Welcome to Rough Theory
Roughtheory.org is a personal academic website maintained by N. Pepperell, PhD candidate in the social sciences at a university in Melbourne, Australia. The site serves mainly as a space for workshopping concepts related to critical theory (very broadly defined).
Looking back over the first two years, the major recurrent themes in my writing seem to be:
- the limits of conceptualising the “social” in terms of the “intersubjective”
- self-reflexivity
- immanence
- materialism
- the concept of a critical standpoint
- the nature/artifice distinction in critical and traditional theory
- determinate negation
- real abstractions
- the science/social science divide
- historical transformations in the sciences and social sciences, and
- the relationship between transformations in practice and transformations in forms of perception and thought.
My best thinking is situational and interactive, unfolded in creative and generative discussions which, for the most part, are what I try to cultivate here.
To cultivate such interactions, I’ve invited members of my local reading group to post here whenever they like, meaning that this blog is now a (very occasional) group blog. I still do almost all of the writing, but someone else heads a discussion just often enough to confuse readers… The Reading Group category gives a sense of what we’re reading and discussing. A few more formal and extensive discussions are filed under the Dialogue category.
When time permits, I also participate in cross-blog conversations with some of the many excellent theoretically-oriented blogs. Larval Subjects, what in the hell…, and The Kugelmass Episodes are particularly regular interlocutors, but many fantastic conversations have taken place with other sites. The Conversations category captures most of these cross-blog discussions.
On the less serious side, I often post reflections on other aspects of professional life - on teaching, research, and general water cooler topics - as well as snippets of overheard street life and other arcania. I also tease my good friend L Magee a fair amount.
The site name seems to have provoked a number of interesting folk theories. I occasionally receive emails asking whether I mean the name to be threatening - apparently it strikes some people on first glance as a warning that I engage in very brutal discussion. ;-P For the nervous, the original concept for the site name was “Theory in the Rough”. I shortened this to “rough theory” to have a simpler URL, but the concept remained the same: I see this as a site where I can expose rough thoughts and draft material, where ideas can be workshopped with others who are also oriented to developing and exploring theoretical concepts. I promise that, whatever impression the site name may give, I’m really very gentle. Honestly. Trust me.