Minds, Bodies, and Objects

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 0969725x 2014 920637, 2014

The Spirit of Matter. Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects, 2023

The title of this book was first conceived for an essay written in 1995 (Pels 1998; now Chapter 3). I use an "excessive object" - Jeremy Bentham's "Auto-Icon", an effigy from 1832 wearing how original clothes and stuffed with his own bones - to theorize why material culture studies has still to become more "material" by shedding some of its Protestant assumptions about mind over matter. Chapters on European museums, the Protestantism of Victorian Science, and Catholic exhibitions precede a discussion of commodity fetishism and the history of advertising that urges us to pay more attention to the "time of things", and how dematerialization poses threats to Planet Earth.

2014

Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2011

Anthropology & Materialism

Zygon�, 1992

Ian Barbour's Religion in an Age of Science is a welcome systematic, theoretical overview of the relations between science and religion, culminating his long career with a balanced and insightful appraisal. The hallmarks of his synthesis are critical realism, holism, and process thought. Barbour makes even more investment in process philosophy and theology than in his previous works. This invites further inquiry about the adequacy of a highly general process metaphysics in dealing with our particular, deeply historical world; also further inquiry about the adequacy of its panexperientialism and incrementalism.

Seeking an End to Academic Materialism, 2022

This paper describes and addresses both popular and academic materialism. It focuses on those forms of academic materialism that deny soul and spirit and reduce men and women to mere objects. Over time, academic materialism often leads to the personal abuse of others – or worse. This paper traces the development of this materialistic model from Rene Descartes (a dualist) to David Hume and Auguste Comte who intentionally stepped forward to establish the reductionistic materialism of the Progressive movement of the last 150 years. People often think they are obligated to support this point to view because they are told “this is what the science says.” This paper critiques the Standard Model of Physics and its search for “indivisible, ultimate particles.” Just when it seemed we would all be forced to accept a dark, cold, spiritless, pitiless, objects/particles-only materialism, many of the physicists themselves (including Albert Einstein) indicated that the universe is much more dynamic, spiritual, and interactional than previously understood, using the Standard Model of Physics. Some physicists still think they are simply "discovering" and "describing" External Reality (which they assume is thoroughly physical in nature). What they don't realize is that they are merely creating “constructs” (conceptual models) to help make sense of conscious experience. Some physicists (like lots of other human beings) can't see past the edges of their own very limited model. A thorough understanding of External Reality is beyond us. We're intelligent and creative, but also very finite and temporal beings, attempting to make sense of our conscious experience - nothing more, nothing less. We should all understand: A little humility and "bigger picture wisdom” would go a long way! This paper will show how in the 21st century it is scientifically possible to consider ourselves unique spiritual beings, living in a dynamic and interactional universe. There are many new insights, and a lot of joy to be had, once we finally get past academic/reductionistic materialism.

Theory and Research in Social, Human and Administrative Sciences II (Cilt 2), 2020

The New Materialisms is a theory that has its origins in theoretical physics. Its aim is to create awareness about the entanglements of humans and the more-than-human worlds so that humans will act more cautiously towards the environment and will likely include ontology and ethics in their process of scientific knowledge production. This recent theoretical and sociological field of inquiry, “The New Materialisms”, has been intensely explored since 1990 and prominent scholars from various disciplines such as Karen Barad, Susan Hekman, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, David Abram, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Vicky Kirby, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost support the idea that anthropocentric exceptionalism must be abandoned since no entity, animate or inanimate, can be deemed superior to another. Agency, which has long been thought to belong only to humans, is evenly distributed to all that is made of matter, so they are ontologically independent and do not need human consciousness or interpretation to exist. The New Materialisms is against any kind of speciesism. Concordantly, the idea is to emphasize the necessity to understand the connection, the interaction, or intra-action in Barad’s words, and interdependence arising from the symbiosis in order to facilitate the continuity of the ecosystems whose destruction means the destruction of the human species along with the nonhuman environment. Within the framework of this theory, there is a “material turn” (2010: 7), as Alaimo puts it in her work; namely, there is an inclination to equalize the importance of the ontology of humans with that of nonhuman bodies (2010: 2). According to New Materialists, neither is superior in terms of agency. Therefore, the theory provides a fresh and dynamic way of interpretation to academic disciplines such as philosophy, social sciences, history, anthropology, literature and theology holding the potential to change the traditional mind-set. It facilitates the rethinking the relationship between nature and culture as nature-cultures. Moreover, New Materialisms is especially popular in literature as a medium of interpreting literary texts in terms of human and nonhuman intra-action.

questionnaire on Matter and Materialisms, October 155 , 2016

Matter is an obstacle, a burden, an alterity that occupies me, the medium of frustration but also of pleasure. Matter is both envelope and core, inescapable. I can't understand why matter requires a "materialism" to plead its case. The more fragile hypotheses, in need of advocates, are the subject, the person, consciousness, imagination. Consciousness doesn't ask for anything more than the freedom to choose when to work with matter, and when to work against it. Imagination wants to dominate matter, and without guilt. In fact, it is redundant to speak of imagination or mind "wanting" to dominate matter. As soon as you speak of "mind," you already name a contempt for matter. you are saying: "matter has no claims on me, things have no claims on me, no ethical claims." The questionnaire identifies a double movement of contemporary thought, two directions, one opposed to the other, and yet in league. Some thinkers stress the ways that humans are like things, others stress the ways that things are like humans. The first tendency is guided by the death instincts, the desire to dial down all tensions. The second tendency is anthropomorphizing. The two tendencies work together to deprivilege the subject of consciousness, the alleged source of creativity in thought and in making, a source ungraspable but marked by first person pronouns. Both tendencies deplore the arrogance of the modern mind that believes it can build the reality it needs. Within art criticism or art history, the materialist plea is pedestrian and literal-minded. Materialism makes a virtue of acknowledging the completely obvious: the environmental and somatic limits on thought and imagination. Such literalism punctures pretention, exposes mystification, and denaturalizes conventions. But these are situational uses. Speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, neuroaesthetics, the doctrine of the life or agency of things, are only ways of talking, discourse tactics. They are fictions safely embedded within larger unspeakable confidences in the subject-of-consciousness. Matter and thing are passwords to a realism targeting hidden irrealisms. But matter and thing are themselves not equally real. It is notable that natural scientists recognize matter but not things. The thing is not a natural "unit" of reality. The thing is a device that helps consciousness grasp matter. Matter only comes into focus through things. The thing, because it shares properties of closure with the person, stands out against a ground of non-things, including formless matter. The autonomy of the thing is borrowed from the person. Modern critical thought is shaped as a protest against the scientific picture of the world. Non-scientists cherish the thing precisely because the physical sciences do not recognize it. Materialism and "thing theory" are supposed to restore realism, but because the thing is already an anthropomorphism, and because its discursive function is to resist absorption into the scientific world-picture, it soon takes on unrealistic and unlikely properties. Things are "alive," matter is "vibrant.