New York City is closer to Berlin than both are to their country-sides. The existence of an unfettered, reputable and authoritative news media is a modern anomaly. Reversion to the mean isn’t replication of the same. Overdetermination: too much wind-up for the pitch thrown. Resilience is better thought as the play in a steering wheel.
Hegel’s “tarry with the negative” is all well and good as long as it’s tarrying. Imagination is like luck, which much of imagination is anyway: easier to focus on in the past tense. We’ll look back at “progress” relegated to the scare quotes of always-late capitalism as the easiest thing humans did in the Anthropocene. Irony is more a knowingness than knowledge, as when: quoting Wittgenstein that death is not an event in life rather than Rilke about death being the part of life turned away from us.
The certainty of uncertainty: a 21st century version of 19th century positivism? The preoccupation with failed states: a 21st century version of the late 18th century mania for European ruins? Complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 