-about-discourse, where things are always unstable and contingent, and any traffic in words necessarily entails ongoing negotiation over their meanings. This constitutes a whole terrain of struggle, to be sure, and the labour that goes into understanding is a

positions and postures

It's always an uphill battle against recuperation and cooptation, right? There are just so many avenues along which transgressive or radical ideas are evacuated of their urgency and reduced to empty aesthetics, or to anachronistic dogma, or to neoliberal identity games. S0 I tell myself it’s because

we're all assistant managers now

To note that the wEsTeRn DeMoCrAcIeS are nothing close to the “honest brokers” they’ve spent decades trying to portray themselves as isn’t really much of a statement, is it? I mean, it feels like an assault on language itself to play along with that characterization when their actions