Description
Book SynopsisOur 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
Trade Review
“This is a brilliant, extraordinarily learned, innovative, thought-provoking, and invaluable exploration into contemporary practices of knowledge-making…. It explores key elements in early modern political philosophy with zest and insight—and explores the ways, sites, and practices within which such key elements of perception…figure in contemporary social analysis.” · Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
“…a daring, well-written and potentially refreshing genealogical foray into the ontological, epistemological, even cosmological underpinnings of modernity.” · Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, University of Bergen
Table of Contents 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
