E.E. Reed

students hanging around after class to argue about the grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard To Find. keeps ya living.

@theverge.com @reckless.bsky.social @davidpierce.xyz good radio makes for good work. thanks, fellas.

empty room with floors, now shiny with poly.

first coat of polyurethane in the back bedroom in the back bedroom.

whoa.

yes! i’ve been listening to Tripp for about ten years. he is wonderful.

yup. apparently he also likes to have a beverage and then slip off from the conference and play the organ at a little church real loud.

Phenomenology Friday

The answer to the machinery of speed is unverfügbarkeit.

Virilio saw it all coming:

“We must politicize speed, whether it be metabolic speed (the speed of the living being, of reflexes) or technological speed. We must politicize both, because we are both: we are moved, and we move. To drive is also to be driven.”

Rosa is right.

We will not resolve our current cascading crises of legitimation until we learn to think about speed.

cc @sharonk.bsky.social

Hartmut Rosa. Social Acceleration. Cover.

Against this background the present work is not envisaged as a contribution to the sociology of time as such, ie., it does not ask what time is, nor in what way it enters into and affects social practices and structures. Instead it seeks to contribute an adequate socia-theoretical grasp of current social developments and problems in the context of the process of modernization and also the debate concerning a fracture in this process between a "classical" age of modernity and a "second" age of late or postmodernity. Further, it aims to systematically work out their ethical and political implications. My guiding hypothesis is that modernization is not only a multileveled process in time but also signifies first and foremost a structural (and culturally highly significant) transformation of time structures and horizons themselves. Accordingly, the direction of alteration is best captured by the concept of social acceleration. The thesis is that without treating the temporal dimension as a categorial and central consideration in social theory one cannot account for present-day changes in social practices, institutions, and self-relations in Western societ-ies. The point is neither to establish a further subfield ("the sociology of ac-celeration) nor to justify an existing one ("the sociology of time"), but rather to reconceptualize contemporary social theory. Thus in what follows I will generally draw on ideas from the philosophy and sociology of time only where this seems appropriate for systematic reasons.

“The thesis is that without treating the temporal dimension as a categorial and central consideration in social theory one cannot account for present-day changes in social practices, institutions, and self-relations in Western societies.”

George Edmondson & Klaus Mladek, editors. Sovereignty in Ruins. Cover.

We are fortunate to find ourselves living in interesting times: times not simply of change or transition but of universal crisis. History is full of crises. Yet compared to its predecessors, today's crisis feels more permanent and enveloping because it lacks the one certainty they shared: that it will, for better or worse, have an end. When the term crisis acquired its contemporary meaning (as a time of social upheaval and epochal transformation) in the late eighteenth century, "the only unknown quantity" was "when and how" the crisis in question would be resolved, and by what means.? Today, our ubiquitous crisis consciousness appears to have cast such assurance in doubt. Alain Badiou can usually be counted on to defend robust revolutionary solutions, yet even he contends that the promise of a remedy—an alternative political vision, a new praxis, or a compelling symbolic fiction-"is in a state of total crisis."* (Which is exactly why the search for such a fiction remains an urgent political project, as we argue here.) Meanwhile, as if confirming Arendt's observation that there is "no longer any 'uncivilized' spot on earth" and that "we have really started to live in One World," the symptoms of crisis have spread boundlessly to become, in a manner very different from what Carl Schmitt envisioned, the new nomos of the earth.* How far does crisis extend? Far enough that even the traditional concept of krisis, with its spatiotemporal limits and inherent faith in resolution, has itself been thrown into a crisis powerful enough to affect the category of the political as such: its ordering function, its concept of historical and organizing space, even, as the surging critical interest in bio- and zoopolitics attests, Aristotle's definition of the human as the only political animal. More than two millennia on, the very origins of the political are so thoroughly in crisis that the margins of the apolis, stalked by the beast and the god, have once again come into view.

“as if confirming Arendt's observation that there is ‘no longer any uncivilized spot on earth’ and that ‘we have really started to live in One World,’ the symptoms of crisis have spread boundlessly to become, in a manner very different from what Carl Schmitt envisioned, the new nomos of the earth.”

Agamben. The Kingdom and the Glory. Title Page.

At the end of classical civilization, when the unity of the ancient cosmos is broken, and being and acting, ontology and praxis, seem to part ways irreversibly, we see a complex doctrine developing in Christian theology, one in which Judaic and pagan elements merge. Such a doc trine attempts to interpret—and, at the same, recompose—this fracture through a managerial and non-epistemic paradigm: the oikonomia. According to this paradigm, the divine praxis, from creation to redemption, does not have a foundation in God's being, and differs from it to the extent that it realizes itself in a separate person, the Logos, or Son. However, this anarchic and unfounded praxis must be reconciled with the unity of the substance. Through the idea of a free and voluntary action-which associates creation with redemption-this paradigm had to overcome both the Gnostic antithesis between a God foreign to the world and a demiurge who is creator and Lord of the world, and the pagan identity of being and acting, which made the very idea of creation unconvincing. The challenge that Christian theology thus presents to Gnosis is to succeed in reconciling God's transcendence with the creation of the world, as well as his noninvolvement in it with the Stoic and Judaic idea of a God who takes care of the world and governs it providen-tially. In the face of this aporetic task, the oikonomia-given its managerial and administrative root—offered a ductile tool, which presented itself, at the same time, as a logos, a rationality removed from any external constraint, and a praxis unanchored to any ontological necessity or preestablished norm. Being both a discourse and a reality, a non-epistemic knowledge and an anarchic praxis, the oikonomia allowed theologians to define the novelty of Christian faith for centuries and, at the same time, make the outcome of late classical, Stoic, and neo-Pythagorean thought that had already oriented itself in an "economic" sense merge with it.

We can then understand in what sense it is possible to say that Christian theology is, from its beginning, economic-managerial, and not politico-statal [politico-statuale]-this was our original thesis contra Schmitt. The fact that Christian theology entails an economy and not just a politics does not mean, however, that it is irrelevant for the history of Western political ideas and prac-tices. On the contrary, the theological-economic paradigm obliges us to think this history once more and from a new perspective, keeping track of the decisive junctures between political tradition in the strict sense and the "economic-governmental" tradition— which, what is more, will acquire a precise form, as we shall see, in the medieval treatises de gubernatione mundi. The two paradigms live together and intersect with one another to the point of constituting a bipolar system, whose understanding preliminarily conditions any interpretation of the political history of the West. […] In this genuinely "governmental" meaning, the impolitical paradigm of the economy also shows its political implica-tions. The fracture between theology and oikonomia, being and action, insofar as it makes the praxis free and "anarchic," opens in fact, at the same time, the possibility and necessity of its government. In a historical moment that witnesses a radical crisis of classical concep-tuality, both ontological and political, the harmony between the transcendent and eternal principle and the immanent order of the cosmos is broken, and the problem of the "government" of the world and of its legitimization becomes the political problem that is in every sense decisive.

“… the harmony between the transcendent and eternal principle and the immanent order of the cosmos is broken, and the problem of the ‘government’ of the world and of its legitimization becomes the political problem that is in every sense decisive.”

it’s just so tedious.

an empty room with freshly stained floors.

and that’s the hall between the bedrooms.

For Once, Then, Something
Directive

because, as Gadamer says, "being that can be understood is language."

never enough time to read all the plato you want.

lololol

my dyed-in-the-wool-baptist mother-in-law keeps coming back week after week to wednesday night bible study where we keep talking about wrede and bultmann, and i continue to be quietly flabbergasted.

Most excellent news from the good people at Liberal Currents!

Congratulations!

i had an appointment to see my physician, but i got so excited talking about plato that i forgot to leave class early.

nyt spelling bee buddy for march 3

clue: tim conway running gag

Red Clay Halo - Gillian Welch & David Rawlings YouTube video by fw22901

don’t sleep on Dave Rawlings!

Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by Cyril Welch.

Mail.

me, clinking coffee cups with him at coffee hour, a twinkle in my eye, smiling a smile carefully calibrated by a lifetime of navigating the treacherous boundary waters of polite company: howdy, bishop. you enjoying everybody asking you about that new album?

lordy. johnny blue skies is coming in HOT!

cleaning this residue from my hands with a couple of sprays of wd-40 like i saw my grandfather do ten thousand times in the garage when i was a child.

empty room with freshly stained wooden floor.

and that’s the front room.

beth moore. but she wisely chose to diminish and go into the west and remain sane.

an empty room with freshly stained floors.

great room finished.