fixity

Jeremy Strong, who, as Kendall Roy on “Succession,” turned ethics-free tooldom into poetry, finds his Cohn in verbal tics and locked-jaw fixity.

It’s a debate that presupposes a fixity, using language long-weaponized by conservative and far-right voices, that many are now challenging and rejecting.

For me, the emphasis on fixity as a measure of authenticity, as implied by the Foundation’s “core tenets,” deflects attention from the emotional probing that makes Gonzalez-Torres’s art so moving.

Part of that fixity comes from nostalgia.

This belief in the fixity rather than the fluidity of human nature or maybe in guilt without redemption shows up everywhere — not just in the formal legal system that decides questions of innocence, guilt and responsibility but also in the social sphere, in which we render verdicts replete with both unexamined assumptions about human nature and prejudices for and against particular kinds of people and acts.