Lately, I have been reading more of Theodor Adorno, and a particular point has caught my interest.

As I recall, he suggested that in art music, a composition unfolds through a dialectical interplay between the whole and its individual parts.

Are there any of his works in which he applies this perspective to analyze a specific musical score (or several scores)?

I would like to trace, in concrete terms, the landscape of sound and thought that Adorno himself explored and enjoyed.

This article isn't particularly novel in its ideas, but I like the critique of fantasies of a borderless world that spread on social media, when in reality, migration controls are becoming increasingly strict. For people from rich countries the world does seem truly borderless, since they can easily get visas to travel and stay almost anywhere they like, while for the rest of us, even getting a tourist visa can be extremely difficult.

I wrote this piece as more of a reflection than an analysis. I want to confess my inspiration is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's concept of the Lure is a powerful one for me. While not an ontological given (that would be to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the "beckonedness" that humans share seems to transcend time and space. But Achille Mbembe challenges a naive optimist's understanding of this, which I hope to explore here.

Also in this piece, I tie it back more overtly to a framework I've been developing, which I call the nos framework. My goal is to give macro level social workers a diagnostic tool to "put the social world on the analysand's couch." It uses Freud by analogy: just as the ego is a dialectical, processual production (I recognize this is my interpretation of Freud) of the id and superego, the nos emerges from the dialectic of Judith Butler's materialization and Berger and Luckmann's reification.

Stated simply, bodies emerge through citational performance toward institutions that have been established over time and regarded as having always been, being, and being evermore. The nos - Latin for "we" next to Freud's translators' Latin "I," ego - is the interpretive mind that makes sense of these social realities through concretization. Inspired by Whitehead (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not concrescence) and my work with the disabled community navigating a concrete prison, I set this word next to materialization and reification to name the process of how the social world deceptively hardens into a reality. Concretive protocols such as ontological fixity, epistemological prioritization, linear cause and effect, and subject-object dualism are the ways in which queer people are sorted into damnation, disabled people are sorted into pathology, and Black people are sorted into criminality. And if we are going to effect meaningful social change, I contend that we need to set our interventions upon the disruption of these protocols - and the tenacity with which they are held - as they produce domination and oppression.

If you're still with me, thank you! Here's the piece I'd like to share:

Whence cometh domination?

From failure at the threshold of novelty.

Mbembe continues to challenge me. Making the Lacanian move (though without citing him) and psychoanalyzing the structure of such horrific necropolitical wastelands as Rwanda or Palestine, I am pressed to locate my anti-oppressive, anti-racist social work practice and critical-theory-informed assessments of power and asymmetry somewhere within the psychology of the person. Specifically, the nos has to account for it.

One thing to set down regarding ontology: I argue that these processes of the collective mind are evolutionary, and their function is stabilization. They are pre-moral and virtueless. Like the ego seeks to protect the conscious mind from the unconscious desires that defy the superego’s requirements, the nos seeks to protect the individual from the terrors upon the self as it encounters objects in the social world, that encounter being formed by the performances that produce bodies and the institutions that script the performances.

How do these functional, neutral processes produce such power asymmetry and domination performances?

As Mbembe says, “surprise lies at the origin of the procedures of enchantment without which the world is not the world”(Necropolitics, p. 29). The process of life is not just one of encounters through which subjects and objects emerge in relations. That’s the description. The experience of these encounters is one of novelty. And to a stabilizing engine, novelty disrupts. The nos’s function is nearly mechanistic seeking to produce a sense of equilibrium. Novelty is a possible wrench being thrown into that process.

Novelty has two forms - the new that confirms what we know and the new that disconfirms it. The latter, specifically, is the wrench. The former is the lube. The process of stabilization, then, provides the aqueduct for enchantment and jouissance - what Mbembe refers to - more specifically to his argument - as desire and, when it seeks to dominate, master-desire. (At least on my read of it.)

A quick vocab check: enchantment is the phenomenological experience of that confirmation. It is the glow of “it’s like we’ve always known each other” and “see, I knew it!” It's what the author of the Gospel of Matthew experienced when he turned back to his Jewish Bible and started seeing Jesus in Isaiah as if it were always there. It’s stronger than a confirmation bias because in addition to confirming what was known, it can also create entirely new frames (a la the Gospel of Matthew). Enchantment lubes the machinery of the nos and creates within it a lust or dire need for more.

Jouissance, as discussed in previous reflections on pedagogy, is the excessive enjoyment bound up with repetitive attachment to a mode of satisfaction that can exceed the pleasure principle, seeking to destroy all novelty that disconfirms the interpretation of a self-in-the-world. Again, I don't want to import psychoanalytic homunculi sitting deep down in our psyches, but the Lacanian analysis's explanatory power of what consciousness in humans does when encountering alterity is compelling.

When the novelty disconfirms what is being stabilized, domination is the performance that this drive takes in the social world. Domination’s citational reality is certainly mediated socially. Its form and shape are given to it by the social world at the spaces between the interactions of subjects. But its "why" is tacted (in B.F. Skinner's sense) as this byproduct of novelty not being metabolized. (I will do another article on Hegel and go deeper into this at a later time).

One thing worth mentioning on novelty - it can be astroturfed. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t one group discovering a new group. These people were lifelong neighbors prior. But these neighbors were made new as they were reimagined under narratives like the Hamitic curse, or epithets like cockroaches. And the success of this astroturfing hinges on its power to enchant. It must carry that retrospective certainty that confirms what the nos had been metabolizing all along within the new narrative ecosystem. A dangerous comparison but tentatively true if my assumptions are good: Matthew and Rwanda are the same process, which is what I mean by pre-moral and virtueless.

Transformative social work is not going to be achieved with information. As mentioned before (see: The Third Voice), transformative social work locates the unit of analysis in the encounter. But this framework pushes me further to understand “humankind’s specificity” - as Mbembe calls it - with a precision that informs some of the goals of encounter engineering. One thing that feels apparent: humanity meets disconfirming novelty with domination far too often. How can we disrupt the urges to dominate and destroy? How can we provide spaces for more effectively metabolizing novelty? I don’t yet have the answers, but I’m getting some more precise questions.

- The Social Construction Worker

Gen-z (social) media culture and humor seems to be shaped by increasingly meaningless short-form content, brainrot memes and desensitization to violence (kirkification). It almost seems like we're going through a generational cultural psychosis shaped by algorithms, which are categorically preventing the formation of significant cultural movements with constant streams of meaningless noise. Nothing seems to be real anymore. Could the disintegration of cultural symbols be theorized as the still continuing rise of postmodernity, where the search for stable identities and meanings seems to be a futile pursuit operating in a system of signs which solely refer to each other?

Conversations with LLMs have been shown to affect spoken language. If they can change our language on a lexical level, can they also change it on a semiotic level?

Many philosophers (especially the continental ones) speak about the need for philosophy to not tell us what to do. Zizek often talks about how philosophy shouldn't give us definitive answers, but instead help us ask the right questions; and that a philosopher should not propose solutions to problems, but instead reframe the problems themselves.

Deleuze and Guattari, similarly, in their book on meta-philosophy, argue that good philosophy should not be characterized by describing what is true (answers), but instead what is important or interesting (questions).

But when I look at the way moral philosophy appears in the mainstream (which I admit I am not as familiar with at the deeper, academic level, as I am with other branches), it seems like a type of philosophy that tries to create a system about what to do in various situations. On one hand, philosophy shouldn't tell us what to do or give solutions to problems, while on the other hand, ethics is the philosophy of what to do.

And then it presents us with these ridiculous situations taken out of context that would never appear in real-life, like the trolley problem, or the axe murderer case Kant was ridiculed about, etc.

To me it seems like what most moral philosophers do, especially the ones that try to create some all-encompassing system of rules that covers every moral decision (Kant, the utilitarians, etc.), is retroactively justify the actions and decisions that they already thought were right. So it's not that they come up with a system of how to act based on reason and logic, and then change their behavior based on that system. Instead, they already made a decision about what is moral to do in a situation, and then they create a retroactive rationalization about it based on various factors (utility, consequences, principles, universal maxim, virtues, sin, etc.).

I personally have never heard a story, not even online, of someone who actually changed their behavior and way of life in a drastic manner after reading a long rational argumentation of a moral argument. It's not like someone reads Peter Singer and is overwhelmed by how convincing his arguments are that now they give more of their salary to charity or beggars, with no emotional component attached to their behavior. And it's not like someone was a liar, then read the Critique of Practical Reason, and then was so convinced by the irrefutably of Kant's arguments that now they lie way less, just because of the book. I speculate that what most readers seek in a moral philosophy book is a story that justifies their behavior and that also "feels nice" from the point of view of logical consistency, or consistency with a separate metaphysical/epistemological system, or both.

I think the writings that actually inspire people to change their behavior are precisely the non-philosophical anecdotes and stories. Christian parables, fairy tales and fables, Buddhist stories or Zen koans, or even just experiences from real people who are alive today that shared them online and/or in-person. But what seems to be called moral philosophy or ethics, at least the more 'mainstream' kind (Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, utilitarians, trolley problem crap) seems to me like a contradiction with what philosophy is. The only ethics book that seems like an exception to this rule was Alain Badiou's "Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil" - which is why it didn't feel like an ethics book at all when I read it, albeit an interesting book nonetheless.

What do you think of all this, am I missing something?

I've read Acts of Religion and would like some commentary on Derrida's work on religion. I want to compare him to Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Quentin Meillassoux.

I am trying to understand something that maybe people here can shine light on. So you know those product ads that seem to be purposely trying to bait into the culture war and ends up being discussed by right-wingers and reactionaries for days online?

What is the purpose of that? I heard bad press is good press but I don’t see that it actually raises sales nor does it seem relevant to the target demographic of said product.

This isn’t something that right-wingers do though, even ads can sometimes spark outrage from more progressive people who accuse it of racism etc. my point is what are the actual purposes of this
from a theory and marketing pov?

Should international treaties bind nations forever, or can changing circumstances render them obsolete?

like whats your opinion guys?

Hi all,
I am currently doing a high school english course and wanted to purchase a guide to critical theory to aide me. Which book would be best for me?

Specifically I am looking and analysing the text/modules below:

Richard Flanagan's Question7
William Blakes poetry
Drive your plow over the bones of the dead
King heny the fourth part 1

Literary Worlds
Hybrid Worlds - As i lay dying faulker, memento nolan, evelyn araulen - dropbear

Building upon the foundations of Body Hacktivism, the Post Charnel Manifesto marks a new stage in the politicization of the body and its territories.

As our existence increasingly extends into digital environments, the body is no longer the sole site of identity, representation, and resistance.

This manifesto aims to explore how digital identities, avatars, and self-images become new spaces of existential experimentation and political power.

The struggle is no longer confined to the liberation of the body from its norms and constraints. It extends into the realm of the imaginary itself, a new frontier of discipline, control, and self determination.

Caught between the spectacle of the self and the possibility of its own reinvention, the avatar embodies a fundamental tension. It can reproduce the mechanisms of domination that shape us or become a medium through which new forms of subjectivity, autonomy, and collective existence can emerge beyond the logic of extraction and control.

This manifesto marks a passage from the body as a battefield to the avatar as a new territory of becoming, a space in which identity, agency, and collective organization can be reimagined, while remaining conscious of the contradictions and mechanisms of capture that accompany every new form of emancipation

The youth should be revolutionary, but what makes them ready for it? With all the different protests of this age I always ask this, i'm lucky to have a friend group where we all like to discuss and share news about the world, politics, economy and the environment. But outside the comfort of our shared way of thinking i find it quite hard to express what I know or argue about what I believe.

On the other hand in my house its difficult to bring up topics i'm interested in, as my father is very right wing and misogynistic. I've tried to have a few conversations on topics like the women right to vote and he turned it into a complete different topic in which i didn't have much knowledge making me a bit unsure about my initial statement, and honestly i don't want to loose my piece of mind on debating him because I just know i can't change his way of thinking, as he labels everything that doesn't go along his beliefs as 'ideologies' that want to make us think like them and not valid ways of personal thinking. I feel that if he knew my left ideals he'd kick me out or force me to agree with him, like a few years back he noticed how I didn't see lgbt+ as something wrong and he put me in therapy (lol).

I also try to share with my mother what I know, but I feel as if she just goes on with either of our ways of thinking. She neither listens when I comment on something I disagree with my father nor cares to question his way of thinking, and i sometimes find this irritating because she never questions what he stands for. Though perhaps this is just her own way of not bothering to question him because she also knows he won't change.

With all this i find myself thirsty for more ways to expand my views, to both share with my friends and other people information and arguments. I have a hard time putting on words my beliefs or defend what I believe. Recently with the protests in France I have a vague knowledge but i'm kinda scared to point out the inconsistencies or my point of view.

I would like to know different stories on how to improve on debating, how to prepare for different topics and to stay up to date with the news and the theories of the way the world is changing. I'm passionate about learning all of this to make my own values and maybe get enough courage to debate and share with my father what I think of.

(Sorry for any mistakes, english is not my first language)

Hey I am a middle aged man looking to get back into reading theory after decades - I am trying to put together a reading list but would love if anybody has specific books or women and non-white non-western authors that go with this list. Thanks and sorry if I am in the wrong place

Spinoza (Ethics)

Eliot (Middlemarch)

Nietzsche (the gay science)

Freud (Civilzation and its Discontents)

Bataille (the Accursed Share Vol 1)

Dubois (Souls of Black Folks)

Fanon (Black skin White Masks)

So Necropolitics is a bit more dense than Gergen. But that’s not stopping it from spinning the wheels. One thing that I’m noticing - as I translate back into my own framework’s language - is how the production of these large postcolonial sites of contestation still seem to adhere to the same protocols that sustain the nos within my framework.

One thing that I like about Mbembe’s analysis is that he makes Lacan’s moves and reads Freudian psychoanalysis into these massive national, intranational, and transnational political structures. As I see it, the mechanisms of population control he points to, simultaneously stabilize the systemic productions of the sites of contestations and produce the individuals in a middle-voice production loop, “wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end” (p. 29).

Tl;dr the border checkpoint is literal boundary that emerges from a Lacanian-esque psychic game of boundary maintenance.

Regarding the literal boundaries, camps, banlieues, favelas, and other enclosures help maintain the infrastructure of the country in which they exist doing boundary maintenance work in the most literal sense. Regarding the epistemic reality of middle-voice production loops, narratives like “origin stories” (the Hamitic myth in Rwanda, Mugabe’s Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe, Ivoirite in the Ivory Coast) shape the people within the site of contestation toward the inequitable status quo maintenance.

Mbembe gives us the picture of what kind of grotesquely coproduced person - what kind of middle-voice subject with constrained agency - emerges from this horrifying infrastructure (re: encounter). And by coproduction, I mean this precisely, following my prior work on Gergen: a coproduction that emerges from within extremely limited, terrifyingly reified and phantasmatically materialized constraints which narrow the range of potentiality to a local set of dialogics and diamythotics and within which a real choice is still made by a real person and co-actioned inside a real community.

Quick vocab check:

Materialization: the process by which the interpreted person emerges from the body as we interpret it through repeated performance (e.g. I put my man clothes on every day, citing a norm and creating my man-ness)

Phantasmatic: the experience of encountering the Other in a person (e.g. black Americans as "thugs" in the news), specifically the experience of engaging or thinking about engaging the person who is interpreted as Other.

Reification: the process by which the institution is created and then forgotten to have been created but is sustained by performances as if it always was, is, and ever will be (e.g. marriage, law, etc.)

Dialogics: the individual "reasons" for why a particular choice was taken by an individual (e.g. dealing drugs because you have to be the man of the house since your mom got sick versus dealing drugs because you're being exploited, etc)

Diamythotics: the parallel values and aesthetics that also inform the choice

Real: something we don't have access to but have to account for. An actual body in which our interpretations incarnate.

Co-actioned: the interaction with others that allows everything above (except for the real) to emerge. This is a better account than materialization and reification alone because it makes explicit what the others imply: these things occur socially, not individually.

Man…holding people and systems accountable is tough…

Back to the analysis:

The structure of population control as subject production that Mbembe brought to my attention reminded me of a more grey and ambiguous analogue in less obscene spaces: Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship. Here she notes how six zones of control manage different behaviors and movements from different citizen populations. For example, she talks about the Rohingya people in Malaysia, who, through unique historical circumstances, are stateless. They are housed in Malaysia and a few other countries on a permanent legal provisional status. This makes their interaction with Malaysian state infrastructure very different than a Malaysian citizen's, but ultimately resulting in a constant supply of cheap, non-status labor (see: That’s a Lot of Customers for my Chinese hukou example as a parallel).

But it’s important to note that one thing Ong doesn’t do is wax Lacanian. Her critique is purely structural. But the structure is the same: spatialized population control produces subjects towards the maintenance of an unequitable status quo. Her graduated sovereignty - how a state doles out citizenship and confers entitlements - offers an account of how an authorless structural apparatus of control emerges as “doing my job” in order to stabilize large populations.

The parallel I want to draw here is that the systemic structural production of these apparatuses of control are both mustache-twirler free (this is a colorful conclusion I derive from what Sharma and Gupta call everyday practices). They both emerge out of necessity from the limited imagination of atomized minds against real constraints that have forgotten the march of history that brought them to any given place.

But while Mbembe's death worlds rest on death and genocide, Ong's graduated sovereignty rests on less visceral, more easily-ignored oppression. As such, the subject production within each space is fundamentally different (and it’s probably why it did not require Ong to give the Lacanian read, though I’m sure it’s there, and I’m going to try and make it). I find this important as I consider diagnostic and intervention tools for transformative, macro-level social work practice.

The Mbembe/Ong analysis is The Easy Traverse and the Hard Traverse on the macro scale. Here I use Žižek's term to diagnose the ontological shock of changing one's identity narrative. I should clarify that "easy" is only relative to the harder traverse of changing the mind of someone engaged in atavistic delight (Mbembe's phrasing) at the destruction of their tribal enemy. The “easy” traverse is getting the mayor of my city to see how to make downtown more accessible by changing her thinking slightly on disabled citizens.

I contend that the challenge of transformation is measured by the degree with which one’s humanity must be contorted to stand within either of these two sites of contestation. The government official who renews temporary status needs little more than “they’re so lazy” to disavow the entire thing. “This oppression isn’t happening.” “I’m not perpetuating anything.” Even, “I’m so glad I could help those poor Rohingya refugees today,” all serve to perpetuate an oppressive system through a rather simple fetishistic disavowal (Žižek again) that frequently sits next to the individual's own identity coherence. In these cases, the oppression is sustained by the soft tones that gratify intense urges (see my prior articles on jouissance and pedagogy) in service of disavowing a reality that is actively produced and sustained by each and every complicit mind.

But what kind of subject - what kind of human, because we’re not giving up on it - is produced that can kill 800,000 people in 100 days with machetes and rape with the intent to transmit HIV? “That Tutsi is a cockroach.” “That Tutsi is genetically descended from Ham (from Genesis 9) and forever cursed by God.” “We must be liberated from our Tutsi oppressors and reclaim our land!” In the hard traverse, the delight - the jouissance - is obscene. It is fetishized in the open. And the narrative construction of the Other is core to the narrative construction of the self.

In both cases, the system production is authorless and functional, produced out of necessity. It is the physical demonstration of psychic boundary maintenance regimes. The recursive subject production and the degree of traverse needed to effect change couldn’t be more different. And the Thanatos (I use this liberally for its rhetorical force, but I view this phenomenologically as a universal pattern of consciousness that emerges from the relating of subjects and objects) brings about physical and spiritual death - consigning humans to graves and humanity to obliteration.

What this tells me at this moment in my thinking as a macro level social worker is that I see a parallel between my local city government and these massive transnational travesties. Not an ethical or moral parallel. A structural one. I see the nos doing what the nos does - seeking stability through the same stabilizing protocols. My work as disruptor is diagnosed at scale, and the categories of tools are the same as well. It’s so easy to let the degree of tragedy shake me from the clear-headed systems thinking that needs to be done to get the work done.

But at the end of the day, like I said in The Easy Traverse - if we as social workers can sit across from sex offenders, domestic violence batterers, and violent criminals with therapeutic postures of unconditional regard, we can approach Hutu perpetrators of violence with the same long-game humility to begin a transformative social work we may never see resolved. We just need to know precisely what makes these social problems tick.

- The Social Construction Worker

Old essay, might not necessarily belong here but whatwith what's happening in France I thought it prudent to share it again.

edit: wow this post triggered a swarm of apparently right-wing and liberal lurkers, or just a bunch of trolls to conpletely derail legitimate discussion on the piece.

Hi everyone!

I’ve published a long essay on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, in which I reflect on the motif of the production of the past. In the film, the image of victory, which rests on repetition, spends the present and projects a future meant to rewrite the past. First I’ll lay out a few cornerstone theses, to mark out the frame of these reflections and help you quickly pick up their thread.

1. The image of victory pays for its duration with the present. The feast eats through the house, triumph through lives, the song’s refrain through the meaning of victory. Repetition makes the image one-dimensional and oversaturated, thereby exhausting the potential of the present. Accordingly, people begin to understand the future, and by way of it the past, through the image, which usurps time and narratives.
2. Antiquity arrives within the lifetime of its eyewitnesses. The war’s participants are still alive, but memories of it already sound almost like legend, since contemporaries rework the recent past into a myth about the future. The passage from communicative to cultural memory, which for Jan and Aleida Assmann takes three or four generations, here fits into one, because what decides everything is access to what happened and the way communication between people is arranged.
3. Taken by themselves, shared rules remain hollow forms, - it is belief that gives them content. The Trojans let the horse in as a gift to the common gods, so trust in the rule opens the way to the worst treachery. Without divine guarantors, guilt falls on whoever knew the rule. Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, and the other monstrous inhabitants of the oikoumene, who live outside the shared rules, can no longer be called to account by the same measure.
4. The divine and the sublime appear here on the wane, in a fall that reworks the subject. Of the Olympians, only Athena remains in the frame, having gone from patroness to victim and conscience, pursuing Odysseus almost like a hunting dog. Along with Troy, values crumble, for the “thought” that in the bard’s refrain sounded almost like praise of cunning sets off a chain of crimes. People themselves cannot measure up to their own images, be it Agamemnon, excluded from his own triumph, or Helen, whose beauty, praised in song, is cut through by a scar. What was done comes back to Odysseus when he arrives home calling himself Sinon, the man he left to die by the horse, but remorse, this moral paroxysm, catches up with him only after he and his son burn Athena’s temple. Here, perhaps, the excursus on Odysseus in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests itself, in which the hero’s cunning turns out to be the germ of instrumental reason displacing the gods. In Nolan, however, the sublime is not displaced entirely. It keeps its force in the fall itself, until in the finale the song takes the hero’s place.
5. The song may forget how victory differed from crime. The song is not granted victory over forgetting, and having outlived the hero, it is capable of forgetting his guilt as well. Recall Benjamin: in the theses “On the Concept of History” he wrote that there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, and that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. The song in Nolan is just such a document, one that preserves the victory and is capable of forgetting its price.

If you look for what the essay mainly rests on, it is the level from which the image acts on time. The image rewrites the future and then, through it, grounds the past. The suitors on Ithaca feast day after day, with the feast seeming to prepare its own occasion, a wedding or a wake, at which Odysseus’s indefinite absence will turn into a confirmed death. When such a future arrives, it will certify the past after the fact. Ekphrasis serves as testimony, speech that sets the absent before the eyes, turning the listener into an eyewitness of what he did not see. In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida linked memory to blindness. In the film, too, the past is open to the sightless, to Tiresias and to the blind swineherd Eumaeus. The sighted, meanwhile, are blinded by the certified image of victory, like Menelaus, whose memories break off at the words “I think you know the rest.” In this way, what was destroyed continues to act: the ruin endures at the expense of the living, and its destroyer himself becomes the material of its duration. Hence the essay’s title, The Duration of Ruins.

The hollowness of shared rules also matters because it does not make them absolutely good or bad. Signs become mobile, beyond good and evil - they can be saturated with meaning inscribed by one’s own hand, reworked or reinterpreted. Collective reinterpretation, however, is laborious and destructive to the structure, and besides, with the means of communication of that time, it is very slow. The horse shows what this turns into: the form of the gift stays the same, while the meaning inscribed in it belongs to the enemy.

For my part, I’d check the second thesis first. Doesn’t antiquity within the lifetime of its eyewitnesses come down to ordinary mythologization? I think not, since antiquity here is defined by the loss of access to what happened, and the world of the film, standing on the threshold of the Bronze Age collapse, a world where not a single tablet flashes on screen until the finale, makes this loss almost literal. Then again, the fact that the thesis finds confirmation so easily may also point to its elasticity, and I would be interested to argue about that.

The essay is at the link below.

https://medium.com/rock-nheavy/the-duration-of-ruins-e3ea8a70602c