Simon Mussell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526105707
- eISBN:
- 9781526132253
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526105707.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the ...
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Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.Less
Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.
Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823276219
- eISBN:
- 9780823277049
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276219.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
It is not just that we are entangled in matter—we subjects who read, write, and ruminate on what “we” are. We are materializations entangled in other materializations; we happen in our mattering. ...
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It is not just that we are entangled in matter—we subjects who read, write, and ruminate on what “we” are. We are materializations entangled in other materializations; we happen in our mattering. What matters in our ethics, our politics, our worlds entangles us in and as new materializations. And at this juncture, it entangles scholarship in retrievals and rethinkings of matter itself. Even disciplines that struggle with long histories of disembodied transcendence are registering the effects.Less
It is not just that we are entangled in matter—we subjects who read, write, and ruminate on what “we” are. We are materializations entangled in other materializations; we happen in our mattering. What matters in our ethics, our politics, our worlds entangles us in and as new materializations. And at this juncture, it entangles scholarship in retrievals and rethinkings of matter itself. Even disciplines that struggle with long histories of disembodied transcendence are registering the effects.
Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823276219
- eISBN:
- 9780823277049
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276219.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over ...
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Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.Less
Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.
Norie Neumark
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262036139
- eISBN:
- 9780262339834
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262036139.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Moved by Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen understandings of voice through listening to a variety of media and contemporary art works from ...
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Moved by Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen understandings of voice through listening to a variety of media and contemporary art works from Australia, Europe, and the United States. The author aims to bring voice studies into conversation with new materialism to broaden thinking within both. Through a methodology based in listening, she brings theories of affect and carnal and situated knowledge into conversation with her examples and the theories she works with. Through her examples, Neumark engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works with which she engages—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing humans, animals, things, and assemblages. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories from sound, animal, and posthuman studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with and within the assemblages of living creatures, things, places and histories around us. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.Less
Moved by Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen understandings of voice through listening to a variety of media and contemporary art works from Australia, Europe, and the United States. The author aims to bring voice studies into conversation with new materialism to broaden thinking within both. Through a methodology based in listening, she brings theories of affect and carnal and situated knowledge into conversation with her examples and the theories she works with. Through her examples, Neumark engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works with which she engages—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing humans, animals, things, and assemblages. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories from sound, animal, and posthuman studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with and within the assemblages of living creatures, things, places and histories around us. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.
Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. Barnett
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621778
- eISBN:
- 9781800341463
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621778.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Building on Romantic scholarship that has opened the door to more capacious understandings of materiality that rethink the subject-object opposition of cultural materialism, the introduction makes ...
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Building on Romantic scholarship that has opened the door to more capacious understandings of materiality that rethink the subject-object opposition of cultural materialism, the introduction makes the case that Romantic-era writers were, like us, material creatures living in an emphatically material world. In the perfect storm of historical and cultural changes in gender and sexuality, print culture, and science, Romantic writers sought alternative ways to explain materiality as fluid, unstable, and affective in order to challenge cultural narratives that insisted on notions of discrete sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The introduction establishes a literary, critical, historical, and theoretical context for reading texts, bodies, things, and language as transgressive materialities that entangle with and alter the matters of the world, as they move across prescribed limits and braid together mobile forms of affect, embodiment, and discursivity. To help uncover this dynamic materiality in Romantic-era texts, the introduction provides a primer on new materialism and offers it as theoretical model and praxis. The collection, the editors conclude, not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils material transgressions that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.Less
Building on Romantic scholarship that has opened the door to more capacious understandings of materiality that rethink the subject-object opposition of cultural materialism, the introduction makes the case that Romantic-era writers were, like us, material creatures living in an emphatically material world. In the perfect storm of historical and cultural changes in gender and sexuality, print culture, and science, Romantic writers sought alternative ways to explain materiality as fluid, unstable, and affective in order to challenge cultural narratives that insisted on notions of discrete sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The introduction establishes a literary, critical, historical, and theoretical context for reading texts, bodies, things, and language as transgressive materialities that entangle with and alter the matters of the world, as they move across prescribed limits and braid together mobile forms of affect, embodiment, and discursivity. To help uncover this dynamic materiality in Romantic-era texts, the introduction provides a primer on new materialism and offers it as theoretical model and praxis. The collection, the editors conclude, not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils material transgressions that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.
Gary Hall
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262034401
- eISBN:
- 9780262332217
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034401.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
What forms might critical theory take when the focus is not only on what a theorist writes, but also on the theory he or she acts out and performs? Chapter 4 addresses this question by means of a ...
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What forms might critical theory take when the focus is not only on what a theorist writes, but also on the theory he or she acts out and performs? Chapter 4 addresses this question by means of a rigorous “piratical” reading of RosiBraidotti’s The Posthuman. Since the focus of this chapter is on how theorists act, it also explains the philosophy Hall is endeavoring to perform in some of the projects and actions he is involved with. Chapter 4 looks at two such projects in particular. The first is Open Humanities Press (OHP), a non-profit open access publisher Hall co-founded in 2006. The project covered in most detail however is a series of books Hall co-edits as part of OHP called Living Books About Life.Less
What forms might critical theory take when the focus is not only on what a theorist writes, but also on the theory he or she acts out and performs? Chapter 4 addresses this question by means of a rigorous “piratical” reading of RosiBraidotti’s The Posthuman. Since the focus of this chapter is on how theorists act, it also explains the philosophy Hall is endeavoring to perform in some of the projects and actions he is involved with. Chapter 4 looks at two such projects in particular. The first is Open Humanities Press (OHP), a non-profit open access publisher Hall co-founded in 2006. The project covered in most detail however is a series of books Hall co-edits as part of OHP called Living Books About Life.
Suzanne Bost
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042799
- eISBN:
- 9780252051654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042799.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and ...
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Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.Less
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.
Danielle Sands
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474439039
- eISBN:
- 9781474476881
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474439039.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter puts the novels of Jim Crace in conversation with Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of the development of OOP in contradistinction to Bruno Latour’s ...
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This chapter puts the novels of Jim Crace in conversation with Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of the development of OOP in contradistinction to Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, it assesses the claims made by Harman for the superiority of OOP over contemporary relational ontologies such as that espoused by Jane Bennett. Turning to Crace, the chapter argues that his fiction enacts a sustained movement away from anthropocentrism, demonstrating the collaborative nature of storytelling and absenting the human from a variety of different landscapes. It argues that, in their examination of the ‘allure’ of objects, these novels espouse a position closer to Harman than Bennett. Finally, the chapter interrogates Harman’s presentation of aesthetics as first philosophy, arguing that the clear alignment between Crace’s fiction and Harman’s work reinforces the claim that aesthetics gives access to the ontological, and demands a reconsideration of agency.Less
This chapter puts the novels of Jim Crace in conversation with Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of the development of OOP in contradistinction to Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, it assesses the claims made by Harman for the superiority of OOP over contemporary relational ontologies such as that espoused by Jane Bennett. Turning to Crace, the chapter argues that his fiction enacts a sustained movement away from anthropocentrism, demonstrating the collaborative nature of storytelling and absenting the human from a variety of different landscapes. It argues that, in their examination of the ‘allure’ of objects, these novels espouse a position closer to Harman than Bennett. Finally, the chapter interrogates Harman’s presentation of aesthetics as first philosophy, arguing that the clear alignment between Crace’s fiction and Harman’s work reinforces the claim that aesthetics gives access to the ontological, and demands a reconsideration of agency.
Lilah Grace Canevaro
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- October 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198826309
- eISBN:
- 9780191865268
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198826309.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Chapter 1 places this book against a backdrop of New Materialisms, using the framework of Thing Theory in its various manifestations to unpack seemingly innocuous but in reality surprisingly loaded ...
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Chapter 1 places this book against a backdrop of New Materialisms, using the framework of Thing Theory in its various manifestations to unpack seemingly innocuous but in reality surprisingly loaded terms like ‘object’ and ‘agent’, and raising the question of boundaries: to what extent does the Materialist slogan ‘Things are us!’ apply to Homer? It explores the issue of representation and the substantial difference it makes to the status of objects and the location of agency, and tackles the productive tension between this book’s core approaches: Gender Theory and New Materialism. The historical and social ramifications of the book are addressed, and some initial dichotomies and categories begin to be drawn out, with a particular focus on memory.Less
Chapter 1 places this book against a backdrop of New Materialisms, using the framework of Thing Theory in its various manifestations to unpack seemingly innocuous but in reality surprisingly loaded terms like ‘object’ and ‘agent’, and raising the question of boundaries: to what extent does the Materialist slogan ‘Things are us!’ apply to Homer? It explores the issue of representation and the substantial difference it makes to the status of objects and the location of agency, and tackles the productive tension between this book’s core approaches: Gender Theory and New Materialism. The historical and social ramifications of the book are addressed, and some initial dichotomies and categories begin to be drawn out, with a particular focus on memory.
Dewey W. Hall and Jillmarie Murphy (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781949979046
- eISBN:
- 9781789629705
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781949979046.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ...
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Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.Less
Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.
Stacy Alaimo
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816621958
- eISBN:
- 9781452955223
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816621958.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, ...
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Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, the book calls for an environmental stance in which humanity thinks, feels, and acts as the very stuff of the world. As a work within the environmental humanities, it grapples with climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, ocean conservation, environmental activism, and the depiction of the anthropocene. And as a study in new materialism it focuses on how the materiality of human bodies provoke modes of posthumanist pleasure, environmental protest, and a sense of immersion within the strange agencies that constitute the world.Less
Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, the book calls for an environmental stance in which humanity thinks, feels, and acts as the very stuff of the world. As a work within the environmental humanities, it grapples with climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, ocean conservation, environmental activism, and the depiction of the anthropocene. And as a study in new materialism it focuses on how the materiality of human bodies provoke modes of posthumanist pleasure, environmental protest, and a sense of immersion within the strange agencies that constitute the world.
Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042898
- eISBN:
- 9780252051753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042898.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume ...
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Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume focuses on what emotions do. Chapters interrogate how emotions do and undo us as both individual and collective bodies. With this aim, this book proposes “emotional bodies” as a tool to understand the performativity of emotional practices as the origin of particular configurations of bodies, such as patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds and contemporary humanitarian agencies. The multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which combines a diversity of sources as well as theoretical and historiographical approaches, challenges traditional notions of the body and the emotions, demonstrating the potential of “emotional bodies” to understand past and present societies.Less
Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume focuses on what emotions do. Chapters interrogate how emotions do and undo us as both individual and collective bodies. With this aim, this book proposes “emotional bodies” as a tool to understand the performativity of emotional practices as the origin of particular configurations of bodies, such as patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds and contemporary humanitarian agencies. The multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which combines a diversity of sources as well as theoretical and historiographical approaches, challenges traditional notions of the body and the emotions, demonstrating the potential of “emotional bodies” to understand past and present societies.
Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne Barnett (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621778
- eISBN:
- 9781800341463
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621778.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or ...
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Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. Essays examine how these writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. They offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes—assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities—that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.Less
Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. Essays examine how these writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. They offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes—assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities—that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.
Raymond Malewitz
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804791960
- eISBN:
- 9780804792998
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791960.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter provides a conceptual bridge between contemporary thing theories, which champion the aesthetic products of the creative misuse of objects, and new materialisms, which use the same ...
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This chapter provides a conceptual bridge between contemporary thing theories, which champion the aesthetic products of the creative misuse of objects, and new materialisms, which use the same activities as a means of understanding and resisting the negative effects of consumerism under late capitalism. The thing theories of Martin Heidegger, Bill Brown, and Ken Alder maintain that the aesthetic “thing” comes into being when an object breaks down and can no longer fulfill its standard function. Through an extended reading of the failed Apollo 13 mission, the chapter shows how this idea was redirected to critique what Evan Watkins calls the “technoideological” culture of late capitalism. While a similar shift from aesthetics to political practice informs twenty-first-century maker communities and environmental activist groups, the chapter shows how the practitioners of these activities often operate instead as champions of late capitalism and clear manifestations of its dominant politics.Less
This chapter provides a conceptual bridge between contemporary thing theories, which champion the aesthetic products of the creative misuse of objects, and new materialisms, which use the same activities as a means of understanding and resisting the negative effects of consumerism under late capitalism. The thing theories of Martin Heidegger, Bill Brown, and Ken Alder maintain that the aesthetic “thing” comes into being when an object breaks down and can no longer fulfill its standard function. Through an extended reading of the failed Apollo 13 mission, the chapter shows how this idea was redirected to critique what Evan Watkins calls the “technoideological” culture of late capitalism. While a similar shift from aesthetics to political practice informs twenty-first-century maker communities and environmental activist groups, the chapter shows how the practitioners of these activities often operate instead as champions of late capitalism and clear manifestations of its dominant politics.
Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781517901264
- eISBN:
- 9781452957661
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9781517901264.001.0001
- Subject:
- Education, Educational Policy and Politics
Inheriting Possibility is concerned with the ways we have come to understand and produce knowledge about the reproduction of power relations and how those understandings have rested on a premise that ...
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Inheriting Possibility is concerned with the ways we have come to understand and produce knowledge about the reproduction of power relations and how those understandings have rested on a premise that nature is made of fixed universals that create the stage for the play of culture. It is said that “truth” exists in nature and that culture contaminates our access to these “truths.” It is argued that this same dualism underpins theories and research on inheritance, social reproduction, and human learning and development.
Given work in the physical and biological sciences and new materialist philosophy, it is not only argued that nature is culture but also that the assumed nature/culture binary has ultimately limited our understanding of how power relations are reproduced. Thus, Inheriting Possibility develops new arguments about the forces of inheritance (i.e., the double injunction and intra-action of material-discursive forces, timespace, and assemblages) and rethinks approaches to quantitative inquiry on social reproduction in education.
Inheriting Possibility delineates how the limitations of knowledge production have been due to the false assumptions about the possibilities of unlocking nature’s “truths” with quantification. It puts forward an alternative ontology, epistemology, and methodology that attempt to carve out a space within critical inquiry for quantitative methods. Inheriting Possibility empirically demonstrates how parenting practices and grandchild SAT performance are both results of myriad forces that are multigenerational, events, and material phenomena that cannot be reduced to pathology or deficiency but rather convey the inheritance of reconfiguring and enfolding historialities of differential patterns of possibility.Less
Inheriting Possibility is concerned with the ways we have come to understand and produce knowledge about the reproduction of power relations and how those understandings have rested on a premise that nature is made of fixed universals that create the stage for the play of culture. It is said that “truth” exists in nature and that culture contaminates our access to these “truths.” It is argued that this same dualism underpins theories and research on inheritance, social reproduction, and human learning and development.
Given work in the physical and biological sciences and new materialist philosophy, it is not only argued that nature is culture but also that the assumed nature/culture binary has ultimately limited our understanding of how power relations are reproduced. Thus, Inheriting Possibility develops new arguments about the forces of inheritance (i.e., the double injunction and intra-action of material-discursive forces, timespace, and assemblages) and rethinks approaches to quantitative inquiry on social reproduction in education.
Inheriting Possibility delineates how the limitations of knowledge production have been due to the false assumptions about the possibilities of unlocking nature’s “truths” with quantification. It puts forward an alternative ontology, epistemology, and methodology that attempt to carve out a space within critical inquiry for quantitative methods. Inheriting Possibility empirically demonstrates how parenting practices and grandchild SAT performance are both results of myriad forces that are multigenerational, events, and material phenomena that cannot be reduced to pathology or deficiency but rather convey the inheritance of reconfiguring and enfolding historialities of differential patterns of possibility.
Chris Washington
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621778
- eISBN:
- 9781800341463
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621778.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics ...
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The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.Less
The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.
Omri Moses
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804789141
- eISBN:
- 9780804791236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804789141.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This afterword works to understand the neglect that befell vitalism as an intellectual lineage after the demise of early modernism. It then examines its “return,” surveying some of the burgeoning ...
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This afterword works to understand the neglect that befell vitalism as an intellectual lineage after the demise of early modernism. It then examines its “return,” surveying some of the burgeoning lines of interest in vitalist theory on the part of contemporary critics, while noting that the dominant “posthuman” interpretation (which has come into prominence as a result of Gilles Deleuze) depreciates vitalism's value as a richly psychological discourse, with unfortunate theoretical consequences. This allows one to differentiate current strands of vitalism from those that emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This chapter examines contemporary vitalist media theory, the so-called new materialisms, as well as several critiques of vitalist politics. It also examines vitalism's occult interests, as well as its historical competition with psychoanalysis as a go-to psychological discourse. By way of conclusions, it maps out some lines of further research.Less
This afterword works to understand the neglect that befell vitalism as an intellectual lineage after the demise of early modernism. It then examines its “return,” surveying some of the burgeoning lines of interest in vitalist theory on the part of contemporary critics, while noting that the dominant “posthuman” interpretation (which has come into prominence as a result of Gilles Deleuze) depreciates vitalism's value as a richly psychological discourse, with unfortunate theoretical consequences. This allows one to differentiate current strands of vitalism from those that emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This chapter examines contemporary vitalist media theory, the so-called new materialisms, as well as several critiques of vitalist politics. It also examines vitalism's occult interests, as well as its historical competition with psychoanalysis as a go-to psychological discourse. By way of conclusions, it maps out some lines of further research.
Stacy Alaimo
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816621958
- eISBN:
- 9781452955223
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816621958.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, ...
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The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.Less
The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.
Lilah Grace Canevaro
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- October 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198826309
- eISBN:
- 9780191865268
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198826309.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Women in Greek epic are treated as objects, as commodities to be exchanged in marriage or as the spoils of warfare. However, women also use objects to negotiate their own agency, subverting the male ...
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Women in Greek epic are treated as objects, as commodities to be exchanged in marriage or as the spoils of warfare. However, women also use objects to negotiate their own agency, subverting the male viewpoint by using the very form they themselves are thought by men to embody. Female objects in Homer can be symbolically significant and powerfully characterizing. They can be tools of recognition and identification. They can pause narrative and be used agonistically. They can send messages and be vessels for memory. This book brings together Gender Theory and the burgeoning field of New Materialisms, combining an approach predicated on the idea of the woman as object with one which questions the very distinction between subject and object. This productive tension leads us to decentre the male subject—and to put centre stage not only the woman as object but also the agency of women and objects. Homeric women are shown to be not only objectified but also well-versed users of objects. This is something that Homer portrays clearly, that Odysseus understands—but that has often escaped many other men, from Odysseus’ alter ego Aethon in Odyssey 19 to modern experts on Homeric epic.Less
Women in Greek epic are treated as objects, as commodities to be exchanged in marriage or as the spoils of warfare. However, women also use objects to negotiate their own agency, subverting the male viewpoint by using the very form they themselves are thought by men to embody. Female objects in Homer can be symbolically significant and powerfully characterizing. They can be tools of recognition and identification. They can pause narrative and be used agonistically. They can send messages and be vessels for memory. This book brings together Gender Theory and the burgeoning field of New Materialisms, combining an approach predicated on the idea of the woman as object with one which questions the very distinction between subject and object. This productive tension leads us to decentre the male subject—and to put centre stage not only the woman as object but also the agency of women and objects. Homeric women are shown to be not only objectified but also well-versed users of objects. This is something that Homer portrays clearly, that Odysseus understands—but that has often escaped many other men, from Odysseus’ alter ego Aethon in Odyssey 19 to modern experts on Homeric epic.
Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, and Brooke Holmes (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198805670
- eISBN:
- 9780191843624
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198805670.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Early Christian Philosophy, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Countering an unflagging modernist infatuation with the new, Antiquities beyond Humanism maps out the ground for a richer and more sustained encounter with Greco-Roman antiquity, excavating an ...
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Countering an unflagging modernist infatuation with the new, Antiquities beyond Humanism maps out the ground for a richer and more sustained encounter with Greco-Roman antiquity, excavating an ante-humanism that nonetheless does not seek any kind of return to a pre-humanist arcadia. The volume arises from a commitment to actively engage the ancient philosophical tradition as a powerful field through which to tackle some of the most urgent questions addressed by the new materialisms and forms of post- and non-humanism. The papers gathered here take up ancient Greek philosophical and literary texts as at once live with possibilities for the present and uncannily distant. Collectively, they approach antiquity as neither origin nor telos but as asynchronous or untimely in Nietzsche’s sense. By bringing together a range of international scholars actively working at the intersections of ancient philosophy, literature, continental philosophy, feminist theory, and political theory, the volume opens up new vectors for thinking beyond the human that are informed by and responsive to the contemporary world while proposing a complex set of relationships to the longue durée of Western history, to deep time, and to the profound strangeness and unsettling familiarity of the Greco-Roman world. In this way, the volume resists and displaces the seductions of presentism, scientism, and technological determinism that often limit the horizons of new materialist thinking.Less
Countering an unflagging modernist infatuation with the new, Antiquities beyond Humanism maps out the ground for a richer and more sustained encounter with Greco-Roman antiquity, excavating an ante-humanism that nonetheless does not seek any kind of return to a pre-humanist arcadia. The volume arises from a commitment to actively engage the ancient philosophical tradition as a powerful field through which to tackle some of the most urgent questions addressed by the new materialisms and forms of post- and non-humanism. The papers gathered here take up ancient Greek philosophical and literary texts as at once live with possibilities for the present and uncannily distant. Collectively, they approach antiquity as neither origin nor telos but as asynchronous or untimely in Nietzsche’s sense. By bringing together a range of international scholars actively working at the intersections of ancient philosophy, literature, continental philosophy, feminist theory, and political theory, the volume opens up new vectors for thinking beyond the human that are informed by and responsive to the contemporary world while proposing a complex set of relationships to the longue durée of Western history, to deep time, and to the profound strangeness and unsettling familiarity of the Greco-Roman world. In this way, the volume resists and displaces the seductions of presentism, scientism, and technological determinism that often limit the horizons of new materialist thinking.