Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2190903
Małgorzata Kowalcze
ABSTRACT New materialism posits a non-anthropocentric ontology which gives rise to expanding the definition of the ethical subject and ethical relation. According to Karen Barad, who is one of the most prominent researchers in the field, ethicality exceeds the human domain and enfolds the whole of existence. Her project of ethico-onto-epistemology grounds ethics in ontology, perceiving it not as a product of a ‘social contract’, but one of the properties of matter, a phenomenon emerging from meaningful ‘intra-actions’ between entities. This paper explores the possibility of viewing Barad’s ethical project in the context of conventional understanding of ethics. It also considers the practicality of the philosopher’s theory. Particular attention is given to the question of how the concepts of individual freedom and responsibility, which appear to be some of the fundamental notions of ‘traditional’ ethics, can be reconciled with Barad’s new materialistic notions of intra-activity, mattering and split agency which question the idea of radical individualism.
{"title":"Is matter ethical? Is ethics material? An enquiry into the ethical dimension of Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological project","authors":"Małgorzata Kowalcze","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2023.2190903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2023.2190903","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT New materialism posits a non-anthropocentric ontology which gives rise to expanding the definition of the ethical subject and ethical relation. According to Karen Barad, who is one of the most prominent researchers in the field, ethicality exceeds the human domain and enfolds the whole of existence. Her project of ethico-onto-epistemology grounds ethics in ontology, perceiving it not as a product of a ‘social contract’, but one of the properties of matter, a phenomenon emerging from meaningful ‘intra-actions’ between entities. This paper explores the possibility of viewing Barad’s ethical project in the context of conventional understanding of ethics. It also considers the practicality of the philosopher’s theory. Particular attention is given to the question of how the concepts of individual freedom and responsibility, which appear to be some of the fundamental notions of ‘traditional’ ethics, can be reconciled with Barad’s new materialistic notions of intra-activity, mattering and split agency which question the idea of radical individualism.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"108 1","pages":"14 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74650549","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}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2169180
Rebekah Howes
ABSTRACT This article argues that within Paul Gilroy’s notion of the ‘changing same’ and his more famous articulation of the ‘Black Atlantic’ there is a culture, an education, that can be retrieved by way of recent re-readings of the Hegelian Aufhebung by Gillian Rose and Nigel Tubbs. The piece begins with an exploration of these ideas in Gilroy’s work, noting in particular the ways in which they speak of both complicity in, and moving beyond, eternal repetitions and reproductions of existing power relations and existing notions of identity. This is then taken to Rose’s Hegelian critique of identity and of the postmodern critiques of identity. Finally, these two contributions are reworked as cultures in a logic of education found in Tubbs. This commends reading the changing same and the Black Atlantic as self-educating and re-forming experiences, expressing the deeper significance of current culture wars, including as a lived experience of the tensions constituting the challenge presented by the idea of reparation.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2161590
M. Zwick
ABSTRACT This paper is a systems theoretic examination of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘cross of reality’, a structure that fuses a spatial dyad of inner-outer and a temporal dyad of past-future into a space–time tetrad. This structure is compatible not only with the ‘human-centered’ point of view that Rosenstock-Huessy favours, but also with the ‘world-centered’ point of view inherent in science. The structure, based in his analysis of speech, is applied by him to a wide variety of individual and collective human phenomena, including language, religion, and social critique. To appropriate terminology used by physicists, the cross of reality could be viewed as Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘theory of everything’, a framework for the social sciences and humanities that can be used to model entities, events and processes. The cross diagrams some basic notions of systems theory. Rosenstock-Huessy’s critique of science is partially shared by systems thought, and the goal he posited for sociology of understanding and alleviating human suffering can gain support from systems ideas and methods.
{"title":"Words and diagrams about Rosenstock-Huessy’s cross of reality","authors":"M. Zwick","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2022.2161590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2022.2161590","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper is a systems theoretic examination of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘cross of reality’, a structure that fuses a spatial dyad of inner-outer and a temporal dyad of past-future into a space–time tetrad. This structure is compatible not only with the ‘human-centered’ point of view that Rosenstock-Huessy favours, but also with the ‘world-centered’ point of view inherent in science. The structure, based in his analysis of speech, is applied by him to a wide variety of individual and collective human phenomena, including language, religion, and social critique. To appropriate terminology used by physicists, the cross of reality could be viewed as Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘theory of everything’, a framework for the social sciences and humanities that can be used to model entities, events and processes. The cross diagrams some basic notions of systems theory. Rosenstock-Huessy’s critique of science is partially shared by systems thought, and the goal he posited for sociology of understanding and alleviating human suffering can gain support from systems ideas and methods.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"33 1","pages":"61 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89311933","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.2012705
Galia Yanoshevsky
{"title":"‘I must first apologise’. Advance-fee scam letters as manifestos","authors":"Galia Yanoshevsky","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.2012705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.2012705","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"97 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73941769","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1984971
Francesca Sobande, A. Emejulu
We began to work together in 2016 as two of the co-organisers of the fi rst Black Feminism, Womanism, and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe symposium at the University of Edinburgh in September 2016. Buoyed by the momentum that followed the Black Feminism, Womanism, and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe events in Amsterdam in 2017 and Berlin in 2018, we sought out di ff erent ways to critically consider, uphold, and archive Black feminist work. This culminated in our idea for the Black Feminism Remix Lab. Remixing is an open-ended and non-linear process that always involves both a nod to the past (what came before which is being remixed) and the development of something di ff erent that captures part of the present (the ongoing outcomes of the remixing process). An approach to co- creating a manifesto that is rooted in remixing is a rich way to re fl ect on the relationship between present-day Black feminist e ff orts, past Black feminist work and Black feminist futurities yet to be imagined. In this short article, we critically re fl ect on our desire to work with Black feminist activists across Europe to co- author a manifesto on Black feminist politics.
{"title":"The Black Feminism Remix Lab: on Black feminist joy, ambivalence and futures","authors":"Francesca Sobande, A. Emejulu","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1984971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1984971","url":null,"abstract":"We began to work together in 2016 as two of the co-organisers of the fi rst Black Feminism, Womanism, and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe symposium at the University of Edinburgh in September 2016. Buoyed by the momentum that followed the Black Feminism, Womanism, and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe events in Amsterdam in 2017 and Berlin in 2018, we sought out di ff erent ways to critically consider, uphold, and archive Black feminist work. This culminated in our idea for the Black Feminism Remix Lab. Remixing is an open-ended and non-linear process that always involves both a nod to the past (what came before which is being remixed) and the development of something di ff erent that captures part of the present (the ongoing outcomes of the remixing process). An approach to co- creating a manifesto that is rooted in remixing is a rich way to re fl ect on the relationship between present-day Black feminist e ff orts, past Black feminist work and Black feminist futurities yet to be imagined. In this short article, we critically re fl ect on our desire to work with Black feminist activists across Europe to co- author a manifesto on Black feminist politics.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"163 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75079141","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}
Pub Date : 2021-11-25DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1984970
Nana Ariel
ABSTRACT
What happens when ‘manifesto’, as the emblem of a committed artistic or political action, is used as the title of consumer products such as perfume? What do critics mean when they say that a certain work is ‘a manifesto’ rather than literature? When does this label appear as a superlative, and when, in contrast, is it a form of denunciation? What does J. L. Austin mean when he wishes, in the conclusion of ‘How to Do Things with Words’, that his work is not seen as ‘an individual manifesto’? The variations of the word ‘manifesto’ in popular discourse are one of the things that makes the manifesto, as Luca Somigli asserts, ‘notoriously so difficult to define’. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of ‘language game’ and the rich scholarly literature on the manifesto genre, this essay offers a reflection on ‘manifesto’ as a multilayered, performative concept which enables multiple cultural agents to perform various discursive actions. Examining its contemporary pragmatic and rhetorical meaning in light of its history helps in understanding how the term ‘manifesto’ is actually manifested.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2100133
ABSTRACT Through an account of the forms of embodied knowledge that arise at the intersection of autism and childhood sexual abuse, this personal-theoretical essay develops an epistemology of the unspeakable. I uncover the epistemic implications of a common response to ‘unspeakable’ accounts of injustice, namely the expression of shock and surprise. Furthermore, informed by feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist works, I describe an interplay between social positionality and what I call ‘non/presence’, illustrating the ways in which ubiquitous norms obscure themselves, especially from the sights and minds of the people who are not harmed by them. Finally, I discuss ways of looking critically at and beyond mechanisms of shock and non/presence. I do so through emphasising the power of hermeneutical tools and resources developed by marginalised epistemic communities, and highlighting their usefulness in advancing what would otherwise remain illegible bodily knowledge into a coherent narrative.
{"title":"Epistemology of the unspeakable: articulating and thinking beyond shock and non/presence","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2022.2100133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2022.2100133","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Through an account of the forms of embodied knowledge that arise at the intersection of autism and childhood sexual abuse, this personal-theoretical essay develops an epistemology of the unspeakable. I uncover the epistemic implications of a common response to ‘unspeakable’ accounts of injustice, namely the expression of shock and surprise. Furthermore, informed by feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist works, I describe an interplay between social positionality and what I call ‘non/presence’, illustrating the ways in which ubiquitous norms obscure themselves, especially from the sights and minds of the people who are not harmed by them. Finally, I discuss ways of looking critically at and beyond mechanisms of shock and non/presence. I do so through emphasising the power of hermeneutical tools and resources developed by marginalised epistemic communities, and highlighting their usefulness in advancing what would otherwise remain illegible bodily knowledge into a coherent narrative.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"100 5-6","pages":"422 - 436"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72474386","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}
Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2084130
C. Nirta
ABSTRACT While the production of monsters through political and cultural discourses has never been as dominant as in recent years, the method through which this phenomenon is framed often remains engulfed in comparative essentialism reducing monsters to acts of transgression, with the inevitable result of articulating monstrosity as mere construction of the other. Such othered identity deprives monsters of reality, of their ontology, and confines them in a space of not-being, always defined through what they are not. This article challenges the idea of monstrosity as categorical transgression and uses the narrative of the ‘wrong body’ commonly associated with trans embodiment as a conceptual framework to argue for an ontology of monstrosity.
{"title":"Monstrosity as resistance: rethinking trans embodiment beyond the rhetoric of the wrong body","authors":"C. Nirta","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2022.2084130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2022.2084130","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While the production of monsters through political and cultural discourses has never been as dominant as in recent years, the method through which this phenomenon is framed often remains engulfed in comparative essentialism reducing monsters to acts of transgression, with the inevitable result of articulating monstrosity as mere construction of the other. Such othered identity deprives monsters of reality, of their ontology, and confines them in a space of not-being, always defined through what they are not. This article challenges the idea of monstrosity as categorical transgression and uses the narrative of the ‘wrong body’ commonly associated with trans embodiment as a conceptual framework to argue for an ontology of monstrosity.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"50 1","pages":"339 - 352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83993507","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}
Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2084430
A. Daly
ABSTRACT In ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, Homi K. Bhabha hints at a connection between discourses surrounding perspectival representation and those surrounding colonialism by noting that trompe l’oeil, alongside irony, repetition and mimicry, is a trait with which colonial texts are replete. The inclusion of a textbook ‘mimic man’ in a mid nineteenth-century Australian trompe l’oeil painting suggests that the link between illusionism, mimicry and colonialism mentioned in Bhabha’s oft-cited essay warrants further investigation. Centring on C.H.T. Costantini’s 1857 Trompe l’oeil (Figure 1), this article explores nineteenth-century Australian visual culture in terms of ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, and in doing so demonstrates the versatility of Bhabha’s framework wiithout ignoring the challenges posed by shifting from a linguistic to a visual register. Namely, by moving beyond the literary scope of his essay, the discussion highlights the difficulty of separating the racialised difference at the core of Bhabha’s arguments from the social, historical and geographic reproduction of European differences across the times and spaces of colonial modernity. The discussion also presents colonial trompe l’oeil as a means by which to reflect on the operations of illusionism itself. Specifically, it suggests the extent to which illusionism, not to mention visuality more broadly speaking, may be considered historically, politically and sociologically contingent.
在《论模仿与人》一书中，Homi K. Bhabha暗示了围绕透视表现的话语与围绕殖民主义的话语之间的联系，他指出，错视与讽刺、重复和模仿一起，是殖民文本中充满的特征。在一幅19世纪中期的澳大利亚错视画中出现了教科书中的“模仿人”，这表明Bhabha经常被引用的文章中提到的幻觉、模仿和殖民主义之间的联系值得进一步调查。本文以康斯坦蒂尼(C.H.T. Costantini) 1857年的《错视》(trope l’oeil)为中心(图1)，从“模仿与人”的角度探讨了19世纪澳大利亚的视觉文化，并在此过程中展示了Bhabha框架的多功能性，同时又没有忽视从语言到视觉的转变所带来的挑战。也就是说，通过超越他的文章的文学范围，讨论强调了将巴哈论点核心的种族化差异与跨殖民现代性时代和空间的欧洲差异的社会、历史和地理再生产区分开来的困难。讨论还提出了殖民错视画作为一种手段，反映幻觉主义本身的运作。具体来说，它表明幻觉，更广泛地说，更不用说视觉，可能被认为是历史，政治和社会偶然的程度。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2084129
Xiaoli Yang
ABSTRACT Situated at the intersection of visual art and the context of the Anthropocene, this article offers an eco-philosophical reading of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic regarding the ecological entanglements between humans, viruses, and the environment. Deploying the trope of the spectrality as a ‘heuristic device’, it argues that confronting the spectral aspects of human-virus encounter provides a helpful way to properly understand the ecological implications of the present pandemic. Bringing contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing's Air Memorial (2003) and Jia Zhangke's short film Visit (2020) into conversation with the theory of spectrality, I analyze what I call the ‘spectral aesthetics’ shared by both works. Specifically, it looks at how Xu's artwork elicits the spectral (im)materiality of viruses that is associated with the memory of the SARS epidemic, the materialisation of air, and the way that the spectre of air can keep haunting us across time and space. Then, it delves into the cinematic representation of a spectral atmosphere permeating the minuteness of human contact, arguing that the coronavirus opens up possibilities of perceiving, thinking, and living as spectres, evoking the sense of co-existence that entails the symbiotic relations among humans, viruses, and the environment.
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