Suicidology calls itself and is recognised as the science of suicide and suicide prevention. Findings from suicidological research are widely acknowledged as truth and inform some of our most profound ways of knowing and experiencing suicide today in the west: suicide is the result of mental illness, it is located in the interiority of the individual, and it is a problem that must be prevented. Suicidologists make these claims by using quantitative research methods, which they propose allow them to study suicide objectively and to find its truth. This paper investigates the somatechnics of research at play in suicidology that allow the field to maintain its position of authority in both academic and public discussions of suicide. It thus analyses how suicide has come to be known in suicidology, and how these knowledges are sustained as the truth of suicide. In bringing Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to bear on suicidology, the paper identifies the ways in which suicidology puts in place narrow parameters for what can be known about suicide and how it can be known. In doing so, the paper argues that what has come to constitute neutral, evidence-based knowledge about suicide both in this field of research and in public understandings of suicide is the result of an elaborate somatechnic machinery aimed at the regulation of knowledge and at the preservation of an image of scientificity and the position of authority of the field, rather than being the truth of suicide. In doing so, the paper argues that the suicidological style of reasoning is a somatechnic that is implicated in in/trans/forming both the body of the suicidal person and that of the expert suicide researcher as particular kinds of subjects in mutually generative ways.
{"title":"Somatechnics, Styles of Reasoning, and the Making of the Subject of Suicidology","authors":"S. Tack","doi":"10.3366/soma.2022.0375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2022.0375","url":null,"abstract":"Suicidology calls itself and is recognised as the science of suicide and suicide prevention. Findings from suicidological research are widely acknowledged as truth and inform some of our most profound ways of knowing and experiencing suicide today in the west: suicide is the result of mental illness, it is located in the interiority of the individual, and it is a problem that must be prevented. Suicidologists make these claims by using quantitative research methods, which they propose allow them to study suicide objectively and to find its truth. This paper investigates the somatechnics of research at play in suicidology that allow the field to maintain its position of authority in both academic and public discussions of suicide. It thus analyses how suicide has come to be known in suicidology, and how these knowledges are sustained as the truth of suicide. In bringing Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to bear on suicidology, the paper identifies the ways in which suicidology puts in place narrow parameters for what can be known about suicide and how it can be known. In doing so, the paper argues that what has come to constitute neutral, evidence-based knowledge about suicide both in this field of research and in public understandings of suicide is the result of an elaborate somatechnic machinery aimed at the regulation of knowledge and at the preservation of an image of scientificity and the position of authority of the field, rather than being the truth of suicide. In doing so, the paper argues that the suicidological style of reasoning is a somatechnic that is implicated in in/trans/forming both the body of the suicidal person and that of the expert suicide researcher as particular kinds of subjects in mutually generative ways.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49553146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Self-care has become a major topic in recent years; everyone seems to be talking about it. Within the academy, discussions on self-care often revolve around the neoliberalisation of self-care, how these practices commodify bodies and lives, and the intimate relationship between the biomedical model of health and self-care. This article takes a radical departure from the current purview of self-care discussions and offers an emancipatory alternative: ‘wild self-care’. This ‘wild’ model of self-care considers how creative, alternative, transgressive, and/or unexpected forms of care can be legitimate ways of pursuing well-being. Wild self-care is highly emotional in nature, articulates the way care is inherently communal, and ultimately grounded in the pursuit for agency. Drawing from a set of interviews conducted with 16 individuals in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia who identified as a gay/queer man or a member of the gay community, I describe a range of different wild self-care practices and demonstrate how sex work, drug use, sex in public, kink, and alternative forms of political activism can be used as legitimate ways of caring for the self and pursuing well-being.
{"title":"Wild Self-Care","authors":"S. Clay","doi":"10.3366/soma.2022.0378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2022.0378","url":null,"abstract":"Self-care has become a major topic in recent years; everyone seems to be talking about it. Within the academy, discussions on self-care often revolve around the neoliberalisation of self-care, how these practices commodify bodies and lives, and the intimate relationship between the biomedical model of health and self-care. This article takes a radical departure from the current purview of self-care discussions and offers an emancipatory alternative: ‘wild self-care’. This ‘wild’ model of self-care considers how creative, alternative, transgressive, and/or unexpected forms of care can be legitimate ways of pursuing well-being. Wild self-care is highly emotional in nature, articulates the way care is inherently communal, and ultimately grounded in the pursuit for agency. Drawing from a set of interviews conducted with 16 individuals in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia who identified as a gay/queer man or a member of the gay community, I describe a range of different wild self-care practices and demonstrate how sex work, drug use, sex in public, kink, and alternative forms of political activism can be used as legitimate ways of caring for the self and pursuing well-being.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42280188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article we offer a textual analysis informed by feminist framings of the geologic as a somatechnic research practice. The turn to geology in recent feminist scholarship responds to the explosion of discourse on the Anthropocene (itself a geologic term) interrogating the power relations implicit in geology as a seemingly objective research practice and epistemology. We use this theoretical standpoint on geology to analyse two literary representations of geologies of the future – Dawn by Octavia Butler and Earth After Us by Jan Zalasiewicz. In Earth After Us, aliens of the future mine the depths of the earth to understand humans’ relationship with the planet and planetary annihilation. In Dawn, aliens mine the geology of human flesh and genetics to understand the same thing. Through our analysis we demonstrate the ways that geology, as a specifically Western epistemology and research practice, relies on the distinction between the body – ‘bio’ – and nature – ‘geo’ – that Povinelli has termed ‘Geontopower’ (2016). Geontopower traces the ways that the research practices and epistemologies of geology are built from Western perspectives, that in turn are built on the backs of bodies – the slave power that built empires, as well as the long fossilised bodies that have powered capitalism. Through a feminist lens we demonstrate how these text’s representations of future geologies articulate a somatechnics in which bodies and technologies are intertwined. We argue that thinking geologically is a somatechnical research practice that reveals the extractive epistemologies implicit in ‘the White Geology of the Anthropocene’ ( Yusoff 2018 ). We conclude by offering a somatechnic geology in which the entangled relationships between bodies and systems of colonialism and capitalism are acknowledged as imbricated in the layers of flesh of humans and the planet alike, in order to imagine more just futures in an era of ecological urgency.
{"title":"Geology as Somatechnics: Re-imagining Human and Technology Entanglements in Geologies of the Future","authors":"Jianni Tien, Eloise Florence","doi":"10.3366/soma.2022.0377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2022.0377","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we offer a textual analysis informed by feminist framings of the geologic as a somatechnic research practice. The turn to geology in recent feminist scholarship responds to the explosion of discourse on the Anthropocene (itself a geologic term) interrogating the power relations implicit in geology as a seemingly objective research practice and epistemology. We use this theoretical standpoint on geology to analyse two literary representations of geologies of the future – Dawn by Octavia Butler and Earth After Us by Jan Zalasiewicz. In Earth After Us, aliens of the future mine the depths of the earth to understand humans’ relationship with the planet and planetary annihilation. In Dawn, aliens mine the geology of human flesh and genetics to understand the same thing. Through our analysis we demonstrate the ways that geology, as a specifically Western epistemology and research practice, relies on the distinction between the body – ‘bio’ – and nature – ‘geo’ – that Povinelli has termed ‘Geontopower’ (2016). Geontopower traces the ways that the research practices and epistemologies of geology are built from Western perspectives, that in turn are built on the backs of bodies – the slave power that built empires, as well as the long fossilised bodies that have powered capitalism. Through a feminist lens we demonstrate how these text’s representations of future geologies articulate a somatechnics in which bodies and technologies are intertwined. We argue that thinking geologically is a somatechnical research practice that reveals the extractive epistemologies implicit in ‘the White Geology of the Anthropocene’ ( Yusoff 2018 ). We conclude by offering a somatechnic geology in which the entangled relationships between bodies and systems of colonialism and capitalism are acknowledged as imbricated in the layers of flesh of humans and the planet alike, in order to imagine more just futures in an era of ecological urgency.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47081581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The accelerated use of technical prostheses as assistive devices has resulted in an externalisation of the site of cognition outside the sensory-motor neural apparatus. This has in turn problematised the notion of embodied cognition and corporeal integrity. Bernard Stiegler in For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010a) states that human beings not only evolve and mature genetically but ‘extragenetically’ and ‘epiphylogenetically’, that is through artificial prostheses or means which are not organic. The ‘exosomatization’ ( Stiegler 2019 ) of the cognitive processes of memory and desire through tools, language, artifacts and technical memory banks has resulted in the formation of hybrid milieus of cognition arising out of an enjambment of soma, that is the body with its neural circuits, and external technics or prostheses that are designed to augment neural receptivity through an amplification of sensory-motor experiences. If the act of memory entails a recapitulation and retention of the past, desire as protention involves a transmission of this past into the future. Such anticipations of the future are increasingly mediated through analogue and digital modes of transmission resulting in the emergence of trans-corporeal sites of cognition. As we adapt to the grammar of analogue broadcasting and navigate through grammes of computational data, we experience a heightened discretisation or fragmentation of the organic plane of consciousness into bits of information. This accelerated discretisation of our cognitive abilities results in a breakdown of the accretive nuances of memory and desire as embodied/somatic processes. Through a close reading of Salman Rushdie’s novels Quichotte (2019) and Fury (2001), this article explores synaptic connections between the human and the non-human as parts of multi-componential apparatuses of memory and desire. It puts forward the thesis that the welding together of an artificial digital memory and the organic biochemistry of cognition alters the preconditions of desire and intelligibility as somatic processes.
{"title":"The Somatechnics of Cognition, Memory and Desire in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and Fury","authors":"Swatee Sinha, A. Roy","doi":"10.3366/soma.2022.0376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2022.0376","url":null,"abstract":"The accelerated use of technical prostheses as assistive devices has resulted in an externalisation of the site of cognition outside the sensory-motor neural apparatus. This has in turn problematised the notion of embodied cognition and corporeal integrity. Bernard Stiegler in For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010a) states that human beings not only evolve and mature genetically but ‘extragenetically’ and ‘epiphylogenetically’, that is through artificial prostheses or means which are not organic. The ‘exosomatization’ ( Stiegler 2019 ) of the cognitive processes of memory and desire through tools, language, artifacts and technical memory banks has resulted in the formation of hybrid milieus of cognition arising out of an enjambment of soma, that is the body with its neural circuits, and external technics or prostheses that are designed to augment neural receptivity through an amplification of sensory-motor experiences. If the act of memory entails a recapitulation and retention of the past, desire as protention involves a transmission of this past into the future. Such anticipations of the future are increasingly mediated through analogue and digital modes of transmission resulting in the emergence of trans-corporeal sites of cognition. As we adapt to the grammar of analogue broadcasting and navigate through grammes of computational data, we experience a heightened discretisation or fragmentation of the organic plane of consciousness into bits of information. This accelerated discretisation of our cognitive abilities results in a breakdown of the accretive nuances of memory and desire as embodied/somatic processes. Through a close reading of Salman Rushdie’s novels Quichotte (2019) and Fury (2001), this article explores synaptic connections between the human and the non-human as parts of multi-componential apparatuses of memory and desire. It puts forward the thesis that the welding together of an artificial digital memory and the organic biochemistry of cognition alters the preconditions of desire and intelligibility as somatic processes.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69468362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Willemijn Ruberg, History of the Body","authors":"Danielle Kinsey","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0370","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42358536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years there have been calls for scholars working within sport and physical culture to recognise the (increasing) confluence of nature and culture. Situated within an emerging body of new materialist research, such accounts have shown how various activities are polluted by, fused to, and assembled with non-human entities. However, more work is needed on the political possibilities afforded by non-human agency, and by extension, the implications that such flat ontological arrangements might raise for the management and governance of physical culture. Building on research conducted with mountain bike trail builders, this article seeks to explore what it means to know, to be, and to govern a human subject in the Anthropocene. Specifically, I draw on James Ash’s (2019) post-phenomenological theory of space and David Chandler’s (2018) notion of onto-political hacking to show how the playful, contingent, and transformative practices of the mountain bike assemblage confront the linear and calculated governance of the English countryside. In doing so, mountain bike trails are positioned as objects of hope that allow for a collective re-imagining of political democracy in a more-than-human landscape.
{"title":"The Ontopolitics of Mountain Bike Trail Building: Addressing Issues of Access and Conflict in the More-than Human English Countryside","authors":"J. Cherrington","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0363","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years there have been calls for scholars working within sport and physical culture to recognise the (increasing) confluence of nature and culture. Situated within an emerging body of new materialist research, such accounts have shown how various activities are polluted by, fused to, and assembled with non-human entities. However, more work is needed on the political possibilities afforded by non-human agency, and by extension, the implications that such flat ontological arrangements might raise for the management and governance of physical culture. Building on research conducted with mountain bike trail builders, this article seeks to explore what it means to know, to be, and to govern a human subject in the Anthropocene. Specifically, I draw on James Ash’s (2019) post-phenomenological theory of space and David Chandler’s (2018) notion of onto-political hacking to show how the playful, contingent, and transformative practices of the mountain bike assemblage confront the linear and calculated governance of the English countryside. In doing so, mountain bike trails are positioned as objects of hope that allow for a collective re-imagining of political democracy in a more-than-human landscape.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42694252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sport, Physical Culture, and New Materialisms: Part 2","authors":"Joshua I. Newman, H. Thorpe","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0362","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42800917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, we draw upon the work of leading new materialist Karen Barad to explore the possibilities for knowing women's yoga bodies differently. Engaging insights gathered from an embodied ethnography on contemporary Yoga in dialogue with Barad's concept of entanglement, we contemplate the complexity of a lived experience in a Yoga body. Engaging the voices and movement experiences of 19 committed women yoga practitioners, we explain ‘Yogic union’ as states of absorption facilitating an awareness of an existence that is complex, interconnected and involving both human and non-human materiality. Specifically, we work within and between the embodied experiences of the researcher and her participants, feminist new materialist theory, and creative writing to present Yoga bodies as phenomena that are always entangled.
{"title":"Entangled Yoga Bodies","authors":"Allison Jeffrey, K. Barbour, H. Thorpe","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0364","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we draw upon the work of leading new materialist Karen Barad to explore the possibilities for knowing women's yoga bodies differently. Engaging insights gathered from an embodied ethnography on contemporary Yoga in dialogue with Barad's concept of entanglement, we contemplate the complexity of a lived experience in a Yoga body. Engaging the voices and movement experiences of 19 committed women yoga practitioners, we explain ‘Yogic union’ as states of absorption facilitating an awareness of an existence that is complex, interconnected and involving both human and non-human materiality. Specifically, we work within and between the embodied experiences of the researcher and her participants, feminist new materialist theory, and creative writing to present Yoga bodies as phenomena that are always entangled.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44211131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article we examine women-specific adventure sport skills training courses in the UK utilising a feminist new materialist approach. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987) concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘lines of territorialisation’, and ‘lines of flight’, we apply a new lens to ask: what type(s) of material-discursive assemblages are produced through human and non-human, discursive, and non-discursive intra-actions on women-specific adventure sport skills courses? To what extent do these courses enable participants to engage with an alternative praxis and ethics and to think, feel, practice, and become otherwise? Our Deleuzian reading showed that the affective capacity of these courses is currently limited by dominant understandings of these courses as bridges to the real outdoors and as primarily designed for women who lack the confidence to participate in mixed-gender environments. However, these courses also enabled productive lines of flight and alternative understandings and practices related to the self, the body, others, material objects, learning, movement, and physical activity to emerge. These were both characterised and supported by less instrumental and hierarchical flows of relations and an openness to not knowing.
{"title":"‘Lines of Flight or Tethered Wings’?: A Deleuzian Analysis of Women-specific Adventure Skills Courses in the United Kingdom","authors":"Zoe Avner, E. Boocock, Jenny Hall, L. Allin","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0369","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we examine women-specific adventure sport skills training courses in the UK utilising a feminist new materialist approach. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987) concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘lines of territorialisation’, and ‘lines of flight’, we apply a new lens to ask: what type(s) of material-discursive assemblages are produced through human and non-human, discursive, and non-discursive intra-actions on women-specific adventure sport skills courses? To what extent do these courses enable participants to engage with an alternative praxis and ethics and to think, feel, practice, and become otherwise? Our Deleuzian reading showed that the affective capacity of these courses is currently limited by dominant understandings of these courses as bridges to the real outdoors and as primarily designed for women who lack the confidence to participate in mixed-gender environments. However, these courses also enabled productive lines of flight and alternative understandings and practices related to the self, the body, others, material objects, learning, movement, and physical activity to emerge. These were both characterised and supported by less instrumental and hierarchical flows of relations and an openness to not knowing.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47569052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Physical activity is commonly conceived of in terms of its human involvement – as a test of, and testament to, human ability. However, physical activity does not exist without the contributions of countless non-human agencies, such as equipment and environments, with which the athletes work closely and form relationships. As such, athletes have a unique understanding of non-human agency. In this article I analyse the power of non-human agency in skateboarding through the representations of the professional skateboarder Rodney Mullen and filmmaker Spike Jonze. I examine their lectures, interviews, and films to show the ways in which skateboarders experience, practice, and represent the principles of actor-network theory (ANT). Skateboarders utilise and manipulate the often-unanticipated potential of non-human tools and urban landscapes and translate them into a collaborative result. Skateboarding is a trial-and-error experiment of testing, innovating, and adapting possibilities and limitations set by a network of mediators including people and ‘things’. Mullen and Jonze commonly depict skateboarding as the product of networks rather than independent human action. Their representations reveal how skateboarders perceive and act out their role as humans within networks alongside non-human agencies such as skateboards and obstacles, and which combine to produce skateboarding.
{"title":"Skateboarders’ Representations of Materiality: A Case Study of Rodney Mullen and Spike Jonze","authors":"Bethany Geckle","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0365","url":null,"abstract":"Physical activity is commonly conceived of in terms of its human involvement – as a test of, and testament to, human ability. However, physical activity does not exist without the contributions of countless non-human agencies, such as equipment and environments, with which the athletes work closely and form relationships. As such, athletes have a unique understanding of non-human agency. In this article I analyse the power of non-human agency in skateboarding through the representations of the professional skateboarder Rodney Mullen and filmmaker Spike Jonze. I examine their lectures, interviews, and films to show the ways in which skateboarders experience, practice, and represent the principles of actor-network theory (ANT). Skateboarders utilise and manipulate the often-unanticipated potential of non-human tools and urban landscapes and translate them into a collaborative result. Skateboarding is a trial-and-error experiment of testing, innovating, and adapting possibilities and limitations set by a network of mediators including people and ‘things’. Mullen and Jonze commonly depict skateboarding as the product of networks rather than independent human action. Their representations reveal how skateboarders perceive and act out their role as humans within networks alongside non-human agencies such as skateboards and obstacles, and which combine to produce skateboarding.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42370344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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