Power of Material/politics of Materiality
Power of Material/politics of Materiality

Author: Susanne Witzgall

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783037349878

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Materiality has emerged as a new focus for art, design, and architecture. Where there was once the belief that the form of a work offered more capacity to bestow meaning, "New Materialism" asserts the agency of material within the artistic process, enmeshed as it is within a web of relationships. For Power of Material--Politics of Materiality, editors Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier have brought together a diverse and interdisciplinary team of contributors to deepen the current discourse surrounding materiality. The contributors were participants at a lecture series held at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and, the book presents the resultant discussions and experimental practices.

Material Politics
Material Politics

Author: Andrew Barry

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-09-23

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 111852909X

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In Material Politics, author Andrew Barry reveals that as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins, and impact. Presents an original theoretical approach to political geography by revealing the paradoxical relationship between materials and politics Explores how political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information about their performance, origins, and impact Studies the example of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline – a fascinating experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility – and its wide-spread negative political impact Capitalizes on the growing interdisciplinary interest, especially within geography and social theory, about the critical role of material artefacts in political life

Vibrant Matter
Vibrant Matter

Author: Jane Bennett

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-01-04

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0822391627

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In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

The Design Politics of the Passport
The Design Politics of the Passport

Author: Mahmoud Keshavarz

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-12-13

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 147428938X

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The Design Politics of the Passport presents an innovative study of the passport and its associated social, political and material practices as a means of uncovering the workings of 'design politics'. It traces the histories, technologies, power relations and contestations around this small but powerful artefact to establish a framework for understanding how design is always enmeshed in the political, and how politics can be understood in terms of material objects. Combining design studies with critical border studies, alongside ethnographic work among undocumented migrants, border transgressors and passport forgers, this book shows how a world made and designed as open and hospitable to some is strictly enclosed, confined and demarcated for many others - and how those affected by such injustices dissent from the immobilities imposed on them through the same capacity of design and artifice.

Materiality
Materiality

Author: Daniel Miller

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2005-07-18

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0822386712

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Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief—whether religious or secular—have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material. Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors—most of whom are anthropologists—examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking, Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human. Contributors. Matthew Engelke, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Bill Maurer, Lynn Meskell, Daniel Miller, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Fred Myers, Christopher Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Nigel Thrift

Practicing Materiality
Practicing Materiality

Author: Ruth M. Van Dyke

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2015-11-12

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0816531277

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It is little wonder that relationships between things and humans are front-and-center in the contemporary social sciences, given the presence of technologies in every conceivable aspect of our lives. From Bruno Latour to Ian Hodder, anthropologists and archaeologists are embracing “thing theory” and the “ontological turn.” In Practicing Materiality, Ruth M. Van Dyke cautions that as anthropologists turn toward animals and things, they run the risk of turning away from people and intentional actions. Practicing Materiality focuses on the practical job of applying materiality to anthropological investigations, but with the firm retention of anthropocentrism. The philosophical discussions that run through the nine chapters develop practical applications for material studies, including Heideggerian phenomenology, Gellian secondary agency, object life histories, and bundling. Seven case studies are flanked by an introduction and a discussion chapter. The case studies represent a wide range of archaeological and anthropological contexts, from contemporary New York City and Turkey to fifteenth-century Portugal, the ancient southwest United States, and the ancient Andes. Authors in every chapter argue for the rejection of subject/object dualism, regarding material things as actively involved in the negotiation of power within human social relationships. Practicing Materiality demonstrates that it is possible to focus on the entangled lives of things without losing sight of their political and social implications.

Power in Modernity
Power in Modernity

Author: Isaac Ariail Reed

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-03-25

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 022668945X

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In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity. Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

Body between Materiality and Power
Body between Materiality and Power

Author: Nasheli Jiménez del Val

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-09-23

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1443812803

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This volume situates and problematizes the points of tension implicated in diverse historical and theoretical conceptualizations of the body through a visual studies framework. By proposing materiality and power as two polarities through which the body is mobilized, it highlights the interstitial function of the body as a mediator between materiality and politics beyond the body/soul-mind dichotomy. Specifically, the book brings together complex analytical approaches to representations of the body in diverse media, such as the visual arts, television, film, literature, architecture, dance, and theatre, among others. As a result, and to highlight the interdisciplinary dimension of this collection of essays, Body between Power and Materiality includes texts by scholars in a wide range of fields, from art historians, media studies experts, and sociologists to literary theorists.

Assembling Therapeutics
Assembling Therapeutics

Author: Suvi Salmenniemi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1351233378

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The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351233392, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume examines the ways in which people engage with therapeutic practices, such as life coaching, mindfulness, complementary and alternative medicine, sex and relationship counselling, spiritual healing and self-tracking. It investigates how human and non-human actors, systems of thought and practice are assembled and interwoven in therapeutic engagements, and traces the situated, material and political dimensions of these engagements. By focusing on lived experiences through ethnographically informed case studies, the book elucidates the diverse forms, meanings and embodied effects of therapeutic engagements in different settings, as well as their potential for both oppressive and subversive social change. In this way, Assembling Therapeutics contributes to our understanding of multiple modes of healing, self-knowledge and power in contemporary societies.

The Materiality of Language
The Materiality of Language

Author: David Bleich

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-06-28

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 0253007739

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A critique of male-dominated modes of language use, their roots in higher education, their effects, and their spill over into popular culture. David Bleich sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. In The Materiality of Language, Bleich addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and its many contexts of use. To recognize language as material and treat it as such, argues Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations, and becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things. “A potentially foundational text in an emergent field [of] language studies, whose work is to break up the monopoly Linguistics and Philosophy have had on the study of language. . . . The insight that the affective operation of language is elided in nearly all approaches to [language] acquisition is brilliant and astounding. . . . The analysis of subject creation as an affective process of recognizing and sharing the same affective state and language as the means for materializing affective states . . . is fascinating and persuasive. . . . One of the book’s distinctive features is the use of gender as a key normative analytical lens throughout. It would be difficult to exaggerate how rare this is among language thinkers, and how productive it is for the arguments here.” —Mary Louise Pratt, New York University “A powerful, first-rate book on a crucial topic. It offers a great interpretation of the sacralization and ascendancy of Latin as a language supporting what Bleich calls ‘an elite group of men.’ . . . This is a brilliant codebook to academic language and its coercions.” —Dale Bauer, University of Illinois“/B>/DESC> literary theory;semiotics;literary criticism;philosophy;language philosophy;philosophy of language;gender studies;social science;language studies;communication studies;language arts;language disciplines;gender;sex;language;rhetoric;academic language;colloquial language;language political aspects;language sex differences;language and gender LIT006000 LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory PHI038000 PHILOSOPHY / Language SOC032000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies LAN004000 LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Communication Studies 9780253016508 Well-Tempered Woodwinds: Friedrich von Huene and the Making of Early Music in a New World Geoffrey Burgess