Theophanic Materiality: Political Ecology, Inhuman Touch, and the Art of Andy Goldsworthy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob J. Erickson
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Art ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Human Power ◽  
Political Response ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Conceptual Possibility

This chapter pursues the queerly constructive task of rethinking the strange entanglements of divinity and matter in the wake of the ecological crises of the anthropocene. Seduced simultaneously by the “land art” (especially cairns) of Andy Goldsworthy, the “new materialisms” of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, and the theophany traditions of Christian thought, this chapter constructs a concept of “theophanic materiality,” where divine energy is entangled in the performance of indeterminate material agencies. Goldsworthy’s artistic process of collaboration with and in place helps theology think anew the fluid possibilities of creativity. That is to say, placing land art in conversation with new materialisms and theologies of creation creates at least one conceptual possibility for the queer intimacy of divinity and earth. To construct such a theology, therefore, might help to effect a reimagined political response to the exploitative systems of human power that bring about our contemporary ecological crises.

scholarly journals Understanding with Water: Hydro-art in Osieki (1973)

2021 ◽  
pp. 356-374
Author(s):  
Karolina Majewska-Güde
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Land Art ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Water Surfaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms

The paper is located at the intersection of the art history of the Polish neo-avant-garde and the environmental humanities informed by feminist new materialisms. It proposes an interpretation of performative works in which artists used aqueous matter as an object of interaction, a source of artistic transcription, and as an active participant in artistic scenarios. It concentrates on works that were realized during the open-air art meetings in socialist Poland and in particular at the Osieki meeting in 1973 with the title The Art of Water Surfaces [Plastyka obszarów wodnych]. Based on the analyzed works, it offers a speculative reflection on Hydroart, which is defined as region-specific development parallel to land art practices.

scholarly journals Review Essay: Steps to a Material Ecocriticism. The Recent Literature about the “New Materialisms” and its Impact on Ecocritical Theory

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serenella Iovino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Four Books

This bibliographic essay illustrates the proliferation of studies about the "new materialisms" and examines the potential influx of this conceptual trend on ecocriticism. In the discussion, in particular, I provide a comparative analysis of four books: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2008), Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2010), Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2010), David Abram, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

Entangled agencies: Rethinking causality and health in political-ecology

2020 ◽  
pp. 251484862094388
Author(s):  
Abigail H Neely
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Assemblage Theory ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
Opening Up

The question of non-human agency has been particularly important and generative in political-ecology. Drawing from science studies, scholars have used actor-network theory and assemblage theory to decenter humans from analyses. Building on this scholarship, this article offers a decolonial approach for rethinking of agency in health for political-ecologies of health drawing from work in feminist science studies that stresses non-proscriptive relationships over individuals. By unpacking the example of isibhobho, a witchcraft illness, through the work of Karen Barad, I argue for an understanding of agency as the reconfiguration of entanglements. This approach offers new possibilities for understanding what causes illness, which moved beyond humans and non-humans to focus on entanglements. This approach challenges models of causality, taken up in both biomedicine and in political-ecology, offering a vision of causality that is relational and opening up new possibilities for healing and for politics more broadly.

New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Diener
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn

Abstract This review considers work in the field of new materialisms, bearing in mind the wide range of approaches that make up the broader ‘material turn’ in critical and cultural theory but focusing in particular on the feminist new materialist conversation that draws on the work of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Samantha Frost, Rosi Braidotti, and others. It notes the new materialisms’ continued heterogeneity and describes a turn to method in the field, one that enables a vibrant dialogue between applied and theoretical scholarship. The pieces reviewed share an engagement with that trend. They also illustrate two important problems that the field has engaged with in 2019. The first question concerns the new materialisms’ politics of citation, and the need for a decolonial practice that engages with indigenous and non-western thought. The second is the question of a new materialist ontology: how to reconcile the tension between ‘flat’ and differentiated, subject-oriented accounts of agency, significance, and value. The new materialists this review follows seek a middle ground, one that allows them to emphasize the political stakes of human and more-than-human relations. Following the introduction, sections are: 1. New Materialist Practice, Feminist Ends; 2. Indigeneity and the New Materialisms; 3. Sensation in a Material World; 4. A Cartography of the New Materialisms; 5. Reading's Situation; 6. Exclusion and Activist New Materialism; and 7. The Things We Imagine.

Performativity and Political Ecology, Matter’s Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 102-138
Author(s):  
Emily Anne Parker
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

This chapter considers the work of Karen Barad, placing her account of the need for a concept of agential realism beside the performative account of racial difference in the work of Saidiya Hartman. Chapter 2 shows that there are not one but two concerns with performativity: (1) a political ecology concern about the lack of attention to “nonhuman” agency in the sense of technology, in the work of Barad, and (2) a performativity concern about whether performativity can contain the intensity of the bodily conscription that whiteness requires, in the work of Hartman.

scholarly journals Urban political ecology in prospect and retrospect

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 289-302
Author(s):  
Matthew Gandy
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Global Patterns

The contemporary theorization of the urban biosphere has reached something of an impasse between the perceived limitations of urban political ecology, the neo-Lefebvrian emphasis on global patterns of urbanization, and the rise of “new materialisms”.  Since its emergence in the mid-1990s, urban political ecology has made a series of distinctive contributions to the study of urban environmental issues yet in recent years a series of conceptual tensions and empirical lacunae have become apparent.  In this essay I reflect on the legacy of the “first wave” of urban political ecology scholarship and consider a series of contemporary challenges including more complex interpretations of agency, materiality, and subjectivity.       

Dante Alighieri

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Bartoloni
Keyword(s):  
Dante Alighieri ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is invoked several times in the work of Giorgio Agamben, often in passing to stress a point, as when discussing the political relevance of désoeuvrement (KG 246); to develop a thought, as in the articulation of the medieval idea of imagination as the medium between body and soul (S, especially 127–9); or to explain an idea, as in the case of the artistic process understood as the meeting of contradictory forces such as inspiration and critical control (FR, especially 48–50). So while Agamben does not engage with Dante systematically, he refers to him constantly, treating the Florentine poet as an auctoritas whose presence adds critical rigour and credibility. Identifying and relating the instances of these encounters is useful since they highlight central aspects of Agamben’s thought and its development over the years, from the first writings, such as Stanzas, to more recent texts, such as Il fuoco e il racconto and The Use of Bodies. The significance of Agamben’s reliance on Dante can be divided into two categories: the aesthetic and the political. The following discussion will address each of these categories separately, but will also emphasise the philosophical continuity that links the discussion of the aesthetic with that of the political. While in the first instance Dante is offered as an example of poetic innovation, especially in relation to the use of language and imagination, in the second he is invoked as a forerunner of new forms of life. Mediality and potentiality are the two pivots connecting the aesthetic and the political.

Active Coeliac: Disassembling Gluten and Coeliac Disease

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 188-205
Author(s):  
Sofia Varino
Keyword(s):  
Coeliac Disease ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Food Additive ◽  
Gluten Free ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Dietary Practices ◽  
Object A ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
New Materialisms

This article follows the trajectories of gluten in the context of Coeliac disease as a gastrointestinal condition managed by lifelong adherence to a gluten-free diet. Oriented by the concept of gluten as an actant (Latour), I engage in an analysis of gluten as a participant in volatile relations of consumption, contact, and contamination across coeliac eating. I ask questions about biomedical knowledge production in the context of everyday dietary practices alongside two current scientific research projects developing gluten-degrading enzymes and gluten-free wheat crops. Following the new materialisms of theorists like Elizabeth A. Wilson, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, I approach gluten as an alloy, an impure object, a hybrid assemblage with self-organizing and disorganizing capacity, not entirely peptide chain nor food additive, not only allergen but also the chewy, sticky substance that gives pizza dough its elastic, malleable consistency. Tracing the trajectories of gluten, this article is a case study of the tricky, slippery capacity of matter to participate in processes of scientific knowledge production.

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