Category: Social Theory
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the feared disseminators of complexity
A new discovery, made within Simon Reynolds’ response to the shuttering of Beyond the Beyond: Matti Swiedmann’s Red Velvet Corridor. Top of the stack of posts at present is this thing, rambling around in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard… all the intervals in that haunting earworm of a scale that…
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neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental
Medium-length essay here by Rob Nixon, whose “slow violence” concept was briefly introduced to me back in early March at a little symposium thing in Utrecht; I’ve acquired the book, obvs, but it’ll likely be a while before I get to it, and I wanted to put up a quick placeholder for it on the…
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unknowable differences populating an imagined horizon
Struggling to write on sociological topics (or indeed on anything that engages significantly with social dimensions, whether academically or otherwise)? David Beer is, too: … beyond the problems of the speed of change and a lack of focus, there is also a sense that the thing I’d normally be analysing – society – will not…
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In search of a dialectical utopianism : Harvey (2000), Spaces of Hope
Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press. Focussing here, for reasons presumably obvious to long-term readers of this site, on Chapters 8 (“The spaces of Utopia”, p133-81) and 9 (“Dialectical utopianism”, p182-95) of what is now a vintage part of the David Harvey canon. Reading these pieces really brought home just how…
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“A sterile and decontextualised narrative”: Grossi & Pianezzi (2017), Smart cities: Utopia or neoliberal ideology?
Grossi, G., & Pianezzi, D. (2017). “Smart cities: Utopia or neoliberal ideology?”. Cities, 69, 79-85. Pretty simple paper, this one, in the sense that it does exactly what it says on the tin; the specific case (Genoa, Italy) is not of great relevance to me right now, but I want to drag some quotes out…