sexta-feira, 1 de junho de 2018

My two cents on (or with) Kleinberg, Scott, and Wilder's "Theses on Theory and History" (2018)

See: www.theoryrevolt.com, #TheoryRevolt

When read in isolation, it is a text that makes well-known yet important points that are and should be remade once in a while; but when read in conjunction with something like Kleinberg's Haunting History, is a way more powerful one, connecting historiographic disciplinary institutions with a whole framework of "ontologic realism" that should be rethought from its base. That's immensely important.

Also wondering and extending (and definitely not in a "reviewer" tone): since we can put more than one text together in a comprehensive whole (our minds not having to be bound by "the analog ceiling"), it's not useless to think that maybe another artifacts or actions would need to result from this kind of disciplinary rethinking, retroactively refiguring the theses themselves. Certainly, independently of how good their arguments might be, manifestoes from the margins to the center of the discipline got a limited efficacy. Even more than texts/videos resulting or being stimulated from them, I'm thinking, for instance, about the possibility of highlighting what "critical history" works are already being done, so that manifestoes like this one don't have to wait to be heard. Making visible can really make a difference (since that's part of what institutions take their power from), can't it? That could provide a mutual refiguration and potentialization between the Theses and critical historians. The strength comes more from the network of texts than by them in isolation; so, what to put together with it?

The Facebook algorithm and the almost dead situation of this page make asking a question a little pointless, but still: thoughts? examples?

Disqus - Prefigurations

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