Description Daston and Galison write the history of the emergence of scientific objectivity, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding into the present day. This magisterial study reveals practices of scientific image-making as constitutive of […]
Tag Archives: materialism
The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
Description A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, […]
Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno
Description Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the […]
Nature’s Queer Performativity
Description Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative […]
Sade: From Materialism to Pornography
Description Examines influences of materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment on Sade’s thinking and writing and how Sade adapts these various philosophies to create his own transgressive approach to materialism. In so doing, Warman shows how […]
The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance
Description Lange’s lengthy history contains a useful overview of materialist authors from Lucretius to Holbach, along with some (biased) discussion of the Kantian and post-Kantian reaction against materialist thought. Although Lange is sympathetic to many […]
Man a Machine
Description Julien Offray de La Mettrie was one of the earliest French Enlightenment materialists. Exiled from France after publishing a book (A Natural History of the Soul) arguing that psychical phenomena could be explained by […]
The Paradox of the Automaton: From Diderot to Cybernetics
Description A concise and provocative history of the idea of automata from Diderot to the present. She argues that the automaton is the cornerstone of modern knowledge and its powers. Creator Martineau, Julie Publisher Montréal: […]
Machine and Organism
Description Canguilhem inverts the normal scientific question–what is the mechanism underlying this organic process?–and asks how machines are organic. He traces the history of the relationships between organism and machine from the ancient Greek political […]
“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne.”
Description Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny’s important novel (Lettres d’une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted […]