Category: Social Theory
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a clear parable of power
Raising my head briefly above the palisade*, here, to clip a couple of paragraphs from an excellent (and, unusually, free-to-air) essay at the Paris Review, which is apparently a tweaked version of an introduction by Michael Tondre for a new edition of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the foundational petro-novel. You should read the whole thing, as…
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the prestige (as seen from the props room)
Reading a Matt Webb post all the way to the end has the effect of revealing him as a sort of genre artist—a term I do not intend as insult. In much the same way as the golden age sf short story authors, he has a fairly standard suite of conceptual strategies; the excitement of…
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various interested parties exercising whatever leverage they can establish within a given context
Rob Horning continues to blaze a trail of theoretically-informed examinations of social media, to the extent that I a) wish someone would ask him to write a book on this stuff, and b) wish someone would check to see if he’s getting outside the house much. Lots of chewy stuff in this latest missive, which…
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like a shadow anticipating its own body
From the opening chapter of Wild Thought, being a fresh translation of the book by Levi-Strauss which was first translated as The Savage Mind: We should not, for all this, fall back on the vulgar thesis (which is however, admissible in the narrow perspective in which it is situated) that magic is a timorous and…
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Nostalgia for politics: The Hours Have Lost Their Clock by Grafton Tanner
Subtitled “The Politics of Nostalgia”, Tanner’s book is divided into three sections, of which I found the first to be the most interesting: this is where Tanner unearths the history of nostalgia as a diagnosis (broadly medical before becoming more specifically psychological) which was literally lethal in its earliest manifestations among soldiers of the Napoleonic…