From Pathways to Channels: Art, Culture, and Commodification

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The anthropologist Ruth Finnegan coined the expression “pathways of urban life” to describe the musical practices of a small British town. These pathways are constituted by the web of social acts of those who take part in this musical life, and they remain in force to the extent that those relationships, and the resulting habits, sustain their force and continuity. … Read more →

Exile of Gods, Heroes, and Monsters

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An old maxim teaches that nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. But it is also true that the intellect combines at its whim the materials it gathers from the tumultuous well from which it receives them. That well opens onto an abyss not only of the ignoramus, but also of the gaze that seeks compassion. Stories are built in common — at least their unspoken part, the part made of sharp edges beneath the light that sets some days apart from others. From there the gods have arisen, with no one apparently having summoned them. From there too the heroes and the monsters: enemies and lovers, as courage and panic are, as life and death are. And at their centre of mass, sacrifice.

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Ineffable Diary

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The Ineffable Diary has been published in secret — a book that has sprouted, unexpected and uncultivated, like a mushroom: a delicacy and a poison at once, a necessary uselessness in times of scarcity. An unsellable object, like the capricious shapes of the clouds on the days that surround a storm. 

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Portada Diario Inefable

The Age of Packaging

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No single material defines our era. Stone and iron are used massively, on a scale never before imagined; the same goes for sand, the rest of the metals, leathers, wood, and so on. And we have added, as a novelty, plastic and all the derivatives of petroleum. This last has led some to think of ours as the “age of … Read more →

The Limits of Humour and Freedom of Expression

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Many professional comedians have come to believe the fantasy of the jester who told the King uncomfortable truths. At least they recognise their condition as servants. As for telling uncomfortable truths, they resemble those journalists who, far from doing any such thing, are the mouthpieces of dominant thought — in their case, of the fashionable aesthetic among the young media-consuming … Read more →

The Justifications of Contemporary Art

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The thesis to be set out here is the following: many works of current art present themselves wrapped in the text of their own justification — in the catalogue text in which they are embedded — as though they were necessarily tied to it, when in reality the work itself, in its material-conceptual formality, need not refer to that text … Read more →

Sketch of a Poetics: The Control of Inertias

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Inertia is understood here in a sense close to that proposed by Newtonian physics in its first law, which we take as known. We apply this sense to any process or material state indifferent to the subject’s intentions and prior to their operations. As an example: a block of raw stone confronted by a sculptor is an inertia. The successive … Read more →

An Unhappy World

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A tedium came over me and cast its shadow. That was when my ordeal began. At the entrance to the company there are always volunteers who smile at you, wearing that pathetic expression of people who love every living creature. In those days, such treacly displays still offered me some comfort. On the way home I could always stop at … Read more →

The Mystery Business

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I confess I have been a consumer of mystery-industry products, especially in their radio format. The pleasant manner in which they were presented on La Rosa de los Vientos, and the distance its host was able to keep from the things being told there, made the programme an evocative way-station for the curious. Nothing like the sensationalist unease radiated by … Read more →

The Perennial Tradition Does Not Exist

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The perennial tradition — perennial philosophy, perennial wisdom, or eternal tradition — is supposedly the common substratum of all historical knowledge from the very origin of human culture: that which links together the great philosophical, religious, ethical, moral, and spiritual ideals, and so on. Well, this tradition does not exist. There are obviously contents that may be common, or similar, … Read more →

The Most Beautiful Profession in the World

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It is almost a tradition that certain figures who appear frequently in the media — actors, artists, or journalists — should declare with a crystalline smile and a victorious pride that they are lucky enough to practise the most beautiful profession in the world, and that ever since they were tiny children they had known their vocation was to tell … Read more →

To Be an Artist Is to Look Like One: From Fetish to Puppet

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When El Fary appeared on television, my grandmother used to say: “That man is a great artist.” I will not deny this character his talents — who lacks them entirely? — but what interests me here is the heterogeneity of the contexts in which the label artist gets applied. El Fary is one, of course, and so is every imaginable … Read more →

The Strange Case of Dr. Puertas

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With the help of a small fortune and in the strictest secrecy, Dr. Julio Puertas built a time machine that ran on plutonium. Such an achievement was the culmination of a childhood dream he had never once abandoned. He studied engineering, earned a doctorate in physics, and secured a succession of well-paid positions to fund his project — all of … Read more →

English Is the Language of Porn

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In ancient Rome, Greek was the language of culture, so much so that even the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in it. The empire, however, was Rome, and Rome gave its language to the lands it conquered — one of whose descendants, through another empire, the Spanish, reached even further. English, too, has had its empire, and still has … Read more →

The Painter and the Light

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There was once a painter who wandered through places where no paths are written, in search of the perfect light. One day, a ray broke through the clouds and spread like a fan over the distant hills. Beneath that light, everything took on new life. The painter was captivated by that sky, but when he tried to paint it, the … Read more →

Who Is Isidoro Magaux?

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The photograph that illustrates this text is the only known image of Isidoro Magaux. His legend has it that he lost his family very young in a blizzard. This is the only uncertain piece of information in his biography. Everything else bears the iron stamp of invention. The first is his name, which he traced over the wreckage of his … Read more →

Matrix and Gnosticism

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The Matrix film saga stimulated a wave of armchair philosophers who saw in it a story of almost mystical depths, a metaphysics renewed with the motifs of postmodernity. It is true that the matrix of Matrix is metaphysical, but it is neither new nor does it engage with the heights of ontology, Western or Eastern. These films basically copy the … Read more →

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity

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The advance of artificial intelligence unsettles some people as if some unknown invader were slowly approaching through space. For them, AI is already on the verge of waking up to take control of itself. This haloed horizon conceals the real reality of these technologies, which is their insertion into our structures of production. What I want to talk about here … Read more →

Mrs. Enríquez

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Mrs. Enríquez was born in one of so many post-war years. Among briars and mud, she knew hunger and resilience before she learned to speak. Her genes, programmed to make an athlete, had instead produced a slight, wiry little woman with sinewy limbs, defiant cheekbones, and light feet. She moved with the energy and steadiness of someone who has not … Read more →

The Myths of the Free Press

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We take the term “mass media” in its common sense: companies that produce and disseminate messages. Their product is presented as the news — not as just any information, but as the relevant events. These media outlets justify themselves, through their professionals, by means of the following myths: These myths also conceal something further: the commodity character of the contents … Read more →

Zaprezs

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Zaprezs placed the tips of his unpolished shoes at the exact edge of the stage. His attire had been treated with meticulous care to eliminate all light and all reflection. The only white was the collar of his shirt, which pressed the flesh of his jowl against his jaw and pushed his head backward. His entire body followed: erect beneath … Read more →

What Is Science Fiction?

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On Chronicle of the Stellar Bridges To define science fiction with any rigour, we need a conception not only of science but also of technology — because what these stories most often present is a display of fabulous devices whose theoretical foundations are left implicit. Here we will draw on the following text by Gustavo Bueno (1924–2016), a Spanish philosopher … Read more →

The Flight of Words

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One summer night, while everyone slept, the words began to escape through the window. They were tired of being used vulgarly, offensively, or incorrectly — of being used to deceive, to lie, or to insult. And so a few of them, the worst-used ones, broke the chains that bound them to our tongue and set out on an adventure. The … Read more →

Traditional Cultures Are Not Traditionalist

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Traditionalism is an ideology that regards certain past institutions as the most perfect and effective, and links them with truth. It is a modern ideology, first explicitly formulated in the political circles which, in nineteenth-century France, reacted against the ravages of the Revolution. The concrete forms to which they appealed were those of the Ancien Régime: throne and altar. Since … Read more →