The Weird, the Ontological, and the Normal

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-355
Author(s):  
Andrew Strombeck
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
A Site ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

Abstract Benjamin J. Robertson’s None of This Is Normal (2018) addresses the entire fictional project of the New Weird writer Jeff VanderMeer. In doing so, Robertson intervenes within recent discussions of new materialism, accounts of which have been entwined with the New Weird. Robertson finds VanderMeer querying the normalizing discourses of capitalism and colonialism, showing how the New Weird can serve as a site to extend and challenge the sometimes-limiting frameworks of the new materialisms. As its critics have shown, object-oriented ontology and other new materialisms risk reinforcing problems of primitivism and positivism. For Robertson, VanderMeer evades such problems by foregrounding the liberal, humanist frameworks marginalizing planet and colonized subject alike. Examining what he calls VanderMeer’s fantastic materiality, Robertson contends that VanderMeer supersedes what Darko Suvin calls cognitive estrangement; VanderMeer asks readers to encounter a world that is estranged but not cognitively recoverable. And yet, by reminding readers of VanderMeer’s poststructuralist attention to language and narrative, Robertson avoids the often-masculinist tendency to posit a primitive world beyond human cognition. None of This Is Normal will be useful to scholars interested in pushing past new materialism’s limits while retaining the field’s insights for questions of climate change and nonhuman agency.

scholarly journals Notes Toward an Extimate Materialism: A Reply to Graham Harman

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-123
Author(s):  
Russell Sbriglia
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Future ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

Abstract This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”

Realism and Materialism

2018 ◽  
pp. 42-50
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Real ◽  
Transcendental Realism ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

This chapter lays out a methodology of transcendental realism and new materialism based on motion. Transcendental realism is the study of the real minimal ontological conditions for the actual emergence of the historical present. The purpose of this method is to give a description of what previous being must at least be like given that it appears as it does today: in motion. The chapter offers critiques of constructivism, empiricism, metaphysics, and transcendental idealism. It also offers a critique of vitalist new materialism, negative materialism, object-oriented ontology, formalism, and all ahistorical methods of thinking about matter and materialism. It concludes with a theory of “process materialism.”

scholarly journals Speculative Before the Turn: Reintroducing Feminist Materialist Performativity

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg ◽  
Kathrin Thiele ◽  
Iris Van der Tuin
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms ◽  
Art And Activism ◽  
The Many ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Speculative Thought

This is a moment for new conversations and new synergies. While a wealth of contemporary speculative materialisms is currently circulating in academia, art and activism, in this article we focus upon a few ethico-political stakes in the different, loosely affiliated conceptions of ontologies of immanence. More specifically, we are concerned here with the very meaning of speculation itself after the many new headings of immanent ontologies, such as object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism or the (feminist) new materialisms. Our concern is a feminist concern, as some of the immanent ontologies seem to actively connect with the varied feminist archive of speculative thought while others seem to actively disconnect from the very same archive. What does this imply for the feminist scholar who is in want of tools for navigating the contemporary landscape of ontologies of immanence? Here, we highlight some important overlapping as well as poignant clashes between various feminist materialist genealogies and OOO/speculative realism. In our discussion we underline the importance of situatedness and context, relationality and affinity—and the possibility for rewiring relations—amid a plethora of lively historiographies and emergent post-disciplinary movements and world-makings.

scholarly journals A Questionnaire on Materialisms

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 155 ◽  
pp. 3-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Apter ◽  
Ed Atkins ◽  
Armen Avanessian ◽  
Bill Brown ◽  
Giuliana Bruno ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

scholarly journals What’s real is immaterial: What are we doing with new materialism?

Aporia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-14
Author(s):  
David Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Healthcare Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Abusive Relationship ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

New materialism is emerging as one of the most signifi cant developments in healthcare research in recent years, offering radical new ways to rethink our critical relationship with forms, matter, objects and things. As with any new paradigm, it can take some time for the limitations of the approach to become clear. In this article I examine some of these limitations, focusing particularly on new materialist defi nitions of objects and the ontology of affect. Drawing on the recent work of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, I argue that new materialism fails the ‘fl at ontology test’, and reinforces the kinds of idealism that it purports to critique. Object Oriented Ontology, on the other hand, may allow us to shape a radical new ethics of objects, using that to transform our abusive relationship with the ecosystem, disturb raditional enlightenment binaries and hierarchies, and to put aside human hubris.

scholarly journals The Sentient Spoon as broken puppet: Celebrating otherness with performing objects

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Matt Smith
Keyword(s):  
Learning Difficulties ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Complex Learning ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
The Way ◽  
Performing Objects

Exploring speculations about new materialism and performance, this article discusses how we (re)consider the ‘puppet other’ as a subject in community performance, focusing particularly on work with youth who have severe and complex learning difficulties. The discussion of this project explores the ethics and politics of practice in applied puppetry (Smith 2014) through reflections about the use of performing objects in relation to specific communities and identities. The method employed in this article is to explore the world of objects in practice, using the ideas of object-oriented ontology. This viewpoint explores poetic processes and speculations about the inner reality of objects, in relation to human participants. This exploration of the materiality of objects is framed in reaction to the way power operates, specifically through the Foucauldian lens of biopower.

scholarly journals “The Flesh of The Perceptible”: The New Materialism ofLeviathan

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-447
Author(s):  
Max Bowens
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Sensory Ethnography ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Post Humanism

This article seeks to entangle two current philosophic praxes: New Materialism, and Sensory Ethnography. Jane Bennett has become one of New Materialism's most prominent proponents since the release of her now-seminal text, Vibrant Matter in 2010. Due to the varied ground upon which New Materialism stands (often conflated with object-oriented ontology, post-humanism, and other general turns within nonhumanism), Bennett's work will be looked at idiosyncratically, then pushed into the realm of the cinematic via an analysis of the documentary, Leviathan. Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, this film was among the first exemplary works to emerge from the Sensory Ethnography Lab, based at Harvard University. In striving for a revitalization of ethnographic film practices, the Lab aligns itself with similarly non-anthropocentric, and non-discursive, aspects of experience to the New Materialism of Jane Bennett. By placing these two contemporary camps into conversation, this article intends to reposition them both: New Materialism as a vehicle for the Sensory Ethnographic, and the SEL as an exhibition of the kind of world Bennett's philosophy envisages. The article concludes with an assessment of the political and eco-political critiques and ramifications surrounding these works.

Un/Limited Ecologies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Interest In Science ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
To Come ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

It seems fair to say that Jacques Derrida’s critical legacy has waned with the restyling of the humanities as science friendly. The term posthumanism, for example, accommodates broad themes in ecology, animal studies, evolution and climate change—even the nature of Life itself. This turn toward physical reality attests to a growing interest in science and its methodologies, as we see in popular accounts of affect theory, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology. Indeed, it is often argued that the waning of the linguistic turn and its apparent hermeticism has enabled this recent fascination with the materiality of bodies and things. However, is Derrida’s “no outside of text” about closure, or its im/possibility? And if the limit segregates nothing at all, if the limit is itself no-thing, then is grammatology an open ecology that already includes what it is defined against, including what is yet to come?

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