5-Dimensional Kanban Board

  Kaloprosopia Rising     Consciousness has all but disappeared. In his 2013 talk for the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) collective, Mark Fisher clarifies that capitalist realism is most properly a form of consciousness deflation, a loss of the ability to imagine an alternative, and a lack of even thinking the problems of capitalism, which is “directly aimed at crushing” the consciousness raised in the 60s and 70s (Temporary). In his talk, Fisher identifies three types of consciousness—class consciousness, psychedelic consciousness, and consciousness-raising–-which have been smothered by the rise of neoliberalism. It is this last one which interests herethics most. Consciousness-raising was a process pioneered by socialist feminists wherein group members would gather together in groups and talk through how problems and feelings—whether social, familial, professional, or amorous—related to and were the fault of structures of capitalism and patriarchy.  A...

                 In her 1979 essay Women’s Time , Julia Kristeva calls for a radical program of gender terrorism. Civilization is “bored to death” and the job of Feminism is to painfully shock society out of its stupor (Kristeva Women’s Time ,193). It must first and foremost emphasize the real fundamental difference between the sexes. To a large extent the goals of feminism were accomplished—women have at least nominal equality in the political, economic, and professional spheres. Only those goals to do with sexual difference—contraception, abortion, and sexual liberation for example—seem to be still on the table. Women are forced to endure, against their will, an all-out assault on difference and specificity, sacrificed on the altar of stability and conformity. Surely, some women rise within male-dominated hierarchies, but these are mere tokens. Real change must begin with symbolic violence. To this end, she points to women from ...

Decadent Beginnings, Symbolist Endings The Decadent movement was an artistic movement of art and literature from the late 1800s. Some place the beginning of the movement with the 1857 publication of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal , others as late as Anatole Baju’s magazine Le Décadent , first published in 1886. Decadent literature was the primary mode of French literature from the beginning of the belle epoque through about 1900, and the many schools of literature at the time, including Parnassism, Naturalism, 1 Symbolism, and Decadentism proper all fall under its purview. This decadent umbrella is primarily comprised of a group of themes which are themselves constitutive of much of what the Decadent movement represented. They include, in no particular order: Theophile Gautier’s Parnassian declaration “ l'art pour l'art” (art for art’s sake), the assertion that there are no deep or primordial truths, the preeminence of artifice over the natural, the modern city as a hive ...

  Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet XLI”  is a demystified picture of women’s sexuality detached from fantasies. In hushed tones just prior to a sexual encounter, the poem attends to the strength of a woman’s sexuality, regardless of her feelings towards her partner. Refusing to fall back to an acceptable justification, such as future love or procreation, Millay rejects an optimistic or reparative meaning to her drives. The sonnet reveals that, as women are undone to be the space of man's becoming through sex, a space is created for a heterosexual and female sinthom osexuality. Intoning to her unnamed lover, Millay expresses her desire to “bear [his] body’s weight upon [her] breast,” while apologizing for the “needs and notions of [her kind]” women (Millay 601).  The reader—and indeed, the lover—may be surprised to learn that the “needs and notions” of women apparently do not include any semblance of a need “for conversation when [they] meet again,” (ibid). Millay i...