Conversation

Replying to and
19. I was never one for close readings, but what I took from that encounter was a habit of thinking the psychic, ethical, social, material, aesthetic, machinic, and ecological together as single "plenum" or "space" or "fabric". Every "thing" is all of these things at once.
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21. Timothy Morton's "Hyperobjects" adds a useful concept to the toolkit. When we conceptualize, we cleave "things" from this continuous, dense space that is reality – and we might think beyond common "objects" or bounded things conceived in a single register.
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22. A train is a physical object, but what of the train, its passengers, all of their thoughts, how them being together and relocating affects the broader psyche of which they're a part, the track, electrical systems, the business that operates it, its environmental impact.
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23. This train is a hyperobject, and "trains" is a hyperobject. These three trains, here. 'People on trains.' Train wrecks, and all the procedures that surround them. The concept "train wreck."
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24. As such, any description or analysis of the alt-right, or any 'movement,' feels woefully inadequate to me – even not worth putting into words. For me, politics is ethico-aesthetic. It is a way of being, an aesthetics, a language, a languaging, an orientation, an attractor.
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25. And for me – for anyone – something so vast and diffuse only exists as an impression. For a progressive journalist, a conspiracy. Men in a room, a chat room, plotting? For me, a new turn in poetry. A specific way of using images. An emotional tenor.
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26. So, insofar as I can about the alt-right, it's as an art movement. It's something like the Beat Generation – an attitude, and a style – one that feels alive, fresh, generative.
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27. If the left had an equivalent, I'd be into that too. But mainstream power never forms the basis of a meaningful alternative culture. The currency of dissent is taboo.
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28. But I'll contradict myself – the left does have an aesthetic counter-culture. It's called the Contemporary Art World. You've probably never heard of it. It's absolutely as fascinating, rich, and contradictory as the alt-right, but it couldn't be more dissimilar.
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