Oh, go to sleep, honey. If you want some chills – you got it. On affect in ASMR

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-325
Author(s):  
Joanna Łapińska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Karen Barad

In the article, the author discusses a new cultural phenomenon known as ASMR in a posthuman perspective, especially from the perspective of new materialism (Karen Barad), studies of things (Bjørnar Olsen, Ewa Domańska) and affective studies (Jane Bennett, Sara Ahmed). The article analyzes selected ASMR videos published on the YouTube website in terms of the affectivity of the objects used in them, arguing that ASMR cultural practices encourage the production of human-non-human assemblages of subjects and objects built of “vibrating matter” (Jane Bennett).

The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rekret
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110666
Author(s):  
jan jagodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Creative Destruction ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Quantum Level ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Karen Barad

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

Werewolf Wollstonecraft

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Chris Washington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Dynamic Power ◽  
Karen Barad

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

scholarly journals Child-creator: New European Paradigm Of Childhood Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Oksana Sapiha
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Semantic Space ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Complex Concept ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Historical Dynamics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Approach ◽  
Children's Culture ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cultural Concept

The author explored the concept of "childhood culture" through the prism of the new European paradigm of culture and domestic cultural creation in the modern humanities. The revision of the concept of "childhood culture" is carried out in the context of polydisciplinarity, which combines anthropological, psychological, sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, art, ethnographic, pedagogical aspects of the analysis of the childhood phenomenon. The semantic polyvalences of "childhood culture" within the classical and non-classical paradigms were revealed. The new European paradigm of childhood culture is considered. The concept of "childhood" is substantiated, which is presented as a cultural phenomenon in which value, figurative, conceptual markers are accumulated, and at the same time a special semantic space is formed, defined by lexemes "child world", "children's creativity", "childhood culture", "children's communication". etc. The dynamics of the relationship between the concepts: "children's culture" — "children's creativity" — "children's festival" is highlighted. It is argued that the concept of "childhood culture" in the theory of culture is transformed into interdisciplinary tools, combining the perspective of cultural and historical dynamics of childhood and the theory of childhood in one methodological complex-concept. The concept of childhood culture is investigated through the prism of anthropological projection (V. Tabachkovsky, M. Mead), game concept of culture (J. Geizinga), cultural concept of aesthetic education (T. Krivosheya), existential point of wiev (J.-P. Sartre), psychoanalytic approach (Z. Freud), in the focus of everyday school "Annals" (F.  Aries), hermeneutic pattern (P. Reeker), etc. The topology of children’s culture of the American researcher D. Kennedy is analyzed, which allowed to state the child-creator as a subject of cultural creation within its non-classical comprehension. Articulated phenomenon of "child-centeredness", which is based on even greater infantilization of society and totally affects all cultural practices (fashion, consumption, education, entertainment, etc.).

A Horse Is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course: Animality, Transitivity, and the Double Take

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Animal Movement ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Slow Motion ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Running Time ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Dividing Line

Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) invites a way of looking that coincides with work done by scholars of feminist new materialism with an eye toward queering binary and static concepts of species, gender, and the relation between them. A close look at one fleeting, slow-motion image of horses racing on a track reveals a pattern of ‘diffraction,’ in the critically productive sense that Karen Barad uses the term, such that we see neither camera movement, human movement, nor animal movement proper, but movement that is ‘of’ all three bodies, but not ‘in’ any given one. The film perpetually defers the dichotomy between animal and human as it is classically conceived in order to reconfigure it.That diffractive pattern recurs throughout the film, in its use of slow motion, lateral camera movements, and the overlapping of multiple movements and rhythms. Throughout its running time, The Lobster suspends the process of becoming in motion, emphasizing the experiential aspect of this ‘-ing’ that bodies do. The film draws vision sideways, rippling and redoubling itself; in the process, it shifts attention from a human state or an animal state – states that, according to conventional logic, exist on one side or another of a dividing line, and which certain types of movement might transcend – to transitivity, or the movement of movement itself.

New Materialism and the New History of Emotions

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Expression Of Emotion ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

A key question for historians of emotion has been the relationship between the expression of emotion and the corporeal experience of emotion by historical subjects. Recently, work indebted to practice and performance theories has emphasised language’s productive capacities to produce emotion performatively. New Materialism extends this conversation by suggesting an alternative imagining of ‘matter’ – the corporeal – which attributes it greater agency in systems of discursive production. This article explores in particular the work of theorist Karen Barad and the implications of her work for the history of emotions.

scholarly journals The Arts and New Materialism: A Call to Stewardship through Mercy, Grace, and Hope

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Nicholas Leonard
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Materialist Theory

During highly polarized times, issues are quickly addressed in ways that emphasize divisions. To support the healing of our polarized culture through art, new materialist theory as presented by Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti will be entangled with art and artmaking according to Dennis Atkinson and Makoto Fujimura to argue for art as an act of environmental and cultural stewardship, creating new possibilities and differences in the virtual that are merciful, graceful, and hopeful. To form this argument, first a summary of new materialism and ethics through Agential Realism and Affirmative Ethics is addressed. Next, a cartography including scientific and theological perspectives is presented for a diffractive reading regarding the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope to develop a new materialist understanding through a philosophy of immanence to counter the circular perpetuation of violence. These concepts are then individually addressed through the proposed new materialist framework to further break from material-discursive dualistic thought. This approach is then explored through various artworks to investigate the co-constructing material-discursive nature of art to create new relations and possibilities in the world. Finally, an in-depth study of the artworks Becoming Us by Megan Constance Altieri and Teeter-Totter Wall by Ronald Rael are addressed to detail how a new materialist approach to art that focuses on the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope can position art as an act of stewardship.

Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-material Knot as a Non-Hierarchical Ontology: A Reply to Nico Carpentier

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-389
Author(s):  
Mads Ejsing ◽  
Lars Tønder
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
The Relationship

In this reply, we question whether 'the knot' is the best way to describe the relationship between the discursive and the material. Our main objective is to show that the discursive and material are co-extensive and therefore emerge from within the same assemblage, prior to any 'knot' between them. To develop this idea, we draw on the new materialism of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, especially their argument for how and why it makes sense to approach the discursive and the material as hyphenated ('discursive-material') as well as performatively constituted.

Tingles of Matter, Tangles of Theology: Bodies of the New(ish) Materialism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Keller
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Entanglement ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
The Universe

This chapter considers a bodily becoming neither human nor divine but entangled in both. In conversation with Karen Barad, quantum entanglement discloses the relational ontology—the “agential intra-activity”—of which every body in the universe is woven. The chapter demonstrates the proximity of Barad's to Alfred North Whitehead's responsive materiality. Here, intercarnation might have turned to intra-carnation. But then there might seem to be a single mega-body inside which all enfleshment takes place. The point, however, is that creatures, micro- or macro-, do not pre-exist their relationships. The chapter examines what kind of theology might materialize in conversation with the so-called new materialism and what sort of theology might already identify itself as a Christian materialism.

scholarly journals City as mobility: a contribution of brazilian saraus to urban theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Pardue ◽  
Lucas Amaral de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
City Space ◽  
Existential Knowledge ◽  
Socially Excluded ◽  
The City

Abstract The article analyzes saraus movement - poetry readings in São Paulo’s periphery - as a cultural phenomenon that over recent years has transformed the city space into a vibrant socio-political project. The movement offers important insights for an anthropology of cities by highlighting the materiality of mobility and spatiality, understood here as a set of social and cultural practices that involve the existential knowledge, social networking, and local community empowerment gained from mobility between predominantly peripheral neighborhoods and urban labor centers. We examine how saraus contribute to the construction of a new imaginary of the city and public space occupied by the socially excluded and racialized peripheries. We provide an analytical and empirical contribution to city production and urban theory, and demonstrate that mobility and the encounter are not simply temporary extraneous interactions, but rather experiences constitutive of social knowledge.

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