Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Monthly Archives: December 2005

Why the World Wide West Wasn’t Won

40 Comments Posted by on December 30, 2005

One of the interesting things about moving are all the objects you rediscover, whose existence you had completely forgotten. I’ve just been sorting through my paperwork, hoping to find things I can now discard, and I came across the following essay that analyses why metaphors of the “frontier” and the “revolution” came to be adopted [...]

Drafts, Philosophy of History, Technology

Holiday Theory Fix

Leave a Comment Posted by on December 24, 2005

I’ll be away from the blog over the holiday period, preparing to move house, write an article, and put together an application for a lectureship in planning – not necessarily in that order. For those seeking a theory fix in the interim, I recommend the University of Chicago’s random academic sentence generator, where the alarming [...]

Miscellaneous, Procrastination

Homeland Insecurity

Leave a Comment Posted by on December 20, 2005

Savage Minds drew my attention to the story, reported originally in the Standard Times South Coast Today, that a UMass Dartmouth student was visited by the Department of Homeland Security after requesting a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book via interlibrary loan. My initial reaction, posted to Savage Minds, was that the story seemed a [...]

Current Events, Miscellaneous, Politics, Teaching

Use Value, Exchange Value – and Collection?

16 Comments Posted by on December 10, 2005

Convolute H in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project relates to collection, and collectors. Its concerns are very similar to the ones Benjamin expresses in “On the Concept of History” – which is, among other things, a critique of a kind of historicism that seeks to document the past “the way it really was”. In “On the [...]

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

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