I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how breaks, ruptures and transitions are conceived of an ontological level. They are evidenced through factors across a range of domains which are presented as indicators of change but the underlying rupture must exceed these particular trends in order to be regarded as such. There’s something might and […]
Tag: epochal theorising
I’m reading Rosi Braidotti’s PostHuman Knowledge at the moment and I’m struggling with it. Leaving aside my other objections to her approach, due to be published by the end of the year, it perfectly embodies a tendency towards the theoretical avant-garde which I’ve found more problematic with each passing year. She is far from alone […]
From John Urry’s Societies beyond Oil pg 9: Leading social analyst Zygmunt Bauman famously described the twentieth-century development of all this movement as a ‘liquid modernity’. But what he did not examine was how there was in fact a literal liquid –oil –that made this modernity, oiling the wheels of a globalizing society. It seemed […]
In today’s Guardian, Neal Lawson offers a cautious reading of Corbyn’s Labour, accepting the ascendancy of the left within the party but urging it to look outwards. I’m sympathetic to many of the substantive points Lawson makes in the article but there’s a rich vein of problematic assumption running through their articulation which needs to […]
In the last few days, I’ve been reading Hilary Clinton’s What Happened and reflecting on it as an expression of a political centrism which I suspect is coming to an end. These self-defined ‘modernisers’ sought to adapt their respective political parties to what they saw as a new reality, necessitating that they be ‘change-makers’ while […]
I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of late modernity. It was the work of Bauman, Beck and Giddens which drew me into Sociology, presenting a till then cynical philosophy student with the possibility that one could meaningfully engage with the world and diagnose the times in a philosophical register. But coming to recognise the […]
