Magic Science Religion

Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-90-04-35710-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 2, 176 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 318 g

Reihe: Experimental Practices

Magic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate. Among the many case studies are accounts of how an eighteenth-century actor gave his audience goosebumps; how painters, poets, and pool sharks use nonlinearity in working their magics; how the first vertebrates gained consciousness; how plants fine-tuned human color vision; and the necessarily magical element of activism that builds on the conviction that "another future is possible" while working to push self-fulfilling prophecy into political action.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Livingston, Ira

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments.
About this Book

1 Introduction
1 All or Nothing?
2 Kindness
ASIDE: The Two-Million-Dollar Comma
ASIDE: Sufficiently Magical Technologies
ASIDE: Our Gods
3 Cruelty
ASIDE: Ghostly Causality
ASIDE: Durable Cruelties
4 Beginning, Again
ASIDE: Chaos Invoked
5 The Freedom Not to Choose
ASIDE: No Atheists in Foxholes
ASIDE: Blake on Firm Perswasion
ASIDE: Metafictional Magic: The Writer’s Will
ASIDE: Shapely Sentences
ASIDE: Beckett Meets Twilight Zone, Glass-Half-Full Version

2 Complex Systems in a Nutshell
1 Horror Movie Reboot
2 Interpositivity
ASIDE: Interpositivity
3 Becoming a System
4 Creatures of Light
ASIDE: Transformative for Whom?
ASIDE: Plant Sorcery
5 Tornados, Whirlpools, and Fires
ASIDE: iii
ASIDE: Co-evolution
6 Leveled
ASIDE: On being born too early and dying too late
ASIDE: Up Around the Bend
7 A Personifying Universe of Stretchy Things
8 Dynamism
ASIDE: One Plus One Equals Infinity
9 Magic, but No Black Boxes
ASIDE: The T-Shirt Version
10 Wildness
ASIDE: Pet Resemblance via Social Theory

3 Magic by Example
1 Failed Magic: Modernist Heaven (and Hell)
2 Placebo Magic
ASIDE: Pregnancy via Magic
ASIDE: Following the Scent
3 Mirror Magic
4 Biting Game
5 Dog Whisperer
6 Conclusion

4 Future Perfect
1 The Gettysburg Address as a Magical Speech Act
2 Pool, Poetry, Prose, and Painting
ASIDE: Dr. Livingston’s Magical Bank-Shot Visualize

Über Autor(innen)

Ira Livingston teaches and directs Poetics Lab at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. His many books - such as the 2015 digital book Poetics as a Theory of Everything (available free online) - cultivate hybrids of cultural studies and systems theory.