Tag: philosophy
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Benjamin Bratton – The Revenge of the Real (2021) [OTF012]
Benjamin Bratton. The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World (London/New York: Verso, 2021). Written hastily and timely during the initial weeks of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Benjamin Bratton’s essay The Revenge of the Real can be read, from the author’s point of view, as a document of multiple, interconnected, systemic failures. Failures […]
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (1985) [OTF011]
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (1985), in The Spivak Reader, ed. by Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean (New York/London: Routledge, 1996), 203-235. A hyperstitional carrier is defined by the Hyperstition collective as a fictional figure or group serving as either an authorial voice or cited name with the appearance of authenticity that would […]
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One Hour Photo (2002) [OTF007]
Mark Romanek (dir.). One Hour Photo (Killer Films/John Wells production for Fox Searchlight Pictures/Catch 23 Entertainment: 2002). Sy “The Photo Guy” Parrish (Robin Williams) works in the photo development studio and kiosk located at the back of the local SavMart store. His otherwise solitary life is dedicated to the underappreciated art of developing prints for casual shoppers and […]
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Reversibility and Intimacy in and Beyond the Master’s House
I presented an abridged version of this paper as part of The Reverse Side: Guattari, Deleuze and Institutional Thought, a series of events which ran from 8th-10th July 2019 at Royal Holloway, University of London. In part a response to the concurrent, much larger International Deleuze and Guattari Conference 2019, The Reverse Side sought “to […]
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Neon Genesis Irangelion: XYZT by Kristen Alvanson review
Kristen Alvanson. XYZT (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019). I already knew that Iran was separated off from the world. Most Americans don’t go there – I’m not sure who does go there. And of course, I hadn’t really believed that it would work. But as soon as the bracelet tightens, I know what will happen. It all comes back to me as […]
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Mark Fisher – Flatline Constructs (1999) [OTF001]
Origins of Theory-Fiction is a new series of blog posts/short essays exploring some of the critical texts of the emerging question of the embedded and stacked relationships between text and concept, fiction and “reality”. The purpose of this series is to gesture towards a concrete, working definition of the term theory-fiction, without being prescriptive, reductive, […]
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Two Questions Concerning Applied Ballardianism
RM: Immediately in The Drowned World, you have the fictional theory of ‘neuronics’ playing a really important role. You have to buy into that theoretical position to be compelled by the story. This is what theory fiction means to me. It’s not a genre but more a question, or even a problem: in what different ways […]
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Corridors of Time: Templexity and Entity
In Chrono Trigger, Square’s classic time travel role-playing game from 1995, a band of time-displaced adventurers team up to prevent an apocalypse, by changing the course of events leading up to its happening. As part of an optional subplot, during a respite from the exhaustion of incessant time leaps and bounds, the adventurers rest near […]
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Response to Gregory Marks’s “A Theory-Fiction Reading List”
I don’t use Twitter, and so I sometimes miss out on conversations about subjects that interest me. It was only recently, when I was reading Simon Sellars’s interview with Robert Barry for The Quietus,[1] that I came across a reference to a list of notable works and influences of theory-fiction that “attracted a lot of […]