Plastic Bodies - new book from OHP by Tom Sparrow

Open Humanities Press is delighted to announce the latest book in Graham Harman and Bruno Latour's New Metaphysics series: Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology by Tom Sparrow (foreword by Catherine Malabou).

Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism.

 

The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to 'rehabilitate' the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the 'lived' body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body’s power to act and exist.

 

The pdf and online versions of the book are of course available for free:

 

http://openhumanitiespress.org/plastic-bodies.html

Pirate Capitalism

Abstract for my talk at Besides the Screen 2015: Piracy in Theory and Practice, AHRC Network event, Coventry University, April 9-10, 2015.

 

In The Enemy of All, an account of the shifting place of piracy in the history of legal and political thought, Daniel Heller-Roazen shows that to be counted within what the Roman philosopher Cicero terms the ‘immense fellowship of the human species’, one is required to ‘belong to a community tied, like the Roman polity, to clearly delimited territory’. In other words, one needs to live precisely ‘a sedentary life on land’. If one does not do this, if one lives a more fluid life – say, at sea – then one is at risk of being considered a pirate, this being one name for those whom we cannot necessarily treat as proper political adversaries. ‘For a pirate is not included in the number of lawful enemies’, Cicero declares, ‘but is the common enemy of all’. In fact, according to the theory of monstrosity of the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon, as ‘the common enemy of human society’ pirates are deserving of extermination.  Of course, today, it is multinational corporations that do not belong to a community tied to a clearly delimited territory and that remain stateless. Moreover, some of them (with a little help from banks in Switzerland), have proceeded to use their statelessness to avoid paying taxes in the UK – and have been dubbed ‘pirate capitalists’ because of it.

 

In this talk for Besides the Screen 2015: Piracy in Theory and Practice, I will show some of the ‘practical’ screen-based ‘pirate’ projects I am involved with, projects that are indeed often fluid and liquid in nature. I will also explain some of the ‘theory’ behind these projects: why a number of activist scholar collaborators, myself included, are willing to risk being considered monstrous as a result of acting something like ‘pirate philosophers’ in a context where it is the multinational corporations who now appear to be ‘the common enemy of all’.  

New Culture Machine Live interview with media theorist Federica Frabetti

New Culture Machine Live Interview with media theorist Federica Frabetti conducted by Janneke Adema. You can find it here:

 

http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com/e/software-theory-federica-frabetti/

The interview focuses on Frabetti's recently published monograph Software Theory: A Cultural and Philosophical Study. Topics of conversation include the materiality of software, code and writing, deconstructive readings of technology, the originary technicity of the (post)human, and the politics and ethics of software. This interview was conducted on February 23rd 2015 at Oxford Brookes University. 

 

Culture Machine Live is a series of podcasts looking at a range of issues including the digital humanities, Internet politics, transparency, open access, cultural theory and the future of cultural studies and philosophy. Interviewees and speakers include Johanna Drucker, Chantal Mouffe, Geert Lovink, Alan Liu, Ted Striphas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Visit http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com 

 

This series is curated by Janneke Adema, Clare Birchall, Gary Hall & Pete Woodbridge. 

For more information about the online, open access journal Culture Machine, visit www.culturemachine.net

Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities: Third Disrupting the Humanities seminar

The Centre for Disruptive Media presents: Disrupting the Humanities

 

A series of 3 half-day seminars looking at research and scholarship in a 'posthumanities' context, organised by the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University. Disrupting the Humanities will both engage critically with the humanist legacy of the humanities, and creatively explore alternative and affirmative possible futures for the humanities.

 

http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/

 

The third seminar will take place on Monday March 9th at Coventry University (ET130) from 5:00-7:30pm

 

Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities

Speakers:

 

Monika Bakke (Adam Mickiewicz University)

Lesley Gourlay (Institute of Education, UCL)

Niamh Moore (University of Edinburgh)

Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University)

 

The event is free but registration is recommended to ensure a place http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/

 

Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities

This seminar will focus on some of the radical methodologies that are questioning the established disciplinary forms, methods and practices of the humanities. It will explore how these emergent methodologies are finding ways of moving beyond the humanist emphasis in the humanities on the individualized creative human author, originality, intellectual property, the fixed and finished object, writing and the book.

 

In doing so this seminar will provide a space for thinking further about the distributed, heterogeneous assemblage of humans, nonhumans, objects and non-anthropomorphic elements that are collectively involved in the creation, circulation and performance of 'humanities' research and scholarship. To provide just one example, in the case of an ink on paper and card book, this would take in most obviously its publishers, editors, peer-reviewers, designers, copyeditors, proofreaders, printers, publicists, marketers, distributors, retailers, purchasers and readers. But it would also embrace all the other 'multiple connections and lines of interaction that necessarily connect the text to its many "outsides"' (Rosi Braidotti): those concerning the labour involved (e.g. that of the agency workers, packers and so-called 'ambassadors' in Amazon's warehouses), the financial investments made, the shipping and container costs, the environmental impact, the resources used, the plants, dyes, oils, petroleum distillates, salts, compounds, pigments and so on.

 

In the dynamic 'meshwork' (Tim Ingold) of 'intra-actions' (Karen Barad) between the human, the animal, the environment and technology that constitutes the University in the 21st century (including all the associated software, code, data and algorithms, their physical supports and material substrates: wires, chips, circuits, disks, drives, networks, airwaves, electrical charges etc.), who or what is it exactly that produces knowledge and that can know? What does the use of networked digital media, devices and platforms mean for our methods and the way we carry out research? How do they constitute and mediate its means of production and communication? And if knowledge and research are the result of complex processes involving both human and non-human objects and actants, what does this mean for politics and ethics? In short, how can we perform knowledge-making practices differently, to the point where we actually begin to take on (rather than take for granted, repress or ignore) the implications of the posthuman for how we live, work and act as academics and researchers? What can the humanities become in all these entangled constellations?

 

Monday March 9th

Coventry University

Jordan Well

Ellen Terry Building, Room 130 (ET130)

CV1 5RW Coventry

United Kingdom

 

http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/

How to Produce a Critique of ‘Open’ in 3 Easy Steps

The Automatic Academic Article and Book Generator™

 

No. 16. How to Produce a Critique of ‘Open’ in 3 Easy Steps 

Step 1)  Set up something you are calling ‘open’ as a straw man by projecting a narrow and weak understanding of openness onto it.

Step 2) Attack this understanding of ‘open’.*

  

Step 3) Present your own version of ‘open’ as an alternative. This allows you to be the hero of your own narrative by in effect saving ‘open’ from itself.  

 

No need to worry about your version of open having already been explored in a more nuanced and rigorous fashion within the movements for open access, open education, open knowledge and so forth. The beauty of this simple, easy to replicate 3-step process is that, by setting up open as a straw man and defining it in a way that serves your own interests, you avoid having to pay attention to any of this.  

References available on request. 

* Important: if your critique involves making a careful reading of thinkers from the history of openness, you absolutely must, must, must remember not to show the same kind of ethical responsibility and hospitality toward contemporary thinkers of what you are calling ‘open’.