February 2012
1 post
WatchLove Your Friends Enough to Hate Them: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium. Performance at Plato’s Porno Cave: A Dream Exhibition, Little Berlin, January 21, 2012. (This performance, despite being neither original nor controversial in its claims, was forcibly suppressed in media res by the curators.) Video clip taken by Vincent Finazzo.
January 2012
1 post
Art and Bribery
The history of art is a history of bribery. A young person who for many possible reasons was lucky enough to escape complete and total ideological subjugation in the first few years of life keeps in touch with their sense of desire, a desire for everything, a desire obscurely but undeniably not satisfied by the social organization of the life into which they have been thrown. Thus, they create,...
December 2011
5 posts
1 tag
On the Bureaucratic Superego and Conventional...
Over the past five hundred years, political repression has been slowly but steadily delegated to the individual. The bureaucratic superego is what I call the function by which the individual prohibits itself from doing things that in the past would have been the jurisdiction of the Law. The driving force for this transfer of functions has been the flexibility of movement desired and required by...
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U.S. Media and Ideological Filtering as a Global...
In the study of international relations, there is a conventional and well-demonstrated theory according to which 1.) global stability is to be understood as a “public good,” and 2.) that due to strategic problems obstructing collective cooperation, often a hegemon is required to effectively subsidize it (Krasner 1976; Kindleberger 1981). Put very simply, in the absence of a hegemon, the global...
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A Return of the Repressed? Preliminary theory and...
Only about 40 years ago the advanced, developed, democratic republic of France was very nearly overthrown by an egalitarian, non-Soviet, non-authoritarian, spontaneous, and mass-democratic political revolution. The most remarkable aspect of the events surrounding May of 1968 in France is how unfathomably distant its subjective experience seems from our own political consciousness today in a...
November 2011
5 posts
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WatchFun. 19.5 minutes. November 26, 2011.
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The Occupations, Hipsterdom, and the...
Voices in mainstream media debate whether the American occupation movement is or will become a bona fide national political movement. Predictably, many sympathizers on the left do not hesitate to call it such, while critics, mostly on the right and mostly those who have the most to lose from a serious resurgence of militant democracy, dismiss our present insurrection as child’s play. Is it...
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Revolution Factories
In the industrial era, factories were physical sites of long-term and repeated interaction among laborers the exploitation and alienation of whom was visible for all to see. The camaraderie and sociality of workers in factories was therefore, as the traditional Marxian schema has it, inherently revolutionary. Today, the factories have been shipped off in favor of any and all currently profitable...
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Living and Writing of a Present Insurrection
It is difficult to write of a present insurrection. Journalize, polemicize, moralize, historicize, predict? Considered individually, all traditional modes of reflecting on politics seem insufficient or inappropriate. Someone once said that humans make their own history but not any history they please, so rigorous attention must be paid to the empirically knowable horizons of material,...
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WatchComposition. 5:18. November 2, 2011.
October 2011
1 post
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Full text of my interview with Temple News on the...
If Temple News had their wits about them they’d have just published this whole interview and called it “Interview with Justin Murphy, premature and self-aggrandizing revolutionary intellectual and artist.” But, the bourgeois press being pretty out of touch, they just excerpted from the least interesting of my comments.
Temple News: First, I need your year and major/exactly what...
September 2011
1 post
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WatchTheoretical Commentary to “Portrait of the Artist as Young Men.” 10:45. September 17, 2011.
August 2011
10 posts
1 tag
Abraham and Hagar are Very Okay Now
A short story by Anne Malkovich Malkovich and me.
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As a 28-year-old independent female, I’ve never until now had any need for a car. Having lived in the city my whole life, I’ve always used public transportation and my bicycle and that’s always been good enough. But now that I’m out of college and I now have a real job outside of the city, my parents and I agreed that it was time to...
About the Truth of Pop Music
If I understand him correctly, musician and theorist John Maus argues that the way of listening called music can be brought forth universally through the core procedure of pop, which, to him, is the process of abstracting away from music all “concentrations” or particularities of its contingent production and enjoyment (namely, standardization, materialization, and multiplication).
According to...
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An Inspired Consumer Reviews the City of...
Written between 2:04 p.m. and 4:21 p.m. on August 19, 2011 by Justin M. (me).
Rustica
903 N 2nd St Philadelphia, PA 19123 (215) 627-1393
Category: Pizza Neighborhood: Northern Liberties
Rustica is simply the best godd*mn place any second on this planet. I just ate a godd*mn buffalo chicken sicilian jigger for only $3, which is without a doubt the best pound-for-pound...
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WatchPortrait of the Artist as Young Men. 18:41. August 21, 2011.
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Introductory Lecture on Aesthetics, Religion, and...
Delivered at The Ox, August 18, 2011.
If God wrote the Bible today, he would be assassinated by the CIA because God was the most radical artist ever, creating so much in six days and only resting for one, never obeying a single law but only making up laws as he went. Socrates was, remember, assassinated by the CIA.
If you think you are an artist but do not get assassinated by the CIA, then it is...
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WatchFull Release of Meeting Mindy Isser in Real Life
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WatchIntroductory Lecture on Aesthetics, Religion, and Politics. 6:58. Delivered at The Ox warehouse. August 17, 2011.
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Seven Provisional Theses on the Meaning and Future...
1. The traditional cinematic representation of communication—the perfectly crafted, expertly balanced, and of course well-timed expressions of emotion—is a double bourgeois ruse. It tricks us first into thinking that to every true emotion belongs an elegant and compelling presentation that is always to the credit of the presenter, even to the Fool who is nonetheless always a...
July 2011
3 posts
1 tag
WatchUnforgettable Epiphany. 1:06. Video, lysergic acid. July 5, 2011.
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WatchOpen Bar Tender. 23.5 minutes. July 19, 2011.
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WatchInternational Relations. 17:42. July 5, 2011.
June 2011
3 posts
1 tag
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April 2011
4 posts
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Finding modern pictures in the National Gallery
To enter the galleries of modern painting from the main entrance of the National Gallery one has to walk through two separate and gargantuan gift stores and two equally impressive dining areas. But really, this is appropriate and historically honest curation. In short, the National Gallery makes visitors access modern painting in the same fashion as history itself has accessed it: through...
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March 2011
1 post
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Self-Immiserative Technomadism
One year of domestic peace and tranquility with a loving girlfriend has come to an end. I am officially moving back to the former meat-packing warehouse that has come to be known as “The Ox,” a space that 10 of us first conquered about two years ago.
My philosophy is shifting toward what I would like to term self-immiserative technomadism. The old Marxian hypothesis about the...
February 2011
1 post
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100% of my telecommunication will now be through...
Today, I paid $20 to Skype for a personal phone number good for three months. Incoming calls are free (as far as I can tell) and $14 more got me credits for making calls, which are only 2.3 cents/minute. Say I speak for 5 minutes per day, which is more than I typically do, that means $14 gets me almost 5 months. I am breaking my cell phone contract ($110) rather than pay $50/month for the next...
January 2011
1 post
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Does Obama Really Care Less than Bush about...
Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian reports a graph, apparently by Matthew Hope of the University of Bristol, to illustrate the claim that Obama is less interested in climate change than Bush. This comes on the heels of several critics who point out that Obama did not mention climate change once in his past State of the Union address. The graph displays aggregate mentions of “climate...