Onto-Cartography - Softcover

Levi R. Bryant

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0748679979 ISBN 13: 9780748679973

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2014

Synopsis

This is a study of how space and time create objects, and how these objects interact. Using real-world examples, Bryant shows how a networked concept of space and time is at the heart of our central political concerns. What sort of interaction is there between, for example, slow-moving objects like climate and comparatively fast-moving objects like governments? How can they interact with each other given their very different lifespans? How do the Amish interact with the members of the stock market, and vice versa? How do members of congress, who always exist, interact with the temporally discontinuous objects of Congressional sessions that only meet during a certain session each year - flitting in and out of existence? It proposes a new form of social and political analysis - 'onto-cartography' - that looks at how relations between objects are forged by communication and causation. It draws on the social sciences, geography, new materialist thought and object-oriented ontology.

About this title

About the Author

Levi R. Bryant is Professor of Philosophy at Collin College.

From the Back Cover

'This book finally rescues materialism from the dilution of social historical theory. But rather than rejecting the lessons of Marxism, Bryant substantially extends the material underpinnings of life. Lucid, far-reaching, and urgent, Onto-Cartographies is the book many object-oriented ontology skeptics have been waiting for.' Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies, Georgia Institute of Technology An investigation of how material agencies structure social and ecological relations Onto-Cartography gives an unapologetic defense of naturalism and materialism, transforming these familiar positions and showing how culture itself is formed by nature. Bryant endorses a pan-ecological theory of being, arguing that societies are ecosystems that can only be understood by considering nonhuman material agencies such as rivers and mountain ranges alongside signifying agencies such as discourses, narratives and ideologies. In this way, Bryant lays the foundations for a new machine-oriented ontology. This theoretically omnivorous work draws on disciplines as diverse as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, media studies, object-oriented ontology, the new materialist feminisms, actor-network theory, biology and sociology. Through its fresh attention to nonhumans and material being, it also provides a framework for integrating the most valuable findings of critical theory and social constructivism. Levi R. Bryant is Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, Texas. He is the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (2008) and The Democracy of Objects (2011). Cover image: Old Water Wheel (c) Eduardo Leite/iStockphoto. Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0748679979
• ISBN 13: 9780748679973
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312