GABlog

Exclude from your discourse all imperatives, implicit and explicit, to third parties. No “x must realize,” or “y needs finally to understand,” or “we have to demand that z…” Nobody really has to do anything, and stating that they do simply establishes a fantasy scenario in which others come to occupy the same [...]

Continue reading A Minimal Rule for Political Discourse

We all know Marshall McLuhan’s catchphrases: “the medium is the message,” “global village,” “the content of one medium is another medium,” etc. I don’t know of any theory of media that has superseded McLuhan’s, a vulgarized version of which has become a kind of cultural commonsense; and yet it’s hard to take McLuhan [...]

Continue reading The Grammar of the Political Economy of Media

The Oulipo group has already spawned a variety of spin-offs: oubapo (comics); oupeinpo (painting); oucuipo (cooking); oumupo (music); outrapo (drama), and at least several more. All one needs to found a new ou-x-po is the realization that the activity in question (the “x”) is governed by rules, some explicit, more tacit, and that [...]

Continue reading Oupopo: A Preliminary Political Combinatorial

I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past few posts the literary group Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature), which devises rules and procedures for composing literary texts. I have situated my growing interest in Oulipo in terms of the way I have been thinking about rules and habits, rules and imperatives, rules [...]

Continue reading Rendering is the Stay of Frenzy: Ou-GA-po