Let America Be America Again
December 23, 2016
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath—America will be!
From Let America Be America Again, by Langston Hughes, 1938.
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- The Post-Work SocietyIn an article on “post-work” for the Guardian, Andy Beckett writes that while work “increasingly forms our routines and psyches,” squeezing out other influences,” so that things we rely on to give life meaning, like religion, party politics, and community fade away, it is also a fact that work is not working, for ever more people, and in ever more ways. Beckett then goes on to count the ways: as subsistence (i.e., the problem of the working poor); as a source of social mobility and self-worth (graduates making you a latte); as precarious; as pointless, and even socially damaging; as incredibly stressful, and thus bad for your health; as poorly distributed (people have too much or too little); and finally, as endangered, and facing extinction due to automation. In this Post-Work Society section of Indarktimes, we explore the issue of post work in both of its major modes: theorizing the end of work because of the trajectory of advanced technological capitalist society, and challenging the priority of the work ethic, and celebrating the value of non-work activity.
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- IDT ComixDetermining the age of the art of the comic depends largely on what we count as a comic. The classic comic strip or comic book, broadly conceived, is essentially a story told through a sequence of images. In some cases, text is combined with the images, although the text certainly isn’t a requirement. On this understanding we might trace the comic back to Greek friezes and Egyptian hieroglyphics. We might dig even earlier in history and note how the Chinese alphabet began with pictograms (narrative through images), which transform over time into the logograms, and eventually into the written forms of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. And if this understanding might appear to overplay the age and gravitas of the “low culture” comic as an art form, it surely does not overstate the power of narrative art. In the later middle ages, in an effort to bring the teachings of Christianity to the illiterate, Pauper’s Bibles were produced, depicting the major stories of the Bible in block cut images. A Bible “comic book” was the only kind of book that illiterates were capable of ‘reading’. And using this same method, Martin Luther was among the first to politicize the…
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- IDT EphemeraThe spirit always appears in strange, evanescent forms.” –Novalis, Pollen 22, Pollen & Fragments Along with the high-minded essays (and now cartoons) IDT also occasionally produces scribbles. We include some of them here, because one does not struggle against dark times via the public use of reason alone. We also live “in dark times” as radically contingent individuals. Since we don’t know anything at all about how to write fiction or poetry, these scribbles take the form of “personal essays,” for lack of a better term. We also like to think of them as “ephemera.” They aren’t really “fragments,” and we certainly don’t think of them as “seeds” or “pollen.” Anyway, we’re allergic to pollen.
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