Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism

Fraser, Mariam; Kember, Sarah; Lury, Celia

doi:10.4135/9781446213377.n1

Cited by 39 publications

(52 citation statements)

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“…For just as theorists of post-modernism made much of the flattening of affect and the dominance of self-referential simulacra, now life itself is seen as complicit with informational and representational processes. This body of literature has also cross-fertilised with recent work on vitalism (e.g., Fraser et al, 2006;Barry, 2005). Here, then, the digital is seen as a way of reconfiguring life 'to conceive life as not confined to living organisms, but as movement, a radical becoming' (Fraser et al, 2006: 3).…”

Section: : a Digital Age?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices

Ruppert

Law

Savage

2013

Theory, Culture & Society

297

260

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The aim of the paper is to intervene in debates about the digital and in particular framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilise and materialise social and other relations. In doing so, our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to 'know' the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CReSC on the Social Life of Methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by the social world, and can in turn become agents that shape that world. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods to take into account the following:

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Section: : a Digital Age?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices

Ruppert

Law

Savage

2013

Theory, Culture & Society

297

260

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The social studies of science also proved very innovative, as evidenced by the work of Fraser et al (2006), Maureen McNeil's shrewd political analyses of technology (2007) The field of media studies has produced an astonishing amount of high-quality research on science and technology, as testified by the work of Jonathan Crary (2001) and the Zone Books series, which brought French theory and philosophy of science to large American audiences. Jose van Dijck' s analyses of digital culture are path-breaking (2007); Smelik and Lykke (2008) opened up the field to a variety of original interventions on the inter-disciplinary structures of contemporary science and its embedded cultural and social aspects.…”

Section: The Humanities In the Twenty-first Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

Posthuman Humanities

Braidotti

2013

European Educational Research Journal

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This article compares notes on different and new concepts of 'the Human', developed both within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic scientific research and in broader social practices. The main focus is on the shifting relationship between the 'two cultures' of the humanities and science in the light of contemporary developments, such as the sophisticated forms of interdisciplinary research that have emerged in the fields of biotechnologies, neural sciences, environmental and climate change research and Information and Communication technologies. These rapid changes affect the very definitions of the human and of human evolution. This article attempts to assess the constructions of the human at work in contemporary Humanities scholarship, which I also describe as the posthuman condition. I will start on a critical note by outlining the dislocations of the discursive boundaries and categorical differences within the Humanities, which have been triggered respectively by the explosion of humanism and the implosion of anthropocentrism. I will argue that these epistemological breaks cause an internal fracture within the Humanities that cannot be mended just by good will. I will then go on in a more affirmative note to defend the argument that the Humanities can and will survive their present crises and even prosper, to the extent that they will show the ability and willingness to undergo a major process of transformation in the direction of the posthuman.I shall devote some time to outlining the posthuman predicament and propose a posthuman affirmative ethics. To be worthy of our times, we need to be pragmatic: we need schemes of thought and figurations that enable us to account in empowering terms for the changes and transformations currently on the way. We already live in permanent states of transition, hybridisation and nomadic mobility, in emancipated, post-feminist, multi-ethnic societies with high degrees of technological mediation which, however, have not ensured justice for all, or resolved enduring patterns of inequality. These are neither simple nor linear events, but rather are multilayered and internally contradictory social phenomena. They combine elements of ultra-modernity with splinters of neo-archaism: high-tech advances and neo-primitivism, which defy the logic of excluded middle. We therefore need great methodological creativity to cope with these challenges.Let me explore in order the different steps of this argument. Posthumanism

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“…Steiner-building on Goethe's creative imagination and Schelling's intellectual imaginationexplicitly linked Imagination with the evolution of consciousness (Steiner, 1905(Steiner, /1981. The relationship between imagination and post-mechanistic, organic metaphors in philosophical thinking has foundations in the vitality of Bergson's élan vital (Fraser, Kember, & Lury, 2005), Whitehead's process thinking (Gare, 1999), and Deleuze's lines of flight (St. Pierre, 2004). Philosopher of imagination, Richard Kearney (1998), has researched the major theories of imagination in modern and postmodern European thought.…”

Section: Pedagogical Life Philosophical Perspectives: Imagination As mentioning

confidence: 99%

Educating for Evolving Consciousness: Voicing the Emergency for Love, Life and Wisdom

Gidley

2009

International Handbooks of Religion and Education

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This paper takes as its starting point the notion that human consciousness is evolving beyond the boundaries of formal, reductionist modes of thinking and beginning to open to postformal, integral and planetary consciousness. It explores the theoretical relationships between several themes arising from the evolution of consciousness discourse and a diversity of postformal educational discourses. Four core pedagogical values emerge from the intersection between these two clusters: love, life, wisdom and voice. These core values are elucidated theoretically in relation to philosophies of education, and practically through examples from the art of education. They are offered as pedagogical seeds for evolving consciousness through education in the 21 st century.

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Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism

Cited by 39 publications

References 0 publications

Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices

Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices

Posthuman Humanities

Educating for Evolving Consciousness: Voicing the Emergency for Love, Life and Wisdom

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