Another chunk of my academic writing has made its way through the slow mill of the publishing process, and is now available to read.
“Paradoxical Containment: The Double Externalization of Packaging, and the Overextension of the Metasystemic Prosthesis” is a chapter in Containment: Holding, Filtering, Leaking (Angerer, Richardson, Schmedes & Sofoulis, eds.), out now in glorious full open access from the good people at Meson Press.
As I remarked to some good friends from my time at Sheffield—friends whose friendship supported me through the depressing experience of seeing my doctoral work land in various disciplinary discourses with all the impact of a fart in a jacuzzi—this chapter is surely the truest bit of academic writing I ever did: truest to itself, and truest to me as its author.
It says much of what I was trying to say in the infrastructure-theoretical parts of my doctoral thesis, at which moment I had neither the writing chops nor the theoretical dexterity to say it (let alone the physical and mental stamina). As such, it’s bittersweet, pointing as it does in a direction I would dearly have loved to have travelled in my postdoctoral years: wandering the infrastructural metasystem with Bruno Latour for (figurative) company.
But the universe had other plans, and I ended up coming to Sweden and building on the futures side of things, rather than the infrastructural side. But when Zoe Sofoulis—who I should probably describe as my mentor, but who I think of much more as just my friend—asked if I wanted to take part in a symposium based around her noted paper on container technologies, well, how could I say no? It would be a sort of swansong for my doctoral work, I thought.
The symposium became a book project, one slowed both by matters contextual (i.e. the pandemic) and by matters more immediate (i.e. the sad and fairly sudden passing of co-editor Marie-Luise Angerer), and while it was coming together, I was slowly drifting out of academia’s airlock… and so this chapter has become a swansong for my academic career as a whole1.
(Or at least for that contiguous phase of my time in academia, because who knows whether or not I might drift back into that airlock again, like an Alastair Reynolds character with a forgotten Maguffin?)
Swansong or not, I’m proud of this chapter: it is perhaps the least compromised of them all when it comes to its argument, and (I think) represents my stylistic peak within the very particular genre that is soci(otechnic)al theory.
Again, like all Meson Press books, Containment is fully open access, and you can download the whole book for free without guilt or risk. I hope you will consider reading it, and letting me know what you think of it.
- There are actually a couple of other chapters by me still to be published, though the handbook in which they are meant to appear has been in the academic equivalent of development hell for maybe three years now; they were written long before the containment chapter, put it that way. So while they may be the last to hit the shelves, they’ll not have the feel of being my last, you know? ↩︎
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