Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods, ’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.
Table des matières
Figures
Preface
ZOOM IN
Introduction
PART I: TROMPE L’OEIL
A Myth of Origins
Chapter 1. Surviving Comparison
Chapter 2. The Strabismic Eye
Chapter 3. Reversibility / Proportionality
ZOOM OUT
PART II: COMMON WORLD
Chapter 4. Political / Phantasmagoria
Chapter 5. Predation / Production
Chapter 6. Exteriority / Interiority
AT PERPENDICULAR ANGLES
References
A propos de l’auteur
Alberto Corsín Jiménez is an Associate Professor at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. He is the editor of Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics (Pluto, 2008) and The Anthropology of Organisations (Ashgate, 2007). His current work examines the rise of an urban commons movement and the development of open-source urban hardware projects by architects, artists and academics.
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