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 Xenological Subjectivity: Rosi Braidotti and Object-Oriented Ontology

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-334
Author(s):  
Jordi Vivaldi
Keyword(s):  
Ecological Model ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
The Self ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Model ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
The Way

Abstract The conceptualization of the notion of subjectivity within the Anthropocene finds in Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism one of its most explicit and profuse modulations. This essay argues that Braidotti’s model powerfully accounts for the Anthropocene’s subjectivity by conceiving the “self” as a transversal multiplicity and its relationality to the “others” and the “world” as non-hierarchized by nature–culture distinctions; however, by being ontologically grounded on a neo-Spinozistic monism, Braidotti’s model blurs the notions of finitude, agency, and change, obscuring the possibility of critical dissent while decreasing the overall theory’s consistency. An alternative ontological model capitalizing on these elements can be found in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its notion of withdrawal. By associating OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism with Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, this essay aims at ontologically discretizing the latter in order to overcome these limitations. Grounded on this association and invoking a narrative imaginary propelled by the Greek terms xenos (guest-friend) and xenia (hospitality), the article paves the way for a form of subjectivity deviating from Braidotti’s ecological model and defined as xenological, arguing that, within the context of the Anthropocene, it constitutes an adequate alternative to Braidotti’s subjectivity.

Thinking as the Stuff of the World

Exposed ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy Alaimo
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The World ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Global Systems

The conclusion of Exposed critiques substantial paradigms by the ways of new materialism. It critiques object-oriented ontology by ways of material feminisms. It argues that there is no positions outside, no straight paths, no transparent global systems of knowledge, but only modest protests and precarious pleasures from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.

scholarly journals Interrogating the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Bruining
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

In this article, I aim to further thinking in the broadly ‘new materialist’ field by insisting it attends to some ubiquitous assumptions. More specifically, I critically interrogate what Sara Ahmed has termed ‘the founding gestures of the “new materialism”’. These founding rhetorical gestures revolve around a perceived neglect of the matter of materiality in ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ and are meant to pave the way for new materialism’s own conception of matter-in/of-the-world. I argue in this article that an engagement with the postmodern critique of language as constitutive, as well as the poststructuralist critique of pure self-presence, does not warrant these founding gestures to be so uncritically rehearsed. Moreover, I demonstrate that texts which rely on these gestures, or at least the ones I discuss in this article, are not only founded on a misrepresentation of postmodern and poststructuralist thought, but are also guilty of repeating the perceived mistakes of which they are critical, such as upholding the language/matter dichotomy. I discuss a small selection of texts that make use of those popular rhetorical gestures to juxtapose the past that is invoked with a more nuanced reading of that past. My contention is that if ‘the founding gestures of the “new materialism”’ are not addressed, the complexity of the postmodern and poststructuralist positions continues to be obscured, with damaging consequences for the further development of the emerging field of new materialism, as well as our understanding of cultural theory’s past.

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 Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy

Stasis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-207
Author(s):  
Bronislaw Szerszynski
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Speculative Thought

In this paper I make a case for a philosophy of continuous matter, in dialogue with object-oriented ontology. A continuous-matter philosophy is one that focuses not on the identity, properties, and relations of discrete, countable objects, but on the nature of extended substances, both in relation to human experience and in terms of their own “inner life.” I explore why and under what conditions humans might perceive the world as objects or as continuous substances, and the language that humans use for talking about both. I argue that approaching the world as continua requires the foregrounding of concepts that emphasize the immanent (internal to a region of space), the inclusive (with contrasting properties coexisting in the same substance), the gradual (manifesting differentially at different points), and the generative or virtual (involving the constant production of form and new gradients). I suggest that starting philosophy from continuous matter rather than objects also has wider implications for speculative thought

scholarly journals Encountering Worlds: Performing In/As Philosophy in the Ecological Age

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 195
Author(s):  
João Florêncio
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Terrestrial Ecosystems ◽  
The Core ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Geological Formations

Within the context of the ‘Anthropocene’, the current geological epoch marked by the impact of human activity on terrestrial ecosystems and geological formations, this article considers the ways in which the ecological blurring of boundaries between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ might affect existing ontologies of performance. Departing from Richard Bauman’s definition of performance as both communication and enactment, we will use the postulates of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology to speculate on what performance might mean beyond the human/nonhuman divide.  Ultimately, it will be claimed, performance, understood as both enactment and unveiling, is at the core of all encounters between all bodies and irrespective of their perceived nature. As a result, the world must once again be thought as theatrum mundi, as a stage where bodies always encounter one another through the contingency of the personae they play, personae that nonetheless are unable to exhaust the full being of the bodies behind them.

scholarly journals Editorial: Time Travel

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-248
Author(s):  
PAUL RAE
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The West ◽  
American Power ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Way

One of the most forbidding and yet rewarding challenges in a substantive internationalization of arts scholarship is accounting for the experience and passage of time. The extent to which developments in theatre and performance over the past 150 years have been tied up with the larger social, economic and technological transformations reflexively understood as ‘modernity’ is a key reason an international journal readership is able to find interest and value in scholarship on performances they may not have seen, that are practised in places they have never been. At the same time, any such research – it is tempting to say ‘from outside the West’, but in fact the requirement holds everywhere – must register how the work under discussion complicates an otherwise oversimplified narrative of developmental modernity. This narrative treats a homogenized industrial and postindustrial ‘West’ as having led the way and established a model for how other parts of the world would modernize subsequently. The assumption is quickened in discussions of art because arguably one characteristic of those transformations as they happened in numerous centres of Euro-American power was the role that artists played in giving them aesthetic form and expressing their meanings. This is prominent in the emergence of modernism and the avant-garde, and it is logical that in recent times scholars of modernism have been particularly energetic in questioning the developmental narrative and demonstrating not only how such phenomena were constitutively reliant on processes elsewhere, but also how artistic developments everywhere both informed each other (often inequably) and manifested local and highly contingent characteristics.

scholarly journals The Twofold Limit of Objects: Problematising Timothy Morton’s Rift in Light of Eugenio Trías’s Notion of Limit

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 493-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Vivaldi
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Ontological Framework ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe ontological abyss that separates real objects from sensual objects is one of the central principles of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which has its most explicit and profuse modulation in Timothy Morton’s notion of rift. This article argues that, despite succeeding in explaining the radical difference that inhabits every object, Morton’s rift fails to explain the object’s unification, rendering the overall theory inconsistent. An alternative approach that accounts simultaneously for disjunction and conjunction between essences and appearances can be found in Eugenio Trías’s philosophy of the limit, a term widely ignored in OOO despite its deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things. The article further argues that the reinterpretation of Trías’s twofold liminal approach in light of OOO successfully addresses the inconsistencies found in Morton’s rift, paving the way for a theory of limits within Harman’s ontological framework.

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.

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