Category: Poststructuralism
-
Capitalism & Schizophrenia: A contemporary reading
It will not be a surprise to anyone who has attempted to read it, but Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ duology is a labyrinthine experience (to put it mildly). I have picked it up again recently after several years, and despite being wiser and grumpier in my…
-
Transforming Cities
Cities, on the surface at least, seem stable. The imposing physical materiality of concrete, steel and glass projects an endurance that is ‘built to last‘. Yet decades of urban critique have elucidated the fluidity of cities. From Walter Benjamin’s Arcades, through Cedric Price’s Fun Palace to Nigel Coates’ Ecstacity, people…
-
Badiou on Fidelity
The last of these XX on YY posts (as I’ve now finished the book!) is Badiou on Fidelity. It is linked to his notion of the Event, and his idea of ethics which are for me, extremely useful way of theoretically configuring subversion and how to engage in Deleuzian lines…
-
Infiltrating the Shard – a philosophical reaction
There’s been somewhat of a feeding frenzy in the media today regarding the infiltration of the Shard by Bradley Garrett and others. Bradley posted the images of his climb to the top of Europe’s new tallest building on his blog and soon after, the media caught wind of them and…
-
Life in Pruitt-Igoe
16th of March, 1972 at 3.00pm precisely. That is when Charles Jencks proclaimed ‘the death of modenism’, as the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis was razed to the ground. Many commentators of architecture and city living in general claimed it was the representative ‘end’ of the Cities of the Future which…
-
I hate EveryOne
When you read stuff like this, it really does make you realise the folly of structuralist thinking, or more accurately, the curse of the ‘ism’. I remember reading something by Marcus Doel once when the opening line was “I hate everyone” (I forget in which one of the myriad of his marvellous essays it…
-
Visualising Cities: Part 2
Having described how I think that the image of a city in film can be an interesting and alternative way of capturing its complexity in a previous blog entry, I wanted to elaborate this idea after some interesting comments, most notably from my brother (cheap plug coming up), who hosts…
-
What now for Actor-Network Theory with the advent of Web 2.0?
Actor-Network Theory (or simply, ANT) has been my staple diet of social theory, methodology and research direction for the last 6 years now, with my PhD thesis revolving around the tenant of ANT and Bruno Latour‘s writings. Adding a temporal dimension, one could say that it was in the late…
-
Mumbai attacks: Information of the Event
People who read this blog will no doubt be aware of my fascination with Badiou’s theorisation of the ‘Event’, and while I am still grappling with the nuances, it is clear that it holds certain truisms with social theory. For me however, its conflation with excess of reality’ (form Baudrillard’s…
-
Interlude 2: The Wire and the Event
I know that I probably watch too much TV, in fact, I once watched the whole first series of 24 in 18 hours, but when it comes to The Wire, I don’t think I could ever watch too much of it. The genre of cop drama/crime thriller has never been…
taCity 