Art Metropole

#16929

e-flux Index #9

Price

$45.00

Date

2026

Publisher

e-flux

Format

Anthologies

ISBN

299971950

Size

20.3 × 25.4 × 4.5 cm

Length

600 pp

Genre

Arts Writing, Criticism, Theory, Available for Wholesale

Did the Theory Wars take place?

As quaint as they may now seem at thirty years distance (under febrile geopolitical conditions that for an increasing share of the world are those of actual wars that did take place, or their looming inevitability), the Theory Wars, and the fissures they opened in the modern academy and wider cultural sphere, supplied many of the (anti)intellectual coordinates for the “moving right show” under which so many of us have now been living since the mid-2010s. Indeed, the outright refusal of the patient mediation of theory seems in retrospect to have defined culture in the 2010s and 2020s: Move fast and break things. First thought, best thought. No filter. Immediacy culture. Bomb first, talk later. The late fascist assault on so-called “gender ideology” and “post-modern neo-Marxism.” The online injunction to “let people enjoy things.” Judith Butler, certainly no friend of Sokal and his comrades, anticipated this in the late 1990s when they wrote that the marginalization of “merely cultural” lines of inquiry under the auspices of restoring Left unity, could in fact only portend the Left’s further weakening and fragmentation.

This ninth issue of e-flux Index interweaves a selection of pieces published by e-flux throughout the Summer of 2025, and is divided into two parts. In six chapters that index the state of Art and Theory Today, the first part revisits the primal scene of the Theory Wars—the tenor of which has changed, from an urgent ideological contest between humanist objectivity and postmodern relativism, to a more even-handed, pragmatic, and pluralist one, in the decades since. It brings together material that the various independent publishing arms of e-flux published around the theme of the often-fraught relations between theory and (artistic, architectural, pedagogic, political) practice.