Liberty Waving Goodbye to the People

Okay, so maybe it’s a tiny bit of a stretch, but I think there’s a lot to be gleaned from the juxtaposition of Renée Adorée (as The Big Parade‘s Melissande) and Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty” (“Leading the People”) I’ve been calling King Vidor a “Romantic” and a “Transcendentalist”–and this exercise might help to clarify what I [...]

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Catachresis on Infinite Earths: The Representation of the Impossible and the Impossibility of Representation in the American Notional Pastime

Any scholar wishing to reserve a place for the emergence of critique from within the chrysalis of popular/mass culture in advanced capitalist societies must sooner or later come to terms with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In fact, the postscript to that book—“The Culture Industry Revisited” (collected in Adorno, CI)—was written precisely in order [...]

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