New to nonsite
Symposium Checking Your Privilege? Perspectives on the Politics of White Identity
BY Katherine Rader, Ashley Jardina, Walter Benn Michaels & Hadass Silver
Unsurprisingly, one central political goal shared by all the panelists is to secure greater racial equality. In addition, three of the four papers (save Jardina’s) point to the necessity of a more economically redistributive version of democratic socialism for the realization of greater racial equality. But these shared goals did not occupy the majority of the discussion, rather it hinged on the question of whether the study of white identity could further or hinder racial equity and democratic socialism.Read more
Articles Issue #35Lukács/Friedby Nicholas BrownMay 10, 2021Articles Issue #35John Berger, Michael Fried and Contemporary Artby Blake StimsonMay 10, 2021Articles Issue #35Some Comments on the Claims Made For and Against Paintingby Jeff WallMay 10, 2021Articles Issue #35Marxism and Criticismby Michael FriedMay 10, 2021Articles Issue #35Art as Seeing Through Neoliberal De-reificationby Irmgard EmmelhainzMay 9, 2021Articles Issue #35Daguerre, Christian Prometheusby Éric MichaudMay 9, 2021Articles Issue #35Ruskin’s Broken Middleby Jeremy MeliusMay 9, 2021Articles Issue #35William Morris: The Poetics of Indigo Discharge Printingby Caroline ArscottMay 9, 2021Articles Issue #35Chardin’s Pastelsby Eik KahngMay 9, 2021Issue #35 The TankResponses to Rita Felski’s <em>Hooked: Art and Attachment</em>by Anna Kornbluh, Robert S. Lehman, Michael Gallope & Jess KeiserApril 2, 2021
READ THE CURRENT ISSUE
Symposium The Surprising Geography of Police Killings: Back-of-the-Napkin Calculations on Race, Region, and Violence
BY Christian Parenti
The key number, however, is this: Only 7 percent of Massachusetts’s residents are black, yet they constituted 35 percent of people killed by cops. African Americans therefore appear in Massachusetts police homicide stats at five times the rate, or with 400 percent greater frequency, than do they appear in the state’s total population count. Now we are beginning to see where the national average comes from.Read more
Articles Issue #35 Daguerre, Christian Prometheus
BY Éric Michaud
Who was Daguerre? The person who precipitated the fall of man into foul narcissism? Or the person who, by giving men mastery of divine light, offered them a path toward ultimate redemption? For his part, Daguerre seemed to be quite conscious of renewing Prometheus’s ancient feat, drawing upon it with evident pride.Read more
Articles Issue #35 William Morris: The Poetics of Indigo Discharge Printing
BY Caroline Arscott
Morris was thinking of the chemical events in indigo discharge printing as analogous to the actions of human history. […] The material processes of getting the dye into the fabric are correlated by him to the politics of the world’s struggles and the prospects for a future society.Read more
Articles Issue #35 Chardin’s Pastels
BY Eik Kahng
In this essay I want to recover not only the academic controversy surrounding the balance between real and ideal, the beau idéal and the beau réel, but also the significance of an empiricist recasting of the role of perception in cognition and its justifiability as the necessary grounds for invention.Read more
Editorials Issue #34 Betting on “The Greek”: How the NFL Is Banking on Biological Racism
BY Roberto R. Aspholm & Cedric Johnson
With the Super Bowl set to kick off on Sunday and media-fueled football fanfare ramping up accordingly, it is worth revisiting the NFL’s preseason scandal that wasn’t—its apparent use of biological racism in denying the compensatory claims of black former players for traumatic brain injuries sustained while playing in the league. Here we interrogate this case, the impotence of disparitarian antiracism to confront it, and its implications for egalitarian politics.Read more
Articles Issue #34 Ben Lerner’s Theater of Dissent
BY Davis Smith-Brecheisen
Ben Lerner’s second Adam Gordon novel, The Topeka School, offers both a genealogy of right-wing political speech and, presumably, an alternative. But insofar as the novel’s politics culminate in political theater, that alternative is reduced to the politics of the status quo. The Topeka School, and those critics for whom its success rises or falls on its ability to provoke aesthetic experience, conflate political experience and political action. While no work of art is likely to do the work of dismantling structures of inequality for us, the work of art that asserts its irreducibility to the “inflexible laws” of the political status quo, and our experiences of it, might provide a new way of seeing or imagining it together—something that the attention to aesthetic and political experience alone cannot do.Read more
Articles Issue #32 The Trouble with Disparity
BY Walter Benn Michaels & Adolph Reed, Jr.
Every time racial disparity is invoked as the lens through which to see American inequality, the overwhelming role played by the increased inequality in the American class system is made invisible. And this is, of course, true on the right as well as the left—think of all the conservative commentators defending the police by invoking the spectre of black-on-black murder. And then think of the widespread agreement among criminologists that the Gini coefficient “predicts murder rates better than any other variable.” Conservatives who try to blame black crime on race and liberals who try to blame it on racism are both missing the point. If you want to distinguish between the left and the right, the relevant question is not what they think about race; it’s what they think when race is taken out of the equation.Read more
Issue #35 The Tank Responses to Rita Felski’s Hooked: Art and Attachment
BY Anna Kornbluh, Robert S. Lehman, Michael Gallope & Jess Keiser
Complexity enchants ANT, new materialism, posthumanism, media studies, affect theory, and the literary undertakings of postcritique, new descriptivism, and “weak theory.” Its prophets claim as virtue that reality is immanent to itself, that no individual element of a complex web can be said to activate “a more fundamental reality” than any other. There is therefore a propulsive purpose accorded to critics: count up the everything, trace out the complexities, caress nuance, feel the vibe, what is connected to what. When everything is complicated and criticism calls itself to the tasks of phenomenological witnessing and empiricist tabulating, the vocation of criticism to make a cut in the swath of experience, to shift registers to a different order of knowing, is abandoned.Read more
Articles Issue #35 Some Comments on the Claims Made For and Against Painting
BY Jeff Wall
Experiences of world-disclosure are accomplished by achievements in certain long-tested forms of art—what we can call the canonical forms. These forms, like easel painting or lyric poetry, have proven over long periods of time to be the appropriate sites for this activity; but, more than that, they were practices through which the value of world-disclosure had been invented and developed through history. It was on this basis that they constituted a canon not just of exemplary works in each art, but a canon of the forms of art themselves. As such, they embodied criteria that could be effective in deciding if an activity was or was not “art.” Although the existence of the canon gave no conceptual guarantee or definition of art, it was accepted as one, de facto, based on its own history, or histories.Read more
Articles Issue #35 Marxism and Criticism
BY Michael Fried
What all this comes down to, then, is that Berger accepts a priori a militant and often staggeringly vulgarized brand of Marxism from which all his judgments about art derive, in language anyway. … My fundamental objection is not that Berger begins from a position of accepting Marxist theory. In the world we live in more and more critics of art may be expected to start from similar political premises. But what is imperative is that the critic define his terms; that he show with sensitivity and logical rigor the usefulness and, if possible, the necessity of employing Marxist concepts and terminology. Unless he can do this his judgments will reveal nothing more
than the strength of his bias and the slovenliness of his mind: they can say nothing about the works of art in question.Read more
Articles Issue #35 Ruskin’s Broken Middle
BY Jeremy Melius
Whenever Ruskin’s language steers toward the performative, it stages its own inability to perform. Instead emerges the quieter power of Ruskin’s constative mode—its gentle, unpossessive efficacy. Out of this come new possibilities for descriptive relation. Neither quite active or passive, the attention Ruskin’s descriptions perform might achieve a voice in some radical sense “middle,” inhabiting, however provisionally, some self-reflexive space between.Read more
Articles Issue #34 Poverty and Politics: Bolsonaro, Neoliberalism’s Authoritarian Alternative, and the Ongoing Assault on Democracy in Brazil
BY William J. Mello
As the struggle against the authoritarian neoliberal regime continues to unfold, the actions of the organized labor-left in general, and the PT in particular, will be pivotal for constructing an opposition capable of defeating right-wing neoliberal authoritarianism. The heightened quality of the political conflict ahead will also challenge the way in which left and progressive forces perceive and develop political action, demanding a left capable of organizing and mobilizing resistance in multiple (institutional and non-institutional) spheres of politics simultaneously.Read more
Editorials Feature Issue #34 Deneocolonize Your Syllabus
BY Blake Stimson
It hardly needs saying that the term “decolonize” once meant something wholly different than it does now. To put it not a little too bluntly, in the heyday of the anticolonial movement it was the colonies and the colonized that needed decolonizing, not the colonizers, but now even that need, as we like to say, has been “colonized.” Of course we understand that the “decolonize” in the slogan “decolonize your syllabus” is metaphorical, that it means diversify or “decenter” (as we also like to say), but that does little to allay the fact that, formally, rhetorically, it collapses the distinction between colonizer and colonized. Sometimes, decentering oneself and one’s syllabi means little more than absolving oneself of accountability for the colonial past. Just to give it a name, we might call this phenomenon “colonial narcissism.”Read more
Past Issues
Issue #35: The Nineteenth Century (Part Three)by nonsiteMay 10, 2021Issue #34Issue #34: Deneocolonizing?by nonsiteMay 9, 2021Issue #33: Sensation and Perception: Modernity as Self-Constitutionby nonsiteDecember 3, 2020Issue #32: Disparity/Anscombe/Autonomyby nonsiteSeptember 11, 2020Issue #31: Architectureby nonsiteApril 6, 2020Issue #30: Not One Step Back from Class Analysisby nonsiteDecember 27, 2019Issue #29: Industrial Democracy, Whiteness, and the Complexities of Black Politicsby nonsiteSeptember 10, 2019Issue #28: Historical Materialist Study of American Political Historyby nonsiteMay 7, 2019Issue #27: The Nineteenth Century (Part Two)by nonsiteFebruary 11, 2019Issue #26: The Nineteenth Century (Part One)by nonsiteNovember 10, 2018Issue #25: Authorship/Anti-Authorship: Legal and Aestheticby nonsiteOctober 5, 2018Issue #24: The Neoliberal Coupby nonsiteJuly 10, 2018
Great no email address has been found in plain text!
Deprecated HTML
Great! We haven't found deprecated HTML tags in your HTML.
Speed Tips
Excellent, your website doesn't use nested tables.
Too bad, your website is using inline styles.
Too bad, your website has too many CSS files (more than 4).
Too bad, your website has too many JS files (more than 6).
Too bad, your website does not take advantage of gzip.
Mobile
Mobile Optimization
Apple Icon
Meta Viewport Tag
Flash content
Optimization
XML Sitemap
Great, your website has an XML sitemap.
http://nonsite.org/sitemap.xml
https://nonsite.org/wp-sitemap.xml
Robots.txt
http://nonsite.org/robots.txt
Great, your website has a robots.txt file.
Analytics
Missing
We didn't detect an analytics tool installed on this website.
Web analytics let you measure visitor activity on your website. You should have at least one analytics tool installed, but It can also be good to install a second in order to cross-check the data.
