his drawings are nice too 👌

love this, where's it from?

Yeah really well put - its a kind of emotional history about what it feels like to live through the eviscerations of late capitalism. Watched The Apprentice recently, the new one about Trump and Roy Cohn in 1970s/1980s NYC, it plays really well alongside The Deuce, which like you say, is definitely getting better with age...

aha nope, it’s an emotional scene culminating within the show no?

where’s a good place to start, do you think?

You should read Ubik: The Screenplay if you haven’t already!

Coming at this from more of a culture / media studies and aesthetic theory perspective, on top of the Massumi and Manning already suggested, I’ve found these helpful:

Sha Xin Wei, Poieses and Enchantment (2013) Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production (2006) Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria (2009)

The work of Thomas Nail may also be of interest.

Nice analysis! I think Anora is a very important film, fascinating and brilliant in various ways.

What I really loved is that it has this propulsive screwball demonism—reminiscent of Uncut Gems (2019) and that is, I think, becoming typical of the End Times hedonism of these “new roaring twenties”—and that really comes alive at the intersection wherein an irony-laden post-modernist hyperrealism (full of neon, glitter, and high gloss surfaces) comes into head-on collision with a super-gritty and sincere (and possibly entirely new) kind of American social realism of which Sean Baker is clearly a master—some kind of heir to John Cassavetes—as evidenced probably more clearly in Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017).

It really is, so then, a maturation of Baker’s ongoing attempt to construct a new cinematic style of screwball social realism that is his way of documenting and analyzing the reality of our increasingly comically unreal society of ascendant super-powerful far-right thuggery; ultra-aggressive capitalist exploitation; and ubiquitous pharmacopornographic (read: oversexed and over-medicated) regimes of living.

Such a fascinating and brilliant film – thank you for posting!

Yes to the Sorokin! I’ve not heard of or read the others so will check them out, thank you 😊 seems like an intense list!

Such a huge contribution to late twentieth century intellectual history! Still curious as to how exactly the D&G filters into and animates Jameson’s oeuvre, there’s a fascination PhD / chapter there…

Pynchon and postmodernism are obviously out of literary fashion atm, but Adam Levin’s Bubblegum (2020) comes to mind. Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022) also, although this is more of a novel of ideas than a Pynchonian systems novel. Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad (2010) and Candy House (2022). Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers (2015).

I’m sure there are many more… but nothing matches the sheer propulsive energy and plasticity of GR, so venture cautiously 😊

Yeah I think the main appeal of The Theory Years is that it gives a colloquial—yet still complex—overview of various postwar French thinkers (moving from Sartre to Deleuze etc). I sound like a university press marketer, but it’s pretty ideal introductory reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates or anyone interested in this sortve thing 😊

Amazing haul. This is exactly the kinda thing I want to see Fiona Bruce gushing over on Antiques Roadshow.

Thanks for sharing this!

Oh great, thank you!

Thank you! Yes this all makes sense (and is not at all obvious to me): it’s a Lacan thing. The Marxism link is more tricky, for all the reasons you note, but yes it’s still there, underneath the dialectic versus differential opposition.

Yes, I also thought of this! Lots of Lewis Carroll analyses in Logic of Sense, from what I recall, it's also (surprisingly!) a very fun book to read - Deleuze's prose is brilliant.

For Deleuze on absurdism (or existentialism, late modernism, or thereabouts), perhaps the closest you're going to find is Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, a book about mid-century painting and diagrammatic intensities. Again, another very fun book to read with lots of incredible prose passages 😊

Thanks 😊 And for anyone interested in seeing more post-modernist paintings, sculpture, videoart etc., you may like this subreddit I've recently started: r/PostModernistArt

Not seen this, it looks dreadful, I’m not sure I get the link but will check it out!

For anyone interested in post-modernist paintings, sculpture, videoart etc., you may like this subreddit I've created: r/PostModernistArt

Of course, all are welcome!

I consider Vaporwave a late-stage post-modernist aesthetic.

For anyone interested in post-modernist paintings, sculptures, videoart etc., I'm starting a new subreddit: r/PostModernistArt that you might like 😊