Semiotics of the End: Welcome to the Virtual Plaza

Like factories, shopping centres today exist only to efface their omnipresence. After “society as a whole takes the appearance of Continue reading →

Semiotics of the End: Turbo-Violence

The image cannot present itself without a certain force, without a certain amount of violence. The image must always remove, Continue reading →

An Oasis in the Desert of the Real: On the Relationship Between Map and Territory

“It is abstraction in its precise, literal sense… complete absence of quality, a differentiation purely by quantity and by applicability Continue reading →

The Metamorphosis and The Lobster: 100 Years of Power and Dehumanization

Reviews of Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2015 film The Lobster seem to be about fifty-fifty on whether they use the term Kafka-esque, Continue reading →

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Video Games

The great messianic art critic Walter Benjamin saw the role of film in his era of capitalist culture as creating Continue reading →

Simulacrum in Literature: Baudrillard and Barthelme

Simulacrum, like many terms surrounding postmodernism, has been defined in a number of ways. Perhaps the simplest definition of the Continue reading →

Is Postmodernism Self-Defeating?

In academia postmodernism is nearly impossible to avoid. Characters like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Jameson, Baudrillard (and many others of course), Continue reading →