As your correspondent sits at his beat-up wooden desk, looking out at the autumn leaves beginning to fall, trying to make sense of things while simultaneously being flooded with various demands, it seems a tricky time to really think.
This writing platform is a chance to make sense of something - to try, through the seemingly modest act of performance criticism, to bring some sense of meaning to the mess of today's existence. One way to exist, of course, is to retreat completely from trying to make sense of anything (and there are a lot of options for us to do this today). It is much harder, I claim, to really engage the dilemmas and issues facing us but outside our individual sphere of concern, which might be ethical, social, and collective.
It is also less comfortable. Engage such questions and you quickly find yourself punished in unexpected ways: like the one who takes the time to check on someone lying on a street corner only to be attacked, we are often disciplined for our attempts to share precarity and act in collaboration. The world, especially 'The West', is set up to favour self-interest, under a guise that this is something 'essential' and inevitable about humanity. But any close observer of people - writer, poet, painter, actor - normally finds something much more optimistic, which is why there is not much art about Adam Smith.
"Goodbye Mummy" - advertising poster for Milk on Rosenthaler Platz Berlin, marking both the retirement of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a new comic high-point for psychoanalysis.
It has been commented before that this writing platform is weirdly not self-interested, but instead is unashamedly engaged with social and collective questions. "How does it make profit?" I am sometimes asked. This is obviously not the point, and profit can't be the purpose of everything - although there are also personal benefits to me that come from developing critical thinking publicly and in collaboration with others, and yes sometimes these are material (although less and less). The project here is always to generate something that is of social and collective benefit - to create a 'critic', and perhaps, 'critics'.
