Category: Social Theory
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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…
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final phase
Finally! Been a long time waiting for this to arrive, after assorted delays and mishaps. And it arrives within a few days of my hearing that Alexandra Pierce at Locus made particular mention of my piece herein (among a few others), and described it as “a powerful story on many levels”; not gonna quibble with…
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science found it hard to converse with the rest of society
Nice to see a typically long LRB review of Latour’s last two books, but Harding makes a bit of a blunder here, perhaps due to his not having been party to decades of STS discourse: There was a hint in We Have Never Been Modern that science found it hard to converse with the rest…