Interventions

Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge. 

Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.

 

Dark and mysterious etching featuring four human figures with bat-like flying apparatuses.
Ageing for Beginners: An Unrepresentative Guide
By
Richard Read
We all know we can move between ages: the bank manager and the brain surgeon screaming in the members' stand at the football club, the sombre academic taking to ecstatic dance at the post-conference night club, the OAP who falls in love, the police people hiding tats beneath their uniforms. Does this pin-ball capacity to flick between several different ages we carry ready and waiting their turn within ourselves serve any evolutionary purpose?
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Thoughts on Reading Joseph Levenson
By
Contrary to the menacing spectacle of national chauvinism associated with China today, Confucian universal values embodied by the idea of tianxia (all under heaven) stem from an ethical scheme of ritualistic empire.  This global view based on cultural improvement is a far cry from the image of modern empires bent on acquiring territories, markets and resources. 
mind your fictions
By
The incapacity of the mind–or rather of the Western mind culturally trained to succeed and strive–to conceive of reality. We are not taught to see what is, but to dream, long, hope, desire, strive, reach for a perfection (physical, intellectual, financial, social) that does not exist outside of our projections and the standards of the society where we are born.
simplistic linguistics versus the simplicity of language
By
Dictation implies a separation between “me” and the writing itself. I had to re-imagine what the writing life would look like. Suddenly I was speaking my text to someone. I was externalizing a step of the process that had been so far silently kept within. We were now two in the room, and at the beginning there was no obvious agreement on what should be typed on the screen.
Dialogue with Montaigne
By
“Il faut souffrir doucement les loix de nostre condition. Nous sommes pour vieillir, pour affoiblir, pour estre malades, en despit de toute medecine."
Disinformation Society
By
As the underlying structures of the war in Iraq become publicly visible, its basic logics emerge: a systematic campaign of disinformation waged at home and abroad, a propaganda machine of unparalleled sophistication, and a cultivated manipulation of fear in the interests of justifying and perpetuating an increasingly questionable war on terror.
The Biology of Writing
By
There is the question of the influence of technology (or absence thereof) on the way we think and write. But I recently came across the question of the biology of writing: what are we writing with? Our minds, our hands, our guts, or an immaterial mix of subconscious/reason/emotion peppered with cruise-controlled linguistic automatisms?

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