the pop dialectic

A note on my new banner: as I explained a year ago, the somewhat misleading title of this blog was always “accidental”. The “anti” was added to the already-taken “popper.com” as a way of creating an “evil twin” substitute, as it were — I liked the way it suggested a weird kind of ambivalence and contradiction, rather than phobic disavowal (otherwise I’d have never used the name). It reminds me of the more nuanced and radical take on Hegelian philosophy implied by the name of the communist journal Aufheben:

There is no adequate English equivalent to the German word Aufheben. In German it can mean “to pick up”, “to raise”, “to keep”, “to preserve”, but also “to end”, “to abolish”, “to annul”.

It makes you wonder if Deleuze and his mates are missing the complexity of Hegel. But in any case, I guess the ambivalence of the “antipopper” name wasn’t readily apparent to anybody else but me, so I’m now setting things straight by “bending the stick” and radically emphasising the “popper” part. (With a little help from everybody’s favourite Hegelians, the Situationist International.)