Category: Social Theory
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synthesis is an ever-complicating process
Here’s a gloriously rambling thing from Matt Colquhoun that starts off talking about dialectics. Hence my choice of title—I’m currently undergoing a sort of dialectics of my understanding of dialectics (if that’s not too pompously meta a way of putting it), and I keep getting sychronicitous little gifts of other people’s thought, like this one,…
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amphibiosis / the war against viruses will not take place
A fairly Harawayian staying-with-the-trouble perspective on the politics of this pandemic and all the other pandemics yet to come, from Charlotte Brives: It is not against viruses that we should be waging a war, but against the political and economic systems which, far from being conceived as protection against the precarity (this itself being variable!)…
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necessary but not sufficient; on hope and optimism in solarpunk and cyberpunk
Start with a disclaimer: I do not identify as a solarpunk. However, I do know some folk who do—most notably m’good buddy Jay Springett, who is one of that scene’s ideologues-in-chief, in as much as it has such things. I also know some folk who study solarpunk from the perspective of the environmental humanities (EH),…
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the project of human mastery must always remain incomplete
Procrastinating this morning by catching up on a stack of as-yet-unread newsletter emails from L M Sacasas. This bit in particular, from 11th March, chimed with a lot of my recent early-morning thinkings-through of The Ongoing Situation: … it is curious to note again the recent proliferation of conspiracy theorizing, something I’ve previously attributed to…
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the caricature of a time that is no longer ours
Oncle Bruno on the radical ecological potential—or perhaps the lack thereof— of the current moment: The originality of the present situation, it seems to me, is that by remaining trapped at home while outside there is only the extension of police powers and the din of ambulances, we are collectively playing a caricatured form of…