Category: Social Theory
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the worst has been averted, at least temporarily
Steven Shaviro on KSR’s new joint: [Kim Stanley] Robinson is juggling many threads, but he has no interest in combining them all into a tightly organized narrative. This is in part, at least, because the world we live in doesn’t work that way. It is unimaginably complex, and it is at least potentially open. The…
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rough guidance: some reflections on the making of travel guides to places that don’t (yet) exist
Somehow I haven’t really talked much about the Rough Planet Guide to Notterdam here at VCTB; I think that’s partly due to an anxiety about “crossing the streams”, getting my day-job stuff tangled up in what is very much a scratch-pad-pub-booth-talking-to-myself sort of website these days, but also to some extent the same anxiety that…
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a poetics of Theory
Something anachronistic in proffering a defense of Theory in the third decade of the new millennium; something nostalgic or even retrograde. Who cares anymore? Disciplinary debates make little sense as the discipline itself has imploded, and the anemic cultural studies patois of the Internet hardly seems to warrant the same reflection, either in defense or…
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PLANRITNINGEN
It begins. A map can never be a territory, particularly when it comes to writing a book, but nonetheless you need to at least imagine where you think you might be going… and I’ve at least walked some parts of this landscape before, albeit hurriedly and without taking as much time to look around as…
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(failed) states of exception
I’ve been an admirer of Christopher Brown’s fiction ever since I bought a two-handed piece for Futurismic that he wrote with Chairman Bruce (“Windsor Executive Solutions”, which is still up and available to read, amazingly enough). I finally got my hands on one of his recent novels back in the spring, and found myself thinking…