velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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The problem of being anyone at all
Those who disparage authors for practicing auto-fiction tend to believe character is a steady state that can be adequately represented on the page and thus see the autobiographical as an easy option, a copout. What they want instead is a determined effort of the unbridled imagination representing many different characters, all stable and well-defined, interacting…
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“A model of how to be and how to behave”: Szeman (2015), Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense
Szeman, I. (2015). Entrepreneurship as the new common sense. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(3), 471-490. [link] # Via a Wired article on the start-up Boomtrain, Szeman introduces the increasingly ubiquitous entrepreneurial story, “narratives that make it seem as if financial and social success is, in the main, inevitable in the new world of the devices and gadgets that increasingly…
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An ending is an extended dissolve
… Vásquez knows that history isn’t the “facts”, much less an approachable truth: it’s the shape of the ruins. Everything we describe as the past depends on an interpretation of what’s left over: and everything that’s left over has a baked-in undependability. In addition, no historical narrative has clear-cut limits: a beginning is always the…
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Cyborg dialectics / a perpetual state of transition
Dresden Codak. Started following his original webcomic way way back in the Noughties, when it was just as much of a one-person labour of love as it is now (though the artwork has gone from good to astonishing over the years). Back then DC (and I, for my sins) were fellow-travellers of transhumanism; DC is,…
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Between fact and friction
The insistence on the primacy of narratives and interpretations does not involve a deriding of facts but an alternative story of their emergence. Postmodernism sets itself against the notion of facts just lying there discrete and independent, and waiting to be described. Instead it argues that fact is the achievement of argument and debate, not…
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”