Tuesday 18 June 2013
POST-MATERIAL
Well, we survived the cold and the (intellectual) challenges at the round table discussion to put forward some ideas on our encounters with New Materialism. It would be great to see some of these responses make their way onto the blog really soon (hint hint). The TIR will be putting up a summary/list very shortly, so keep watching this space.
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I was going to add one more thing to my last comment and realized I had posted way down in the archives, so I am reposting that one below.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to put in one more pitch for the science philosopher Andrew Pickering and his book The Mangle of Practice. I tried to bring him to New York, but wasn't able to make it happen. He's been below the radar, but now there is much more attention being paid to his work. Here's an interview with him on the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/how-to-think-about-science-part-1---24-listen/
The Ian Hacking bit ain't bad either. cheers
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Thanks for letting me sit in on Saturday's discussion. I am glad to see the conversation around new materialism has legs here as well. I will try to stay abreast of your efforts as I disperse myself around the globe and back to NY in preparation for my project with CAST/Hobart in Summer 2014/15.
Here are a couple fun/relevant/not relevant/etc things that crossed my mind.
In the states at least, the person's name I hear most when linking OOO with new media/technology is Ian Bogost. I've read some of his blog, commentary on Harman, Heidegger, etc., but it's not really my specific area of interest. His book is called Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing. Interestingly, Amazon defines it with the tag "posthumanities" "Providing a new approach for understanding the experience of things as things, Bogost also calls on philosophers to rethink their craft. Drawing on his own experiences as a videogame designer, Bogost encourages professional thinkers to become makers as well, engineers who construct things as much as they think and write about them." *this relates to Jane Bennett's interest in art as a way of material thinking
The journal Collapse really takes new materialism/spec realism/OOO down the worm hole, see especially the food issue: http://www.urbanomic.com/publications.php
The Canadian poet I mentioned was Lisa Robertson. Her most well-known project, The Weather, is a book length poem that centers around shipping forecasts announced on BBC radio. I've read many of her books but was especially taken with the first section of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, which I think of as a model for a poetics that can respond to art through a negotiation of surface and affect rather than through information or the reduction of the artwork to the knowable, a meaning.
And in thinking about my own project today, I was re-reading curator Anthony Huberman's essay, "I (not love) information," which relates to the under-emphasized characteristics of fluxus like intimacy, artist-to-artist models of distribution, refusal of collapse between poetics and politics etc. and to give some context to the importance of materials-based inquiry: http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.16/i.not.love.information
Ok, that's my brain dump for today...Ciao and till next time. Erin
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DeleteThank-you Erin, I’ll treat my brain as a veggie patch and your brain dump as horse manure. I will be sure to have a look at those articles you mentioned, especially the book, Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost. That stuff sounds like it might elucidate further certain intuitive ideas and contextual/conceptual arenas that interest me in relation to easel based painting (as an activity that results in creating objects) and its position or anti-position in relation to a hierarchy of closed forms. Sometimes I think my works might be an attempt to explain some abstract qualities of painting (the sublime, pathos, fatalism) as they're conceived in the western tradition, by transcribing my explanation or illustration of them through the act of painting itself. Erin it was an added dynamic (fertiliser pun not intended) with your presence at the discussion as I'm sure the other participants would agree. Along with all the other thoughts and formulations that have recently been stimulated in my mushy stuff I am sailing on a sea of object-orientated ontology or maybe just object ontology.
DeleteOO ∞
After reading the New Materialism overview that Deb (thank-you Deb) recommended: Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin's New materialism: interviews and cartographies (2012), available through Open Humanities Press/ MPublishing, Ann Arbor. http://openhumanitiespress.org/new-materialism.html; I have now gone back to the book I was reading prior, The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard's work is quite contrary to the New-Materialist things I've been watching and reading. He uses the word, "man" a lot, which is a concern. Though there are insights (at least intellectual posturing) regarding certain quirks and idiosyncrasies generated from his projections onto and into our relationship with technology and useful/non-useful objects - underlined by his early post-modern, existentialist dissertations, contained in the book so far, that will interest me enough to finish it. Then I’ll eagerly get the worms into four new books I’ve ordered, which seem to be significant texts regarding New-Materialist discourse. Coming my way are:
ReplyDeleteVibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
Bennett, Jane; Paperback
Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
Morton, Timothy; Paperback
Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions)
Massumi, Brian; Paperback
Difference and Repetition
Deleuze, Gilles; Paperback
I too will fossick and postulate further and be sure to keep the hemlock close at hand!
Josh.
Thanks Erin and Josh for the terrific posts, full of stuff to follow up and ponder. My head is still done in, having spent the last week going back over all the notes on the day and attempting to make sense of it ... probably a silly move! But yes, there will be notes shortly for all participants)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reference to Bogost, whose blog I dip into (once a Heideggerian ...etc) and will now follow up on the book. Also Lisa Robertson ... the affect/architecture thing sounds great.And pleased to see Brian Massumi rising above the hoardes again -- spent a lot of "Massumi time" in the 1990s but probably will find it a completely different reading now.
Finally, I note the "intuition" word keeps popping up: I feel it's a big negotiation if NM is taken to some of its further limits and am thinking about it quite a bit: will post when I get further down that path!
Thanks, Deb and Josh. I found this clip of Lisa Robertson reading her book the weather while searching for something else, although I have to say that she is a poet I prefer on the page rather than spoken, although usually, for me, it is the other way around.
ReplyDelete******
https://jacket2.org/content/poem-talk
In October of 2000, Lisa Robertson presented along with Steve McCaffrey at the seventeenth episode of PhillyTalks. She read from a then-new work, The Weather, just a few months before the book’s publication by New Star in Vancouver (2001). Here are the segments from that 2000 reading: ”Monday” (2:10): MP3; “Tuesday” (7:06): MP3; “Wednesday” (2:14): MP3; “Thursday” (6:38): MP3; “Friday” (9:16): MP3; “Saturday” (4:02): MP3. The book-length project, organized as such by days of a/the/every week, was in part stimulated by the poet-researcher’s experience during a six-month Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge University: as a non-local, she found herself listening to late-night weather and shipping reports on the British radio, discerning there and elsewhere a specifically localized language that seemed abstract and was yet radically precise.