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Underground > Head Shop >

Good recent theory

07:54 / 19.06.02

possibly more head-shop oriented, but i thought i would ask generally what recent theory people think is interesting, i.e., worth chasing up. i will reply when i finish what i'm currently reading, i reckon...

15:54 / 19.06.02

I think this is very definitely a Head Shop thread and will suggest a move accordingly.

01:23 / 24.06.02

not entirely convinced by this move, and inclined to turn this into an analysis of tendency to deny the textuality of theory, but not for fear of inviting derrideanism...

anyway, i've been reading the third and last volume of foucault's 'selected works', which has lots of good stuff - particularly happy to finally get to read his 'lives of infamous men'. the previously untranslated brazilian lectures (obviously covering research that went into Discipline and Punish, and giving an interesting Nietzschean angle to the project...)

also plugging away at manuel de landa's newie, intensive science and virtual philosophy. interesting but hell dense and demanding - not nearly as sexy as his other books (war in the age of intelligent machines and a thousand years of nonlinear history - both highly recommended)

07:10 / 24.06.02

does foucault's work really count as recent?

08:30 / 24.06.02

Small world theory - see the recent Tipping Point thread.

Also general discussions about justice in an international setting - no professional theorists, just chats with other lawyers.

08:53 / 24.06.02

by "textuality" i take it you mean "being printed in a book and sold as such -uality", since "theory" in general has put the X back in text, if you know what i mean. that is to say, a "book" and a "text" are not even kind of the same thing any more, despite my old latin teacher who would say "open your texts to page 23."

to try and contribute a bit more -- today i received and started reading a new semiotext(e) interview book w/ kristeva called Rebel, She Said, which so far is an interesting (and shockingly comprehensible, for her) defense of may 68. it's a new book, but it's translated from 1998; and it's still just kristeva... i'd like "recent" in this thread to mean something less like "same shit in a newly published package" and something more like "an approach that hasn't quite been done before" or "by someone we haven't heard much goodness from previously". but maybe i'm being way too optimistic. and maybe the non-answering of that sort of category is an indication of an interesting (non)trend in theory.

02:58 / 25.06.02

"does foucault's work really count as recent?"

yes, in the dual senses of 'recently published in english' and 'more relevant to contemporary situations than almost anything else going'.

speaking of semiotext(e), their recently published 'reader', Hatred of Capitalism, is pretty excellent - weird mix of wacky french theorists (baudrillard, d&g, virilio, foucault), wackier and less canonical american theorists, various terrorists and journalists, and good first-person fiction.

03:57 / 25.06.02

but the theoretical framework itself isn't quite so recent. obviously, the dateline on recent is fairly relative, but foucault did all of his work before i even started reading theory; new published work by him is hardly a revelation, and certainly not an overturning of his previous thought, and so the work isn't much more "recent" conceptually than anything else he did. (i'd also question the idea that translation into english makes something become "recent" -- i recently picked up a newly published version of the memoirs of judge schrieber, and it is certainly a recent addition to my bookshelf, but i wouldn't consider it a recent development in psychology).

also, just because something is especially relevant doesn't make it recent. aristotle is almost always more helpful to the theatrical storyteller than the most recently published "how to write a screenplay in three weeks" but that doesn't make it "recent." unless you recently read it, and want to count it that way.

i'd love to think there is new exciting work being done in theory that i'm totally unfamiliar with, theory that is lurking around the corner of my next conceptual breakthrough -- but i've not seen evidence of that yet.