Category: Social Theory
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neither unprecedented nor revolutionary / bioethics, biopower and the pandemic
OK, this is gonna be a long one. And if the C19 situation is fraught for you, then consider this a content warning—I’m going to talk about mortality and our societal attitudes to such. I’ve been wanting to write something like this for a good few weeks, but have frankly been too much of a…
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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…