The end of the world has been on my mind lately. In the city where I live, Seattle, this summer saw dramatic differences in the climate; for weeks the air quality was worse than in Beijing. On one occasion ash rained down from the sky, covering windows, lawn chairs and spider webs in a preternaturally grubby residue. These events were unnerving in no small part because of their baleful coincidence with the news that the current administration would be pulling out of the Paris

To what extent are thinkers of an analytic bent justified in dismissing the idea that there is something on the order of what Adorno calls a mythical residue or substrate in art, in music, in language? What might account for the general discomfort this causes? It likely stems from a slippage that takes the non-provability of the non-rational, non-quantitative, non-discursive (all non's?) elements in art to constitute non-existence of these elements. The claim of non-existenc

It doesn't look like Charles Bronson is playing the harmonica or, indeed, like any of the sounds in the opening scene from Once Upon a Time in the West are actually attached to their visual sources. But this is not for a lack of detail. Every sound is presented with an impossible richness of detail, recorded in stunningly high fidelity. But fidelity to what exactly? What sort of reality is this scene meant to simulate? The inundation of sonic concreteness and detail in the sc