In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism's anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.

The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there.

Identitarianism assumes that people are condemned to identify with the positive (ethnic/ gender/ nationalistic) predicates they possess, as if their subjectivity were exhausted by those properties. Exactly the opposite is the case: the authentic dimension of subjectivity consists not in any positive identity but in that which makes identifications.

Identitarianism assumes that people are condemned to identify with the positive (ethnic/ gender/ nationalistic) predicates they possess, as if their subjectivity were exhausted by those properties. Exactly the opposite is the case: the authentic dimension of subjectivity consists not in any positive identity but in that which makes identifications.

The sustaining fantasy of Nolan's Batman films - which does chime uncomfortably with Romney -is that the excesses of finance capital can be curbed by a combination of philanthropy, off-the-books violence and symbolism.

While football embarrassingly exposes the excesses of capitalism, the Olympic sports have been used to propagate the neoliberal mantra that success is simply a matter of hard work.

Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'