Peter H. Vartanian

Greetings!

I am a pertinacious scholar from an agrarian hamlet tucked into the stone and pasture of the Tyrolean Alps: Weng. It is neither (a) a place that tends to produce theorists nor (b) one that is conspicuous enough to not miss if one blinked on the wrong bend in the road. Indeed, the scale there was human and weather-sized; mountains set the boundary conditions; and, seasons explained more than any market did.

Since self-transplanting to the manifold of U.S. urban life, my world has arrived in files, cables, contracts, rumors, maps, datasets, and half-remembered conversations on trains. I try to hold them together long enough to see a pattern and then let the pattern fracture again, so that it does not become an idol. The work, then, is less a career than a flexuous attempt to look at power without flattery and at fragility without romance.

This site is only a small room in that larger project: It will — in the longue durée — collect notes, diagrams, thought-experiments, and other working artefacts: things that are not yet polished enough for formal publication but too stubborn to stay in a private notebook.

If something here is unfinished, that is a feature moreso than a defect.

It means… that the question is still alive.