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The payoff of interactivity, the thing that gives the story a hook that it couldn’t get otherwise, is less about ‘choice’ or a pleasure of diverging from linear narrative, than a sense of active contribution to the progression of that narrative.

Graham characterised Latour as a ‘secular occasionalist’. Occasionalism was a philosophy originally associated with ancient Islamic thinkers, who thought it an abomination that one thing could directly affect another. Even for fire to burn cotton, they maintained, it was necessary for God to act as a mediator. Graham’s theory of objects, arising from his deliciously aberrant reading of Heidegger, emphasises the opacity of objects, the way that a subterranean region of themselves is always retained that does not enter into any external relations. In this way Graham restores the mystery of causation

This struck me as one way of getting to the Lacanian opposition between the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic is about relations; at this level, an object is a signifier, whose function is determined – and exhausted – by its relations with other signifiers. But the signifier is also a particular form: in the case of language, the letter; in the case of a chess set, the pieces. This level of form, which lies beyond human meaning but upon which human meaning depends, is the asignifying, non-sensical Real. The ‘real’ in Graham’s version of Speculative Realism can be seen, then, as a Lacanian Real.

Every commodity has a fetishistic aura (a pro jection of its exchange-value) that far exceeds its material and utilitarian properties as a mere ob ject (its use-value).

My aura is not an attribute, or a consequence, of anything that I actually do. It is independent of my agency, just as it is inaccessible to my awareness. My aura is an expression of how I am “famous for being famous”: like Edie Sedgwick in Warhol’s entourage, or like Paris Hilton today.

But can we really distinguish, as Benjamin wants us to do, between the sublime magic of the authentic work of art, and the “putrid magic” of the commodity? Is the aura of the Mona Lisa any different from the aura of Greta Garbo? In fact, Leonardo and MGM both provide us with images of enigmatic beauty; and we revere both images in the same way.

In other words, the cult of the painting and the cult of the movie star are equally artifacts of commodity culture. The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world; this is equivalent to saying that it is the most frequently reproduced. We would not be able to experience the aura of the singular painting that sits in the Louvre, if we had not seen its image reproduced so many times in books, on postcards, even on film and television.

In other words, the entire drama of the aura and its decay, or what Benjamin also calls the movement from “cult value” to “exhibition value,” is internal to the commodity form itself. Technological reproducibility itself is a consequence of commodity production and circulation, rather than the reverse (a point on which Benjamin remains ambiguous).

The heart of Benjamin’s argument is that “the whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological – and, of course, not only technological – reproducibility.” But that is precisely the point: the authenticity of the original Mona Lisa can only be perceived by way of contrast to its many inadequate, inauthentic replications. You can’t have one side of this duality without the other.

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.

Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.”

Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation.

t. But the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content. If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the “mass media” that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

he all but obliterates the 500-year-old western tradition of perspective by flattening his flesh silhouettes in a space that goes nowhere. It's this visual violence that liberates his eroticism, because it erases any meaning or narrative.

When John Malkovich, in Being John Malkovich, enters the portal which provides access to the thoughts and experiences of Malkovich, a series of strictly Cartesian questions arise, such as: Why does he do this, given that he already has access to his thoughts and experiences? Can the events of that moment of terrifying self-transparency be psychoanalysed? Ontologically, what is the status of that experience? Is it a dream? Is it “reality”? What is its materiality? The brilliance of Being John Malkovich resides in what many perceive as its failure: its reliance on a Cartesian view of the subject as puppeteer. Imagine that Malkovich entered the portal thinking that he might uncover the greatest secrets of the human subject, only to discover one banal certainty: “I think, I exist.” This, then, is the Cartesian Real which Lynch can’t stomach: if one enters the subject, there is no transcendental crisis, only the terrifying certainty of the cogito - a moment of pure appearance, resisting all (psycho)analysis.

How should one approach Stevens' poetry? As with any poet, the first step is to enjoy him, to take pleasure in Stevens' exquisite language, subtle rhythms, arresting images, surprise effects, and distinctive sounds. We have become a little too insistent about meaning in poetry, as if a poem were no more than a vehicle for ideas. We should be mindful of Stevens' observation that “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have”

The second step in approaching Stevens' poetry is to concede that he, like Proteus, is slippery. He will not be fixed. If there is a common thread throughout his work, it is that reality and our response to it are in constant flux.

One might say these instances represent the poles of Stevens' notorious “reality-imagination complex” (L 792), but they do not yield a dialectic, as if there were a synthesis or resolution to the continual process of adjustment. Rather, they constitute discrete moments in a never-ending cycle in the poet's (and in our) response to reality. Change is the essence of poetry for Stevens because change is the essence of life.

The third step, and perhaps the key adjustment readers must make when approaching Stevens, is to acknowledge that his poems are not about a subject so much as they are about the poetry of the subject, about the way the subject develops through language.

Throughout the
entire proceedings, he had sat a bit pushed back from the table, looking
sallow and brooding, else intent and reticent. When his turn came to
speak, he cleared his throat and slowly, in carefully enunciated
syllables, began with this proposition: if Wallace Stevens is
influential in 50 years, then the break between American poetry and the
world will be complete. Much of the crowd, a bit confused by this
comment, leaned in attentively. Was Stevens a great poet? Yes of course.
But, was he a companionable poet? No, not at all. In fact - Wiman
continued in measured tones - he was almost inhuman, uprooted,
impenetrable, unpenetrating, a self-indulgent effete, a hyper-cerebral
poet with raw talent blazing but little sense of how to convey something
a reader might enter into, something born of blood and emotion and the
shared commonalities of lived life. He was a destructive influence on
modern poetry. By now there was palpable and shocked hush in the air.
Stevens' poetry has abjured the world, Wiman continued, he lived in a
bubble of the mind so that he might not be infected by life. His poetry
corrosively and obsessively studied itself and was utterly unconcerned
with the specificity of things and with relationships to people. There
was coldness or distance that Wiman sensed in Stevens' poetry and it
turned him off, way off, didn't arrive at the root of him as a reader.
The early poems thought in sounds, not in ideas, and throughout Stevens'
career, all he could see were busy associative surfaces with very little
depth.

Daguerre called the image he created in 1837 the “daguerreotype” (acquiring a patent from the French government for the process in 1839). He made extravagant claims for his device. It is “not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature,” he wrote in 1838, it “gives her the power to reproduce herself.”

In the story, Holgrave, the strange lodger living in the gabled house, is a daguerreotypist (as well as a political radical) who says of his art: “While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.” It is Holgrave’s silvery daguerreotypes that eventually reveal the nefarious motives of Judge Pyncheon—and in so doing suggest that the camera could expose human character more acutely than the eye.

It seems to me that the elevation of the Paris Hilton LP to a central object of study reveals the double bind of Popism: either it has to be admitted that the interest is motivated by a reactive flouting of what are taken to be rockist hierarchies, or it is must be claimed that the LP is being assessed on its own merits, because it is 'good', in which case all the problematic issues of evaluation and canonicity are raised again. Notice that I'm not saying that the LP was bad; like most record buyers I was indifferent to it. What I am questioning is whether the Popist affirmation of the LP could have happened without a rockist big Other to scandalise.

The fate of a Slovene Communist revolutionary serves as a perfect metaphor for the twists of Stalinism. In 1943, when Italy capitulated, he led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners in a concentration camp on the Adriatic island of Rab: 2000 starving prisoners disarmed 2200 Italian soldiers. After the war, he was arrested and put in a prison on Goli otok ("Naked Island"), a notorious Communist concentration camp near Rab. While he was there, he and other prisoners were detailed to build a monument to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1943 rebellion on Rab. As a prisoner of the Communists, he was building a monument to himself and the rebellion he'd led. If poetic injustice means anything, this is it. The fate of this revolutionary was surely the fate of the people as a whole under Stalinist dictatorship: the millions who overthrew the ancien régime, and were then forced to build monuments to their own revolutionary past.

I still don't understand, frankly, why people hate literary scholars for having a professional vocabulary while remaining perfectly content with economists' using "devaluation" or philosophers' using "existentialist," or physicists' talking about a "projective Hilbert space endowed with the Fubini-Study metric." These days even Tucker Carlson uses "deconstruct" and George W. Bush has developed quite a fondness for "ideology," which half my dissertation committee rejected as jargon.