Traverse Fantasy

There was a certain graffiti during the attempted 1968 revolution in France: " Structures do not walk on the streets!"  Žižek summarizing Lacan (haven't read Seminar XVII  unfortunately) submits that the opposite is true, and this is where one might appreciate his relative conservatism: that the street fights between the student revolutionaries and the police were in fact expressive of and overdetermined by the social order, which is in a constant and dynamic process of self-definition (comparable, I think, to Marx's analysis of the circuits of capital in Volume II   which I summarize here , specifically in that the circuits represent logical moments of a process which really occur simultaneously; that being said, my interpretation is heterodox because many Lacanians act like discourses are individually constitutive of a symbolic order, which I feel like is analytically stupid and useless but whatever). Prismatic Warren (the guy) posted today on  Prismatic...

This is a paper I wrote for my first semester of undergrad in 2018. I actually wanted to expand it into a thesis about the economics of online platforms (business people say stupid shit about it) before I shifted my research wholly into Greco-Latin poetry, but I still like the analysis and sometimes wish I could refer to it. So, here it is! Sorry for any eighteen-year-old bullshit. Also I removed the footnotes because they were annoying to reformat, but the works cited section is still there. Shout-out to my professor who was an English literature guy forced to teach engineers how to write. He was very entertained by me, I think. And he was a great professor! Very patient with the STEM freaks.  Introduction Social media is a mode of discourse specific to the information age, an evolution of the personalization of commodities and the commodification of personality where users relate to each other in a manner not unlike celebrities and brand images. As a new means of communication...

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows." I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels ...

I read Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg around December 2023, and I’ve vaguely gestured towards having opinions about that book in the two years since. I didn’t write a “review” (loosely speaking) of it because I started devaluing my own time spent writing then, and I felt that my feelings about the book could be boiled down to me not being the primary audience (or, rather, the subject about whom Feinberg speaks). These feelings did inform a certain analysis I wrote of trans discourse , and a FAQ but I did not refer to Feinberg or her work directly. So, this is a chance for me to actually get into the book, which solidly had me in the first half. It’s also a chance for me to exercise writing again, since I feel like I’ve lost some capability since I stopped blogging actively, especially in the context of what they call critical theory (makes jerk-off motion with my hand). Trans History The first part of the book is REALLY good. I was constantly gagging at the wealth of histo...