Explore the vast range of titles available.

The object‐oriented ontology group of philosophies, and certain strands of posthumanism, overlook important ethical and biological differences, which make a difference. These allied intellectual movements, which have at times found broad popular appeal, attempt to weird life as a rebellion to the forced melting of lifeforms through the artefacts of capitalist realism. They truck, however, in a recursive solipsism resulting in ontological flattening, overlooking that things only show up to us according to our attunement to them. Ecology and biology tend to get lost in the celebration of “thingness,” which puts on par artifacts, trash, and living beings. Such abstractions fail to understand the political, ethical, and ontological implications of eliding the animate/nonanimate distinction, which from the opposite direction (of flattening) reproduce the same violences of historical colonialism (hierarchical humanism). I argue that ontological flattening entails epistemological narcissism, fails to take into account plural (interspecies) perspectives, and propose biosemiotics can address these shortcomings through becoming‐with nonhuman knowledge.

Allegories are alluring because they promise to light up inchoate objects, trace unimagined connections, and resolve ambiguities and paradoxes of human—and morethan-human and abiotic—life. At the same time, allegories reveal their own failure to cohere, disintegrating in the excessive polysemia of their heterogeneous fragments. Meth cooking similarly throws into relief the unstable composition of a life. Meth cooking is an aporia: it leads the way out of workaday failures while lapsing back into them.

Shipwreck Architecture draws a connection between cosmotechnics, surrealism, and object-oriented ontology using an architectural design framework as a departure point. An academic introduction will connect the tragic aspects of Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics, to the tragic pairings created by figurative surrealists Rene Magritte and Salvador Dalí, to the ontographic project of shipwreck hauntography. This trajectory of ideas is then projected into a creative project: a speculative history of shipwreck architecture where the cutting edge of biological research is projected into a technological future when the distant aims of today’s technology are ancient history: when the first generations of grown buildings are preserved as ruins, when giant decommissioned carbon-capture factories drift like ghost ships across lakes of their inky waste, when people remember when shipwrecks caused by the hazards of rising sea levels were later exposed by sinking sea levels and converted into hotels and theatres, and finally, when these theatrical memories provoke such nostalgia that shipwreck architecture would be replicated and fabricated.

Archaeology is often defined as the study of the past through material culture. As we enter the Anthropocene, however, the two parts of this definition increasingly diverge. In the Anthropocene the archaeological record ceases to be observed from a distance, but is something we exist within. It is not an assemblage of material culture, but a hyperobject of vast temporal and geographical scope, in which ecofacts increase in prominence and the role of artefacts recedes. This article examines the archaeological record as a hyperobject and argues for an expanded definition of archaeology for the future past. It argues for a shift from the study of objects towards a broader archaeology that includes immaterial Anthropocene culture.

This study introduces the Personality Assimilation Materiality Analytical (PAMA) framework to explore the interaction between personality traits and material affordances of technological products in online environments. Drawing from assemblage theory and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), PAMA reconceptualizes personality as an emergent property influenced by the material characteristics of technological objects. Utilizing the Amazon Review Dataset, the research employs computational methods to analyze the co-evolution of personality traits and product affordances such as cognitive, physical, functional, and sensory aspects. Findings highlight the dynamic interplay between user personalities and material attributes, demonstrating how these factors influence product engagement and performance in digital marketplaces. The study advances personality theory by illustrating the evolving nature of personality through technology interaction and offers practical insights for product design, digital marketplace optimization, and personalized recommendation systems. The results emphasize the need for integrated approaches to understand the mutual shaping of personality and materiality within technological assemblages, paving the way for future research in human-technology interaction. Findings in this research offer insights for product design, digital marketplace optimization, and personalized recommendations by highlighting the interplay between personality traits and material affordances in shaping user engagement.

A growing literature in archaeological theory has embraced the “material turn,” especially what is branded as “Object-Oriented Ontology” (OOO). Some archaeologists view this as an opportunity for the discipline which is, by definition, a practice of knowing objects. Others argue that the material turn may open up hitherto-unexplored ways of looking at historical processes. While this all sounds very exciting for a new generation of archaeologists, we see a genuine need to be cautious about the implications of subscribing to OOO-inspired archaeologies. These new theoretical developments have a direct impact on how archaeologists narrate, conceptualize, and interpret the past, present and future. In this article, we scrutinize the philosophical pathway behind this perspective and discuss its relation to archaeological theory. We advocate a modest, responsive version of new materialist archaeologies that can engage more thoughtfully with the past and Anthropocene social crises of systemic injustice and inequality.

The philosophical movement known as speculative realism (SR) has much in common with archaeology. As well as a shared concern with objects and with time, both have orientations towards an external reality that exists (or existed) outside the domain of human knowledge. This paper explores overlaps and commonalities in these two very different types of investigation. Proceeding from an archaeological perspective, it critically assesses the relevance of some of the key ideas of SR for archaeology, while also looking at ways in which these can be challenged, honed, adapted and transformed through encounters with archaeological objects. It asks the question, what can archaeology usefully contribute to the SR project?

This article deals with Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO). It explores the tensions in Harman’s quadripartite notion of the object and how aesthetics provides an indirect mode of access to the object. This principally comes by way of metaphor and theatricality, the rift and transposition of the sensual from the real. A good illustration of these concepts can be found in Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation. Reading Lost in Translationthrough OOO, we can see the theory enacted, and understand how the of the spectator interacts with the film, the reader with theory. Through this aesthetic prism we can approach the both the object of the film and the theory even in the face of their very retreat. All objects, films, theories, and even this article, become lost in translation. Everything, in any relation, is condemned to mediation. Nevertheless, there are still remain intimations of the real to be had both beyond and through the sensual and literal. This article is an attempt to explore this relationship.

Worldwide followers of the late Chinese Christian reformers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee share a central concern with human-divine ‘oneness’, but there are different understandings in different localities about how such oneness works. I utilize one such difference by analyzing group unity in Euro-America using Taiwanese understandings of oneness, which involve things (selfsame unities) but not relations. Experimenting with Dumontian, Strathernian, and object-oriented anthropologies, I show that anthropological analysis is currently possible (a) by emphasizing things, (b) by emphasizing relations, and (c) entirely without relations. Anthropology entirely without things, however, has not yet been achieved. I conclude by suggesting reasons why we might want to attain this final possibility in our approach to things and/or relations.

In the famous ‘Fragment on Machines’ of the ‘Grundrisse’, Marx points out how social or collective knowledge (the ‘general intellect’) has become a ‘direct force of production’ through its embodiment into technical devices. The rhetorical wording ‘artificial intelligence’, with its own misleading anthropomorphic connotations, looks, from a Marxist perspective, the apex of this process in which knowledge becomes the core of the fixed capital that ideally must be re-appropriated by the workers. In this context, AI Art appears as one of the many expressions of the commodification of the collective knowledge in which, for using the expression of Guy Debord, ‘all that was once lived has moved into representation for being commodified’. However, the progressive availability of AI tools for generating art also opens the doors to a ‘detournement’ strategy by allowing a decolonization of the artistic scenario in which each of us becomes the ‘author’ without being the author. Maybe in future, rather than asking ‘who is the author?’ we will find ourselves asking ‘what is the author?’. A move of this kind achieves automatically the ‘death of the author’, with the corresponding subversion of the notions of artistic intention, authorship, and genius, while disrupting the present commodification process behind the artistic ecosystem, in a fashion beyond the best intentions of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. This move is ultimately disruptive from a metaphysical point of view as well to the extent that the human centrality is dispossessed by the recognition of forms of creativity different from our own creativity.