Quantum feminicity is a term that refers to the intersection of quantum theory, a technological branch of physics, with feminist theory, a social and political movement. Engaging the modal logics of this intersection, the article explores this intersection through one aspect of quantum literacy; that of the quantum splitting of the concept of the temporal narrative. The article examines what are the interdisciplinary convergences of feminist and physics’s respective philosophies. Focussing on the quantum modalities that are being practiced in relation (...) to the situated nature of technological platforms engaged, the article proposes that modelling a quantum feminicity can assist in disengaging modes of sexual difference that are used to gender all kinds of bodies through a countermanding the temporal. Experiences of bodies are considered as experimental modes that provide quantum vectors for feminist actions. (shrink)

This article contrasts two radically different approaches to valuation—neoliberal and pragmatic—using each frame to consider value in design. Neoliberalism is outcomes-focused, maximizing value through different but commensurable forms, which are aggregated and ranked using a common denominator for the purposes of competition. Pragmatism is process-focused, with a variety of values negotiated and configured through valuation inquiries in context-specific ways. This article argues that, in line with pragmatism and in contrast to neoliberalism, design practice is based on diverse value orientations through (...) a material and temporal process shaped in accordance with different purposes. The argument suggests that the way valuation is performed in design is an alternative to the reductive but dominant neoliberal approach. This prompts consideration of the “performative agency” concept—that design practice can transform how valuation is carried out, presenting and sustaining an alternative model. (shrink)

Artist Mark Farid presenting his research so far in the development of Seeing I. This included development on the 360 degree, first person point of view recorder, along with research done onto Farid in the effects of long-term immersion in virtual reality experiencing the lives of other people.

This article sketches the outline of a semiotic materialism, drawing on Mexican-Ecuadoran philosopher Bolívar Echeverría's thesis that production=signification. For Echeverría, every process of social production and consumption is and must at the same time be a process of signification and interpretation. This thesis, initially developed in the mid-1970s, emerges most immediately from a novel synthesis of Marx with the work of Jakobson and Hjelmslev. It also establishes an expansive and highly original social ontology, at the core of which is a (...) ‘trans-naturalised’ conception of the specificity of human social reproduction. This ontology both grounds the conceptual innovations of structural linguistics within a critical understanding of reproduction, as the general structure of material life, and demonstrates the necessarily semiotic character of all acts of production and consumption. We analyse this proposition and elaborate upon its critical implications, particularly a deepened theorisation of ideology and fetishism, which Echeverría describes as enacting a ‘subcodification’ of every explicit ‘message’ that can be transmitted, regardless of its content. By inscribing signification at the heart of critical social theory, Echeverría offers a unique account both of social reproduction and the effects of capitalist accumulation upon that process. (shrink)

From Kant to postmodernism the idea of the sublime was always tied with questions of ethics and politics. Kant saw the sublime as a proof that rationality triumphs over nature, validating law and judgement through the subjective experience of pleasure and pain. Lyotard saw in the sublime a symptom of a crisis at which rationality reaches its limit, and subjectivity is confronted with its own collapse. As this chapter will show, both these approaches are inadequate to account for the sublime (...) in 21st century. The failure of liberal democracy and the rise of populist and fascist ideologies calls for a re-evaluation of the sublime as the dissolution of the symbolic order and the coming face to face with the alternative reality of the death drive. This chapter names this reality ‘The Diogenes Complex’, after the homeless beggar who made his form of existence the manifestation of his philosophical creed. Through his performative actions Diogenes has shown that reality is sublime because it is irreconcilable with rational logic and warned against the futility of trying to act rationally in irrational times. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the AHRC Cultural Value Project and the ensuing legacy work. It suggests that this work has resulted in the re-positioning of the field of inquiry into cultural value by shifting attention away from policy constructs and towards lived experiences; away from measuring the outcomes of cultural participation and towards understanding the process of engagement. The challenge still remaining is to develop an empirically grounded pragmatist account of cultural value as a form of practice—a situated interface of agents, (...) actions and structures taking place in an institutionalised and materially circumscribed environment. Reconceiving cultural value in these terms will have profound methodological implications, not least the challenge of finding methodologies appropriate to its analysis within the realm of historically and geographically variable relations and structures. It is however a challenge worth taking. The proposed shift, it is suggested, will provide a way of addressing some long-standing ‘problems’ arising in relation to cultural value: the separation of conditions and consciousness; the overemphasis on the cognitive at the cost of the bodily; the separation between ‘the best and the brightest’ and the ‘everyday’ conceptions of culture. The proposed approach may also drive the refinement of flat(ter)-ontology methodologies which neither succumb to methodological individualism nor overemphasise methodological structuralism. (shrink)

This single authored book examines the purchase of photography on contemporary continental philosophy. Its core argument is that because photography is at one and the same time an image and ephemera, it is the ontological foundation of post-phenomenological philosophy that privileges experience over and above theoretical and critical engagement with the arts.

Reality television has spawned a proliferation of programmes that feature ‘ordinary’ people. Often this notion of ordinary not only means non-celebrity but is also a synonym for working-class. Class, however, is typically unacknowledged and unspoken in the narratives that unfold in the genre, while the programmes themselves construct class and perceptions of difference, largely through fashion and appearance. Although there is an increased representation of working-class subjects in the reality genre, this visibility is not matched by an access to control (...) of media platforms. Therefore, it is argued, what is often found in the representations generated by these programmes is a kind of class tourism that involves Othering. A substantial branch of reality TV that deals in narratives of transformation and foregrounds fashion and the body as signifiers of classed taste is introduced, and it is posited that cultural hegemony might be identified in the framing of middle-class taste as good taste in this subgenre, not only for those surveyed on-screen but also for the audience watching at home. Snog Marry Avoid? is analysed in relation to the performance of classed femininity it offers within this context. (shrink)

We challenge the prevalent opinion that consumption does not seem to matter as much as production and defy the fetishism of industrial work. We explore the implications of the premise that under conditions of cognitive capitalism consumption dictates what production does, when and how. We explain that in a post-industrial global society and economy fashion, branding, instant gratification of desires, and ephemeral consumer tastes govern production and consumption. The London riots of August 2011 send us a warning that consumption and (...) cognitive capitalism are asphyxiating in the structures and norms of industrial capitalism that are still in place. (shrink)

We revisit the Marxist debate on the commodity form. By following the thought of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to understand the commodity form through the Kantian categories a priori. Sohn-Rethel explores the proposition that there can be no cognition independent of its historical and social conditions and puts forward the daring conclusion of an ontological unity between knowledge and commodity exchange. We suggest that Sohn-Rethel’s thought finds new relevance nowadays, under the prevalence of a cognitive capitalism. We (...) discuss the reformulation of relations of production and consumption under cognitive capitalism and show how knowledge-led immaterial and affective labour adds a higher value to the commodities into which it is embodied. Above all, the commodity form in cognitive capitalism becomes biopolitical. (shrink)