Questions Flashcards
thermal exciter
michel serres in ‘the parasite’, ordering always implies violence, by excluding the inessential one misses the essential - the ordering act obscures.
A thermal exciter, that which catalyses the system to a new equilibrium state
chapter 1 Matter summary
challenges Bergson’s idea of comic as mechanic / rigid encrusted the living and as in opposition with élan vital, shows matter to be lively and have agency
the smaller particles like dusts, smoke powders can have huge effect
constant transgressions of bodily boundaries through tears, snot, sneezing show all bodies to be porous and linked int larger assemblages, dependent on the world.
make visible invisible thresholds of etiquette and hierarchies of matter - like Douglas writes Matter shows systems.
slapstick films chip away at the boundaries between body and world-
practice theory relation chapter 1
overarching question about decentering of human agency relates to the ideas that informed the cloud, lightning or the asteroids. as does the question of how this material featuring comediennes and europeans might regain new currency in other works
question of outlines and where a body starts or ends is really at the heart of the project - works demonstrate impossibility of defining outlines (cloud, electricity, slightly different conversation rocks in space).
making visible of invisible or unconscious boundaries by shifting the use or context in etiquette or language, by confounding a paper steamer for spaghetti. the same abbreviations I address with the cloud.
speculative realism
Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy
defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy (or what it terms “correlationism”
Quentin Meillasoux, Graham Harman, Levi Brant, Timothy Morton, (Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant)
Speculative realism where in thesis
I refer to Speculative Realism in the introduction p. 11 and bibliography, naming Harman (collection : speculative Rurn) and Meillasoux (After Finitude, 2008) and try to show it as part of a wider development of thought that is also addressed by Latour for example.
I am less interested in critique of Kant and correlationtism and prying apart their exact different stances (Speculative Materialism of Meillasoux vs OOO of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant)
a) opening boys club and are aggressive in their dismissal and omissions of female and historic voices. Including some voices interested in materiality like Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett and to some degree Mary Douglas.
Rosi Braidotti on Speculative realists
here are two or three things that I don’t fully get about the speculative realists. First of all, the treatment of objects as self-organizing entities is not in itself new. Media and science fiction scholars – like Jussi Parikka now, or Donna Haraway before him – have been theorizing objects along these lines for years.
Similarly, the emphasis on matter, and the continuity between matter and mind, and between human bodies and the world in which they live, is not new either. It has always been at the core of Spinozist, Deleuzian and materialist feminist studies, including those of Simone de Beauvoir, Haraway and my own. I am surprised, sometimes even shocked, that their discussions and bibliographies make little mention of these debates. How can you wipe out the whole of Deleuzian studies in one footnote?
Bryant makes these throwaway comments: ‘Oh yeah, 1970s feminism.’ Their mums, right? 1970s feminism: What is that?
Though you and many of the speculative realists seem to have similar concerns when it comes to the relationship between subject and object, they appear to abandon the human subject altogether while you wish to re-theorize it.
For me, the human or posthuman subject is still very important, if only because we experience everything from a position that is human. Of course, as we speak, scientists working in robotics are cloning the scent of dogs, or the radars and sonars of other species like spiders and bats. So, within a posthuman reality, multiple standpoints can be taken. But you cannot step outside the slab of matter that you inhabit. The limits of your skin – porous, highly intelligent skin that processes information as we go – are the limits of your perception. Complex, multiple – but not infinite.
I agree with the distinction Katherine Hayles makes between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. You can be a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric thinker. In fact, in advanced capitalism, in which the human species is but one of the marketable species, we are all already post-anthropocentric. But I don’t think we can leap out of our anthropomorphism by will. We can’t. We always imagine from our own bodies – and why should we, considering that we still live on a planet populated by humanoids who think of themselves as humans, in different ways, with different points of reference? Our very embodiment is a limit, as well as a threshold; our flesh is framed by the morphology of the human body, it is also always already sexed and hence differentiated.
The so-called speculative realists tend to be paradoxically dis-embedded and dis-embodied: they are really speaking from nowhere, though they try to hide it. They are unable to account for where they are speaking from. To me, however important it is that we concern ourselves with a-subjective or non-human matter, the politics of locations of the subject is something we cannot let go. What we should be speaking about are extended minds, distributed cognition, experiments with forms of affirmative relational ethics that take these parameters into account.
How are films prequels of discourses around OOO?
They are prequels in how they focus and zoom in on Objects as powerful - emphasise that humans can operate like objects too and their interest in amplifying the noise of objects.
It is really important though to align myself here with Rosi Braidotti and Katherine Hayles whom I cite in the introduction (p. 13) a decentering of the human cannot occur from a disembodied, nongendered perspective. (attack on OOOs conception of correlationism and feminist materialism that I would rather allign this project with).
OOO & artwork
An artwork is, of course, not ‘simply’ a thing, since unlike a mountain range or solar radiation, it is part of reality that is of human cognition’s own making – its own production, its own reshaping of the material world. Artworks are the traces of people reshaping the world in the process of questioning it, and themselves. (JJ Charlesworth)
Art, design, architecture, urbanism, society, economy, ecosphere – all aspects of what human beings can choose to reshape, through conscious action. (For me ooo is only one strategy in this thesis that stands next to other strategies like an archival excavation of female achievement).
Speculative realism criticism
the Anthropocene has gained currency as a pseudo-scientific version of the environmental dogma that insists humans are messing up the planet up because they reshape matter already too much.
Meanwhile, speculative realism gains popularity by giving philosophical credence to that cultural distaste for ‘human mediation’. What speculative realism thinks of as its novel philosophical insights – that humans are no exception to things, that there should be no distinction between human and nonhuman ‘actants’, and that the subject–object hierarchy in philosophy should be abolished – become the philosophical cheerleaders for a contemporary culture that denounces the idea that human beings can – even should – actively reshape the world in their own interests.
diegetic
In film, diegesis refers to the story world, and the events that occur within it. … A non-diegetic insert is a film technique that combines a shot or a series of shots cut into a sequence, showing objects represented as being outside the space of the narrative.
assemblage
gathering, conglomeration of disparate objects
surface realism melodrama / naturalism (slapstick)
While in realism, faithful representation of reality including the details of nature is important, in Naturalism, nature itself is a force, generally a powerful, indifferent mechanism
