Suchergebnisse

Both new and historical materialisms have attracted a reputation for leading to 'bad politics'. Historical materialisms have been accused of reducing too much to material relations and their production, whereas new materialisms have been accused of avoiding politics completely. This article reads the critique directed at materialisms against Hannah Arendt's exceptional distrust of matter. Focusing on her concept of 'worldliness', it grapples with the question 'why do we need an attention to matter in the first place?' The attempted re-reading takes place through a feminist and postcolonial lens that draws out the contributions and failures of Arendt's (anti)materialist framework in its banishing of matter from politics. Arendt's focus on the prevention of dehumanisation further serves as a means to discuss materialism's risk in negotiating the tension between deindividuation and dehumanisation.

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin's conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of 'cosmic terror', places a strong focus on our perception of the 'inhuman'. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one's 'deautomatization' from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar 'deautomatization' strategies – examples include Shklovsky's ' ostranenie', Brecht's ' Verfremdung', Artaud's emotional 'cruelty' and Bataille's 'base materialism' – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our 'habitual picture of the world'. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin's ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- PART I Post-Identity Politics -- Chapter One Interview with Cassils -- Chapter Two From SF -- Chapter Three From Nomadic Theory (2011) -- Chapter Four From Towards a New Class of Being -- Chapter Five A Feminist Genealogy of Posthuman Aesthetics in the Visual Arts (2016) -- Chapter Six Animality and Blackness (2020) -- Chapter Seven Asserting Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace -- Chapter Eight From Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America (2017) -- Chapter Nine Witnessing Animals -- Chapter Ten Video Dog Star -- Chapter Eleven Interview with Garry Marvin -- Chapter Twelve From Plant Thinking -- Chapter Thirteen A Program for Plants (2016) -- Chapter Fourteen No Manifesto (1965, 2008) -- PART II Material Dimensions -- Chapter Fifteen Interview with Nandipha Mntambo -- Chapter Sixteen Locating Me in Order to See You (2007) -- Chapter Seventeen From The Rendered Material of Film Stock (2009) -- Chapter Eighteen Interview with Heide Hatry -- Chapter Nineteen On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History (2008) -- Chapter Twenty Elephants in the Room -- Chapter Twenty-One From Second Skins -- Chapter Twenty-Two Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment (2012) -- Chapter Twenty-Three Super-natural Futures -- Chapter Twenty-Four Rhythms of Relation -- Chapter Twenty-Five Proliferation, Extinction, and an Anthropocene Aesthetic (2017) -- Chapter Twenty-Six Interview with Graham Harman -- Chapter Twenty-Seven From Dark Ecology (2016) -- Chapter Twenty-Eight From What Is the Measure of Nothingness? -- PART III Registering Interconnectedness -- Chapter Twenty-Nine Interview with Kathy High -- Chapter Thirty From Writing Machines (2002) -- Chapter Thirty-One From Unexpress the Expressible (2012) -- Chapter Thirty-Two Introduction to Nocturnal Fabulations -- Chapter Thirty-Three Posthuman Performance (2010) -- Chapter Thirty-Four Critical Relationality -- Chapter Thirty-Five Ecosex ManiFesto (2011) -- Chapter Thirty-Six Interview with Jane Bennett -- Chapter Thirty-Seven Interview with Pauline Oliveros -- Chapter Thirty-Eight Animals, Nostalgia and Zimbawe's Rural Landscape in the Poetry of Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya (2016) -- Chapter Thirty-Nine Waiting for Gaia -- Chapter Forty Interview with Newton Harrison -- Chapter Forty-One Seeds = Future (2013) -- PART IV Emerging Ecologies -- Chapter Forty-Two Interview with Katherine McKittrick: (2021) -- Chapter Forty-Three Interview with Doo-Sung-Yoo -- Chapter Forty-Four Interview with Kelly Jazvac -- Chapter Forty-Five A Questionnaire on Materialisms -- Chapter Forty-Six Art as Remembrance and Trace in Post-Conflict Latin America (2016) -- Chapter Forty-Seven Interview With Manuela Rossini -- Chapter Forty-Eight African Afro-futurism -- Chapter Forty-Nine Whose Anthropocene? A Response (2016) -- Chapter Fifty Unruly Edges -- Chapter Fifty-One The Rise of Cheap Nature (2016) -- Chapter Fifty-Two From Forensic Architecture -- Chapter Fifty-Three Letters to Dear Climate (2017) -- Coda -- LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX