Theory & Practice Archives - Page 4 of 12

Education

Politics of Small Things

December 13, 2016 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

This piece is part of the OOPS Series, "Social Interaction." Jeffrey Goldfarb’s “The Politics of Small Things” is a both an insightful work of social analysis and -- through this analysis itself -- an enactment of this-worldly hope in, as he might phrase it, these dark times. Instead of focusing on ...

Theory & Practice

The Spectacle of Disintegration

November 9, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Everyone I know was sad and shocked and disbelieving when Donald Trump did so well in the 2016 election. Whatever happened was not quite what the models predicted. It may take some time to figure out what part of this was driven by a rage whose roots are in experiences ...

Education

How to Think through Cages

November 3, 2016 • by Santiago Zabala

What I liked so much about these suggestions was the subtle call to think without fear and without expectations. The cages will always be there, but I came to understand how important it is to create a philosophical cage that allows you to leave it. When would leaving become necessary? ...

Theory & Practice

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

September 11, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Asger Jorn is acknowledged to be one of the great artists of the postwar years. Even more impressive in my estimation is his theoretical work. I made the case for this in The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011). Since then, two collections of Jorn’s writings have appeared in English: ...

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

Theory & Practice

Chthulucene, Capitalocene, Anthropocene

September 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

It’s a time naming things in another way, because the thing that needs to be named is a certain strange quality of time. Here’s a marvelous sentence by Donna Haraway, with three names for three kinds of time, all in the one sentence, overlapping but not the same: "The unfinished ...

Feature

Friction

September 5, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has just published a brilliant book on the global trade in a certain kind of mushroom. As much as I’d like to report on it, I feel like I have to get my head around a previous landmark work of hers before attempting it. Here ...

Education

What Could History Have Been?

Imagining new approaches to the humanities

August 26, 2016 • by Matthew Strother

“What could history have been?” The question asks how events might have turned out otherwise, if only X had happened instead of Y. What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? What if Hitler had? The official term for this kind of what-if thinking is “counterfactual history,” and it covers anything from ...

Theory & Practice

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

on Paolo Virno

July 2, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Paolo Virno offers a curious diagnosis of the times. In A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004), he writes of the communism of capital. It’s a thought that has some pedigree in Marx, who made a similar observation in his own time about the formation of the joint-stock company, which ...

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

Feature

Refugee Movements and the Crisis of Europe

Theoretical Interventions

June 24, 2016 • by Silje Kristine Anderson

This panel discussion probes this crisis from a theoretical perspective and discusses its political implications by asking: What follows from this crisis for the European project, the paradoxes of international law, the role of the nation-state, and the resurgence of nationalism? And how does the emergence of new political practices and subjectivities ...

Refugee Movements and the Crisis of Europe

Theory & Practice

What the Performative Can’t Perform

On Judith Butler

June 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Judith Butler's Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015) is a series of occasional pieces which, taken together, show both the extraordinary range of her thought, and perhaps also some of its limitations. Here her thinking extends from questions of gender performativity, seen as an instance of precarity ...

Feature

Chaos, Order & Everything In Between, Diane Vaughan

May 11, 2016 • by Zeyno Ustun

Global events such as the Syrian refugee crisis, the growing challenges to austerity and for a living wage, the protean nature of social media as a news source, and many other situations present us with scenes of chaos, order, and the transitions in between. Such phenomena can result in varying ...

Chaos, Order & Everything In Between, Diane Vaughan

Feature

2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Rahel Jaeggi

March 30, 2016 • by Silje Kristine Anderson

How should we conceive of social change and moral progress? How do they come about? How are the two phenomena related to each other and how can they be evaluated—as change for the better? These are questions which have repeatedly preoccupied contemporary philosophical discussion and which seem to be indispensable for a critical ...