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.)

Ethics and Aesthetics are Not the Same Thing: USA Electoral Politics, July 2019

I would not say that I have a hope that electoral politics can fix our situation, but I would say that I wish that it will – and I intend to take steps to make that wish a reality. It's been written that there are four boxes to make use of in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammunition, and that it is best to use them in that order. Today I'm hoping to make use of the first of those boxes, as well as some of the tools that Edgar and I have laid out in these brief essays.

Written by: Cameron, Political, AnalysisCameron SummersJuly 1, 2019Politics, Analysis, 2020 Presidential ElectionComment

Crafting a Healthy Masculinity (Part 2): Ending Martyr Culture

Martyr Culture is not particularly masculine, but it is endemic in American masculinity. It's the mindset that says you have to sacrifice everything to have any worth. In that way, it's sort of at the crossroads of capitalism and toxic masculinity.

The Nostalgia Trap: On Watching Neon Genesis Evangelion in 2019

Notice: this piece includes spoilers for an anime series that’s nearly 25 years old, but is only experiencing a broader pop-cultural moment now due to its release on a streaming service (Netflix). If you are the sort of person who thinks that spoilers ruin a series, you are warned now.

It also includes discussion of depression and adolescent sexual development, because it’s Evangelion and that’s what the whole show is about.

Lessons from Architecture: What not to do with Paradigm and Syntax

For us, this is the end result of an unconsidered aesthetic: a building is not a sculpture. It is something that actual people have to use, and if it makes them feel anxious or depressed to be there, then it's a failure as an artistic project. It makes it so that they can't function, because a building envelopes the people within it – it becomes the totality of their environment. If it's bad, then they don't have a choice but to feel bad because we don't get to choose jobs based on the architecture.