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.

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 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.

Ecology, Capitalism and Waste: From Hyperobject to Hyperabject

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Mikkel Krause Frantzen ◽  
Jens Bjering
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Ecological Thought ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

The article develops the notion of the ‘hyperabject’ – coined by Danish poet Theis Ørntoft – into a proper theoretical concept. The term hyperabject is a synthesis of Timothy Morton's concept of hyperobjects and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and in the article we argue that the concept of the hyperabject entails a necessary critique of and correction to Morton's ecological thought, as well as various other versions of speculative realism, new materialism and object-oriented ontology.

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.”

scholarly journals The Problem of Understanding Historical Processes in the Philosophy of Speculative Realism

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-35
Author(s):  
Vladimir Iosifovich Potapchuk ◽  
Nikolai Vladimirovich Kshevin
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
New View

The paper examines the issues included in the range of problems of ontology and philosophy of history, identifies the prospects for further study of the con-cepts of historical development in the philosophy of speculative realism. Such a study seems possible due to the focus of speculative realism on the de-velopment of a method that can explain the move-ment in time of both social and non-social objects. A brief overview of the origin of various models of historical development is given. Some theoretical positions of certain areas of speculative realism are studied. The view of object-oriented ontology and new materialism on the nature of history is substan-tiated. Special attention is paid to the sources of origin of certain concepts of the philosophy of speculative realism and their connection with devel-opment models in object-oriented ontology and new materialism. The outlined differences in the models of historical development in object-oriented ontolo-gy and new materialism reveal the potential of re-search in relation to speculative realism as one of the directions of modern philosophy. Such material makes it possible to better understand the essence of the differences between certain areas of specula-tive realism and forms a new view on the assess-ment of the reasons for such differences.

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.

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