Kember 2016

From Whiki
Revision as of 17:47, 14 January 2017 by Wtrettien (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Kember, Sarah. iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2016.

introduction

Critique of the "flattened ontology" of lists (Bogost 2012) and Object Oriented Ontology

"The fetishization of objects serves to align markets and metaphysics. It makes imedia OOPs theory compatible, if not necessarily complicit with, industry goals oriented to novelty and innovation -- iPhones -- rather than invention and intervention. Intervention is precluded in the shift from knowledge to things, and environments of things-in-themselves." (24)

Derangements of scale -- not opposed to imedia environmentalism per se, but requres "boundary cuts between co-constituting processes and the instrumentalisation, and potential re-instrumentalisation of forms" (24)

"It is is in boundary work -- as critical-creative decision-making -- that a politics and ethics of imedia are enacted. Te absence of boundary work allows politics to default to the mainstream, to what is {(or is soon, inevitably, to be) and produces derangements of scale in imedia theories that are very small and/or very big. Scales slide in the absence of epistemological structures, the boundary cuts of particles nad people, black and white, wood and trees that are too easily and conveniently conceded to, uncontested, made uncontestable and consigned to the philosophical past so that we can move on to better things-in-themselves." (24-5)

Bennett 2001 -- vibrant materialism compatible with OOO because it is "reactionary and foundationalist", establishing the grounds for a more positive/affirmative politics by substituting cynicism/paranoia/critique for more creative and generous outlook (28) -- this is a "dialectical feminism" that abandons critique; dangerous and limited critical strategy