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Theory, Culture & Society

ISSN 0263-2764

4 papers in the library · 9 citations · publishing 2008-2026

Papers

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Channeling Alterity: Toward a Theory of Shamanic Audiovisualization

Theory, Culture & Society September 10, 2026 Tian Li

This article theorizes the concept of ‘shamanic audiovisualization’ – a process whereby the cinematic apparatus itself functions as a ritualistic medium channeling alterity – to challenge logocentric models of testimony and trauma that dominate the archive. Moving beyond the imperative to ‘give voice’, which risks re-performing the violence of the event, I examine how Korean screen media offers...

Simmel’s Rome: An Essay on Understanding and Self-Transcendence

Theory, Culture & Society 2025 Thomas Harrison

Georg Simmel’s essay on Rome gives paradigmatic expression to an imponderable method that the philosopher practices for years, symbolized by the idea of a plumb line cast from the unstable waters of a sea to its firm foundations. Here Simmel shows how a complex and transhistorical city receives meaning through its multiply tense urban relations, constituting nonetheless a strangely coherent...

Beyond the Neomaterialist Divide: Negotiating Between Eliminative and Vital Materialism with Integrated Information Theory

Theory, Culture & Society December 1, 2018 Alexander Wilson

Though most neomaterialists share a commitment to the Copernican decentring of humans from the world stage, there is disagreement on the purposes of such an endeavour. The polemic stems from a fundamental discrepancy about what the return to materiality entails: is matter the principle of the non-thinking as such, or is it always already imbued with some sort of subjectivity? Is the new...

The `Hard' Problem of Consciousness Is Continually Reproduced and Made Harder by All Attempts to Solve It

Theory, Culture & Society March 1, 2008 Rupert Read 9 citations

I argue that the so-called 'hard' problem of consciousness ' the problem of how consciousness is possible at all, and how it 'connects' with matter ' is only an artefact of the ways in which human scientists approach consciousness and (more generally) mind. Putting the point paradoxically but also quite precisely: the efforts to solve the mind'body problem, and this its latest variant form, are...