Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux – a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism – object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash‘ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive, percolating, topological, cyclical, and generational, as consisting of countercurrents or of a surface tension between objects and their own qualities. Objects Untimely invites us to reconsider the modern notion of objects as inert matter serving as a receptacle for human categories.

At their peak, architectural marvels such as the Sagrada Família, the Tower of London, the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba, and the Eiffel tower, had a combined annual visit of almost 16.4 million people. The animated icebound castle in Disney’s (2019) Frozen had 116.4 million views, from one single YouTube trailer, in less than 24 hours. The spaces of such massively consumed animation have for generations informed the architectural imagination of people across the globe and from very early in their lives. Yet, not only have the architectural disciplines remained rather absent in the design of these massively consumed spaces, architectural theory has likewise failed to articulate a framework to approach the architecture of animation. To address this void, this book offers an interdisciplinary approach to survey the role of space in animation, including in creating humorous moments in early cartoon shorts, generating action and suspense in Japanese anime, and even stimulating erotic pleasure in pornographic Hentai. Exploring the imagined architecture of animation, from early motion picture to digital animation and from computer graphics to game engines, offers an analytical frame to reconceptualize space.

Is time out of joint? For the past two centuries, the dominant Western time regime has been future-oriented and based on the linear, progressive and homogeneous concept of time. Over the last few decades, there has been a shift towards a new, present-oriented regime or 'presentism', made up of multiple and percolating temporalities. Rethinking Historical Time engages with this change of paradigm, providing a timely overview of cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches to this new temporal condition. Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier have brought together an international team of scholars working in history, anthropology, archaeology, geography, philosophy, literature and visual studies to rethink the epistemological consequences of presentism for the study of past and to discuss critically the traditional assumptions that underpin research on historical time. Beginning with an analysis of presentism, the contributors move on to explore in historical and critical terms the idea of multiple temporalities, before presenting a series of case studies on the variability of different forms of time in contemporary material culture.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time—the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel—the explosive, world-changing potential—back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.

This book rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events by scrutinizing and theorizing the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives.

Cognitive Archaeology is a relatively young though fast growing discipline. The intellectual heart of cognitive archaeology is archaeology, the discipline that investigates the only direct evidence of the actions and decisions of prehistoric people. Its theories and methods are an eclectic mix of psychological, neuroscientific, paleoneurological, philosophical, anthropological, ethnographic, comparative, aesthetic, and experimental theories, methods, and models, united only by their focus on cognition. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology is a landmark publication, showcasing the theories, methods, and accomplishments of archaeologists who investigate the human mind, including its evolutionary development, its ideation (thoughts and beliefs), and its very nature-through material forms. The volume encompasses the wide spectrum of the discipline, showcasing contributions from more than 50 established and emerging scholars from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Prominent among these are contributions that discuss the epistemological frameworks of both the evolutionary and ideational approaches and the leading theories that ground interpretations. Significantly, the majority of chapters deliver substantive contributions that analyze specific examples of material culture, from the oldest known stone tools to ceramic and rock art traditions of the recent millennium. These examples include the gamut of methods and techniques, including typology, replication studies, cha?nes operatoires, neuroarchaeology, ethnographic comparison, and the direct historical approach. In addition, the book begins with retrospective essays by several of the pioneers of cognitive archaeology, presenting a broad range of state-of-the-art investigations into cognitive abilities, tackling thorny issues like the cognitive status of Neandertals, and concluding with speculative essays about the future of an archaeology of mind, and of the mind itself.

The second edition of An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era explores the period between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and reflects on the archaeological theory and practice of the recent past. This book argues that the materiality of our times, and particularly its ruins and rubbish, reveals something profound and disturbing about modern societies. It examines the political, ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological foundations of contemporary archaeology and characterizes the excess of the contemporary period through its material traces. This book remains the first attempt at describing the contemporary era from an archaeological point of view. Global in scope, the book brings together case studies from every continent and considers sources from peripheral and rarely considered traditions, meanwhile engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue with philosophy, anthropology, history, and geography. This new edition includes the latest developments in the field, both methodological and theoretical, and adds new and exciting case studies to engage students. It also covers some of the most pressing issues of the present, as they are being addressed by archaeologists, such as pandemics, the antiracist movement, the global rise of reactionary populism, the ecological crisis, and climate change. An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era is essential reading for students and practitioners of the contemporary past, historical archaeology, and archaeological theory. It will also be of interest to anybody concerned with globalization, modernity, and the Anthropocene.

This ground-breaking collection explores the assumptions behind and practices for performance implicit in the manuscripts and playtexts of the medieval and early modern eras, focusing on work which engages with performance-oriented research.

A groundbreaking, multidisciplinary collection that rethinks our present moment and anticipates the key concepts that will shape and direct the twenty-first century. Contemporanea is a nascent lexicon for the twenty-first century edited by seasoned philosophers and authors Michael Marder and Giovanbattista Tusa. The collection showcases perspectives from a range of noteworthy thinkers in philosophy, ecology, and cultural studies, as well as artists, from across the globe, including Slavoj Zizek, Timothy Morton, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, and Vandana Shiva, who each describe what they anticipate will be the concepts shaping the trajectory of this century—everything from the world state to the nuclear taboo, automation to Teslaism, plant sexuality to arachnomancy, and ecotrauma to resonances, to name a few. This century, as the editors explain, has to date grounded itself in the debris of the preceding century, whose revolutions and struggles failed to transform our time: post-colonialism, post-fascism, and post-liberalism have morphed into neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and neofascism, often combined in a previously unimaginable mix. And, just as the political developments at the beginning of the twenty-first century revived and reshuffled those of the preceding epoch, so too have philosophical trends sought to breathe fresh life into the stillborn -isms of the past—realism, vitalism, logicism, materialism, empiricism, criticism—adding the adjective “new” and sometimes “radical” before them. To articulate a different future, another language is needed. And, to develop another language, one needs to develop fresh concepts, including the concepts proposed in this collection. Contributors Mieke Bal, Claudia Baracchi, Amanda Boetzkes, Erik Bordeleau, Anita Chari, Emanuele Coccia, Valentina Desideri, Roberto Esposito, Filipe Ferreira, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Claire Fontaine, Graham Harman, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Ranjit Hoskote, Cymene Howe, Daniel Innerarity, Joela Jacobs, Ken Kawashima, Sabu Kohso, Bogna Konior, Brandon LaBelle, Anna Longo, Artemy Magun, Michael Marder, Michael Marder, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Timothy Morton, Mycelium, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bahar Noorizadeh, Kelly Oliver, Uriel Orlow, Richard Polt, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Tomás Saraceno, Vandana Shiva, Anton Tarasyuk, Anaïs Tondeur, Giovanbattista Tusa, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Santiago Zabala, Zahi Zalloua, Slavoj Žižek

In Couplets, Brian Massumi presents twenty-four essays that represent the full spectrum of his work during the past thirty years. Conceived as a companion volume to Parables for the Virtual, Couplets addresses the key concepts of Parables from different angles and contextualizes them, allowing their stakes to be more fully felt. Rather than organizing the essays chronologically or by topic, Massumi pairs them into couplets to encourage readers to make connections across conventional subject matter categories, to encounter disjunctions, and to link different phases in the evolution of his work. In his analyses of topics ranging from art, affect, and architecture to media theory, political theory, and the philosophy of experience, Massumi charts a field on which a family of conceptual problems plays out in ways that bear on the potentials for acting and perceiving the world. As an essential guide to Massumi's oeuvre, Couplets is both a primer for his new readers and a supplemental resource for those already engaged with his thought.