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Undisciplined Theory
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Undisciplined Theory

  • Gary Genosko - University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT)


June 1998 | 224 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
What is the value of interdisciplinary theory? Are there any boundaries left which social theory must recognize? This book shows that the vital questions in theory are being posed and followed at the interdisciplinary level. Our awareness of this is curtailed by the institutional organization of social theory which still tends to assume a canon and clear boundaries. Gary Genosko proposes that postmodernism has provided the main challenge to institutional myopia. Yet postmodernism is too often treated as an aberration or a blind alley. The challenge for social theorists today is to develop and practice `undisciplined theories' which constantly question the limits of the canon and expose the porous character of boundaries.

The book contains rigorous and original analyses of the writings of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, McLuhan, Freud and St Augustine. The author uses these materials to point the way to credible forms of undisciplined theory. Three tasks emerge as urgent issues for social theory: the need to think and feel ambivalence; to track the circulation of anomalies in theoretical texts; and to learn from the fascination with interpretative boundlessness.


 
Undisciplined and Undisciplinable
Baudrillard's Radical Anthropology

 
 
Going to the Dogs
Freudian Caninophilia

 
 
Proliferation, Openness, and the Between in Deleuze and Guattari
 
Guattari and Schizoanalysis
 
The Giddy Spiral of Interpretation
Reading Augustine

 
 
McLuhan's Legacy of Indiscipline

`Stimulating and enjoyable... in particular with regard to the overall organization of a few central themes: ambivalence, the bestiary, the in-between and the shift from un- to indisciplined theory' - Joost van Loon, Nottingham Trent University