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As soon as the discourse of the campus becomes a libidinally fraught fantasy about children to whom something might happen, we find ourselves on the theoretical terrain mapped by the Lacanian theorist Lee Edelman two decades ago in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). As I have previously argued in this magazine, in the discourse of the campus the student turns out to be a type of the Child—the organizing trope of the heterosexist ideology Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” Reproductive futurism is, among other things, an ideology of security: the sacrosanct Child, “the telos of social order, …the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust,” must be protected at any cost; the naturalness of heterosexuality and the gender binary must never be questioned. Katehi’s narration of the primal fantasy of the campus exhibits reproductive futurism at its most histrionic. In the imagined body of the “very young girl,” collective anxieties about the Child and about social reproduction—always raced; note, again, the specter of miscegenation hanging over the narrative—are given pornographic form.

And then thought stops abruptly: whenever there is a risk that something might happen to the Child, the time for thinking is over. It is time for action, reaction. Time to call the police. That actual UC Davis students, engaged in an act of passive resistance, were hurt as a result of this frenzy to protect the “very young girls” of UC Davis belies the phantasmatic status of the latter.

Viewed through the lens of Edelman’s argument in No Future, the fantasy of the campus appears as an allegory of the nation-state. The future of the nation itself is taken to be at stake in what happens “on campus.” Both nation and campus are supposed to be securely bounded, to keep safe the Child; in both cases, this safety proves impossible to guarantee, and this ineluctable exposure—to violence, to liability, to non-affiliates—spikes the panic. When there is “campus unrest,” panic flares because the campus is supposed to be where unrest does not happen, where the Child is safe from reality. Panic nudges both campus and nation toward ever more extreme, ever more militarized practices, aesthetics finally subordinated to terror. Borders, checkpoints. An especially shrill Columbia Business School professor has taken to demanding, on any media platform he can access, that students who chant “Free Palestine!” should be expelled and banned from the Columbia campus.

The Child must be defended. So, enemies must be banished. So, a camera must be installed. So, a wall must be built. But let it be covered in ivy!

—Samuel P. Catlin, "The Campus Does Not Exist: How campus war is made," Parapraxis Magazine. Emphasis mine.

#samuel catlin is BRILLIANT and I love him #samuel p. catlin #lee edelman

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Nightclub interior design by Santachaira, 1986. The tables have the form of Vinyls, outside is a 'lightning storm' neon performance.

Scan

#interiors

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I read a fantastic short story yesterday by Ken Liu called "Good Hunting," about folklore, machines, colonialism, misogyny, and finding camaraderie in survival. Enjoy.

#ken liu

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I'm emotional because it's Pesach and the Yale protestors for Palestine are occupying the plaza of the library my grandfather helped to build :')

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#the freedom seder #arthur i. waskow

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Zainab Bahrani, from The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria, 2003

#zainab bahrani #art history #colonialism

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I'm emotional because it's Pesach and the Yale protestors for Palestine are occupying the plaza of the library my grandfather helped to build :')

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WHO MADE MAN'S MOUTH? WHO MADE THE DEAF, THE MUTE, THE SEEING OR THE BLIND? DID NOT I? NOW GO!

Oh, Moses. I shall be with you when you go to the king of Egypt. But Pharaoh will not listen.

So I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt with all my wonders. Take the staff in your hand, Moses. With it, you shall do my wonders!

I will be with you, Moses.

#hans zimmer #the prince of egypt

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Cocaine was a stimulant used by a priestly caste of the middle period United States called businessmen in order to commune with The Market. [1]

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LEVINSON!!! Although in the book Hanna is much more adversarial with him. And he's in Chicago, not LA. Most of the deleted scenes wound up getting reintegrated into the novel somehow. Note to self...

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What made Michael Mann decide to use the name "Vincent Hanna" (and keep it all throughout Heat's long gestation + many permutations) has been one of the more stubborn codes to crack, but I'm starting to wonder about Hanna as in Henne (the old Germanic death deity), also related to henbane (the toxin/hallucinogen).

#one pill makes you larger etc #more research needed but I have a good feeling about this particular hunch #he IS the liminal trickster/death/bard/psychonaut figure! #heat 2 midrash

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He is in love with her.

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i just know neil mccauley does NOT fuck around about his spreadsheets

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Straight Outta Compton (2015)

Director: F. Gary Gray

Cinematographer: Matthew Libatique

#straight outta compton #f. gary gray

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This country’s infatuation with Taylor Swift is mystifying. I just don’t get it. To me she has the charisma of a Stepford Wife and the soul of a petroleum company. Perhaps it’s all an elaborate postmodern schtick. She’s acutely aware of her own pop cultural situation, and the idea that a persona so calculatedly inoffensive and emotionally hermetic could believably stake a claim to “tortured poetry” is being played for irony. “Bux, she’s not that deep.” No, I know; the depth is an emergent property because the whole discourse surrounding her image becomes an inevitable parody of that same image’s reproduction. RIP Walter Benjamin you would have loved “Fortnight.”

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Labor of love, with an emphasis on LABOR.

#I hope you’re happy with your barnes & noble jigsaw trap MICHAEL #heat 2 midrash #espen j. aarseth #literary theory