This is a kind of inside-baseball question, I think. For the typical English speaker, theory means something like speculation. In more academic/research contexts, theories are the conceptual basis for the work we do: e.g., a theory of evolution. The OED provides this helpful definition that is closer to what I had in mind as a […]
Category: speculative rhetoric
Media archeology is a familiar term even though its history is not so easily traced. Certainly it has to do with philosophical lineages passing through Foucault and Kittler, but that’s only a start. When I started this blog, more than 15 years ago, I subtitled it “an archeology of the future,” in part because the […]
If you happen to go back and look at my posts from a decade ago (though why would you?), you’d find some very strongly-worded political commentary. Maybe it’s because I’m older or maybe it’s because social media is such a morass of political invective that it just doesn’t interest me anymore as a writer. That […]
I am at work on a chapter in my book that deals with cognition as it relates to a realist ontology and rhetoric, and I’m hoping this exercise will help me to crystalize my thoughts. I’m drawing on some familiar concepts (at least to me) from distributed cognition and extended mind to DeLanda’s fascinating and bizarre […]
In Pandora’s Hope, Latour tells the story of being asked if he “believes in reality.” His response was something to the effect of not realizing that reality was something one needed to believe in. Elsewhere Graham Harman has written of an email exchange with Manual DeLanda, who wrote “For decades admitting that one was a realist was […]
Levi has a recent post on this subject discussing these 3 models which he terms poststructuralist, contemporary, and Deleuzian. The challenge here is figuring out how to create space for a subject with agency who can undertake political change. Thus he ends this way: When we talk about resistance we want something approximating decision, choice, […]
Continuing my increasingly plodding march across An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, I’ve completed Latour’s description of the modes he refers to as “quasi-objects” and “quasi-subjects.” To recall, one of the keys of the argument here is to dispense with the binary of subject and object. However, Latour recognizes that these concepts play a central role […]
I am continuing my slow march through An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) and want to do so today in the context of a conversation I had with my Teaching Practicum class. On Monday we read and discussed Maxine Hairston (“Winds of Change”) and Lester Faigely (Competing Theories of Process) on the topic of the […]
As I’ve written here before, one passage that has really stuck with me since my early days in graduate school comes from Lester Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality, where he observes that the disagreements in rhetoric and composition can be understood in terms of the subjectivities we want our students to occupy in the classroom. I’ve always […]
After the very busy administrative time at the beginning of the semester, I’ve been catching up on my reading. Ted Underwood has an interesting post on the relationship between data and genre as he investigates genre through an analysis of large digital collections. He observes: The biggest problem was even less quantitative, and more fundamental: […]
Alex Reid 