scholarly journals NARRATIVE FUTURING

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-55
Author(s):  
Rachel Horst
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
The Future ◽  
Creative Inquiry ◽  
Post Humanism

In this paper I explore the scholarly potential of a narrative futuring methodology for writing-as-becoming within the context of the future imaginary. Through an experimental bricolage of future fiction, theoretical exploration, and personal essay, I attempt to perform a methodology that troubles temporal boundaries and allows me to write my way into the new. I situate this exploratory work within a rich heteroglossia of creative futures and speculative writing that exists both in and outside the academy and informs my narrative futuring praxis. New materialism and post humanism provide the onto-ethico-epistem-ologies for this creative inquiry in which I attempt to entangle myself with rational possibility, absurd potentiality, and poetic virtuality. The future narrative here is neither predictive nor prophetic, but rather is taken up as a mechanism for doing futures-oriented theory; this is a writing-as-reaching into thick assemblages of the not-yet and storying the productive partiality of narrative (non)representation.

scholarly journals Przestrogi dla utopistów. Wizje optimum dóbr w historii idei w książce Andrzeja Waśkiewicza

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Sokół
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Orders

The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.

scholarly journals What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara Stone
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post Humanism

What can post-humanism teach us about game design? This paper questions the line drawn between what species and matter can play and what cannot play. Combining works by scholars of feminist post-humanism, new materialism, and game studies, primarily Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and T.L. Taylor, it proposes that play is a form of communication not only between animals and humans but also between plants and cyborgs, insects and atoms. Beginning by interrogating the borders of the human that have been built on ableist and racist discourses, this paper moves towards considering the human as interspecies and outlines that we must reassess the ways in which a multiplicity of species experience the intra-action that constitutes “play.” With a brief look into the history of defining play in both game studies and animal studies and their small crossover, play is reconfigured into an outlook or an approach rather than a set of rules. It is a drive that all species and matter experience, including insects, bacteria, and metal. This moves us beyond considering solely the materiality of our bodies at play by reconsidering the objects of play as our co-players, as matter with agential force. I argue that we need to reconsider the videogame player as an interspecies being, an assemblage of human and non-human bodies. The de-anthropocentricization of the popular notions of player agency allows for a multiplicity of reactions not created in the linear cause and effect course, the belief in ultimate player control within procedural systems, which dominates game studies. This paper concludes by submitting possibilities of what considering the non-human through a feminist and anti-ableist lens can offer game designers, players, and critics, such as considering the material platform’s impact on play, reforming the individualistic agency of players, and designing for the Other(s).

Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms, New Materialism, and Colonialism

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Ravenscroft
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Ethical Question ◽  
Australian Context ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Western Concept ◽  
Post Humanism

The essay looks at the challenges Australian Indigenous materialisms make to the Western concept of human and its relation to the inhuman, and it does this through reading the novels of Waanyi writer, critic, and activist Alexis Wright. In the Australian context, a highly productive knot is being tied between post-humanism and postcolonialism, such that the binary of “culture” and “nature” is understood in relation to another binary couple that sits snugly within “culture” and “nature,” and that is “colonizer” and “native.” The place of Indigenous-signed literary texts in critiques of Western materialisms cannot be underestimated. It is through the arts that most encounters between Indigenous and settler Australians take place. How non-Indigenous readers might approach these literary texts is a key ethical question with implications for new materialist and post-humanist projects.

scholarly journals The AI Creation Meme: A Case Study of the New Visibility of Religion in Artificial Intelligence Discourse

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Singler
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Human Hand ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
The Future ◽  
Secular Age ◽  
Post Humanism

Through a consideration of examples of the AI Creation Meme, a remix of Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo featuring a human hand and a machine hand nearly touching, fingertip to fingertip, this article will tackle the religious continuities and resonances that still emerge in AI discourse in an allegedly ‘secular age’. The AI Creation Meme, as a highly visible cultural artefact appearing in a variety of forms and locations, will be analyzed and discussed for its religious, apocalyptic, and post-humanist narratives, along with reference to earlier work on the New Visibility of Religion—specifically, Alexander Darius Ornella’s consideration of the New Visibility of Religion and religious imagery of the 2006 film, Children of Men. Work that outlines the aspects of critical post-humanism, speculative post-humanism, and transhumanism in relation to the contemporary post-secular age will also be addressed to expand on the implicit apocalyptic messages of the AI Creation Meme. Such a consideration of repeating and remixed imagery will add to the scholarly conversation around AI narratives and the entanglements of religion and technology in our imaginaries of the future.

scholarly journals “The Flesh of The Perceptible”: The New Materialism ofLeviathan

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-447
Author(s):  
Max Bowens
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Sensory Ethnography ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Post Humanism

This article seeks to entangle two current philosophic praxes: New Materialism, and Sensory Ethnography. Jane Bennett has become one of New Materialism's most prominent proponents since the release of her now-seminal text, Vibrant Matter in 2010. Due to the varied ground upon which New Materialism stands (often conflated with object-oriented ontology, post-humanism, and other general turns within nonhumanism), Bennett's work will be looked at idiosyncratically, then pushed into the realm of the cinematic via an analysis of the documentary, Leviathan. Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, this film was among the first exemplary works to emerge from the Sensory Ethnography Lab, based at Harvard University. In striving for a revitalization of ethnographic film practices, the Lab aligns itself with similarly non-anthropocentric, and non-discursive, aspects of experience to the New Materialism of Jane Bennett. By placing these two contemporary camps into conversation, this article intends to reposition them both: New Materialism as a vehicle for the Sensory Ethnographic, and the SEL as an exhibition of the kind of world Bennett's philosophy envisages. The article concludes with an assessment of the political and eco-political critiques and ramifications surrounding these works.

The Future Life of Trauma

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Event ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Responsibility ◽  
British India ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Future ◽  
Domains Of Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Psychic Event

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses. It unfolds a new materialism that asserts the coincidence between the symbolic and empirical domains of life. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as it is presented in the Freudian metapsychology, Future Life thinks anew the relation between temporality and the traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, understood as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the determining character of the structure of repetition. It comprises two major sections. The first elucidates how the case of the psychoanalytic concept of trauma discloses the self-transformative tendency of life as the movement immanent to the real. Through a focus on the role of borders in the history of the 1947 Partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in post-genocide Rwanda, the second brings to light the implications of trauma as a material event in pressing contemporary issues of nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, Future Life presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity. The epilogue pushes toward a new approach to ethical and political responsibility that breaks the deconstructive loops perpetuated by the idea of promise. The result is the formation of a form of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its innate power to transform itself.

scholarly journals The Concept of Post-humanism and Its Reflections on Tourism Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruhet Genç
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Social Impacts ◽  
Tourism Sector ◽  
Tourism Education ◽  
The Future ◽  
Economic And Social Impacts ◽  
Post Humanism

The aim of this manuscript is to investigate the influence the impacts of post-humanism on tourism education. The paper will start with a body of literature on post-humanism based on the previous studies and debates in the academia. The methodology will be literature review and critical evaluation of the findings. As a conclusion, the study suggests that the Post-humanist reflection in tourism education will contribute positively to the tourism sector, specifically regarding to sustainability issues. The manuscript will also suggest a model in order to provide a quantitative analysis for the post-humanism, including the technological advancements and environmental regeneration variables, along with possible economic and social impacts. In short, establishment of a tourism education that considerably pays attention to the benefits of post-humanism will be essential for functionality and effectiveness of tourism practice in the future.

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