General information

Course type AMUPIE
Module title Objects Of Power. Materiality Of Politics And Politics Of Materiality
Language English
Module lecturer prof. UAM dr hab. Andrzej Wojciech Nowak
Lecturer's email awnowak@amu.edu.pl
Lecturer position Professor
Faculty Faculty of Philosophy
Semester 2024/2025 (summer)
Duration 30
ECTS 4
USOS code 23-PIE-OOP

Timetable

street: Szamarzewskiego 89

Module aim (aims)

Have you ever thought about why some political systems last for a long time? Or how certain objects, monuments and buildings show power, keep it going, and sometimes help make new political systems and revolutionary movements?

If you have, then this course is for you. During the course, we will talk about how power and the things we use to represent it are connected to the real world. In modern philosophy, including critical and emancipatory philosophy, we often talk about the political nature of language and discussion. But this is not enough. Just think about the role of the Berlin Wall in the politics of the Cold War. This was possible because it was a physical representation of a specific policy; it was material and it separated parts of Berlin from each other. Power is not just words or discussion, but also physical reality. Feminist critiques of technology show how many patriarchal orders are sustained because they have become part of the surrounding reality. To change political realities, we also need to change the material world.

The course will draw inspiration from two strands:
1. contemporary science and technology studies, from which we will learn methods derived from anthropology and STS for the study of materiality.
2. approaches inspired by Marxist, anarchist and feminist thought, from which we will learn how the structures of power are enmeshed in materiality.

The module aims to explore different forms of embodiment of power and politics in artefacts, objects and infrastructures. The lectures will be based on texts from philosophy of technology, philosophy of power and politics, science and technology studies, anthropology and history. On the one hand, we will analyse how materiality, objects can become political (as presented in Winner Langdon's classic text "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"), and on the other hand, we will analyse how we can establish politics by using the "politics of materiality". The theme will be "problem-oriented", i.e. the agenda will be set by the issues of concern.

Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)

English language skills are required in order to be able to participate in both the lecture part of the course (passive knowledge of English) and the discussion part (reading and conversational level), as well as to be able to handle the audiovisual material that will be presented and made available to the students.

Syllabus

1. Do artifacts have politics, and how to find them?

2. What are an object and its agency?

3. From Objects to ontological politics and ontological design

4. Boundary object and ethnography of infrastructure

4b – Case of oil pipe: Andrew Barry & Evelina Gambino, Pipeline Geopolitics: Subaquatic Materials and the Tactical Point,  Andrew Barry: Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline. 

4c. – Case of Documents:  Isto Huvila The Politics of Boundary Objects: Hegemonic Interventions and the Making of a Document, Olga Restrepo, Malcolm Ashmore The guerrilla’s ID card: Flatland versus Fatland in Colombia

5. Objects and things as comrades and part of an identity

 6. Objects and stabilization of politics – Case I: Body of Lenin

    • Alexei Yurchak, Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

 

    1. Alexei Yurchak The canon and the mushroom Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse,

 

    1. Alexei Yurchak Form versus Matter: Miraculous Relics and Lenin’s Scientific Body

 

    1. Sergey Kuryokhin, Lenin was a mushroom / С.Курехин: Ленин был грибом https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2cs8QLnxlU Sergey Kuryokhin: Lenin was a mushroom / C.Курехин: Ленин был грибом, part 2 - YouTube



 7. Objects and politics Case II more-than-social-movements

 

 

Case 1. Dicky Yangzom, Clothing, and social movements: Tibet and the politics of dress


Case 2. Eun-Sung Kim, The material culture of Korean social movements

Case 3. Bartosz Ślosarski, A Strategic Toolbox of Symbolic Objects. Material Artifacts, Visuality and Strategic Action in European Street Protest Arenas

Case 4. Terence E. McDonnell, Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana

 

8. Objects and politics - case II technofeminism, materiality and gender

9. Hegemony and Objects



 10. Material hegemony in practice - “Conceived child as an ontohegemonic object

    1. Andrzej W. Nowak, The conceived child - Material politics in the Polish’ war on gender’ in Democratic situation, Mattering Press 2021

 

    1. Andrzej W. Nowak „Dziecko poczęte” jako obiekt ontohegemoniczny. Obiekty, materialność i wizualizacja a procesy ustanawiania hegemonii (in polish) http://avant.edu.pl/2020-03-16

 

    1. Michael Lim Tan, Fetal Discourses and the Politics of the Womb



 11-12 Analysis of contemporary material and ontological struggles – students cases and proposition

Reading list

Provided above