Naomi Scheman:
“The material turn, or: Why would a feminist theorist be obsessed with stones?"
Research seminar at Department of Women’s Studies, Wednesday 22nd September, 10-12, (ASA, Fänriksgatan 3, Lilla auditoriet, C122, Turku)
Description of the theme of Scheman’s lectures
One way of distinguishing emotions from ("brute" or "raw") feelings is that emotions are "feelings plus"; they are meaningful, interpreted, contextual, and, as such, distinctively human. Taking this thought as a (problematic) starting point, I want to bring together things Wittgenstein says in his later work about emotions and about the human to help think about both and about the relationships between them.
My suggestion will be that we think about emotions as socially constructed, specifically as stories, but that we go on to think about stories not just as human artifacts, but as, literally, what the world is made of. This thought is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's claim, in the Tractatus, that "the world is the totality of facts, not of things." I want to ask what becomes of such a thought when we free ourselves--as the later Wittgenstein teaches us to do--from the conception of philosophical analysis that led, in the Tractatus, to an untenable atomism.
The work of the physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad models a rejection of atomism in favor of a fundamentally relational conception of the world, and I want to draw on this model to suggest ways of thinking about the world as "storied" and about the places of emotions and of the human in such a world.