Embodied Knowledge of/with the place. Review of the book: Placemaking, A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy (Page, Tara, 2020)

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Synaesthesia

The following entry includes firstly a list of synaesthetic portals, and secondly an initial table of scaled sensory modalities following Felicity Colman’s ‘Fragment of a Modalities Map’ (Colman, 2019, p. 985-987). James Joyce famously begins his ‘Proteus’ chapter of Ulysses with Stephen Dedalus describing the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible’ (Joyce, 1922, p. 37). Synaesthesia presents a phenomenon whereby the modality is not merely ineluctible but is also a portal that can potentially link one sensory realm to another, suggesting an infrastructural connectivity that links ostensibly individuated or hermetically differentiated perceptual fields. To describe this process as merely the condition of synaptic short-circuitry affecting a small percentage of human animals does not account for the ways in which synaesthesia is always already at play in all the regular sensory categories, in its experience as and between what analytic philosophers call ‘qualia’, neither does it account for also the ways it can be played as if it were an instrument itself. Perception in general can be perceived as an organ within itself: a desiring organ, as Vicki Kirby says in Quantum Anthropologies (2011, p. 120).

The Glove as Tool To Touch: An Intra-view from Within New Dawn Felipe Duque in Conversation with Swantje Martach

New Dawn is a global arts/theories queering project, which was initiated in Berlin in 2020, and which speculates future aesthetics of the glove as “tool-to-touch.“ The present intra-view is a real ‘view-from-within,’ as it unfolds a conversation (a turning, moving, becoming [versare] together [con]) in-between the two members of this project’s theoretical section: Felipe Duque and Swantje Martach. This intra-view sets out to explore the role the glove plays within the touch. A gloved touch differs from a non-gloved touch, as the glove heightens the touch. The glove functions as a first other that is encountered in the touch, hence it is touched and touching us back. And it is a medium for and mediator of touching other others, as it is through the glove that the ordinarily touched (the world) is touched. By means of this double position in the touch, the glove emancipates from human control. It enables us humans to realize many touches that we alone would not be capable of, and in this way, it emancipates us from our limitations as humans. The glove is a very material invitation to become, that increases with every new gloves invented, a switch to which is just another un/dressing away. By focusing on the glove/hand entanglement, New Dawn can be read as promoting the haptic sense as a hitherto neglected contributor of the aesthetic. Being self-critical however, we argue that depicting the future of touch by means of the glove eventually is a rather restrictive speculation, as it limits all touch to the one we exert by and experience from hands; whereas reality disposes a multiplicity of touches (e.g. a touch between shoulders, eyes, lips). To expand future touches could thus be an interesting continuation for New Dawn.

Towards a Feminist and Affective Pedagogy of Vulnerability

This paper gives a theoretical-affective account of my experience of teaching the course “Vulnerability, Gender, and Justice.” Applied to pedagogy, the notion of vulnerability, diffractive methodologies, and rhizomatic thinking can potentially transform traditional ways of reading philosophy, of understanding ourselves, and of understanding how we are situated in practices within molar and molecular lines. This course aimed to activate potential lines of flight that may fly away from normativity.

Apparatus and Its Uses: ‘Ecologising' Diffraction As A Materialist-Epistemological Practice

This paper addresses the problem of how to 'do' theory without implying “that theorizing is outside the world” (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, p. 16) by elaborating a particular, ecological use of the apparatus. Tracing Foucault’s use of the dispositif (Foucault, [1977] 1980, p. 194), I argue that his key invention is identifying the generative capacity of the apparatus in terms of its constraints, which coincide with its situatedness as part of the world. By diffractively reading this invention through Barad’s posthumanist use of the apparatus, their agential realist practice of diffraction is re-iterated as a specifically 'ecologising' technique. Rather than following Barad in grounding this technique ontologically, Foucault’s “author-function” (Foucault 1969) leads me to ground such theorising an ongoing, materialist-epistemological engagement with the environment.

What do ‘propositions’ do for research-creation? Truth and modality in Whitehead and Wittgenstein

Research-creation is a way of researching socio-material processes as art practices. Scholars and artists pursuing research-creation often reference Whitehead’s conceptualisation of the ‘proposition’ as a key theoretical device for speculative and creative work. However, this scholarship perhaps downplays the truth/false distinction that is essential to Whitehead’s account of the proposition in favour of the proposition’s potential as a speculative tool. In this paper, I explore the proposition as conceptualized by Whitehead. I think with a series of music theory concepts to theorise how Whitehead’s proposition explores a modality of truth. I then discuss how the concept is taken up in research-creation. I frictionally bring together Whitehead’s articulation of the proposition with that of the early Wittgenstein’s. Finally, I discuss some promises and perils of this approach, with direct relevance to questions around research method and methodology in the social sciences. This article is of relevance to scholars interested in research applications of process philosophy, graduate or post-graduate students interested in an introduction to Whitehead, and research-creation practitioners interested in the proposition.

Mathematics in the middle: The relationship between measurement and metamorphic matter

This paper revisits philosophical questions regarding the relationship between mathematics and matter. I briefly present four contrary and contemporary perspectives on the speculative force of mathematics, as a provocation for further discussion on the subject of sciento-metrics. I first consider the ideas of the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, as a way of setting the stage for various kinds of materialist philosophies of mathematics. I then turn to the ideas of two mathematicians - Fernando Zalamea and Giuseppe Longo - and a computer scientist - Gregory Chaitin - and explore how their discussions of contemporary mathematical practice offer important insight (and twist) regarding the relationship between mathematics and matter.

Slime

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Versions of Phenomena

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Review of the book: Derrida after the End of Writing. Political Theology and New Materialism, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (Crockett, Clayton, 2018)

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