The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics
... Here, we work with the idea of enchantment: "the experience of being caught up and carried away", where our attention is captured, we are "charmed and disturbed", and our "background sense of order has flown out the door" [12]. Contemporary AI algorithms, especially deep learning, have a particular power to enchant. ...
... Designing and communicating AI things as supernatural-enchanted-products, in fact, shapes the social perceptions of these systems, taking them out of the realm of mere technical tools to be regarded as socially capable agents [113] and/or socially valuable applications [18]. Building on Bennett's development of enchantment [12], Campolo and Crawford [18] define this phenomenon as enchanted determinism: "a discourse that presents AI, and deep learning techniques especially, as magical, thus outside the scope of present scientific knowledge, yet also deterministic, in the sense that AI algorithms can nonetheless detect patterns that give unprecedented access to people's identities, emotions, and social character". Working in this magical domain allows designers to focus on mastery of the illusions that they create [113] while minimizing concern for the consequences they cause [18,36]. ...
... Different views do exist on what an object with the power to enchant is and does. Bennet [12] looks at enchantment more as a state in perception rather than as a quality of objects. Conversely, Rose [104] believes that an enchanted object is something that starts as an everyday object that gains 'magical powers' by the addition of technology, which makes the user both comfortable and captivating. ...
This paper examines the role that enchantment plays in the design of AI things by constructing a taxonomy of design approaches that increase or decrease the perception of magic and enchantment. We start from the design discourse surrounding recent developments in AI technologies, highlighting specific interaction qualities such as algorithmic uncertainties and errors and articulating relations to the rhetoric of magic and supernatural thinking. Through analyzing and reflecting upon 52 students’ design projects from two editions of a Masters course in design and AI, we identify seven design principles and unpack the effects of each in terms of enchantment and disenchantment. We conclude by articulating ways in which this taxonomy can be approached and appropriated by design/HCI practitioners, especially to support exploration and reflexivity.
... n Jane Bennett's (2001) work, The Enchantment of Modern Life, she explains the disenchantment of modern living "as a place of dearth and alienation (when compared to the golden age of community and cosmological coherency)" (p. 3). ...
... My urge to feel more alive in the city links me back to Bennett's (2001) conceptualization of living an enchanted life: "to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday" (p. 4). ...
... I wonder how might the two-disenchantment and enchantment co-exist in the city space? Bennett (2001) In what follows, I will share my journey as I take on the challenge of resisting disenchantment through nurturing a practice of walking the city. This practice has shaped my understanding that a curriculum aimed at a modern ecological ethic will require a recognition and loving attachment to the places we live with. ...
In this paper, the author explores how the practice of walking the city may open curricular spaces to nurture a deep engagement and feelings of enchantment with the world. By disrupting the taken-for-granted sensibilities of our everyday urban lives and being open to the unexpected voices, bodies and more-than-human beings who co-exist in urban spaces, the author contends that when we slow down and become attuned to our surroundings, possibilities of transformation can emerge. In this interdisciplinary unfolding, the author first shares how walking allows us to experience time and space to accentuate our relations, engagements, and being in the world. Through narrative and photography, the author then reflects on encounters from recent walks through the city of Calgary, addressing notions of self-reflexivity, play and experience. Through these walking encounters, this paper reflects on considerations for embodying a curriculum to promote a modern ecological ethic.
... For the polymath Walter Benjamin, film photography was the transformational pivot of the modern era (Berger 1972;Hanssen 2005)-and it is clear that from the early days of the study of the anthropology of art there was an interest in the implications of an image travelling between different forms of expression (e.g. Heidegger 1950;Arendt 1968;Adorno 1970;Taussig 1993 When discussing the implications of commodification and commercial advertising in a wider sense, Peter Pels (2010) usefully employs a concept similar to Bennett's (2001) notion of the 'enchanted materialism of modern life'-that is, the idea that capitalism employs 'magic' to construct and capture its markets (see also Hampson 2013, 160;Hampson and Weaver 2021). Also, and as suggested above, we know that objects with agency 'do things' to and for humans (Gosden 2005). ...
Both on and off the rocks, it is clear that many pictographs and petroglyphs are powerful cultural and social ‘tools’ as well as sacred beings. Indeed, in certain regions of many countries, cultural and socio-political identity is shaped, manipulated, and presented through rock paintings and engravings. In this chapter, we focus on re-contextualised and appropriated Indigenous heritage and rock art motifs, in commercial settings, in sports team mascots, and as integral components of political and national symbols—there are illuminating similarities (as well as differences) that span the globe. Case studies include instances where descendants of the original artists have re-imagined and adapted the meanings and uses of motifs, and also where non-Indigenous/non-descendant groups have appropriated rock art imagery—often without consultation with or permission from Traditional Owners and heritage managers. We offer results from fieldwork and study in North America, northern Australia, and southern Africa.
... Wszechobecna racjonalizacja rzeczywistości, "współczesna historia odczarowania" świata, choć niewątpliwie pozwoliła gatunkowi ludzkiemu wiele osiągnąć w sensie technologicznym, to jednak zarazem poniekąd zdeprecjonowała ważność nieintelektualnych aspektów ludzkiego odczuwania świata. A jednak, jak stwierdza Bennett, "różne cuda nadal żyją wśród nas […], ani my, ani świat nie jesteśmy odczarowani" 36 . Skądinąd wiara w to, co nieracjonalne bądź niezrozumiałe, jak również zakładanie istnienia czegoś bez dowodu na jego istnienie nie są wyróżnikami postawy religijnej. ...
The article discusses the novel The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen’s applying elements of selected posthumanist theories, mainly object-oriented ontology (G. Harman, T. Morton) and new materialism (J. Bennett). It considers the assumption that in the novel, the ontological status of human beings as well as material objects is fluid, as both play the role of a prop and the entity manipulating the prop. The author focuses on the main character’s religious cognitive perspective and her relations with her (im)material surroundings. An attempt is made to point out certain similarities between the religious worldview and the posthumanist approach. To this end, the author discusses several issues related to the dualistic categories of material vs. immaterial, rational vs. irrational, as well as human vs. non-human.
... My concern regarding the vocabulary of non-human labor stems from an attention to "the affective conditions for social critique" (Butler 2009): an attention to the affects carried or inhibited by different ways of describing our lived worlds, especially to the ways these affects shape our collective responsibilities and political responsiveness to certain situations and events. The depiction of more-than-human beings as mere agents put to work in global capitalist economies might foster modernity's mortifying "disenchantment tale" (Bennett 2001), which describes non-human nature in mechanistic ways. In this case, it seems to me that seeing other earthlings as caregivers might nurture a sense of common vulnerability, interdependency, gratitude, and reciprocity in a way that the concept of labor cannot. ...
While the ethics of care has considered the possibility that caring occurs for the environment, it often remains silent about the caregiving that humans receive from the environment. This essay suggests that ecological justice requires humans to consider themselves not only as ecological caregivers, but also as care receivers from more-than-human earth dwellers. The argument is built by first accounting for the diverse forms of care that humans receive from other-than-humans. The focus then turns to eco-feminist and eco-Marxist thought to denaturalize this care, highlighting how capitalist economies put other-than-humans to work and appropriate their efforts to maintain the world. The fact that they cannot demand a salary and that the commodification of life increases its depletion leads to an examination of how the conceptual recognition of more-than-human care can be translated politically. The article sketches how the political tensions at work in practices and conceptions of care outlined by feminist and indigenous thought could allow to engage more critically with environmental issues, notably by blending environmental humanities’ emphasis on affective dispositions and attachments towards other-than-humans, with materialist ambitions to highlight exploitation and invisible labor.
... The solitary flute in the wood, the tune played, did not drown out the other sounds of the place; it formed an ensemble with the various voices of the larger-than-human world. There is an intimate relation between songs and enchantment, and as the philosopher Jane Bennett (2001) notes, the etymology of 'enchantment' is to en-chante, that is in French chante. ...
... It is practical, warm, and beautiful, and like all artefacts, it holds multiple stories. It is, indeed, enchanted (Bennett, 2001). Diffractive memories and stories have emerged from my engagement with the tartan fabric. ...
This piece demonstrates a creative practice that invites educators from diverse backgrounds to consider the memories, stories, and cultural histories alive within them. How we carry and know our own stories influences how we can critically and reflexively enact or challenge policies of cultural responsivity in education. Given that the political landscapes in education get remade over and over, the threads of our personal histories remain vital to remember, so they, too, do not move into the realm of forgetting. To connect, in an ongoing way, to our unique heritages and stories is to challenge current policy proposals that intend to privatise historical and cultural education, risking fragmentation and dissociation. This piece uses a diffractive storytelling approach through critical autoethnography to consider how material artefacts are imbued with histories and stories. This article traces my memories as a Pākehā (immigrant of European origin) educator in Aotearoa, New Zealand, from Scotland, through the artefact of a tartan quilt. I demonstrate how educators may use creative practices to remember and trace the threads of their stories through their material artefacts, elucidating the lenses from which they teach so they may equip students with the tools to navigate political influences within their own stories.
... Here is where a dialogue with the relational ontologies from the Hippocratic tradition can be potentially established. For instance, extant concepts in the literature concerning materialities, flows and processes can be combined with premodern conceptualisations of matter (Bennett 2010) wider tropes of enchantment (Krøijer and Rubow 2022;Bennett 2001), "becoming-with" (Wright 2014;Haraway 2008), biosocial becomings (Ingold and Palsson 2013) or biocultural creatures (Frost 2016). Moreover, by reinstalling vitalism at the core of the humoral views of bodies and cities, should relax alleged dualism of Western and non-Western showing possibility to reconnect fragmented histories of body-world interactions across different cultures. ...
The cleanliness, mobility and quality of urban air has regained political legibility in debates on post-pandemic cities. To contextualize the political and epistemological significance of air in urban contexts, we suggest looking at the under-researched experience of premodern cities and bodies, how they developed a complex ecological imagination and solutions guided by findings from Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. While we do not romanticize these efforts, we argue that they represent an overlooked archive through which the post-Enlightenment mechanization, securitization and abstraction of air can be challenged. Turning to recent findings from both more-than-human thinking and microbiology as applied to air (aerobiome), we acknowledge that microbiome science is a result of laboratory science; however, we argue that findings from microbiome science point to a reanimation of air as something that cannot be fully instrumentalized or securitized as in modernistic programs of biopolitical control. By drawing on the experience of the Hippocratic tradition as a catalyst and a proxy for wider ontologies of flows and corporeal porosity across the Eurasian landmass, we suggest arriving at an affirmative reconceptualization of human-environment entanglement based on notions of permeability and a non-binary ontology of flows. This more-than human approach may not only complicate the alleged simplistic view of the “West” as a dualistic monolith but act also as bridge and companion to Indigenous and Southern ontologies and experiences of life, non-life, matter and nature.
... Confusion is the condition of the 21 st century. Modernism has been described as a state of disenchantment (Bennett, 2016). Postmodernism followed with modes of analysis of deconstructing the 'truth'. ...
In this photo essay I draw on Haraway’s (2016) call to stay “with the trouble” and make “kin in the Chthulucene” to reflect on emergent community understandings as a result of catastrophic fires on Kangaroo Island (KI) in 2019. The title Immolation with Ashes is a signifier for staying with the trouble and draws on Indigenous ethics of care and understandings of connection to place. I draw on documentary photography that I conducted over several years on KI to unveil the impact of the ecological disaster and use the images as a site for reflection. Through the framing of apocalyptic pedagogies I offer a family vignette to provide insight into the event of the fires and the emergence of community knowledges and networks that arose as a result of the fires. The photos throughout the paper also reveal sites of healing landscapes in the same way in which traumatised communities form solidarity and knowledge in recovery.
... Na visão de Bennett (2001), uma falha em reconhecer conexões pode levar à violência e que um senso de identidade desconectado com os aspectos materiais da vida está na raiz da atual crise ecológica. Bennett afirma que o Antropoceno representa uma oportunidade de repensar as coisas e faz um convite para que haja engajamento e esforço da parte dos humanos, de maneira mais sustentável, com todas as coisas, que são consideradas matéria vibrante, viva, ou seja, com capacidade de afetar o planeta e a humanidade. ...
Resumo: O objetivo desse ensaio é analisar a noção de evento em Hannah Arendt e sugerir como esse conceito pode ser útil para pensar o protagonismo político dos não-humanos no Antropoceno. A análise procura na sua hipótese, demonstrar como uma noção evental do tempo, constituído de forma experienciada com os não-humanos, contribui para pensar o momento atual do ser humano no planeta. Nesse contexto, o trabalho e a tecnologia se aliam à ciência como um mecanismo propulsor através do qual opera-se a transformação da natureza do planeta e a emergência dos eventos. Aborda-se três conceitos relevantes dessa transformação: a imprevisibilidade, irresistibilidade e irrevogabilidade, características intrínsecas dos eventos. Espera-se como resultado do trabalho atualizar a noção de evento e ainda examinar como uma noção evental do tempo em Hannah Arendt pode contribuir para refletir acerca dos desafios da atualidade, onde o que é tido como natureza adquire protagonismo mais explícito no destino dos seres humanos e na sua relação com o mundo e as coisas. Palavras-chave: Antropoceno. Hannah Arendt. Meio ambiente. Evento.
Abstract: This essay aims to analyze the events in Hannah Arendt and suggest how this concept can help think about the political protagonism of non-humans in the Anthropocene. The analysis seeks, in its hypothesis, to demonstrate how an event notion of time, constituted in an experienced way with non-humans, contributes to thinking about the current moment of the human being on the planet. In this context, labour and technology combine with science to transform the planet's nature and the emergence of events. Three relevant concepts of this transformation are addressed: unpredictability, irresistibility and irrevocability, and intrinsic characteristics of events. As a result of the work, it is expected to update the notion of event and examine how an evental notion of time in Hannah Arendt can contribute to reflecting on the challenges that human beings experience today, where what has been considered nature acquires a more explicit role in the destiny of human beings and their relationship with the world and things.
How are we to understand the contemporary preoccupation—at least in many English‐speaking societies—with ‘random acts of kindness’ and the idea of kindness more generally? Should this be seen as a challenge to the logic of capitalism or reinforcing of it, an example of commodification of emotion within our everyday lives? By introducing and mapping the contours of an emergent ‘kindness industry’, placing emotion (and enchantment) at the heart of how attachment to the idea of kindness is theorised, and marshalling existing empirical research on contemporary framings of everyday kindness, I argue that there is a need for a critical sociological engagement with the ‘pro‐social’ that does justice to its profound ambivalence. In the case of contemporary kindness this involves understanding both the regulatory nature of the enchantment sold by a kindness industry and the problem‐solving potential of the enchantment of kindness in the everyday, where it both helps address contemporary feelings of hopelessness and shame and facilitates the possibility of making life materially liveable.
The story of limpets, those conical sea-snails frequently found on rocky shorelines may seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but that is not the case. If given careful, prolonged attention, room to express themselves and an engaged receptive audience they reveal a richly entangled human-nonhuman story which unfolds over thousands of years. A process of art-based research, underpinned by new materialist thinking and practice channels this attentiveness, provides physical room, makes space for creative inquiry, corresponds with humans and nonhumans, and generates a willing audience with enchanting, potentially life affirming consequences.
To conceive a philosophy of art education that is removed from actual practice would belie the extraordinary experience of developing and making practice. In this article, I propose to explore the philosophical implications of art practice being an experience of the ‘daily extraordinary.’ A view of practice as being at once stretching and comfortable, takes the artist and viewer's responses to the strangeness of the everyday: the delightful, the shocking, or even the miraculous, in what appear to be simple and mundane experiences. If we perceive learning in the arts as a pursuit of ideas, affect and expression that occurs in regular practice, there is an inclusivity that renders both learning in the arts and philosophy of art education accessible to everyone. In this article I will refer to the Goldsmiths Centre for Arts and Learning's research programme of 2022–2023, in which events and connected teaching activities practised being All For the Arts . With visiting speakers, museums and galleries and postgraduate students, CAL researched how the vitality and challenge of art practice, which includes the individualities and expression of persons and histories made ordinary and invisible, could bring the value of learning in the arts to the fore. Including reflections from contributors such as John Baldacchino, A Particular Reality, Carol Wild, Danny Braverman, Raphael Vella, Kevin Tavin and Andrea Kárpáti, we explored inclusivity in art practice from the daily extraordinary of each speaker's developments in educational research. Also, in the company of representatives from arts organisations such as Entelechy Arts, Autograph ABP, Whitechapel Gallery, Young V&A and Bow Arts, we considered the amazing and essential factors of inclusivity in the arts – that could be encountered on a daily basis. I will gather meeting points here among this incredible range of contributors.
Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and ‘smart’. From real-time bus information, autonomous electric vehicles, smart parking, and smart street lighting, such initiatives are often presented as a social and environmental good. Critics, however, increasingly argue that technologically driven, and efficiency-led approaches to sustainability in the smart city are too simplistic and leave little room for participation and citizen agency despite government efforts to integrate innovative technologies in more equitable ways. This has prompted a growing awareness that a human-centred notion of cities, in which urban space is designed for, and inhabited by, humans only, is no longer tenable. Within the age of the Anthropocene, increasing numbers of scholars and practitioners are acknowledging the entanglements between human and non-human others (including plants, animals, insects, as well as soil, water, and sensors and their data) in urban life. In Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities, renowned researchers and practitioners from urban planning, architecture, environmental humanities, geography, design, arts, and computing critically explore smart cities beyond a human-centred approach. They respond to the complex interrelations between human and non-human others in urban space. Through theory, policy, and practice (past and present), as well as thinking speculatively about how smart cities may evolve in the future, the book makes a timely contribution to lively, contemporary scientific and political debates on what it means to design genuinely sustainable smart cities.
Latest research in environmental humanities often presumes the necessity of some kind of an ontological “shift” in thinking and living, while the question of the possibility of such a shift on an experiential level, is still to be answered. In this article, I am (re) visiting Latvian folk epistemologies as a sample case of alternate yet already “present” ontogenealogies that could be applied for reinventing ways to experience environed embodiment. While it is not possible, or desirable to recapture the past, alternate ontogenealogies of the Global North—partly local, yet always also entangled with closer and farther regions, can provide insight into the building of future societies upon the idea of meaningful, senseful materiality. Especially—in context of pre-Christian sacrality of naturecultures that place meaning beyond and before human I-consciousness, thus, capturing the idea of consciousness as the result, not the source of senseful agency of materiality. Moreover, such inquiry allows diluting the presumption of a homogeneous Global North, instead demonstrating the heterogenous genealogical background that co-constitutes our experiences and materialities today. Within this article, I focus on the topics of life and nature in Latvian folksongs—Dainas, expressed through the elemental worldings of stone and forest, to demonstrate old Latvian epistemologies as a fruitful ground for an affirmative environmental ethics in the future.
We invite you to explore with us the enchanting affects that move us, through ordinary moments in writing for children. Enchantment shows how we are entangled with the world, that which surprises us and builds a sense of wonder. A wind in the trees, a gentle smile, a look of horror. The smell of fresh coffee and the final words of a manuscript. We explore enchantment as mundane but gendered experiences which entail a promise and a potentiality, one that is part of power relations, and where an ethical possibility to engage in the world differently emerges. This paper shows how enchantment is not a detachment from, but a connection to the world. Through interviews with children's writers, we ask how enchanting affect can help us to see work through a different ethical lens.
Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance is notable for the ways in which it evokes a childlike fascination with the world. This article considers not only how this experiential mode is constructed, but also how the topic of childhood overlaps with Enescu’s conception of an enchanted dwelling-place, particularly in the context of how humans interact with the natural world. I argue that exploring such ‘strategies of enchantment’ and their musical framing allows not only for a more nuanced understanding of Enescu’s aesthetics and his music, but also of the role that enchantment as an aesthetic category occupies within musical modernity more broadly.
Previous survey evidence suggests that situational-enchantment is a mental state conducive for psi-related experiences. In this conceptual replication and exploration, we used a preregistered research design to examine hit rate on a mobile application ('app') test of putative psi that was administered after participant exposure to two competing conditions in counterbalanced order: (a) an 'enchant-ed' immersive tour in a 'haunted' house museum versus (b) a 'disenchanted' outdoor tent session with a video that allegedly debunked the paranormal. A convenience sample of 31 volunteers recruited via social media completed counterbalanced testing in both conditions and measures of transliminality and paranormal belief, which we converted to high and low (median split) measurements as co-variates of the hit rates on the psi test. Findings showed that high levels of both transliminality and paranormal belief, as well as the 'haunted (enchanted)' versus 'skeptical (disenchanted)' conditions significantly shifted overall hit rates and above-chance performance. In the majority of analyses these effects represented more than a 10% shift in both hit rate and tests against average psi guessing rate. We discuss these results as supporting an interactionist (environment-person) model of certain parapsychological phenomena.
Sound and listening are intrinsically linked to how we experience and engage with places and communities. This guide invites landscape architects and urban designers to become soundscape architects and offers practical advice on sound and listening applicable to each stage of a design project: from reading the environment to intervening on it. The book will be of interest to landscape architects, together with other design professionals such as urban designers, architects, artists, planners and engineers that play a primary role in the composition of the soundscape
This paper posits participatory art as a distinct but underexplored practice of interest for human geography’s contemporary work on art and aesthetics. It suggests that participatory art needs a conceptual, critical, and interdisciplinary grounding in human geography to advance the expanding relationship between participatory art practice and theory, aesthetics, and geography. Through three analytical themes – politics, publics, and space – the paper argues for an interdisciplinary approach to participatory art that draws across art theory, participatory praxis, and geography. The paper concludes around geography’s suitability to critically explore the ethical and aesthetic relations created by participatory art.
Solana Kline is a critical human geographer and political ecologist. Her work focuses mainly within more-than-capitalist socio-economies, nature-based recreation, US public land spaces, more-than-human, and experimental methodologies. Her current research is exploring the positive holistic health impacts of US public land trail infrastructures for gateway communities/socioeconomies and the more-than-human lands. 1 Abstract: This research explores how belonging and communion emerge from the human body engaging directly with more-than-human (MtH) during nature-based recreation. It asks: how are nature-based recreators experiencing relationships with more-than-human via their movement and sensing in US Forest Service trails? This research presents the conceptual tool haptic rapport to better explore and represent the intimate, sensory-based, meaningful, and embodied relationships that come about through haptic contact occurring specifically between human and MtH natures. Contact-based and flow-based haptic rapport are explored here. This data serves to contradict structurally presumed separations between humans and MtHs; between recreational mobilities and belonging; and between cutaneous touch and internalization of that touch experience. This research highlights USFS land spaces as essential sites for nature-based recreation, belonging and sensing place, mobility, and the human-MtH relationships they make possible. Haptic rapport can be applied in all contexts and fields to better understand the intimacies and meaning-making associated with MtH-human engagements.
The staging of ice might seem a particularly effective way of drawing spectator attention to the Anthropocene and climate change since ice can have a sensory appeal that encourages attentiveness and related bodily affects. This chapter contends, however, that an artistic intention to communicate about environmental protection may need to engage selective emotional feeling. It proposes that a prosody that shifts from seeing (or hearing) to feeling and then to caring within performance can enhance viewer participation and awareness of place. Performance with ice also implicitly evokes fears about the consequences of global warming that it may need to counteract. The analysis considers examples of twenty-first-century artistic works presenting ice and, in particular, THAW, a performance by the Australian physical theatre group, Legs on the Wall, that evocatively depicted human dependency and struggle by positioning a performer mid-air on melting ice. THAW evoked surprise, curiosity about precarity as well as a sense of exhilaration, in tandem with concern for the performer. There was an imaginative convergence of affect and emotional feeling in communication about the environment.
This article reconsiders the relationship between identificatory and mimetic reading practices—so often viewed as naive or mystified—and attention to intertextuality, which has so often been seen as contrasting with and discrediting such practices. Such a reconsideration, made timely by growing dissatisfaction with a post-providential, disenchanted view of the world as devoid of meaning, is invited by and in turn illuminates one of the most celebrated novels of the twenty-first century, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005). The narrator-protagonist of this novel, I argue, embodies a type that the most influential current of novel theory has made difficult to credit, perhaps even to recognize: the reverse quixote, a character who ostentatiously resists conflating literature and life or viewing the world and experience through the lens of literature—but who would benefit from doing so. Intertextual reading brings this reverse quixotism to light and reveals its dimensions, as the intertextual reader tracks the connections that the novel's anti-identificatory characters refuse to make and considers the motives for and costs of this refusal. The most significant intertext driving this shadow plot is George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), itself a study of the meaning-making, life-shaping power of identificatory and mimetic reading, or what Eliot calls “the magic of quick comparison.”
This article argues that the picture book series Pettson and Findus by Sven Nordqvist can be a valuable resource when looking at ethics of matter and thinking through relationships with the more-than-human. Pettson and Findus is a series of picture books written and illustrated by Sven Nordqvist. The books depict the relationship between old man Pettson and his cat Findus, who live in an old farmhouse in the south of Sweden together with chickens, invisible “muckles” and a variety of other creatures and people. The books centre on relatively mundane activities, made into small adventures by the various different creatures. This article analyses the Pettson and Findus series through Donna Haraway’s analysis of human animal relationships in When Species Meet (2008) and calls for the making of oddkin in Staying with the Trouble (2016). This article, using Will McKeithen’s analysis in Queer Ecologies of the Home and Monica Flegel’s Pets and domesticity in Victorian culture, argues that Pettson and Findus live in a queer kind of household, and participate in queer home making. Using Jack Halberstam’s analysis in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) this article centres Pettson as a figure that is both queer and silly, and through this queer silliness creates certain openings for queer community with the more-than-human, and the making of oddkin.
Chapter 1 argues that we must problematize the place of wonder in order to reorient it as an ontological concept. There I begin with a discussion of thaumazein, the Ancient Greek word for wonder. Plato’s claim in the Theaetetus that philosophy begins in wonder places thaumazein explicitly in the realm of knowledge. Ultimately Plato seems to argue that because knowledge cannot provide an accurate account of itself, we are left to wonder at our inability to gain absolute knowledge of the world. While Plato may have intended to indicate our lack of absolute knowledge, thaumazein is quickly appropriated by Aristotle as a way to initiate the desire for knowledge, thus setting the stage for wonder to be used almost exclusively as an epistemological concept.
As an epistemological concept, philosophy has focused on defining wonder. But the task of defining wonder is also the task of rendering wonder a static tool used to guide our inquiries. I argue that reading the phenomenological and ontological work of Merleau-Ponty through recent insights from new materialism and object-oriented ontology challenges not only our claims to knowledge, but also our conception of wonder as a static tool that can be resisted.
Chapter 2 takes a step sideways and argues that we must account for the aesthetic treatment of wonder before explicitly developing an ontological wonder. By focusing on the aesthetics of wonder I will be doing two main things: First, I establish a need for a new conversation about wonder via the discourse on disenchantment and the politics of art, and second, I bridge the gap between the focus on human subjects and an ontology of wonder that displaces the distinction between subjects and objects. In the first half of the chapter, I argue that aesthetics has contributed to the development of wonder by describing rare experiences or rare objects. I then argue for an aesthetic causality in which wonder can be attributed to nonliving objects. Finally, I then turn to the work of novelist Haruki Murakami in order to elaborate on the scope of ontological wonder, and to expand the relationship between art and ontological wonder. Specifically, I look at the novel 1Q84 as a dramatization of both aesthetic causality and ontological wonder.
Public discourse and political climate policymaking are based on scientific reports and propose technological solutions to solve the crisis, primarily by changing fossil fuels to renewable energy. Rather than questioning growth and the overuse of natural resources—which has been at the core of green concern for decades—green growth is the motor in an economy that aims for continuous economic spin, driven by new technological innovations that will enable us to go on as before, simply by replacing energy sources. It is no surprise that in such a discourse, the alternative voices—such as religious or spiritual responses—are left out, but to go from that and conclude that no such voices exist would be to rush to conclusions. I suggest that if we want to search for enchantment in times of climate change, we must look elsewhere. Searching for these voices means leaving the discourse framed by scientific rationalistic measurements because we can find an enchanted alter‐tale beyond this disenchanted tale. In this article, I account for voices from my field and answer the question: What motivates people to turn to spirituality in times of climate change?
Adult characters in children’s literature often remain in the “blind space”, Vanessa Joosen observes (Adulthood). Whereas this is true for a lot of children’s books, there are also picturebooks that focus on mothers, often designed as tributes to motherhood. Within this array of books on mothers, however, some offer a more nuanced portrayal of motherhood than others. Samtidigt i min låtsasvärld (Meanwhile in My Imaginary World, 2018) by Lisa Bjärbo and Emma AdBåge shares a mother’s imagination with the readers. The mother’s inner world is connected to shared pleasures, which are easily considered to be “childlike”. By using a mother’s perspective in a picturebook intended for children and adults Bjärbo and AdBåge create an intergenerational experience. Building on concepts and insights from sociology, age studies and children’s literature studies and the textual and visual analysis of Samtidigt i min låtsasvärld, I reflect on the way picturebooks have the affordances to create an intergenerational understanding of daily situations and, by doing so, could contribute to breaking the good mom myth.
En este trabajo se estudia el concepto de biofilia desde una perspectiva humanista, literaria y conservacionista. En primer lugar, se propone adoptar la definición de biofilia de Edward O. Wilson como forma de atracción innata que siente el ser humano por la naturaleza y lo vivo. Esta idea se pone en relación con las distintas formas de filía («amistad, amor») identificadas por Aristóteles en la Ética a Nicómaco. En segundo lugar, se analiza la centralidad del concepto de biofilia en la novela Perdita (2013) de Hilary C. Scharper, una obra que propone la existencia de unos fragmentos perdidos de la Teogonía de Hesíodo y que supone un interesante ejercicio de adaptación del pensamiento científico y humanista a la expresión literaria y mítica.
In an age in which anthropocentrism is increasingly under fire, the investment of the artistic tradition in that paradigm deserves particular attention. Portraiture is especially significant, as it seems to be the anthropocentric art form par excellence. It seems to reinforce key features of anthropocentrism: the distinction of the human from the nonhuman and the superiority of the former over the latter. We can pursue these questions most effectively if we distinguish descriptive (“weak”) anthropocentrism from normative (“strong”) anthropocentrism. The former involves some sort of focus on humans, the latter combines this with claims about their superiority over the nonhuman. Certain works by influential portraitists, such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, and Ana Mendieta, contest both weak and strong anthropocentrism. Other portraits seem to be involved in weak anthropocentrism, but not necessarily strong anthropocentrism. Considering the artwork of Alice Neel and the philosophy of Judith Butler, I argue that such works have an important ethical role to play in orienting us in our relationships with humans, precisely in resisting strong anthropocentrism even in expressing weak anthropocentrism.
Women in the Movement of Rural Women Workers ( Movimento de Mulheres Trabalhadoras Rurais or MMTR) in southern Brazil envisioned a social movement that represented their interests both as women and as small farmers and agricultural workers, while also allowing for a plurality of voices and strategies. This article describes the feminist and democratic culture of militancy that these women sought, from the 1980s through to the 2000s, and shows how difficult it was to establish and sustain such a culture. These women not only confronted the deep, ongoing difficulties of challenging gendered social relations, but also the pain, shame and silencing that intertwined with gains in voice and equality. They also confronted larger social movements whose leaders understood power differently to the way these women did. For the women described in this article, women’s activism requires a deep form of democracy where all voices are heard. Paradoxically, in the context of rural Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil and the panorama of movements that are active there, the rootedness in the everyday lived experience that made the movement relevant to women who advocated for this form of democracy also kept them from taking on powerholders within the movement who chose to ally with larger, more hierarchical movements, sacrificing significant forms of autonomy and voice in the process.
This article was created on the wave of the ubiquitous and already-saturated topic of ethics in the field of artificial intelligence. We were motivated by the proliferation of rules within this field and by a posthumanism critique of this topic. We attempt to nurture a new research platform for a social science analysis of the “How of ethics” issue by providing an argument for the study of algorithms and ethical issues by expanding the usability of the concept of niche construction and environmental perspectives in ethnographic studies. From a design perspective, this means expanding the quest related to the ethical matter by intensifying the inquiry in a design that includes not just the design process but also a more comprehensive environment. Inspired by current trends in evolutionary anthropology, science studies, and the philosophy of science, we are in line with approaches that reaffirm ethical issues from standpoint theory in the current scientific debate about trust in science. The results of our historical perspective on the issue of value neutrality point out that the position where the tool is not neutral does not mean that it is biased but that it is deeply involved in the network of relationships that influence it to be biased, and that threatens its autonomy. By providing argumentation based on the issue of ethics, we have nurtured the so-called ecology of practice and connoisseurs as a new practice and perspective that ethnography can take on the issue of accountable, ethical, and trustable science.
The Decalogue, commonly known as the Ten Commandments, is usually analysed as a text. Within the Hebrew Bible, however, it is depicted as a monument– an artifact embedded in rituals that a community uses to define itself. Indeed, the phraseology, visual representations, and ritual practices of contemporary monuments used to describe the Ten Commandments imbue them with authority. In this volume, Timothy Hogue, presents a new translation, commentary, and literary analysis of the Decalogue through a comparative study of the commandments with inscribed monuments in the ancient Levant. Drawing on archaeological and art historical studies of monumentality, he grounds the Decalogue's composition and redaction in the material culture and political history of ancient Israel and ancient West Asia. Presenting a new inner-biblical reception history of the text, Hogue's book also provides a new model for dating biblical texts that is based on archaeological and historical evidence, rather than purely literary critical methods.
Postdigital nature is the consumption and prosumption of nature through postdigital technologies. Individuals are increasingly co-creating with nature as postdigital technologies become more prevalent. Where interactions with nature used to be between humans and the nonhuman (animals, plants, water, soil etc.), postdigital nature also includes the interactions between these entities and postdigital technologies. Postdigital nature is creating new assemblages and entanglements which have implications for humans, the nonhuman, and postdigital technologies.
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