No One Ever Chose To Be Post-Modern: The Utopian Impulse and Contemporary Philosophy as Trauma-Response

Of course, Jameson and Ernst are different from myself insofar as their discussion is falling more on the Eu Topia side of the equation, whereas I'm more interested in the Ou Topia side of the equation (not that I don't look for the good and don't have a utopian urging, just that I'm a fantasy and science fiction writer by inclination; I'm obviously going to gravitate towards the no-place.) And why shouldn't we be interested in places that don't, can't, or won't exist? The world is spanned and mapped and there are no horizons left to cross – much less for a smoker with bad eyes.

Escaping the Prison of Contingency: Another Attempt to Pin Down the Utopian Impulse

What I am calling the Utopian Impulse is a hypothetical third drive, something to break the Freudian dichotomy of sex and death. What Marcuse called “The Great Refusal” and Mark Fisher called “the Specter of the world that could be free”, I view as expressions of the Utopian Impulse. I don't want to think of it as anything mystical, but I can't help but feel inflected by mysticism when I discuss it. It is a haunting spirit, a radical outside, an alchemical potential. (Image is taken from instagram user @prismattco.)

No More 5AMs: On Trash Television, Suits, Disco Demolition, and Cryptids

This is the last 5AM I have for the foreseeable future – I'm not coming back next semester, as Edgar and I are moving. While I don't like waking up early, I think being up early is quite nice: in the dawn light, during what John Steinbeck called “The hour of the pearl” in Cannery Row, there's a pleasant, unfinished quality to the world. Almost like a level in a video game that isn't done rendering: a sense that anything can slide into existence, remade and renewed. Of course, the effects on my health are more than I like. Falling asleep at 9PM, and becoming incoherent for a time before then, has taken its toll. I already have enough bad habits, I don't need this on top of it.

A Wind Out of Nowhere: The Utopian Impulse

That’s a bit of a left turn, there at the end, but it’s on my mind a lot lately. Give a well-educated person not one but two jobs where their major duty is reading signs to people and you’re bound to get weird.