Reviews for Ordering knowledge in the Roman Empire

The average rating for Ordering knowledge in the Roman Empire based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-02 00:00:00 Daniel Steer It was not everything I had hoped for. But it was very good. He covers a really broad range of theoretical, philosophical, and cultural references. It reminds me of Jon MacKenzie's "Perform or Else" in both that range of sources and the lack of coherent synthesis. I like the artists he mentions as touch-stones (Rauschenberg, for instance), and I really liked his inclusion of advertising materials for goods + services (such as paper shredders or cautioning about identity theft) as objects of study but it didn't really come together for me in the end. I wished he had put together something more compelling, disturbing, dislocating for me as a contemporary, garbage producing american. On a positive note, this book feels like a book-length expansion of a PhD Dissertation, and I think that is kind of neat. I certainly will come back to it to chase down his references. I'm still searching for theories of abject materiality.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-09-18 00:00:00 Stavros Moutopoulos The first couple of chapters are really smart and insightful. After that the book loses focus and it's not quite clear what he's actually arguing.