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Theory, Culture & Society

ISSN 0263-2764

3 papers in the library · publishing 2018-2026

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...