What If Culture Was Nature All Along? (new Materialisms)
by Vicki Kirby /
2017 / English / PDF, EPUB
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New materialisms argue for a more science friendly humanities,
ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the
importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention
- climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to
leverage their difference against language and the discursive.
Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even
eschew, those of epistemology.
New materialisms argue for a more science friendly humanities,
ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the
importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention
- climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to
leverage their difference against language and the discursive.
Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even
eschew, those of epistemology.
While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical
shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is to re-navigate what
constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a
rewriting of the Derridean axiom, "there is no outside text" as
"there is no outside nature." What if nature has always been
literate, numerate, social? And what happens to "the human" if its
exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and
ecological implication?
While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical
shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is to re-navigate what
constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a
rewriting of the Derridean axiom, "there is no outside text" as
"there is no outside nature." What if nature has always been
literate, numerate, social? And what happens to "the human" if its
exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and
ecological implication?