what's potentially revolutionary: it grates but can't be policed. It's like a ricocheting bowling ball in the china shop of capitalist America. Or some such thing.

The show turns maudlin in the fifth season as it begins to look for its heart of gold. It's as if the daffiness of the show was too much for it. And so it succumbed, letting itself be enfolded in the banal affect factory of the spectacle. This often happens with TV shows, of course, as they are conspicuous constituents of the spectacle. A tragic example is the little known and short lived, "Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23." In the first season, the "good girl" from the Mid-West comes to New York and has her bland sanctimony upturned by the partygirl's brilliant and liberating amorality. In the second season, the show flipped the script back to the familiar, ruining the very thing that made it interesting.

But let's forget how 'The Office" turned sour. In its first four seasons, it gives a devastating critique of capitalism, of the fear and loathing that pervades it, of the alienation it forges. And, in the very same breath, it offers a mode of resistance.

10.03.2017

Francis Bacon in his studio. Note the images everywhere. As Deleuze argues, the painter doesn't begin with a blank canvas;
he begins with a canvas dense with images.

Where to begin? How to begin? As Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition, Descartes supposes to begin without presuppositions. I'll doubt everything, says Descartes adopting his version of skepticism, and see what I