It has been my experience for the past ten years that producing thoughts that bear a linear, methodical and consequential coherence involves excruciating pain. I blame the technological epoch we live in. If Benjamin thought that the Parisian arcades represented the architectural fracture of a society that no longer coalesced a homogeneous, cohering culture, I say that the situation has not gotten any less so or simpler. Everything around us, sensorially, points to fracture. Fragmentation is the aesthetics, as well as ethos, by which we socialize and even attempt to define ourselves and the person next to us. Fragmentation reveals, empirically, the deep relatedness among things and persons by which everything we know and can speak of, attains meaning, material presence, metaphysical presence. Fragmentation refuses linear ordering or codifying. Benjamin spoke of constellations, but ultimately his constellations subscribed to a linear composition. That is, things in Benjamin’s constellation adopted significance by becoming ruins that by necessity re-iterated the historiography of past, present and future. If linearity was the method that organized social phenomena and epistemology before the 20th century, well, linearity no longer holds hegemony. What is the current codifying method that turns nothing into something, that manages to skirt around origin and end in order to sustain duration as such and the duration of things, a process that in itself becomes a politics of things?
Realism 