scholarly journals Dispositif, Matter, Affect, and the Real: Four Fundamental Concepts of Lyotard's Film-Philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Woodward
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
The Real ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Contemporary Context ◽  
Untapped Resource

Jean-François Lyotard's work remains a largely untapped resource for film-philosophy. This article surveys four fundamental concepts which indicate the fecundity of this work for current studies and debates. While Lyotard was generally associated with the “theory” of the 1980s which privileged language, signs, and cultural representations, much of his work in fact resonates more strongly with the new materialisms and realisms currently taking centre stage. The concepts examined here indicate the relevance of Lyotard's work in four related contemporary contexts: the renewed interest in the dispositif, new materialism, the affective turn, and speculative realism. The concept of the dispositif (or apparatus) is being rehabilitated in the contemporary context because it shows a way beyond the limiting notion of mise en scène which has dominated approaches to film, and Lyotard's prevalent use of this concept feeds into this renewal. While matter is not an explicit theme in Lyotard's writings on film, it is nevertheless one at the heart of his aesthetics, and it may be extended for application to film. Affect was an important theme for Lyotard in many contexts, including his approaches to film, where it appears to subvert film's “seductive” (ideological) effects. Finally, the Real emerges as a central concept in Lyotard's last essay on cinema, where, perhaps surprisingly, it intimates something close to a speculative realist aesthetics. Each of the fundamental concepts of Lyotard's film-philosophy are introduced in the context of the current fields and debates to which they are relevant, and are discussed with filmic examples, including Michael Snow's La Région centrale (1971), Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di Dio, 1950), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), and neo-realist cinema.

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.”

Excessive Materialism and the Metaphysical Basis of an Object-Oriented Ethics

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-124
Author(s):  
Justin L. Harmon ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Real ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Ethical System ◽  
Ethical Norms ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Do So

The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) to critique Graham Harman’s avowedly nonrelational object-oriented ontology from the shared relational vantage of ethics, social philosophy, and feminist new materialism; and (2) to articulate the metaphysical basis for a materialist ontology that serves at once as a posthumanist metaethic, or, as I call it, proto-ethic. The nascent movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology suggest some fruitful strategies for challenging the anthropocentrism of the post-Kantian philosophical landscape. They do so, however, by simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of thinking with these strategies to address moral and political problems, insofar as they characterize the real as fundamentally nonrelational. I argue that Harman’s adopted noumenalism is ultimately self-undermining, and offer as an alternative a materialist account of reality as intrinsically phenomenal, where phenomenality is unpacked as the excessive, ongoing source of proto-ethical norms to which every human ethical system implicitly appeals.

How Far Are We from a Hot Bath?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Status ◽  
Hot Bath

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.

Tracing the Rift: Heidegger, Hölderlin, and “The Origin of the Work of Art”

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 295-307
Author(s):  
Will McNeill ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Concept ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
To Come ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Do So

Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is notoriously dense and difficult. In part this is because it appears to come almost from nowhere, given that Heidegger has relatively little to say about art in his earlier work. Yet the essay can only be adequately understood, I would argue, in concert with Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin from the same year, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing.” Without the Hölderlin essay, for instance, the central claim of “The Origin of the Work of Art” to the effect that all art is in essence poetizing, Dichtung, can hardly be appreciated in its philosophical significance without the discussions of both essence and poetizing that appear in the Hölderlin essay. This is true of other concepts also. The central concept of the rift (Riß)—the fissure or tear—that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” might readily be assumed to be adopted from Albrecht Dürer, whose use of the term Heidegger cites at a key point in the 1936 essay. Here, however, I argue that the real source of the concept for Heidegger is Hölderlin, and that the Riß is, moreover—quite literally—an inscription of originary, ekstatic temporality; that is, of temporality as the “origin” of Being and as the poetic or poetizing essence of art. I do so, first, by briefly considering Heidegger’s references to Dürer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and other texts from the period, as well as his understanding of the Riß and of the tearing of the Riß in that essay and in its two earlier versions. I then turn to Heidegger’s 1936 Rome lecture “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing,” in order to show the Hölderlinian origins of this concept for Heidegger.

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.”

The application of critical realism as a basis for agency in environmental education: The case of Roy Bhaskar

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-238
Author(s):  
Mehri Mirzaei Rafe ◽  
Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast ◽  
Afzal Sadat Hosseini ◽  
Narges Sajadieh
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Environmental Education ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Real ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Human Habitation

AbstractThis article will investigate the philosophy of science of Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) as a coherent basis for environmental education. The work of Bhaskar serves as an in-depth approach to understanding how to apply critical realism (the critical and the realist) to matters such as environmental education, because he concretely theorises the connections between science, social change and metaphysics. By mobilising key Bhaskarian motifs — that is, the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the laminated system as a means to understand reality, the ways in which inquiry may be organised through the real, actual and the empirical, and the positive application of dialectics — this article constructs a new approach to environmental education and positions it in the field of environmental education by comparing it to posthumanism and the new materialisms. This article contains inquiry-based study outlines for enhanced thinking around: (1) climate change and social justice; (2) movements towards a carbon-free economy; (3) water, food and population; and (4) the future of human habitation.

scholarly journals SPECULATIVE REALITY OF POST-ANTHROPOCENE

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Real ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Human Object ◽  
Turn Taking

The article investigates posthumanism in the context of speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. Posthumanism is been considering as post-anthropocene on the assumption of critics of conventionalism as a correlation between thinking and being. The speculative turn appears as the non-human turn, taking into account the statement of the existing of existence in the absence of a thought. The post-Anthropocene is understood as postpostmodern in connection with the orientation to the objectivity as an aggregate of objects, one of which is a human being. This kind of objectivity takes into account the aleatoricity of reality and in view of this the speculations of the real have a expressed play component, which at the level of matter is manifested in the mutability of the dark ontology of the slimy. In the speculative reality of the post-Anthropocene, the human being itself is objectified, appears as a human object and it is in this state that it discovers the diversity of its qualities and relations. The human object in this case is an aggregate of objects, in turn splitting into a number of objects, which provides a post-Anthropocentric possibility of thought without thinking. Undermining and overmining, i. e. polytical as subversion of a subject in post-postmodern events brings him to the state of a human object. Thus, the principle contingency of the post-anthropocene is proved.

scholarly journals Archéologie du politique chez François Bon

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Inkel
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Double Mutation ◽  
The Real ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Critical Revision

De ses premiers romans, publiés chez Minuit, aux livres les plus récents, l’oeuvre de François Bon a connu une évolution importante. Si les préoccupations politiques n’étaient pas absentes de Sortie d’usine, elles étaient encore classiquement organisées par le registre de l’aliénation des travailleurs, audacieusement figurée par l’héritage formaliste de l’écrivain. Le retour à ce motif de l’usine à travers Daewoo donne à lire une double mutation : celle du politique, de plus en plus insaisissable et pourtant lourd d’effets — à l’image du Réel — et celle du récit qui cherche à le figurer. C’est à la mise en scène de micro-relations en tant que figurations du politique à l’état embryonnaire que je m’intéresserai, cherchant à repérer dans cette recension des rapports intersubjectifs une archéologie du politique qui se confond avec la nature même du récit plutôt que d’en être simplement l’objet.AbstractFrom his first novels, published by Éditions de Minuit, to his most recent books, Bon’s work has shown a notable evolution. If political concerns were not lacking in Sortie d’usine, they were still classically organized according to the register of worker’s alienation, though daringly figured through the writer’s formalist heritage. The return of the factory as a subject in Daewoo reveals a double mutation: that of the political, increasingly elusive yet heavy in its effects — just like the “Real” — and that of the narrative aiming at its figuration. This article will thus focus on the representation of micro-relations as figures of the political in an embryonic state, seeking to locate in this critical revision of intersubjective relations an archaeology of the political that merges with the narrative itself, rather than simply being its object.

scholarly journals New Materialism, Technophilia and Emancipation

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordana Jovanović
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Political Emancipation

The aim of this paper is to reflect on psychological, ethical and political implications of new materialisms (Barad, Bennett, Coole, Frost) in the context of expanded and accelerated regimes of measurement as part of a technological governance of the human. As new materialists are committed to both epistemic and political emancipation, I first analyse theoretical, in particular epistemological, foundations of new materialism. The new materialism has achieved liberating epistemic effects in criticizing self-referential discursive and socio-constructionist agendas. It argued instead for a return to material and somatic realities. However, I examine whether its flat ontology, its epistemology of de-differentiation of the human and non-human, even non-living agencies and commitments into a principle of immanence, provide appropriate means to critically assess ethical and political implications of entanglements of humans with the historically- produced technologies and social worlds in general. The next question to be discussed is whether a return (nevertheless a discursive one) to material and somatic realities can in itself protect those very vulnerable realities. As horizontal ontology invokes a horizontal normativity which cannot serve as a foundation for emancipatory projects, it follows that normativity needs other sources beyond the new materialism paradigm. Thus, I argue that such a weak or insecure position of normativity within the new materialisms affects any concept of human subject, regardless of its entanglements, and any project of emancipation. I conclude these critical analyses by claiming that the new materialism’s epistemological and political emancipatory promises cannot be fulfilled by means provided by the new materialism itself.

New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liedeke Plate
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Death Of The Author ◽  
Empirical Approaches

New materialism (and new materialisms) is part of the material turn currently sweeping through the humanities and social sciences and entails a paradigm shift toward a more material(ist) understanding of social and cultural life. From new materialist thinking, new (empirical) approaches, methods, methodologies and objects of study ensue. The new materialisms emerge from feminism, philosophy, and science and technologies studies and critique the foundational binaries of modern thought, especially the nature/culture, object/subject, human/thing dualisms, whose anthropocentric biases are seen to have led to the current ecological and civilizational crisis and the incapacity to think through and adequately engage with them. Proposing to give things their due, new materialisms are interested in “the force of things” and debate “the agency of things.” The post-anthropocentric interest in the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking of indigenous ontologies on which some new materialisms may in fact be based, but whose influence has so far insufficiently been acknowledged. At its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn. A number of scholars have sought to bring the insights and concerns of new materialism(s) into the fields of literary theory and criticism, developing “thing” or “stuff” theory and seeking to conceptualize and operationalize a new literary materialism. For this, they draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including material culture studies, book and print culture studies, and comparative textual media studies. Given the importance attached to the linguistic turn as the cultural moment and textual approach in relation to which new materialists agonistically construct the newness of their material(ist) endeavors, the publication context of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author”—the multimedia magazine in a box Aspen 5+6—is highlighted as an important site for critiquing a nonmaterial approach.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document