Sobre

“Ideology,” Althusser famously writes, “has a material existence.”

Culture is worth a lot of theory.

Theory.Culture is dedicated to the collapse of easy distinctions between frivolous and serious, low and high, concrete and abstract, and so on. Oprah, Foucault, Ricky Williams, Adorno – blending and blurring in thinking about mass, popular, political, and intellectual culture in the United States. September 11th, baseball, talk shows, ideological contests – all at once sites of insight into our culture, however that “our” is conceived.

In many ways, our project here can be understood as an update, in light of spectacular developments, of Guy Debord’s proclamation forty years ago:

Ideological facts were never a simple chimaera, but rather a deformed consciousness of realities, and in this form they have been real factors which set in motion real deforming acts; all the more so when the materialization, in the form of spectacle, of the ideology brought about by the concrete success of autonomized economic production in practice confounds social reality with an ideology which has tailored all reality in terms of its model. – Society of the Spectacle

However our world might be deformed, writing and thinking and speaking make it re-formable. Seen another way. Perhaps very unlike what we imagine as before the deformation, but still worth seeking. Re-formed, it is our handiwork. Our responsibility. Our pains and pleasures – or, the world reclaimed.

Theory . Culture -  I also write and live as John Drabinski