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.

 

Human Rights, Alienation, and Aesthetics
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In Marx’s understanding of human rights, alienation violates the workers' rights. In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx notes that the great documents of right, like “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” consistently stress the importance of personal liberty, linking it to the free disposal of private property.
Boundless Bodies: "bio-art" in 2009—or the man with three ears
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A new trend in the arts is to use human and animal organic tissues (mixed or grown together) instead of paint, clay or other traditional media as the primary material for art. The artificiality in art is literal, and yet subverted, the artificial becoming natural, being grown out of the natural world, and - more disturbingling - creating a new "natural" or at least living world.
Quevedo, Borges, and Translation
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Borges felt great admiration for Quevedo as a writer, but at a certain point he began to feel suspicion of writers whose genius is purely verbal.  Borges begins to elaborate the idea that the particular way in which something is phrased is somewhat arbitrary, and that the important thing is the archetype, the idea itself.
Complexity Works Too
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A few weeks back I posted a video which benefited from the art of simplicity. But sometimes complexity is alright. Even if that complexity comes in the form of signs & symbols without a clear referent.
More on different ways to believe
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Jonathan Mayhew's response to my post last week challenged me to be more specific about how ways of believing can be different, as opposed to merely being cases of believing different propositions. He argued that without such evidence, the new atheist contention that moderates ultimately aid and abet fundamentalists remains strong.

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